The problem with the conspiracy theories for both whistleblowers is that in both cases they actually disclosed the damaging information already.

They were popular but they were famously bug-ridden and unstable. Nobody misses Windows 95 or XP, btw.

Hell, NT was the first moderately stable OS they had, and that was just because someone had the bright idea to halt new feature development for a period of time and focus on fixing what they already made.

I remember the 80's and 90's.

Microsoft software now is light years ahead of where it used to be. Is it perfect? No. But it's stable and works now, which it certainly didn't do for a few decades.

That's just not really enough to be that influential.

Eh, it was a bit cringe.
https://www.penny-arcade.com/c...

"What exactly is he influencing? Certainly not product design. Everything Microsoft produces today is shit. "

Wait you think that if he was influencing them they would be better? What in the 40+ year history of Microsoft makes you think that?

Cry harder, nutjob.

https://apnews.com/article/job...

Best Buy honestly isn't that bad for a fair number of consumer electronics -- you can get decent deals on TVs for example.

Fortunately books 4-6 can't be spoiled because they're gibberish and nobody understands them.

Up until volume 3 at least. After that, Herbert kind of went off the rails.

I've noticed this in C/C++ devs since at least the 90s. Coding in C/C++ is seen as a Hard Thing To Do, and becomes a foundation of their self esteem. These people get quite arrogant and refuse to let it go because it means kicking that Jenga block out from underneath their towering egos.

I quite like that Rust is disrupting these little fiefdoms. C-like languages have had 30 years of memory unsafety and it's been a shambling disaster. Let's turn the page.

Oh do they have proof that he was killed?

Do I think the medical examiner and all the other investigators are right and he killed himself, or do I believe in a vast, shadowy conspiracy requiring all those parties plus the prison guards, plus whoever controlled access to the federal prison building to function? A conspiracy whose goals seem to silence him, with the assumption that he had something juicy on powerful people, something that wasn't kept in with the other blackmail materials that law enforcement actually had possession of, and something that he had never decided to use before to save his own neck? And that suicide wouldn't make sense when he was almost certainly going to spend the rest of his life in prison, where he had already been assaulted and was in constant fear?

Yes, I think he killed himself.

Several of the cameras were still working. Not a very effective conspiracy.