Daily Tech News 6 November 2025

• A survey has found that 72% of game developers say Steam is effectively a monopoly in the PC gaming market. (TechSpot)
  
  No it hasn't.

  In a survey of over 300 executives from large US and UK game companies, 72% either slightly or strongly agreed that Steam constitutes a monopoly over PC games.

  So by "developers" you mean... Not developers.

  Many customers are so adamant about only purchasing games through Steam that the industry's largest publishers, including EA, Ubisoft, and even Microsoft, have tried - and failed - to withhold their titles from the service.

  Because Steam works. The competitors less so.
  
  The one standout is GOG, which gets in your way even less than Steam.

• AMD reported its quarterly results and the news is all good. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  "Client" product sales - that is, the CPUs normal humans buy - were up 46% to $2.8 billion. Gaming revenue soared by 181% to $1.3 billion, though the market is still dominated by Nvidia and AMD's gains are a result of moving from "adequate" to "pretty good" rather than stealing the market lead.
  
  Total revenue was $9.2 billion for the quarter, up 36% from last year, and profits were up 61% to $1.2 billion.
  
  
  
• The password for the Louvre's video surveillance system was "Louvre". (PC Gamer)
  
  Oh.
  
  
  
• SK Hynix - Hyundai's memory chip division - has shown off its roadmap for the next few years. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  You can't afford to look at it.
  
  Pricing problems aside, DDR5 is going to be with us for a while. DDR6 is not expected until 2029 or 2030. Updates like MRDIMM Gen2 are set to double the speed of DDR5 by the simple trick of using two banks of chips at once, so we'll probably be fine.
  
  
  
• Unicode footguns in Python. (Python Koans)
  
  (A footgun is a gun designed explicitly for shooting yourself in the foot.)
  
  I've said before that Unicode is a semantic Superfund site, and Python has been around longer than Unicode - though not by much - so it's not surprising that some things are painful.
  
  I do wonder though if there are any programming languages where Unicode is not painful. Unicode attempts to create a single character set merging every human language in history despite the fact that the rules resolving said characters are often mutually contradictory.
  
  It's a mess.
  
  
  
• Speaking of messes the October Windows 11 update is triggering BitLocker recovery on some systems. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  This is where you boot your PC up and are met by a demand for your BitLocker password, usually despite you never having heard of BitLocker in your life and certainly not having consciously set it up with a password.
  
  Meaning - if you don't have another PC handy to research the workaround this time - your data is being held ransom by your own computer.
  
  Microsoft had a similar bug back in May. And July last year. And August of 2022.
  
  Windows 10's lack of updates looks better every day.
  
  

• My house has artificial turf at one side and the rear (between the house and a retaining wall) which the builders told me they put in because keeping a lawn alive in those areas would be too much work.
  
  I tried to talk them down a bit on the price because I knew I wanted to replace it with something less plastic, but they weren't having it, and it was a sellers market right then with a big chunk of NSW under water.
  
  Anyway, I had a sudden thought today that the surface under the fake grass was rather hard underfoot, and if for some reason they had concreted it that would drastically limit my options. (I'm thinking of a mix of pavers and pebbles, maybe a couple of strategic shrubs, but shrubs don't grow well in concrete unless you really don't want them to).
  
  Peeled back a segment.
  
  Nope. Just packed earth. All good.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

| Access Comments