In fairness...

1.) Cisco is far less litigation happy than Oracle is. Not saying they don't have attorneys on retainer, but Oracle is frequently referred to as a law firm with a software sales division - very different tiers.

2.) Cisco owned Linksys for a while, sure, but they haven't owned it in nearly 15 years - Cisco sold it over to Belkin back in 2013, who in turn sold it to Foxconn around 2018.

3.) Cisco may have discontinued selling routers running Linux out of the box, but they never did any signed-bootloader shenanigans that prevented DD-WRT/Tomato/OpenWRT from running on routers for quite some time - I remember running Shibby's TomatoUSB on an AC3200 for quite some time. Ironically, I think Belkin later started making it nearly-impossible to run third party firmware on Linksys hardware (except the $400 ones).

4.) It's not like anyone else took up the mantle...a handful of routers can run OpenWRT, but they're from obscure vendors - it's not like Cisco got rid of OSS-running routers, only to have Belkin or Netgear or D-Link take it up...Asus did for a little bit (the N56U being a better example), but they didn't keep up with it.

So yeah, Cisco has its clear faults...but how they handled the consumer router division, in my opinion, isn't the best example of this problem...and certainly not when being compared to Oracle.

Petrol cars burn 30 times as often as BEVs, according to the statistics of insurance companies. Yes, for each BEV fire, you have thirty conventional car torches.

And that's a problem exactly why? I don't claim it to be 100%, I just point out the error of assuming 100% uptime for any type of energy source. Any power source based on heat and mechanical components has a lot of wear and tear, and components have to be serviced and replaced all the time, be it coal, gas or nuclear.

You have to pay the tariff to register the car with the DMV. I don't know how long non-U.S. license plates are accepted for a car driving in the U.S., but I would expect it to be limited to 12 month.

The most famous fire on a BEV carrying ship, the MV Fremantle Highway accident, was caused by a patrol car catching fire. But apparently, the BEVs get the blame, despite most of them remained undamaged.

You can get Chinese (and some European EVs) for half the $40,000. And in China, even Korean EVs sell for $10,000.

Irrespective of the nationality of the people making decisions, I think what the GP is getting at is that there were different philosophies over the decades at Microsoft. Amongst the things Ballmer is most famous for is his "Developers, developers, developers, developers" mantra...and the idea was to make Windows the easiest platform to develop software for, and the developers would write software that would encourage the proliferation of Windows in the market. It was a rare case of growth by "trickle-down economics" - take care of the developers, and the developers would grow the market for the platform.

Microsoft's method of increasing shareholder value during the Ballmer era was indirect - value was sought after by market capture, which was fulfilled more so by third party developers than by Microsoft itself. By contrast, the Nadella era has been about "increasing shareholder value" by pushing everyone to Azure and Office subscriptions and by putting ads into Windows and by data harvesting.

Neither era was some sort of pinnacle of customer care; both were concerned about increasing shareholder value. I think the GP is at least somewhat justified in having concern about Microsoft's shift toward increasing shareholder value by making the Windows platform being actively-user-hostile, rather than developer-friendly.

It's a lot more complicated. Remember the solar panels to power the data center? They catch Sun light, so you need to add them to the surface of your data center. And to keep it at 300 K, you need twice the area to the other side to radiate off the heat. And those areas should not face each other, because they would then heat each other. It's a lot easier with convection, because then, the moving gas molecules transport away the heat.

Solar PV sails would have film with metallised aluminium on the back, a bit of vacuum then more aluminium, then a blackbody HOPG film with liquid cooling channels (for its thermal conductivity at low weight). The silicon would be distributed along the sails to minimise the distance the coolant has to travel.

Obviously.

Black body radiators work pretty well if they can only see the earth. PV will get more power per m2 than you can get rid off, but they are in the same order of magnitude.

You can calculate the amount of heat you can transfer via radiation. It's called Stefan-Boltzmann law. At a temperature of 300 K, you can radiate 460 Watts per square meter as a maximum. But from the Sun, you get 1370 Watts per square meter. That means that you have to have at least twice the area away from the Sun to keep temperatures at 300 K. A spherical body like the Earth would be at equilibrium at 279 K if it gets no other energy except direct Sun radiation.

The only reasonable way to make these PV behemoths is as heliogyros, otherwise it takes too much structural components.

They will sail the solar wind ... how that will actually look orbit wise, dunno, it's completely new territory and no one is doing the simulations yet.

Cosmic rays should be handled with resilient architecture, not shielding. Everything needs to be extreme light weight, at most you could generate put a couple megavolt between wire electrodes to guide charged particles to avoid the sails (flexible PV on one side, cooling foil with cooling liquid channels on the other side, bit of vacuum in between).

Windows 95 and 98 shipped with "Progman", a UI shell that loosely mirrored Windows 3.1. Windows XP, and even Vista, shipped with a "classic mode" Start Menu. My standards are lower now; if they could stop breaking ExplorerPatcher and OpenShell, that'd be great.

And do what? Develop UWP apps to be sold in the Windows Store that was so poorly implemented and curated that it's useful for almost-nobody - the developers still writing desktop Windows software likely have an established distribution channel at this point, so they don't need to pay the MS tax. The users have no need for it because they're either doing everything in a web browser, or using their existing software that already has a distribution channel of some kind. This means that the software on offer amounts to mostly-shovelware.

Tangential because it's Office...but they could show they're listening by making Copilot an icon in a corner when logging into Microsoft365, rather than spitting the user into a chat window by default. They're still trying to find a use case for on-device AI, and it's pretty telling that they're shoving it into the OS via annoyances, while their best example (Recall) is something that made more people say "that's creepy" than would say "that's useful". Copilot is the new Clippy in Office, there are memes about how plain-English formulas in Excel make obvious mathematical mistakes, and this is all on the backdrop of sucking everyones' data into OneDrive.

...So, by the author's admission, AI isn't a feature that matters? ...Seriously, I'm half asleep and I can still come up with holes in this argument...I don't think it's going to stop until the AI bubble implodes; the best we can hope for is for MS to implement fewer nags about it, but if Edge is any indication, I've got no confidence.

The average uptime for a coal power plant is between 70% and 90%. Your example should be closer to 8 TWh/year. That means that you would need about 80 of them to provide the same power as Wind and Solar.

PS. assuming the Trump effect won't kick in for the US over 2025.