Let's get turbo encabulated!

No idea on the men-vs-women thing.

But it seems absolutely crazy for the DRMed media sales industry to remind people that their media could Just Work and be normal, instead of requiring specific proprietary players (a different one for each media source). They shouldn't even mention piracy, because that just plants the seed that people could instead have standard format files, where things are much more convenient than the awkward situation with DRMed media.

If we want people to just accept that things are shitty and must always remain shitty, then it's probably best to not encourage people to think about the topic at all. Shhhh! Don't bring it up, and pretend that the idea of a convenient media library, where users have the choice to use whatever player software that they want on whatever device that they want, simply doesn't exist at all.

Science makes no such claim. Indeed, science has yet to fully encapsulate what it means to be “alive” in the first place.

So stop claiming that science says what you want it to say, just because that’s the result you desire. That in and of itself is not science.

Yaz

Their old 1% is still there, those are in addition to the regular rebate, so I don't know why you have such a problem with it. It's not like they took something away for that. It's just a few clicks on the web site, which I go to for paying the bill anyhow, and you can sign up a few weeks before the quarter begins.

Discover Card's shtick is that if you pay your balance in full each month, you get 1% back (from the 3% or so merchant fees). The downside is that not everyone takes it. I've had a Discover card since the late '80s, and up until about 10 or so years ago, I had to have a Visa card as my second option. I think I still have one non-US payment per year that I make (to my domain registrar in Europe) where I have to use Paypal instead.

These days, when I get the e-mail notice that my bill is due, I just go to the web site and click it through. I hated the days of having to write checks and stuff them in envelopes and all that crap.

I'm impressed if your bags are good enough to use as trash bags. Here in Texas, the current fashion is to use relatively small bags made out of the thinnest plastic possible. They're only big enough for a small wastebasket, and they rip if you look at them wrong. So they only put in like two or three items per bag at the checkout, and often double-bag them.

My primary motivation for using cloth bags for groceries is simply to avoid having those awful plastic bags lying around, so I won't be temped to reuse them, which never works anyhow. It's also cool to have everything in two or three big cloth bags that I sling over my shoulder, so I don't have to take the basket out to the parking lot, then park the basket in a corral. I do have to be careful when I get a loaf of bread or such, to put it where it won't get squished, but that's not often.

This reminds me of how in the 1980s, things like FPUs and MMUs were separate chips. Do you want an 80387 with your 80386? Do you want a 68851 with your 68020? But then the newer CPUs just came with that stuff.

Even if 90% of the machines sold over the next few years never use it (think of how many 80386 chips were running MS-DOS as a "fast 8086" and never went into protected mode), it's nice that on the software side you'll eventually be able to expect it. In 1988 you couldn't assume floating point was fast for everyone, but by 1998 you could.

"....how the hell do I stop him?"

Stop fetching resources from his servers. He can't track you, if you stop giving him the data to do it.

Nope - didn’t forget; as you pointed out MS gave up on Xenix in the late 80’s, and I specifically stated (as you quoted) “UNIX wasn’t even on Microsoft’s radar in the 90’s”.

MS did some stuff with UNIX in the 70s and 80s, but by the 90s they were all in on DOS/Windows and Windows NT, with a bit of Mac OS (before it was UNIX based).

Yaz

Strong disagree. While creative types have long favoured Mac, most hard-core developers and power users eschewed it for other platforms — until around 2003/2004, when OS X became mature enough and developers with UNIX-style toolchains moved over in droves.

Go back to relevant /. stories around that timeframe, and you’ll see how common it suddenly become to go to conferences and see 80%+ of developer laptops being PowerBooks (and later MacBook Pro’s). That was virtually unheard of just a year prior — and a lot of devs still prefer it to Windows, because most UNIX-style commands and toolchains “just work”.

Yaz

it was about beating OS/2.

Most of the other UNIX’s weren’t designed to run on 80x86 platforms, so they were never in any real contention with Microsoft. AIX, HPUX, Solaris, Dynix (which was Intel based but had a special architecture separate from PCs) — none of these were in the same market as Windows.

No, Microsoft’s target was OS/2 — which had a bigger resource footprint, but was also a vastly superior OS, with real pre-emptive multitasking, a (by 90’s standards) modern high performance file system, the ability to pre-emptively multitask Windows 3.x and DOS apps well before Windows 95, and a superiors desktop environment (a modern Workplace Shell would still absolutely slay). It was here that Microsoft introduced Win32s and kept changing it every few weeks to break OS/2 compatibility for newer Windows apps. It was here that the per-processor agreements were put into place with systems manufacturers to make selling OS/2 on systems more expensive (for those too young to know, in these agreements the manufacturer paid and charged for a Windows license with every system sold — even if it didn’t come with Windows. So if you wanted an OS/2 system you were paying for both OS/2 and a Windows license you didn’t actually get).

UNIX wasn’t even on Microsoft’s radar in the 90’s — it just wasn’t a PC operating system, and was mostly targeted to systems that didn’t compete with Microsoft. If you wanted a UNIX system, you had to buy your hardware from your OS vendor (much like with macOS today) — virtually nobody (except some of the early cool kids running Linux and *BSD) was buying white-box Intel systems and running UNIX — the numbers were too small for Microsoft to care. OS/2 was their real target — and in the end, it worked.

Yaz

Why did eBay even have a thousand employees to lose? What could these people have been working on?

Next week: car tires worldwide are mysteriously crumbling into dust.

RTFS: "broadband speeds". But do we really need full broadband speeds in the middle of nowhere that's too remote for cellular towers?

The key word is "try." They try through the art of persuasion, to make buyers think copyright law says something other than what it says.