Microsoft operates as if it was a growth company so the markets treat it accordingly.

The distros should be maintaining thier own packages for deployment in the distro. I mean it's really the main function of the distro. For instance Red Hat has a staff who's sole purpose is to make and maintain packages for RHEL (with security pathches etc). On the non-commercial side, Debian has rules on what goes in what goes in the stable and unstable packages and enforces those rules so the packages are only updated when needed. Other distros have other rules, including as you indicate outsourcing the package maintance to a third party outside of the distro's control.

If a distro has outsourced the package construction to a third party outside of their control, it was their choice to do so. A consequence of that choice is that they're at the mercy of the third party, but this doesn't mean that they didn't have this choice to begin with.

Something you probably don't get though, is that distributions have no choice.

That is wrong. Distributions actually have all sorts of choice in the matter. There is nothing preventing them from keeping to ship the older versions KDE3 or Gnome 2 while all the upgrade chaos goes on. It's open source so if the upstream maintainers don't want to do it there is nothing that prevents them from maintaining the older version themselves, getting together as a group to maintian, or even just leaving as is and not following the upgrades.

They instead choose to foist all this on their users for reasons that escape me (though being the path of least resistances for them might be why). To say they have no choice in the matter is just wrong.

The article indciates that these are just the mirrors and the shells. There are no instruments and they're currently sitting in a warehouse instead of being in space. NASA would need to equip them and launch them before they could even be used for anything, but it would shorten the timeline (over the Webb Telescope) since they're similar to the existing Hubble telescope.

You've never been to Douglas, AZ have you? It's not exactly flat, I doubt they could get enough open, flat space to build a pad.

It's also not near anything and makes Brownsville look like a bustling metropolis.

Then the requester is not likely looking for a laptop at all. The reduced 80-key keyboard has been standard on laptops for a long time and the market for a laptop with a full 101-keyboard is likely at or around one person so there is no money in anyone making a decent one.

If the requester that hung up on a full keyboard, they should just by a USB keyboard and carry that with them. They're not going to find any laptop with a keyboard anywhere close to that one that will make them happy.

It's called a death spiral. It's something that happens to a lot of companies actually where they start jetsoning their "underperforming" business lines but not realizing that the underperforming business lines are covering some of the fixed costs of the "good" business lines. Once those costs are re-allocated to the "good" lines, they are not underperforming and need to be jetsoned off. Eventually there is nothing left in the organization that can cover the fixed costs and it goes under.

It's one of the things they teach you to watch out for in business school. Why it keeps happening over and over and over again, I have no idea.

You can do the same thing with SharePoint solutions now. Granted there are still some quirks.

Why it took Microsoft 7 years to make them functional enough to use after the launch of SharePoint I have no idea.

Turn down the encoding of the YouTube videos. At some point they started trying to stream everything at 1080p which is awesome, but the bandwidth usage is too high for pretty much most links. They'll stream just fine if being viewed at 720p or 480p once the bandwidth is dropped and look fine since very few of them are actually recorded at anything higher than 480p anyway.

At a certain point the peerage costs would be equal or greater to just going to the big content providers (Netflix, Youtube, etc) had having them host a cached version on the internal Comcast network that Comcast subscribers would hit first before trying to go out over a peered link (which should then not count against the cap since it's internal).

Since they're not doing that but directly trying to drive customers to the Comcast Xfinity and away from being paying customers of their competition (both in services and in content). They've kind of crossed a line methinks.

What you'll find though is the well connected interest groups would then rule the roost and pretty much run roughshod over everyone else, all so the connected groups can make the most profit at the expense of everyone else. And by the next election it's usually too late to overturn the decisions (and if it's really controversial they'll just run someone else who'll keep the machinery flowing to the right connected parties.)

We tried the closed meetings, get things done way before and it was so bad laws like the Open Meetings and Sunshine laws since keeping things secret and getting things done led to things like general corruption and machines like Tammany Hall. Having everyone gum up the works (i.e. having all sides voices heard) is a feature of the system, not a bug.

The issue is that meetings should be public so the public can know what's being discussed, can be there to watch, and be able comment on the proceedings since the board members actually you know work for the public. Doing the meeting via email does keep a paper trail, but it doesn't allow the public to weigh in on the decision. That is the issue.

That's the problem the studio is complaining about not being allowed to take their cut, mainly because they were cut out of the process entirely.

They dropped them from the list of "secure" providers. Global Payments is still authorized to handle VISA credit card payments.

At this point cell phones have pretty much killed charges for room charges from the phone. I don't think I've used a phone in a room in like 15 years.

Having bad WiFi is one of the things that can drive business customers from staying there, and business customers are usually the most profitable customers for a hotel.