Getting stronger is subjective. If you analyze their performance, here's what you see: two divisions make up the majority of their revenue and profit. It appears to be Windows and Office. That is the same as 20 years ago.

• Division Gross Margin (% or revenue)
• Devices and Consumer Licensing: 93.8%
• Computing and Gaming Hardware: 1.25%
• Phone Hardware: 2.72%
• Devices and Consumer Other: 23:72%
• Commercial Licensing: 91.75%
• Commercial Other: 30.54%

However when it comes to hardware, MS barely makes any profit.

More importantly, the size and scale of the conspiracy would have to be massive. Tens of thousands of people worked on the program would have to be fooled. How many hundreds of thousands of people would have to work to keep ten thousand people fooled or not divulging? Neil deGrasse Tyson said it best in that only 3 people knew about Bill Clinton's sex scandal yet it got out. Also it would have cost the US government more money to create a hoax than it would to actually go to the moon. And they would have done such a piss poor job at it anyway.

Also they tend to fixate on a few things that seem to be the smoking gun; however, when looked in detail are not as definitive as they seem. For example photos from NASA show that shadows are not parallel. According to conspiracies, this must have been because more than one light source was present, ergo, it was staged. This however does not take into account that the surface of the moon is not flat. Mythbusters verified this.

Another one is the crosses (+) in the photos appear sometimes behind the subject instead of in front. This can only be because the crosses were added later to photos and not originally taken with the "moon" camera. Anyone with sufficient expertise photography knows that can be caused by overexposure. Overexposure was necessary for some photos in order to get a decent image. And the list goes on.

And it hasn't been maintained in 12 years or so.

I would have to disagree with the analogy of embrace and extend as systemd is open source whereas MS products were not. And you can use alternatives but it may be more work to maintain them.

Well init in my opinion is as the poster stated init is an excellent chef's knife. The problem is in the modern age, sometimes you need a screwdriver and sometimes you need scissors. Systemd can do all those things but it's not great at doing so. It's enough to get by.

Well there are advantages to systemd whether you personally like it or not. Like automatic dependency handling, parallel service starts, monitoring built-in. And there are disadvantages too.

Systemd vs init: It's the new emacs vs vi debate for the 21st century. :P

Compared to Windows 95 it was worlds ahead. But that's not saying much. :P

I have and there is no secret. The press release does a good job of summarizing the results.

Now that is a gross mischaracterization of the data. 10,000 scientists were contacted. Their expertise ranged from many disciplines. 3,146 responded. The two questions were asked with 90% and 82% voting "Yes" respectively (2831 and 2579). Out of the 3146, then the list was narrowed down to scientists who were actively publishing and more than 50% of their papers in climate science. That eliminated most of the respondents down to 79 which are basically the experts in the field.

Even if you discard the 97% number, the 90% and 82% are hard to ignore.

Yet two experts did. There are biology professors like Michael Behe who argue for Intelligent Design instead of evolution based on very little evidence. Thankfully there are in the minority.

The move to USB was a practical matter. One interface for low bandwidth connections: USB. One for high bandwidth ones: FireWire. It was about future proofing than legacy. And it had the effect that it brought down costs when you could use the same peripherals for Mac and PC if the drivers were there.

It also wasn't well supported until way after Apple made their change. Oh it was there. But adoption was poor. Drivers were non-existent or poor. Even Windows didn't have proper USB support til Windows 98. As for the dark ages, yes you can still get MBs with PS/2. I haven't used that port in a decade or more like I haven't used a serial or parallel port. I don't have a need.

At the time, PowerPC chips were more powerful than x86 in terms of raw computing power. I believe that the G5 Mac was technically classified as a supercomputer based on an old standard of flops and could not be exported until the US government updated the definitions.

The reason for the switchover to x86 had to do more with power efficiency, customization, and logistics. While the PowerPC architecture did lend itself to better overall computing performance, it was lacking in power efficiency and heat. For a desktop that's not a major problem, but it is a problem for laptops. It's a problem that IBM never really solved as they never released a mobile G5 and Apple was stuck with mobile G4s until the Intel switchover. Here is one area where Intel was way ahead.

The two other related issues have to do with Apple's needs and IBM and Motorola's manufacturing logistics. Apple despite ordering millions of chips a year was always going to be a small customer in terms of volume. However Apple was going to need a heavily customized consumer PowerPC chip that required to be updated almost every year. Meanwhile most other PowerPC customers would want server/workstation chips that IBM used in their own products. Now these can be done but these factors cost time and money. I can see why Motorola and IBM (and also Apple) would be less likely to invest into new chips.

On the flipside, the Xbox 360's Xenon processor would be more the model of what IBM/Motorola wanted. Although it was heavily customized, the basic design has not changed in 8 years when the Xbox One was launched with estimated sales of 40+ million. This gave IBM enough time to do a die shrink to cut costs.

The change to Intel gave Apple many advantages. First of all, faster and more efficient mobile processors were available. Second, most of the features that Apple wanted were already in the x86 design as they were designed for consumer PCs. Third, any customization Apple requested from Intel, Intel could sell to competitors like Dell. For example, the first MacBook Airs used customized Intel Core processors in which the chip package had been shrunk 40%. Intel didn't mind investing the money for this customization as they sold them immediately to other customers. Many of the features that Intel got in the collaboration became part of the Ultrabook specification.

[Citation Needed]
This is the original press release about the 97%. By the way, the correct citation is "In analyzing responses by sub-groups, Doran found that climatologists who are active in research showed the strongest consensus on the causes of global warming, with 97 percent agreeing humans play a role. "

Basically the survey found that the experts in the field have 97% consensus. For overall numbers of scientists:

No I think computer models are really the only thing we have as we don't have a spare planet to experiment upon and god-like powers. But with all models, I don't assume that they are all 100% accurate. But I think they can be constructed to be close enough to determine a reasonable outcome.

No one has ever said that these models are 100% for all future predictions. Like most of science, theories (and models) that best fit observable data are used. And like most of science these are tested. I don't know if this is some sort of delusion or lack of understanding of how science works. Just because a scientist proposes something or releases a paper, it is not automatically accepted without challenge. Data is challenged. Conclusions are challenged.

All science is challenged. Consensus is reached after enough data and evidence is presented that favors the conclusions. Einstein's General Theory of Relativity wasn't accepted because Einstein proposed it. It took a solar eclipse before many physicists began to accept that it might be the best theory. Now by today's standards, the results of solar eclipse experiment would not have been enough.

The problem with the "features" that MS touted were they weren't really features. Squirting could have been neat if it hadn't been so crippled. Compared to other MP3 players that played PlaysForSure v1, the Zune didn't offer anything that extraordinary over the iPod ecosystem. Both only operated with 1 device family. These days that doesn't matter as much as DRM has largely been removed. At best the Zune was slightly better than other MP3 players but not as good as the iPod Touch.

Win 8 was about forcing users to use Metro so MS could catch up in tablets and hybrids by leveraging the desktop. MS was behind Apple and Google on tablets even though they had a decade head start. But rather than allow users to pick Metro, MS probably feared that consumers would adopt it as much as they adopted the Zune. The Zune wasn't a bad product besides the poor color choice of brown. Sure the Zune beat out an iPod Classic, but it was not a "wow" product that offered anything significant over the iPod Touch. Thus it never got much traction. If MS had released a different UI for Win 8, a consumer would never pick Metro for their desktops. Thus they would be unfamiliar with it when it came to tablets and hybrids.

I think the Imminent Threat refers to the body searches that police do to determine that suspects have no weapons on their person when arrested.