The 32GB limit was first added in 1994. exFat didn't exist till 2006. I'll let the reader draw their own conclusion about your claim, given those facts

At least on initial inspection "bespoke teams" and "long-term collaboration" sounds like they will be at odds with one another:

I'm curious whether the assumption is just that people who aren't the author are fungible cogs to be picked up and discarded with as much 'agility' as possible; or if they believe that first-time authors getting decent sized advances is an inefficiency and they seek to rectify that by ensuring that authors who don't sell can be discarded at minimal cost; just with a less-depressing focus on the part where authors who do sell do get paid.

Man, I want to live in your world, where the government is so competent that the intelligence agencies are able to competently coordinate with the anti-trust folks, and to do so so secretly that only knee jerk paranoid folks see what's happening. As opposed to the actual world, where none of the agencies has any competence whatsoever outside their own specialized field, and couldn't organize an intra-departmental BBQ either competently or secretly.

Microsoft doesn't force every developer who wants to write for Windows to pay 30% of every sale to Microsoft. You can be on their Windows app store for a 12-15% commission, and if you don't want to be on their app store, you can just market independently and they take nothing from you. Apple is a walled garden where the price of entry is 30% of your revenue, period.

Making the minimum specs for a new OS higher would absolutely be monopolistic behavior if Microsoft was the sole builder and provider of new Windows computers (like Apple is for the iPhone). Except they're barely in the hardware market at all; I strongly suspect their choice is more about not needing to test on as many systems, and only secondarily about supporting sales of new PCs from OEM partners.

Microsoft does charge 30% for Xbox store sales, and it's just as exploitative there, but it's also a more niche market, where it's less of a dominant player, so it's lower priority, presumably.

ERP systems typically don't fail because of their databases or frontends(and, when they do, they tend to be big, huge, must-talk-to-all-the-legacy-systems-and-support-analysis-and-reporting-at-nontrivial-scale situations that isn't a trivial matter to handle with just some basic web experience). They fail because the process of capturing(and where necessary taking a hard look at and changing) all the business processes so that the dev side can implement them or make sure that they are handled by the product they've chosen is ugly and complex.

Similarly; nobody picks excel because of confusion about its power and capabilities: overwrought-but-inadequate excel is what happens when there is no effort, or no successful one, to get business practices codified into requirements that can be shoved over to the devs and implemented; so you get ad-hoc development of local bandaid tools; typically bolted together by a fair amount of manual copy-paste and futzing; implemented in whatever the people who are familiar with the processes are familiar with. Not uncommonly excel ends up being that; as it's at a pretty favorable intersection between "power" and "number of basically nontechnical users at least partially qualified to work with it".

I love NoScript and have been using it for ages, but I do wish there was a "curated" mode with a minimal trusted whitelist you could opt into using, sort of like a reverse ad-blocker. There are times when visiting a new site that the list of blocked domains is monumental, and figuring out the minimal set necessary for the page to function is pretty much impossible without investing way too much time.

Even an option akin to "temporarily allow all" but instead using a whitelist built from contributions (maybe ala SponsorBlock) would be a better middle-ground than what I often end up doing and just temp-allowing everything until I'm done with the site.

The techbros can obviously buy their way in to the party readily enough(realistically, unless you are talking grungy underground scene events in disused warehouses, it's probably not art-for-art's-sake money that is even throwing the party; though it may be the entertainment industry side sponsoring the artistic side because that's prestigious for the sector as a whole, the way a certain number of Oscar-bait movies that are expected to be critical successes and commercially middling is accepted practice); but that's significantly different from being able to buy the regard of people who they've been more or less directly threatening.

Are they just high on their own supply and didn't realize how it would go over? Is forcing the soon-to-be-replaced labor units to watch videos with you rambling about how brilliant their obsolescence is part of the fun?

You can say the exact same thing about cigarette companies in the 70s, 80s and 90s.

What makes them corrupt is when they lie to the public and regulators about the health impact of their products. TEL companies knew that lead was causing problems, but tried to bury that under a pile of lies, lobbying, and obfuscation. Tobacco companies knew cigarettes were addictive and caused cancer, but tried to hide it and delay as long as possible any kind of public health campaign or laws against public smoking.

That's the line that can't be crossed if you want to pray to the Invisible Hand for guidance.

No, you don't. Otherwise light reflected from a mirror wouldn't be able to make an object hotter than the mirror, which is obviously wrong. Technically speaking the constraint is more than just the frequency of the light: for example, a laser has "negative" thermodynamic temperature, which means a laser beam can heat an object to an infinitely high temperature (theoretically), despite being, for e.g. an infrared laser (although since the object you're heating up tends to radiate energy as it's temperature to the fourth power, you quickly need a really, really powerful laser to get to high temperatures).

You're misunderstanding the thermodynamics/optics a bit. You can't focus the black-body radiation from an object to heat something hotter than the object, but the Moon *isn't* a black-body. The moon, in fact, emits no visible light whatsoever (it doesn't get hot enough). The Moon reflects sunlight, so just as reflected light from a mirror can get an object hotter than the mirror, moonlight can heat objects hotter than the moon. How hot I don't know (because the thermodynamics of optics is really complex), certainly not as hot as the sun but certainly hotter than the moon.

It wouldn't be surprising if there will be some demand for bite-sized physical machines from people who think that they can't assume hypervisors will be security boundaries; but I suspect that getting actual improvement will be harder than it looks; especially if you aren't willing to sacrifice convenience:

VMs are, certainly, in no small part about utilization and economies of scale: until you get to the point of systems 'big' enough that they seriously restrict your choice of vendors(eg. basically everybody sells 1-2 socket systems; 4-8 means Xeon, and only certain more expensive Xeons, more than 8 sockets means some fancy custom interconnect) it's basically always cheaper to slice a bigger system in half than it is to buy two smaller ones: much less redundant hardware that way.

However, they are also about management convenience that you can't really get out of a physical server without adding a (potentially dangerously) capable BMC or similar computer-inside-the-computer(like the "nitro" controllers that AWS uses): and the history of BMC vulnerabilities(both against their network interfaces and against the components they expose to the OS running on the system) is not entirely cheery; with the situation probably looking worse if you want a BMC that can do all the various management things vsphere can do to an ESX VM.

There's also the question of OS driver vulnerabilities and hardware/firmware vulnerabilities: this VM escape relies on ESX's virtual USB device being buggy; it's not as though you would necessarily have greater confidence in the virtual USB device the BMC uses to interact with the OS; or even the firmware of some of the physical devices on the motherboard.

If anything, while they clearly aren't perfect and can't be trusted enough to avoid much greater attention to how to keep guests from interfering with one another; my suspicion would be that the complexity, and thus bug potential, of real peripherals is considerably higher than that of VM peripherals; especially the newer ones that are explicitly abstractions designed to be convenient for virtualization; rather than close imitations of common physical hardware intended for compatibility with OSes that don't expect to be running in a VM.

There are some 'usb devices over IP' software offerings that add a virtual USB root and can be used to connect USB devices that are physically connected to other hosts(obviously this works better with relatively low-bandwidth and latency-insensitive things; it's more about license dongles and USB to serial converters than video capture devices); so you do have options(and those offerings also tend to have explicit support for relatively easy switching of the USB devices being redirected between multiple hosts, if that's required); but it seems pretty unlikely that their virtual USB devices have gotten the same amount of probing that the vmware ones have, since they are relatively niche offerings vs. being the de-facto on-prem virtualization option(at least until Broadcom showed up).

Potentially still worth it, if you've got some absolutely unpatchable ESX host running at least one guest that must have USB, since the vulnerability on the vmware side is now a known one; but quite likely to not be a net gain in security vs. a patchable host; just given the relative amount of attention given.

There was a somewhat similar(also a bug in the virtual USB device allowing manipulation of the VM host from inside a guest with virtual USB a few years ago. There have also been a couple(CVE-2015-3456 and CVE-2021-3507) targeting the virtual floppy drive device.

They seem to be relatively rare; though tend to be pretty alarming when they do come up because their relative rarity means that people often treat a hypervisor as a reliable security boundary so there isn't necessarily a lot of backup built in to handle cases where that assumption is invalidated.

I don't know whether they'll be able to get past the requirement that Apple have sufficient market power in at least one of the tied products; but it seems like a pretty straightforward argument that iCloud is tied to iDevices in a number of ways that typically aren't wholly without justification(eg. having iCloud be the only thing you can restore from reduces the complexity of the first-run restore option because it can just assume iCloud; rather than Apple having to define an interface that 3rd party restore providers would offer or add a pre-restore app install section so that the relevant 3rd party app could be installed to provide the restore interface(the way 3rd party apps can snap into the "Files" app); but which are...awfully convenient...given Apple's margins on both cloud storage and higher storage phone models.

It probably doesn't help(if Apple seeks to make some sort of "we do it for the security of the people!" argument) that iOS historically(and still does, though it is much de-emphasized) supported either unencrypted or encrypted backups and restores over USB when directly connected to a computer; so clearly it was possible to design a backup mechanism for an untrusted storage medium back when cabled syncs were still general practice; and they specifically didn't bother to do that for networked backup and restore.

This seems like a pretty tenuous theory. There's a reasonably solid suspicion when businesses with clear connections to the cube farms, like restaurants and coffee places whose main draw is proximity to offices(and, typically, because of the way the zoning shakes down, significantly less proximity to things that aren't offices) are involved that people no longer seeing them as convenient, because they aren't in the office, or requiring their convenience, because it's a lot easier to make your own coffee when you don't have a commute.

This is a department store though: furniture, clothing, cosmetics, jewelry, housewares of various sorts. Am I claiming that literally nobody has ever popped over in an emergency after spilling coffee on their pants; or that it has never benefitted from being more convenient because it's on the way home from work? No, that sort of thing must happen at least occasionally. Do I buy that people drawn to the area by the fact that they work there are the primary audience for those sorts of (more typically) planned purchases? That seems like a hard sell.