Posts by Oh Homer

Ever wondered why tech products fail so frequently? No, me neither

Re: "the wonderful one-hoss shay"

I have a queue of millennials here asking for an Amazon link to this product, and whether it accepts a standard USB charger.

Re: "cheap footwear"

The only shoes I can wear for extended periods, without experiencing excruciating pain, is memory foam loafers.

The first example of such a shoe that I ever tried was "Skechers Go Walk Pro 3" at around £60. They lasted about 3 months of constant use as indoor workwear, before falling apart.

Meanwhile, a functionally identical pair of shoes from shoezone cost just £10, and lasted exactly the same length of time.

There are two important points to note here:

First, the "more expensive shoe that lasts longer", in this instance, simply doesn't exist. It's not that people are making bad choices, or even that they can't afford good choices, it's simply that better choices are not available, because today's market comprises goods that are universally shit, regardless of price.

Second, given the universal shittiness of all things in today's disposable culture, spending more to get better quality actually doesn't make any sense, because "better quality" now amounts to nothing more than marketing drivel, devoid of any real substance.

In the case of the above example, both the £60 branded and £10 unbranded shoes were probably made by the same children, in the same Indian sweatshop, for the same total production cost of less than $1. The price differential is purely aesthetic, just a marketing ploy, or in free market economic terms "as much as the market will bear", and has no correlation to the actual production cost or quality whatsoever.

The same is true of pretty much everything else in the market, until you get into the upper echelons of esoteric goods - Ferraris and so forth - a market that services a tiny fraction of 1% of the world's population.

That is the "gift" that first industrialism, then subsequently capitalism, has given to the world.

False economy

Everything is shit for a reason. Unfortunately that reason is completely bogus.

It started with the Industrial Revolution, the pretext for which was, in essence, better living through mass production, both in terms of better employment opportunities and more diverse, cheaper yet better goods. In reality, the motive was warfare - the need to mass produce arms faster than the "competition".

This was the birth of the War Economy, and subsequently Consumerism. It also marked the end of self-sufficiency, or what is retrospectively defined as the "Cottage Industry", and with it the art of craftsmanship.

The end result is goods and services that are certainly "cheap" in quality, but not in price; diversity that is not really as diverse as we like to pretend, due to both corporate monopolisation and product normalisation; and jobs that are increasingly minimum wage, zero-hour contracts that are barely enough to survive on.

In modern parlance, it's a race to the bottom, and sadly that race is now over.

GitHub shrugs off drone maker DJI's crypto key DMCA takedown effort

"What are the lessons here?"

Only one lesson required: ultimately anyone can build their own drone and write their own control software, so attempting to "regulate" it, with copyrights or otherwise, is about as pointless as attempting to regulate the manifestation of psychotropic mushrooms on lawns.

User stepped on mouse, complained pedal wasn’t making PC go faster

Grannies will be grannies

Disclaimer: I have a background in elderly care.

I suspect that the "mouse pedal" incident was mostly a wind-up. Roving gangs of grannies can smell fear, and will exploit it for their own amusement. That's not to say they actually had a clue what they were doing with the computers, but I'm sure they were hamming it up more than a little.

Having said that, I still remember the incident where I tried to talk my own mother, over the phone, through the process of booting up my PC and getting some information I needed off it. Long story short, after much hair-pulling it turned out that she was waving the mouse in the air, which accounted for why the pointer wasn't actually moving. Ultimately I was more annoyed that it took me so long to figure that out.

Death notice: Moore's Law. 19 April 1965 – 2 January 2018

"make messy code performant"

Here's a radical idea...

Don't make messy code.

To all those who for years sneered at low-level code optimisation over that myth called "portability", for your delectation may I present to you a big old plate of Just Deserts.

Bon Appetit.

Don't panic... but our fragile world is drifting away from the Sun

Actually this was all planned millennia ago

Earth has been secretly plotting to escape from Sol for years, before it blows up and takes us all with it. It's already put down a deposit for its new home in the Pavo constellation. All that's left to do is book the removal lorry and call a taxi.

NHS: Thanks for the free work, Linux nerds, now face our trademark cops

Wait...

A government department is trademarked?

YouTube turns off cash tap for automatic video nasties

"Disturbing" content?

If all it takes to "disturb" these spineless drama queens is a few Peppa the Pig parodies then I weep for the millennial generation.

I grew up watching stuff like Outer Limits, Twilight Zone, Hammer House of Horror, The Wicker Man and Eraserhead, to name a few. I spent more than a few Saturday evenings hiding from Daleks behind the settee. Even stuff like The Tomorrow People was fairly dark and disturbing, and that's just the opening credits.

I suppose it's symptomatic of a milksop generation that has imaginary "allergies" to everything, and which needs "safe spaces" to hide from that vicious beast called reality. I dread to think how they'd cope if they had to do something actually traumatic, like fight in a war or rescue someone from a burning building.

PPI-pusher makes 75 MEEELLION nuisance calls, lands £350k fine

Easy way to collect the fines

Arrest the company directors and keep them in custody until they pay the fine. If they refuse or hold out for more than a month, send them to prison for one month for every day the payment is overdue. If they still refuse then send them down for life, freeze their business and personal accounts, seize all available assets and auction them off. Anything tucked away in tax havens should be pursued using reciprocal agreements with the host country (or conversely the threat of trade embargoes). Assets held in trust or signed away to a spouse should also be fair game, as this is another well recognised avoidance gambit.

Like most government bodies that claim to be tough on corporate violators, they need to grow a pair and learn the true meaning of the word "tough".

Remember those holy tech wars we used to have? Heh, good times

Re: "RPN is just evil"

I love RPN because suddenly I'm the only person in the room who can use the calculator.

"Religion gave way to pragmatism"?

Not really. It's more a case of everything sucks equally now.

Take Linux, for example. It's hard for me to advocate, as I used to, something that has now fully embraced the Windows mentality via systemd.

As for Windows, first Vista then Windows 10 eradicated whatever little was left of the Windows fanboi community.

And Jobs pretty much took the Cult of Mac with him to the grave, along with whatever little was ever actually good about Apple products.

Turns out that Google really is evil, and damned proud of it too, and Android is frankly an even bigger headache than Windows, in my now long term experience of it.

So what's left to advocate?

Here's my new vendor of choice: none of the above. They all suck. Let's face it, everything in tech. sucks, and is getting exponentially suckier by the day.

The only thing left to advocate is chucking the whole lot of it into the shredder, and going outside for some fresh air ... before heading off down the pub - the only thing left in life that is guaranteed to never, ever suck.

Butcher breaks out of own freezer using black pudding

Re: "milled somewhere that doesn't also handle wheat"

Wheat-infected oatmeal is not typical in Scotland, nor I assume in the rest of the UK. It mostly seems to be common in the US, where one very seldom finds natural, unadulterated food products, since nearly everything over there is heavily processed, genetically engineered and saturated with chemicals. I believe the most common contaminant is an abomination called HFCS - banned in the EU and elsewhere, a synthetic and sickly-sweet syrup made from genetically engineered corn, which is added to pretty much everything, including supposedly savoury dishes.

Over here I think you'd need to buy "instant oats" type products to get oatmeal that contained anything other than pure oats, and generally speaking such things are never used as ingredients for other dishes, such as haggis or black pudding. Plus no true Scotsman would ever ... etc.

Re: "psychosomatic illness"

I.e. hypochondria. Or actually, given the transmission vector of this particular disorder, it'd be more appropriate to diagnose it as mass hysteria.

As for gluten-free haggis and black pudding, neither recipe is supposed to contain wheat anyway, so the fact that explicitly "gluten-free" versions are available is a bit comical.

The reason for the gluten-ified bastardisation of this or any other type of sausage is usually the unwarranted addition of rusk, a cheap filler material used to "bump" any sort of stuffing mix, solely for the purpose of ripping off customers.

This was such a huge problem in the past, most typically with pork links sausages, that the government actually had to intervene and force sausage producers to meet or exceed certain minimum proportions of the primary ingredient before they could legally sell it as "meat".

As far as I can tell, the last bastion of legacy "mostly rusk not-really-sausages" in the UK exists only in Northern Ireland, which sells what they refer to as "white pudding", a dish that bears no resemblance whatsoever to its namesake on the mainland, but is really just a poor-man's "pork" sausage. They manage to get away with this simply because they refer to it neither as pork nor sausage, although that's really what it is, albeit in its absolute minimal form.

However, bumping processed "meat" in general with rusk (and many other things - primarily water) is sadly very common, albeit heavily regulated to ensure that consumers receive something that is mostly meat.

I believe that Stornoway Black Pudding is widely recognised as the best in the UK, and contains no wheat at all as per the traditional recipe, not because the producers are pandering to hypochondriacs.

Memo man Damore is back – with lawyers: Now Google sued for 'punishing' white men

Re: "his views were not discriminatory"

You need to take another look at his rant:

"The manifesto claimed women were more prone to "neuroticism" than men, and essentially tried to make the case that girls just typically don't make good engineers."

Not only is that clearly discriminatory, it's also crass hypocrisy, given the supposed purpose of his little invective.

Punishing discrimination is not discrimination

In the same way that executing a murderer is not itself somehow equivocal to murder, because the violator forfeits any further right to consideration of the principle he violated.

Nvidia: Using cheap GeForce, Titan GPUs in servers? Haha, nope!

Re: "you need dedicated ASICs"

Yes, if you look up the mining profitability calculator on Nicehash, you'll see that a single Bitmain Antminer S9 could potentially(!) earn you about £600 a month, whereas the next most profitable GPU hardware (an Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti) will only yield about £160 a month.

Then again, you could probably knock together a mining rig with a 1080 Ti for less than a grand, whereas the Antminer costs three times as much, however it does earn you four times the profit, so overall it makes more sense.

As for Nvidia's policy, IMO (IANAL) EULAs in general are legally unenforceable, and the "if Nvidia discovers them" caveat will put the kibosh on any extralegal enforcement too, so overall this policy is bollocks, if you ask me. It also does nothing for gamers, as the policy explicitly allows bitmining anyway, so GPU prices will continue to be artificially inflated.

Personally, I'm starting to think that if you can't beat 'em, join 'em, as at least that way I'll be making money rather than spending it.

Now, if someone would just kindly donate three grand to get me started...

Kernel-memory-leaking Intel processor design flaw forces Linux, Windows redesign

Intel Inside...

Can run but can't hide.

What a clusterfsck.

Yet another reason to stick to AMD.

Open-source civil war: Olive branch offered in trademark spat... with live grenade attached

The most disturbing thing...

Is that either one of these supposed defenders of "freedom" felt it necessary to implement blatantly anti-freedom bullshit like "trademarks" in the first place.

And not only because claiming a monopoly on names is a Draconian and morally indefensible violation of free expression, but perhaps even more importantly because it's an insult to the intelligence of we who supposedly get easily "confused" and can't tell the difference between multiple entities with the same or similar name.

Personally, I know half a dozen people called "John", yet miraculously I have no difficulty telling them apart. When presented with two plain white boxes containing smartphones, I still manage to tell the difference between the Apple and Samsung. Frankly even if both boxes simply read "phone", I'd still be able to tell the difference, just looking at the photo on the box. When travelling through various Third World countries, and encountering many electrical shops sporting goods made by companies with names like "Ponysonic", incredibly I knew they had nothing to do with Panasonic, and would have known just by the quality even if the name had been identical. Yes, I can even tell the difference between a real and fake Rolex. Seriously, it's not exactly rocket science.

If there are people in the world too stupid to differentiate between different things with the same name, then clearly the problem is those idiots, not the names. Why should the rest of us have to suffer the oppressive regime of intellectual monopoly, just because there are easily "confused" idiots in the world?

UK security chief: How 'bout a tax for tech firms that are 'uncooperative' on terror content?

"terror content"

I think he meant to say "alleged terror content".

Certainly there is content out there that promotes terrorism, and some of it may even be blatantly obvious, but once you throw "trivia" like due process out the window, suddenly anything the establishment doesn't like becomes arbitrarily designated as "terrorism", and can be intercepted, monitored, logged, blocked, censored and generally used to persecute you, with complete impunity.

Frankly there's more "radicalisation" coming from Westminster than anywhere else, given the brazen propaganda it spreads implying that companies are somehow aiding and abetting terrorism merely by refusing to violate civil and human rights.

So it turns out that fighting crime costs money?

Good, it's supposed to. I'd rather my taxes were spent on fighting crime than persecuting people who simply dare to disagree with the government.

NB: It's worth remembering that the original definition of "terrorism" was "state rule by terror", before the actual terrorists "radicalised" people into believing otherwise.

How's this for a stocking filler next year? El Reg catches up with Gemini

Rear-facing camera or go home

OK, so now I've had a chance to really think about it, this device isn't anywhere near as exciting as I though it would be.

I mean, basically it's just an Android smartphone with a keyboard stuck to it.

No seriously, that's it. Isn't it? If there's significantly more to it then I'm afraid I don't see it.

So OK, there's nothing wrong with having a proper keyboard for smartphones, as long as the actual "phone" part checks all the boxes.

Except this one doesn't.

For a start, where's the camera? I mean the real camera, not the selfie camera.

Also, a dual-display would be good, so you can actually see who's calling without opening the device, and also make calls with an external touch dial pad. The second display wouldn't have to be full size, just big enough for a dial pad and maybe two status lines. Relocate the speaker and mic to the back somewhere, while you're at it, so this thing can actually be used as a phone, without having to play the iPhone 4 Twister game.

Other than that, yeah, pretty good, but honestly I think their money would've been better spent by just developing the keyboard itself, then selling it as an accessory for any phone. That way they wouldn't have had to pointlessly reinvent the smartphone, and I wouldn't be expected to shell out £/$ 600 for yet another Android device I don't need just to get a proper keyboard.

Executive summary: this is a £/$ 600 Psion keyboard screwed onto an Android phone.

I'd buy the keyboard for £30. Max.

Let the downvotes begin...

"the first new computer form-factor since the iPad"

Are you saying that the iPad was something other than a tablet, the likes of which have been around since at least Microsoft's Tablet PC in 2002, a full 8 years before Apple finally jumped on the bandwagon, and in one form or another since the late 1960s?

As for the Gemini, as much as I like what I've seen of it so far, it also doesn't even remotely qualify as a new computer form factor either. The form factor is "palmtop", and has been around since at least the 1980s.

Ubuntu 17.10 pulled: Linux OS knackers laptop BIOSes, Intel kernel driver fingered

"Least(sic) the Linux fanbois..."

That should be "Lest", as in Lester Haines.

Yup, shockingly it turns out that all software has bugs, and Linux is no exception. Windows is certainly no exception either, nor is MacOS.

Next!

Astroboffins say our Solar System could have – wait, stop, what... the US govt found UFOs?

The paranoid obsession with extraterrestrials

The fact that there are other people on this planet, some of whom are allegedly of a different "race", does not somehow send me into hysterical fits of panic. The fact that there are more entire species of living organisms on this planet than there are individual humans in Switzerland, also does not send me into an apoplectic tizzy.

So why the fuck should it be such a big deal that there are organisms living somewhere other than on this rock?

Of course there are. Why wouldn't there be?

Apparently there are people living in China too, which is very far away from me. Should this fact bother me somehow? Should it bother me if they lived even further away, such as 10,000 miles above the surface of the Earth? How about 20,000 miles? How about 1,000,000?

Seriously, what difference does it make? It's just distance, and the variance between species is just biology. Why the paranoid hysteria? Why the obsession?

"They" are out there, somewhere, in fact everywhere, where "they" comprises everything from slugs to Germans to some currently undocumented, perhaps humanoid species of life on other planets.

Deal with it!

Magic Leap blows our mind with its incredible technology... that still doesn't f**king exist

Magic Leap of Bullshit

Is this the same company that invented the left-handed screwdriver, by any chance?

The fact that such con-artists exist is not surprising. The bit that blows my mind is the fact that they somehow managed to con rubes out of two beeelion smakeroonies.

Mozilla's creepy Mr Robot stunt in Firefox flops in touching tribute to TV show's 2nd season

about:studies

(!) The address isn't valid

Yay.

You can have my ESR when you pry it from my cold dead fingers.

5 reasons why America's Ctrl-Z on net neutrality rules is a GOOD thing

"will list every service and website you get"

Sadly, I'm betting El Reg won't make it into our corporate overlords' shortlist.

A million UK homes still get crappy broadband speeds, groans Ofcom

"indoor 4G mobile signal from all four networks"

Pfft. I don't even get an outdoor any "G" mobile signal from any network?

Do I get a prize?

Please make it a dedicated 1TB/s line, so I can download all the pr0n before our dark overlords block it.

Brit film board proposed as overlord of online pr0nz age checks

Re: Attempts by the Government to block porn will fail

I could live without porn (wait! what am I saying?), but for me the biggest concern is that this is just a pretext to arbitrarily block anything our overlords don't approve of. Today it's porn, tomorrow it's an austerity protest site...

Will it fail? Well, partially. It'll fail for the typical El Reg reader, whose savvy enough to use VPN et al, but in the short term (at least) it'll probably succeed for the great unwashed masses, at which point you might as well rebrand the UK as North Korea 2.0.

NiceHash diced up by hackers, thousands of Bitcoin pilfered

Mugs game

This is just one of the many reasons why I will never go anywhere near craptocurrency.

Staff at Steria gov shared services centre offered voluntary redundo

Why is it always at Christmas?

No but seriously, it's like mass redundancy has become a sort of Christmas tradition.

WW2 Enigma machine to be seized from shamed pharma bro Shkreli

Re: "they might learn"

Psychopaths are genetically incapable of learning from their mistakes, because they completely lack the capacity to understand that the harm they cause is in any way "wrong", and therefore in their view cannot possibly be a "mistake".

Rather, it's everyone else who's "wrong" for stopping them, criticising them and punishing them, since in their neoliberal view they should be allowed to run amok with complete impunity. Indeed they view their causing harm, with or without any particular reason--but typically for some personal benefit, to be a sort of "inalienable right", and that our stopping them actually constitutes a form of "violence".

Yes, the twisted mind of a neoliberal psychopath is a vile, mysterious cesspool, full of horrors.

Re: Psychopath vs Sociopath

The difference is subjective.

From my limited understanding of the subject, psychopathy is genetic, whereas sociopathy is supposedly circumstantial.

Personally I think the latter is a myth, otherwise everyone subject to similar circumstances would become a psychopath, which is demonstrably not the case. Again, from my limited exposure to various research material, only 1% of the general populous is considered to be clinically psychopathic.

Someone like Shkreli, who would deliberately kill for no reason other than greed, then publicly sneer about it, is clearly one of them, especially given that there was absolutely nothing harsh about his extremely privileged circumstances at the time, that might otherwise have accounted for his behaviour.

Re: Fail

"but it’s a constant reminder that we should use knowledge for good"

Yes, because arbitrarily hiking by 56x the price of life-saving medication to $750 per pill, then very publicly sneering about it, is such an obvious example of "using knowledge for good".

Please let this psychopath die in prison.

Twitter's fight to kill Uncle Sam's censorship of spying numbers edges closer to victory

Just the numbers?

In a fair society, we'd get more than just the numbers, we'd get the explanation for what exactly these people had allegedly done to warrant an invasion into their privacy.

In fact this clandestine inquisition wouldn't be allowed in the first place.

Have something to say? Say it to my face. In a public court. Period.

Facebook, Google, IBM, Red Hat give GPL code scofflaws 60 days to behave – or else

Re: Translation please

Wow! I call for assistance and magically Bruce Perens appears.

Karma suggests I should now write my letter to Santa and/or buy a lottery ticket.

Favourite quote:

Thus, it is ironic that when originally presented with the opportunity to apply the GPL 3 to Linux, Linus Torvalds and the Kernel team were quite hostile about it, while the kernel team’s recent announcement attributes the principles they have adopted to the text in GPL 3. Perhaps they’ve learned something since those hostile moments.

Translation please

Maybe it's the flu, but I've read that article three times and I still don't have a clue what it's on about.

So GPL violators won't be sued quite so quickly? Or they won't be sued at all, but instead will be invited for tea and biscuits and a nice cosy chat? Or it's going to be a bit like the TVL, who endlessly send "Dear Legal Occupier" love letters but then never actually get around to doing any humping?

Meanwhile, I missed this linked article the first time around:

Essentially, the SFLC, which holds a trademark on "Software Freedom Law Center", is upset the SFC holds a trademark on "Software Freedom Conservancy".

OK, that's it. I'm done.

Tom Baker returns to finish shelved Doctor Who episodes penned by Douglas Adams

Re: Doctor Who's 17th season

Is that salt, or pepper?

Re: And for those lost episodes.

They may have long scrubbed the tapes, but presumably they still have the scripts. With the aid of CGI it shouldn't be too difficult to simply recreate those lost episodes from scratch.

156K spam text-sending firm to ICO: It wasn't us, Commissioner

Outsourcing to Belize

Yup, nothing suspect about that whatsoever. Honest.

Abolish the Telly Tax? Fat chance, say MPs at non-binding debate

Re: "I don't go to school"

Maybe if you did then you'd understand that what you subjectively characterise as "entertainment" is not an essential public utility, it's not a human right, and it doesn't make the difference between life or death ... or even between comfort and squalor. It's completely non-essential, of purely subjective value, and those who have absolutely no interest in it whatsoever should not be harassed into paying for it. Period.

A better analogy would be if everyone were forced by law to pay Cineworld for the benefit of a largely adolescent minority who religiously visit the cinema to watch endless streams of Transformers sequels, on the basis that "you might one day decide to go watch a film at Cineworld", even though you haven't been anywhere near a cinema in well over a decade.

Would you find that acceptable?

No, then why the fuck should I be forced to fund your hobby?

Re: "something I approve of"

Your subjective reasoning is non sequitur.

Why should those who don't "approve of" the garbage that passes for modern day TV entertainment be endlessly harassed, intimidated and treated like criminals?

And no, contacting the TVL does not stop the harassment, it only ensures that the next threatogram is addressed to e.g. "Mr. Smith" instead of "The Legal Occupier". I speak from personal experience.

It's not like I oppose taxation -- I'm a lifelong socialist and Labour Party member, after all -- but taxes are supposed to be for essential public utilities, not something that subjectively qualifies as "entertainment".

I don't particularly care how many starry-eyed sentimentalists eulogise the BBC. I. DO. NOT. WANT. IT. Why the fuck should I be expected to pay for it?

Digital minister: We're still talking to BT about sorting crap broadband

Re: "f*** the country dwellers attitude"

Not a farmer, but I live as a not very affluent tenant on a farm. Personally I don't think I should have to be a farmer to qualify for something as basic as a decent telecoms infrastructure. That'd be like saying that country folk shouldn't get postal services, or electricity, or roads, or ambulance services, or pretty much anything that fails to meet this Social Darwinist expectation of "high margin profits and fuck everyone else".

I think some people fail to understand that not everyone who lives in the countryside owns a sprawling estate, three Land Rovers and a stud of horses.

"recoup by further hiking"

Sorry, maybe I'm missing something obvious, but why would BT or any company making over £3 billion in profits every year need to further gouge customers to pay a £600 million bill?

If our neoliberal government really wants to regulate something (isn't that an oxymoron?) then maybe it should start by looking at BT's blatant profiteering first, before worrying about exactly how it spends those profits (or not, apparently).

Massive US military social media spying archive left wide open in AWS S3 buckets

Re: YABCSP

I'm more interested in (or rather, depressed by) witnessing yet another example of America's obsession with controlling the planet, then whitewashing the true motive with the usual "terrorism" rhetoric (where the definition of "terrorism" seems to be "anything that doesn't support the notion of American supremacism").

Leaks like these only confirm, over and over again, what we've already known for decades.

Crap London broadband gets the sewer treatment

"leveraging the waste water network"

Sewer worker: (hands Mike Magee a water pump) Right mate, get "leveraging"!

Uber loses appeal against UK employment rights for workers

Not an employer?

Oh really?

“When allocating bookings, Uber deliberately does not tell the driver the destination and strongly discourages drivers from asking passengers the destination before pick up – so that drivers are not able to decline a booking because they do not wish to travel to that destination.”

Nothing like being your own "boss", eh?

Card shark Intel bets with discrete graphics chips, shuffles AMD's GPU boss into the deck

Well then...

Suddenly Monday's news makes a lot more sense. Looks like Intel really was planning to move into discrete graphics after all.

However, I still think this is pointless. They won't get the gaming segment, and apparently they're not even going to try. They "desperately covet" AI, allegedly.

[Sniff] Is that the smell of Gnome underpants?

UK Land Registry opens books on corporate owners

Re: Private Eye

From the PI article:

"A recent Freedom of Information request by Christian Aid for the Serious Fraud Office's risk assessment for the BVI was refused on the less than reassuring grounds that releasing it would harm relations with the territory"

Looks like the British Virgin Islands is now fscked.

AMD, Intel hate Nvidia so much they're building a laptop chip to spite it

Re: 'in terms of "most shipped"'

I'm looking at this from Intel's perspective, not the end user's. Who has the "most shipped" is really all Intel cares about. Intel already owns 70% of the GPU market, so I really don't understand why it's bothering to chase the thin end of the wedge. It's either predatory or stupid, or possibly both.

You could argue that if the end result is better graphics for 70% of the market, then who cares what Intel's ulterior motive is, but remember we're talking about the 70% who obviously don't give a damn about graphics, otherwise they wouldn't be using Intel in the first place.

The 70% wouldn't benefit anyway, as their use case could probably still work on graphics hardware from the 1990s. Meanwhile games developers will continue to target Nvidia, as ever, so it's not like Intel users would get a better gaming experience even with improved Intel hardware, since that hardware is and will continue to be completely ignored by developers.

So who exactly does Intel think it's targeting with this nonsense, and why?