I mean we already have sources of trustable code, they are called distributions and provide working, yet a bit stale, versions of popular software packages. Even the fact that they are not "bleeding edge" already makes them more secure since they had a bit of a "shake down period". It's not like a developer commit will make it straight into deployment.

That is one of the most reputable newspapers in Germany.

... see the US as the "Ass of Canada"?
https://www.der-postillon.com/...

Just how do you propose the issue of it spinning round? Anybody inside would, at best, get dizzy, at worst squashed by centripedal forces.

Well what's holding that back is the lack of a "standard PC", a common platform where you can just boot up your OS image and have a basic way to enumerate the hardware so you can actually boot. Essentially that's what the IBM-PC brought the world.

SoCs typically are highly proprietary as every manufacturer wants to do their own thing to keep their customers from switching.

like there's an article in the magazine "mc" about universities ditching MS-DOS and Windows for that new "Public-Domain-Unix" Linux.... ... but that was in the issue 6/94, from 1994.

Windows, in the real world, has been on a steady decline since then, only propped up by OEM sales and it's lower use of ad-blockers boosting up statistics based on that data.

Yeah, but there has been an intense concentration on one thing alone, cars. And that industry is failing. Other industries were killed off deliberately. (think of the wind turbine industry or the solar industry)

Adding to that the current breed of politicians often is post-WWII, people who haven't learned that gift that the constitution is. For them values like Democracy are not as important.

It's getting harder and harder not to.

There's the CDU which has one part that's just corrupt and the other part that wants to erect a pseudo Christian God-state. The differences in opinion to the right-most party are actually very small.

Minister of economy Reiche does her best to to stop the move to renevable spouting nonsense like "'the sun doesn't charge money' is nonsense". The same party essentially killed the wind industry in Germany some years back.

It may not yet be that they shoot civilians on the street like in the US, but it's still rather right-wing.

What we are seeing now is that more and more households with solar are also installing batteries. About 80% of all grid battery storage is now in private households (at least in Germany)... and that's just the part we have data from, many households are probably just to lazy to register their batteries.

Those households then will store their self-harvested energy in the batteries, using it, particulary, when dynamic electricity prices are high, thus lowering the demand at times when supply is low.

Commercial battery storage is mostly held back by the government with their pro-fossil agenda, but we'll likely see more storage at power plants and consumers like office buildings, also stabilizing the grid. In fact there are calls to demand a bit of storage on every big plant, so that they can momentarily (for seconds) feed in more power. This is supposed to emulate the "rotating masses" phenomenon of classical power plants.

Probably the main problem today are right-wing governments (at least in Germany) who, increasingly, want this all to fail, sabotaging it where ever they can.

Typically Microsoft opens offices in order to foster "Government Relations". For example when Munich worked on ditching Windows in favor of their "Limux" project, Microsoft opened an office in Munich... and quickly there was political pressure to close down that project, moving to Windows again.... ... maybe that strategy didn't work in China. Maybe government officials are less corrupt than they are here.

Well but for normal distributions there are two big advantages compared to commercial updates.

1. You can turn it off at any time
2. It's designed to make it _very_ hard to specifically provide special update for a special target, since the process is transparent, and mirrors are something that's encouraged.

Particularly part 2 is relevant in an age where an US-president could just force a company to send a special version of program X to person Y.

... that if you get software without source code and it has an auto-update feature you cannot control... maybe you are not the person who owns those computers.

The costs of various operating systems is not a monetary value you can just compare. It's a variety of things you need to consider.

For example if you get Windows, you need to factor in the specialists who can manage those systems, those are rare, and most people claiming they can, don't really know what they are doing. However should you, for whatever reason have such people around, perhaps for historical reasons, that may be a non-issue.
For MacOSX one big issue is that you are tied to extremely budget hardware. It may look cheap at first glance, but build quality typically isn't very good plus they are hard to repair and there are hidden surcharges. Again that may be irrelevant as you can just out-source that.

The costs of switching however have reduced significantly since the Internet came along which eliminated the need for many applications in the past. Most systems are POSIX now so software is now mostly portable. Heterogeneous systems can make switching even easier as it keeps you from relying on systems that make switching more expensive.

Yeah, but that's actually not our problem here. If everyone would just do that, we'd have no memory crisis. It's the "hyperscalers" who are gobbling up all that memory for their _huge_ models. That's the problem, not someone running something locally.

And companies are already switching to local models instead of paying those hyperscalers more money. That means those hyperscalers will loose more and more of their income. That will cause the bubble to burst.