Right, I honestly agree with you for the most part (that is: profit-maximization above all else is inherently evil). My point is that slandering Microsoft specifically is a bit redundant since they would be joined by literally any company vying for profitability (which obviously excludes many start-ups which are instead vying for the POTENTIAL of future profitability).

When we start creating scapegoats with faces, we lost sight of the larger, structural problems behind those singular entities.

Saying that "distrust of the CCP" is racist towards the ethnically Chinese is about as silly as you can get.

Listen, I'm not a huge fan of Microsoft either, but this has little to do with "evil" and more to do with "company". If you have a gripe with corporate capitalism (and there are many gripes to be had), that is another story altogether. But lets not look at something predictably profit-focused from a profit-focused organization and then screech about "evil" or whatever.

Ultimately, the drive to create "career readiness" has infected every aspect of education in most of the world's first-world countries. Kids aren't prompted to have a love of learning, but merely to learn itself. Having children opened my eyes to this tragedy, and my wife and I have made it a priority in how we raise and love our kids to share the love of learning new things with them, not just studying science to get a good career.

I don't think Google wants to bring any attention to a perceived browser-monopoly when they own the overwhelming share of the android and desktop browser space.

Joy. Can't wait to use yet another website on my widescreen PC monitor that will seemingly cater exclusively to portrait-oriented tablets and phones. I guess I should consider it a blessing that we at least got /. to undo that insane redesign.

Another day, another story about crypto "investors" getting fleeced. What will we find out next, that these "financial instruments" don't actually have any underlying asset or material value?!

Can you people construct arguments that don't involve pleas to emotion and other related bullshit? How is a trillion dollar company buying an independent publisher of widely popular games a positive for competition, customer choice, or any related metric? And how, for fucks's sake, is this "signaling virtue"? Nintendo is famously single-platform when it comes to their games. You don't really have a point there at all, since they publish most of the biggest games on their console. Sony has made big acquisitions before, but none of them are even close to the scale of this (especially when you consider that Microsoft just bought Bethesda not too long ago).
Seriously, is your brain so rotted by the conservative fear-mongering that you would willingly fight FOR corporate conglomeration?

Keep in mind that huge amounts of people are uploading photos and videos to cloud sharing services from their phones on a routine basis. I almost always leave my phone disconnected from my "gigabit" home internet connection since my "5g" (read: 4g with marketing) T-Mobile connection has a much larger outbound pipe.

They mention "best practices" so I'm assuming (read: hoping) they mean something like a salted SHA256. Either way, this is a good lesson to use unique passwords for different services that are rotated somewhat frequently.

For me, the biggest benefit is hardware transcoding support. But similar to the other poster somewhere above, I paid for a $100 lifetime subscription years ago and haven't looked back.

For what its worth, I run Plex and Jellyfin side-by-side, and while I love that Jellyfin is opensource, it definitely lags behind Plex in both functionality, usability, and stability. I'm hoping they close the gap someday!

I would honestly be amazed if this statement is taken at face value by anyone that reads it. Their operating system business has been in a slow decline for around the last decade or so. They make so much more money from the combined sales of Azure and O365 than Windows that it makes me laugh out loud to think anyone would suggest the contrary.

Can you point to some specific examples of Microsoft's "just that bad" offerings in the Azure ecosystem? I'm sure there are a few, since AWS is still the leader in both breadth of services and market penetration, but as someone who has used both extensively for corporate, state, and federal government clients, I really can't understand how someone can suggest that they are just that bad without having a position of favoritism towards a competitor.

I'd rather have 4 megacorps competing with each other on equal footing than a single one dominating the landscape. Neither are good scenarios, but one is fantastically worse than the other.

Is this a joke? Amazon has spent countless dollars lobbying elected and appointed officials alike to secure its dominant position. You have to be comically naive to suggest that they are the number one spot because "their offering is just better".

Here's a fun anecdote: I've actually worked on several projects for the federal government that saw tens of millions in cloud spend. Want to know how the cloud provider was determined? The managing director had a relationship with a vendor who was an AWS reseller. I'm sure that decision was based solely on capabilities and certainly not on what amounts to a backroom deal! Especially given the fact that the diversity of services required amounted to not much more than managed DBs and VMs!

That has become quite the popular strategy by both sociopaths and their sycophants alike.