Or just use BitLocker software mode or LUKS and skip hardware/firmware level implementation. Then you have a much more well vetted software stack instead of trusting anything about the hardware vendor's implementation, which have historically been shown to have various weaknesses.

It was certainly a difficulty, but I suspect between ecosystem work and iterating on the processor design the market *could* have made it a serviceable ecosystem.

While the technical challenges certainly further embarrassed itanium, the main issue is that it demanded recompilation and users weren't exactly in a rush to recompile for the then hypothetical concern of only having 4GB of ram per-process. Well before that became a practical concern, AMD64 arrived.

Itanium sucked and no one wanted it, but if it *had* been the only multi-vendor option for reasonable large memory support, the market would have figured it out. Thankfully Intel wasn't the only company allowed to implement x86, or else we probably would have been stuck with a terribly awkward transition and putting up with the warts. If AMD64 didn't happen, and Itanium was truly unfixable, then maybe someone would have made a run at higher end MIPS64 again, or *maybe* PPC, though I think IBM would have never found the will to do that with PPC including letting their competitors use it.

To the extent you end up at a bash prompt without a lot of external software download without microsoft 'help', then you are actually running WSL, the bash is running under a linux kernel under virtualization.

To the extent that the powershell prompt seems to take some 'bash' commands, they are aliases for unrelated things. Most egregious is curl being aliased to invoke-webrequest, which behaves *nothing* like curl except the most impossibly basic usage.

I refer to the POSIX subsystem they started in the 90s. I don't deal with Windows much and for all I know it's been dropped in favor of 'just use WSL'.

I think this is really the key, they have a lot of self-imposed mandate to *make* copilot succeed as proof that their copilot strategy is correct, and since organic growth did not come now they are forcing it through renames and shuffling people into chat prompts by befault.

Just like IBM went through a phase when they named *everything* Watson trying to capitalize on the Jeopardy publicity stunt, despite many of the things having zero commonality with each other.

Frankly, Wine on a more broadly supported kernel is likely closer to a viable alternative than ReactOS.

Biggest thing ReactOS could bring is Windows driver support, but the ReactOS kernel doesn't even support the current driver models, so it turns out that Linux hardware support is actually stronger than ReactOS hardware support.

I think they are doing something interesting, but frankly I see it as more a potential preservation effort for Windows XP like experience rather than a viable possibility for modern Windows replacement.

And nVidia's income graphs since 2022 took off. The big winner of the 'fuck-you' money in tech went to nVidia thanks to LLMs...

AMD deserved to usurp, but they had long executed better technology and the market didn't reward them to the extent you would have expected..

Itanium could have ultimately succeeded after some fixups if not for AMD.

Like everyone *knew* it was obnoxious but for a time, everyone assumed that it was going to be the only path for a multi-vendor ecosystem to get 64-bit addressing, which was obviously going to be needed with PAE being a crappy limited workaround. All the other viable 64-bit architectures of the time were locked into vendors, and if you were going to have to recompile everything for a new architecture *anyway*, why not Itanium? It would have been nice if Intel would actually pay attention to backwards compatibility which had been their bread and butter, but if they weren't going to give that, then ultimately the industry may have begrudgingly accepted it.

Thankfully, AMD was licensed to be able to make a much more sane offering...

Not Unix, but NT did do the POSIX subsystem, generally recognized as being a token effort to tick requirements checkbox for customer rather than intended to actually be used seriously.

Pretty justified NIMBY here, the companies don't want to give the local communities anything but problems, and it's not something they really *demand* like traditional NIMBY concerns around power plants, landfills, etc.

I think they understand just fine, it was when they didn't understand that these companies could build the datacenters.

I remember a few years back a community realizing years too late that the big datacenter project they were so excited for was a bad deal. They saw the square footage, and remembered how many long term jobs that meant when a textile company had a facility of similar scale, and made assumptions based on that. Then they just had this huge energy and water suck with a handful of low level jobs.

Now they understand better that the datacenters are completely useless to the local economy, which is at least for them the big problem.

Even if the bubble turned out to be durable, it would *still* be bad for the local communities blighted by these datacenters. The boom/bust doesn't even matter for their concerns.

Their problem is there is no upside for the local communities, so they either have to lie and hope people believe it, or tell the truth and have people reject it outright.

I heard one being honest, when criticized about increased energy costs, lack of likely new jobs, strain on water supply, their only response was "but you can be part of the AI revolution!"

You'd have a point if Microsoft didn't already have a long history using semiannual updates to silently turn on features that users had disabled or were previously opt-in.

I don't know how many times I've had to go back and re-hide that goddamned Cortana circle, for example.

No, I'm not. I'm actually (slightly) strengthening the claim.
Originally I considered that he was the (nominal) head of state was significant. I removed that requirement, which makes the claim stronger. I will say that removing the head of state, whether or not valid, is a more extreme action, but even removing a resident by force is not legally justifiable.

But that's totally irrelevant. That he was a resident of Venezuela is sufficient to say that foreign governments have no right to arrest hime for acts committed within Venezuela. That he's the (perhaps) nominal head of state is just a cherry on top of the illegality.

There is no accepted legal principle that would allow the US to prosecute the head of a foreign country for acts in that country. That Venezuela might have grounds for the prosecution is irrelevant.

What is is, is a claim that "might makes right". It has no other real basis.