tal

Budget-constrained segments, including government procurement and education, experienced a slightly steeper decline than the commercial market. Both are expected to remain under pressure through the end of the year, although Omdia believes they could see a meaningful recovery in 2027.

The text and the above graph expect PC purchasing to shoot back up in 2027. I don't buy it.

Purchasing on PCs is down because prices on memory are up. There are only two ways that prices on memory come back down in 2027: a lot more supply enters the market, or demand drops significantly.

There are going to be new fabs coming online in 2027, but they won't be running at full bore until 2028. A lot of unexpected supply seems unlikely to suddenly materialize in 2027.

I am also pretty skeptical that everyone is going to suddenly stop purchasing memory for AI purposes in 2027. If one wants to bet on a huge retraction in AI-related demand, that might do it. But I think that if that's what this was based on, they'd be pretty explicit about it.

If purchasers in 2027 suddenly decide "the hell with it, I'm willing to pay a lot more for memory than I was last year", if price elasticity of demand suddenly falls off, that'd do it. But I don't see a reason for that to happen. Heck, even if it did, I'm not sure how many other memory consumers there are to try to outbid. The market cannot increase production in that timeframe, so the only way for PC purchasers to use more money is to outbid someone else, to get some memory that would have gone to someone else. It sounds like the big AI companies mostly have contracts in place, so you probably can't outbid them in 2027, even if you rolled up with more money. I guess maybe you could try to outbid cell phone users for available memory or something.

I've also seen a number of articles predicting that memory prices in 2027 will, if anything, be somewhat higher than in 2026.

I think that PC purchases are going to stay low in both 2026 and 2027.

The heck kind of paint job is that? Blue and gold?

searches

Huh. Apparently that was a legit British North African camouflage scheme. Totally unaware of that.

https://www.quora.com/Was-the-Matilda-II-actually-painted-blue-during-WWII-If-so-why

Was the Matilda II actually painted blue during WWII? If so, why

sort of….

In the early part of the North African campaign British armour was painted a mix of sand, slate grey and what I’d call sky blue (I think the official spec was silver grey but as a modeller I do find that the same shade of paint from two different modelling companies can be quite different…. online forums are full of modellers arguing about RAL numbers and how modern samples compare to original paint revealed during restoration of real vehicles! )

Its both a disruptive pattern which breaks up the distinctive tank shape and well chosen for blending in with the horizon (parts of the western desert are perfectly flat). The slate grey would fade to a paler blue making the tank appear more blue than sand over time. The same scheme was applied to many other vehicles.

considers

I guess, now that I think about it...most of the movies I've seen about the North Africa Campaign were in black and white, so...no way to know. Huh. TIL.

Last time I bought them was the Close Combat series from Slitherine/Matrix Games, which does war games.

checks

Looks like they stopped last year:

https://www6.slitherine.com/news/important-update-last-chance-to-purchase-physical-manuals-and-editions-before-march-1st

Dear Wargamers,

We want to share an important update with you.

Starting March 1st, 2025, Slitherine will no longer sell physical game manuals or physical copies of our games through our website. This marks the end of an era, and we understand how much these editions have meant to many of you over the years.

There is a trend away from Physical purchases to digital, and a decreasing number of new PC’s even have DVD drives and very few laptops meaning the potential market has been shrinking for years. This, combined with increasing delivery costs, environmental awareness, and more red tape on international deliveries, all combine to make it unviable.  > For those who appreciate the tactile experience of a physical manual or a boxed edition, this is your final chance to secure a piece of wargaming history. You have until February 28th, 2025, to purchase from the remaining stock, after which these products will no longer be available.

No infrastructure for having the British government blacklist sites today. You'd need a British version of what China and Russia run today. Could be that they'll wind up adding it.

Trump gets OpenAI to offer US 5% stake

https://www.schwab.com/learn/story/some-indexes-accelerate-entry-massive-ipos

Some Indexes Accelerate Entry for Massive IPOs

FTSE Russell: FTSE Russell announced the results of its index consultation on May 26, 2026, with changes effective as of the same date. Russell's U.S. Equity indexes will now allow fast entry for very large IPOs on the fifth trading day, instead of waiting for the next quarterly rebalance. However, the weight of the IPO in the index will be based on investable market capitalization. In other words, only shares available to public investors will be considered when calculating the company's size. Plus, IPOs must have at least 5% of shares available to public investors, either on the IPO date or within the next 12 months.

Uh. So does that 5% count towards the minimum float amount that triggers automatic buying by some index funds?

Secondly, I couldn’t even install qemu if I wanted to because it wasn’t in the apt repositories that shipped with Debian.

Debian has a non-free repo containing non-open-source software that it hasn't historically enabled by default, but I don't think that that'd apply to qemu. I'm pretty sure that's all open-source.

goes looking.

qemu's been in the Debian repos since...checks sarge, which was released as a stable release in 2005.

And it was in main, not non-free, so it should have been there as an out-of-the-box enabled repo:

https://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian/20050312T000000Z/pool/main/q/qemu/

QEMU only came out in 2003.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QEMU

QEMU is free software originally developed by Fabrice Bellard; the first preview release was in 2003.

It looks like it was packaged in Debian unstable since 2004, though I wouldn't recommend jumping right on unstable to a new user.

$ apt changelog qemu-system 2>/dev/null|tail -n 15

 -- Paul Russell <prussell@debian.org>  Mon, 15 Mar 2004 23:56:25 +0100

qemu (0.5.2-2) unstable; urgency=low

  * Fix build problem so bios.bin etc. can be found. (Closes: #237553)

 -- Paul Russell <prussell@debian.org>  Fri, 12 Mar 2004 05:43:00 +0100

qemu (0.5.2-1) unstable; urgency=low

  * Initial Release. (Closes: #187407)

 -- Paul Russell <prussell@debian.org>  Wed,  3 Mar 2004 02:18:54 +0100
Fetched 314 kB in 0s (1,431 kB/s)
$

I mean, Valve doesn't sell games on physical media in the Steam Store either that I'm aware.

Hmm. considers So, like...she kinda added some crispiness to the noodles on the underside that way?

Thematically consistent with the present physical state of the White House, so that works.

It also microwaves up well after having been chilled, so makes for great leftovers to snag a slice of from the fridge. It doesn't really have much to get soggy.

One of my favorite childhood foods was sombrero pie. Still love it. I think it came from a Betty Crocker cookbook at some point.

searches

Pretty sure that this is it.

https://www.food.com/recipe/sombrero-pie-348597

Man, when you grow up with something, it just...yeah, it hits you.

As 4Chan has no assets in the United Kingdom (given that it has no connection to the United Kingdom), that would require you to show up in a US court as a platiff

I think that the way this works is that first the British government has to go to a British court and secure a ruling against 4Chan and then go to a US court and prove to it that 4Chan is under British jurisdiction to get that ruling enforced by a US court. As an aside, I think I'd be careful if I were 4Chan

there are things that they can do that are not immediately obvious, like targeted advertising aimed at Brits, that might place them under British jurisdiction in the eyes of US courts. I also dunno about accepting donations from Brits. But if they rigorously kept their nose clean, then I agree

it's very much possible that a US court would rule that there is no British jurisdiction.

However, I do have to say that I think that the prospect of Ofcom arguing the matter in front of a serious-looking judge in a British court, horsehair wig and all, while presenting material from, say, /d/ (NSFW), and having said judge gravely contemplate it and British law seems like it'd be sound fodder for a comedy skit.