My key problem with this is that I know WHERE my program is in the program menu, but I don't know what it's called. Care to tell me how to search for a program you don't know the exact name of?

And frankly, with more and more programs coming up with more and more esoteric names...

The only application I "need" that I couldn't find a suitable Linux replacement for was Autodesk 360. And that runs fine in a VM.

What else would I need that I can't get on Linux?

Meta can give up the metadata (pun intended) of who you're speaking with, which is often enough for legal/govt purposes, but they cannot give up the content of the messages.

The biggest problem with WhatsApp -- if you aren't a tinfoil hat wearing paranoid -- isn't Big Brother. It's Big Data. WhatsApp will happily ingest your contact list, photos, location, and all manner of other sensitive information, after which Meta will happily use said data to sell you ads. Nothing stops Signal from doing the same, or Apple for that matter with iMessage, but neither of those two outfits are ADVERTISING companies. Meta absolutely is and its CEO is on record laughing at you for giving him all of your information.

Regarding Big Brother, end to end encryption is a false sense of security if you're worried about him. Go read the 1/6 indictments and court transcripts and see how many allegedly secure Signal chats got entered into evidence. If you're using an E2EE platform to plan a criminal conspiracy, I hope you realize it's only as secure as the weakest person in the group, the one who will happily rat out the rest of you in hopes of a better deal. If you're using it for something more mundane, like cheating on your spouse, well, the civil system has a much lower standard of evidence than the criminal and it's going to reflect really badly on you if you don't surrender the messages during discovery.

You know the idea behind every version of Windows since 7, every version of MacOS since Spotlight was introduced (circa 2005) and every halfway decent Linux distribution is that you SEARCH for things rather than navigate menus, right? Click the start menu and start typing what you want. The vast majority of the time Windows will get you there before you've finished typing the entire word.

Out of all the complaints -- many legitimate -- about changes to Windows over the years, this is by far the lamest. It's like beaming up to the Starship Enterprise and bitching that SOP is to tell the computer to navigate to Earth at Warp 6 rather than entering the precise coordinates into a keypad, followed by the precise fuel intermix ratio to achieve the desired speed, blah, blah, blah, all because you're unwilling to take the few days required to retrain your muscle memory to do things differently.

Most everything you said except this. As someone who switches between Windows and MacOS 20 times a day, I assure you MacOS is superior in almost all UI elements.

No it's not. And you know it's not, because you correctly identity the broken asylum system as the problem, and those people aren't sneaking across an undefended border. They're SEEKING OUT Border Patrol officers so they can make their asylum claim.

The law entitles you to a HEARING the moment you ask for asylum. Until that hearing occurs you are legally entitled to remain in the country. Why aren't you mad at the politicians that starved the system of resources instead of the desperate migrants who are simply exploiting the world's most obvious loophole? It shouldn't take YEARS for an asylum claim to be adjudicated, but it does, and that's a problem we could fix if one of the two major political parties cared as much about the issue as they claim.

This problem could be solved by the simple expedient of hiring more immigration and administrative law judges. One of the aforementioned two parties won't go for it. Old school members of the party in question are reflexively hostile to any perceived expansion of government and secretly like illegal immigration because it exerts downward pressure on wages. Newer more populist members of the party are part of a Cult of Personality that has cynically decided it's more politically advantageous to have a broken system to rail against than it is to actually fix said system.

Reinforcing the aristocratic nepotism of the Ivy Leagues is not how you go about getting people to feel sympathy for them or their alumni.

Then I repeat my statement that current law already allows Google to bring in the exceptionally gifted, just as Corning was able to bring in my friend, so what's the problem? If there is a person who is genuinely in the top 0.1% of a given field, you can get them into this country, under existing law, and if they're truly that good at what they do you aren't going to be able to abuse them as H-1Bs are commonly abused.

I'm sorry, I just zero faith in the tech industry as a whole and Google in particular. They're crying wolf about AI. Wake me up if there's a Sputnik moment in AI, which there won't be, because we already lead the damn world in it. They can already bring in that 0.1% top tier talent. Again, what's the problem?

If I'm reading between the lines of your posts, you're a nepo baby, "I prefer not to pay in cash, for instance, because I expect the investments I would have otherwise liquidated will maintain their historic rates of return over the next 30 years, essentially making that education free." How many people do you suppose enter undergrad age with enough assets to pay for an Ivy League education, up front, confronted with that oh-so-horrible dilemma of whether to liquidate assets or assume debt? For the vast majority of people, it's a false choice, "assume debt" is the only option in the multiple choice list.

Not sure where you're getting the idea from that an Ivy League education equals money being shoveled at you. All of the people I know with jobs that get money "shoveled" their way are working 60, 70, 80+ hours for the privilege, which may appeal to some, but a lot of people would rather not do that. An Ivy League degree may get you a better first job than a peer with a degree from a State University, but that first job won't be one with any sort of work life balance, not if your objective is to have money "shoveled" at you.

FWIW, I have no "axe" to grind here, at least not agains the Ivys. I'm a happy high school graduate making six figures. To the extent I have an "axe" to grind, it's that my circumstances were largely a fluke of timing, and someone entering my vocation today without a college degree has virtually no chance of replicating my success. We've built a society that largely throws to the wolves the vast majority of the populace (60+%) who do not have any sort of degree. That's a far bigger societal problem than whether the Ivy Leagues represent a good bargain over significantly cheaper State University systems.

Sure it is. And before that it was about cybersecurity talent. Before that it was about development talent. Before that it was about networking talent.

The only consistent theme here is there's never enough on-shore talent, so we need to bring in more off-shore talent, and surely their willingness to work for lower wages AND have their permission to be in the country dependent on the whims of their employer has nothing to do with it?

I've known exactly ONE person that qualified as exceptionally gifted in my career who came into this country. She worked for Corning and helped develop Gorilla Glass. She came here from Finland, not India, and if Corning had abused her the way the tech industry abuses H-1Bs she'd simply have gone back home to her highly developed country with a better social safety net than ours. The law already allows corporations to bring in such exceptionally gifted people to fill roles like that, roles you can't fill with an off-the-shelf job posting and education. So what's Google bitching about?

Oh, that's right, they're laying off thousands of people despite being massively profitable while simultaneously whining that the labor market isn't meeting their needs.

This is all about screwing over labor. Nothing more, nothing less. I'll support making it easier for Google to do this if the law loosening the restrictions they believe are problematic also creates a new class of visa that isn't tied to employment, with the original sponsoring employer compelled to pay 100% of all public services consumed by the immigrant for 10 years after arrival, and the finalization/upholding of the recent rule prohibiting the enforcement of non-compete clauses. So sure, sponsor that immigrant, but you don't get to hold them hostage, they can move about the labor force as any American could, and if they end up on public services YOU get to pay the cost.

Mandate a system like that and watch how fast Google and ilk discover the vast majority of talent they need is available on-shore.

Nobody claimed it was $0. Many have claimed it's a bad deal compared to the cost of a significantly cheaper public university education. A car analogy would be between a Honda Civic and a Mercedes S-Class. Either one will get you to work and back, efficiently and safely, but one of them costs 1/6 to 1/5 what the other does.

What you're proposing has failed in every country that has tried it. The US has more runway than most, because of the USDs status as the global reserve currency, but eventually that runway will run out.

It's not about shitting on smart people. How many exceptionally smart (the US Government's term is "exceptionally gifted") people do you think got into this country via H-1Bs? Very few. The vast majority are brought over here after a company posts a job at a massively below market salary, which goes unfilled, because duh, then they whine to Uncle Sam about a labor shortage and bring an Indian over to take the aforementioned job at the below market wage.

It's a shitty deal for everyone, the immigrant included, because now they're held hostage to a potentially shitty job that a native born citizen could walk away from. Do you think it's for nothing that the vast majority of people who remained at Twitter after the Musk takeover were immigrants on work visas? Do you think the average American would sign up to work 80+ hour weeks for that asshole, knowing their reward for giving up their entire personal/familial life would probably be to get laid off anyway at a later date? No, they quit in droves, but the H-1Bs didn't have that option because quitting meant being promptly deported.

It's modern day indentured servitude and the only people who want it are MBA assholes looking to squeeze more blood from the labor stone, err, I mean, extract more efficiencies from a dynamic global market.

What you said is true, but it does not change the fact that W11 is shit. In fact, I can't really see the point of your reply as it relates to what I said.

We run our own (huge) data center, so convincing our people that we should stay "at home" was easier, especially since we have our own cloud service (with blackjack. And hookers) so they can placate marketing with "yes, yes, we are doing this in the cloud" without even lying, but even here, some felt that urge to move stuff into AWS.

And yes, now we're having severe headaches.