No, no, you see, productive work only happens in an office building, and they'll rent a local office in India, so somehow that magically makes the Microsoft Teams call more productive or something.

The explanation is that they gave Zucc's glasses a private server to handle the requests. Then routed every single set of glasses in the building through it. And the "chef" on camera's request for it verbally triggered all of them, on a single server, that was only designed to handle Mark Zuckerberg's glasses request had hundreds of glasses respond and the thing crashed because of improper config. I think this is a privacy invasive product, but the explanation of how a live demo failed does scan. All devices listened for a wake word, then shit the bed when they effectively DDoSed the private server instance.

As a Macbook owner, the HDMI port is extremely useful. Tons of business conference rooms still have HDMI in the table. Eventually that will go away but I don't want massive inconveniences or a shitload of dongles all the time (and yes, I do have dongles for ethernet, displayport, generally more USB-A, but I generally don't need them.)

They want to layoff workers without the headlines that they've laid off X,XXX employees or paying severance.

That's it. That's the rationale. Any other explanation given is bullshit.

Pretending that Chrome its position fair and square is so absolutely insane it borders on lunacy.

Google used to pay freeware installers (Adobe Flash, Shockwave, Java, CCleaner, etc.) and the like up to $1 per install. If you didn't uncheck the box while installing these programs, then Chrome installed as the default browser importing all the important bits (passwords history etc). If you didn't install Chrome in that way, Google Search, YouTube, etc. all heavily promoted Chrome installations.

You can argue on whether or not what Google did was for the overall benefit of the web (and certainly it was better than IE being where it was), but it was most definitely not "fair and square". Now we have the opposite, artificially slows down Firefox to drive Firefox users to Chrome solely based on the user agent (meaning it's an artificial distinction and not based on any actual browser performance difference.)

Perpetual licensing and software maintenance (particularly in enterprise software) have never been the same thing. You can take the Windows 95 or Windows XP Pro license you bought decades ago and you have the right to perpetually use the software, even today (and some places still do due to niche incompatible hardware/software), and the EULA you have with Microsoft gives you that right. But Microsoft is not developing new security patches for Win95/XP today.

You are not automatically entitled to support/maintenance (stability fixes, legal changes, new features, and even security fixes) on enterprise software. Most enterprise software (until more recent subscription/cloud sales) was sold as a big perpetual license purchase up front, then some much lesser percentage amount for maintenance/support.

The problem is Broadcom came in too greedy with trying to twist the knife on licensing after acquiring VMWare, so they scrambled to make promises to keep customers from fleeing due to the massively increased costs in the "simplified" licensing model. One of them was that they would start providing customers security patches (for versions within support window) even if the customer was not paying support fees to Broadcom.

And that's where Broadcom now has made a commitment most enterprise software vendors have not, and they have to honor it. If Broadcom had not made the promise that customers would receive security fixes on their current perpetual versions that are within support (if nothing else) even outside of paying support fees, many customers chose to not migrate to another option. Not providing security patches as promised puts their customers at risk of being breached. Broadcom owes their customers that much.

But that's different than software being sold for perpetual license and that being a promise of indefinite support/security patches of that version in perpetuity. I am not aware of a single piece of enterprise software that promises this...

The original ruling in the Microsoft antitrust was that Microsoft was an abusive monopoly and needed to be split into two companies: one that made the OS, and one that made other application software. Microsoft successfully appealed because the Judge was found to have improperly discussed the case with media, reversing the ordered breakup and stating that traditional antitrust law was not suited for browser tying. Other actions were remanded back to the lower court.

The DoJ then negotiated a much lesser antitrust settlement with MS rather than risking taking it to court again.

Without the judge having talked to the media while the case was in process, it's very likely the original ruling would have survived the appeal, and Microsoft would have been broken in two.

First, Chrome won the browser war fair and square by building a better surfboard for the internet

. No, it 100% did not. Let's take the Ruby founder taking some technical appreciation for the improvements of Chrome (despite other issues).

Beyond Google and Google services heavily positioning Chrome installs, other freeware like Flash, Shockwave, Java, CCleaner would promote Chrome, because you'd get paid up to $1 per install. Software that did this would sometimes alternate based on either existing install or keeping other people on their toes installing other software like the Ask.com toolbar or "McAfee Security Scan Plus". This helped convert technically illiterate users who were pushed into what their trusted site told them was the best, or what they either trusted or clicked through on a shrinkwrap installer.

Secondly, Google has a history of using Chrome specific quirks to make other browsers behave worse. Like using deprecated Shadow DOM v0 calls only ever implemented in Chrome/Chromium derivatives that loaded 5x worse in alternative browsers like Firefox that weren't Chrome based.

Google now lets to define the web standards that succeed or fail by overwhelming marketshare. It is the same behavior that led the Justice Department to declare IE monopolistic, even though the origin market differed by company (Microsoft by desktop OS, Google by internet advertising/services), the end result of the tying is the same - one monopoly supporting the other to the detriment of the entire web.

The ManifestV3 force and Manifest V2 deprecation that deprecates much more effective privacy/ad blockers used under ManifestV2 is a prime example of Google using their dominant browser position to preserve their ad business.

For Zigbee extenders, I don't have an answer for you.

For voice, Home Assistant has a voice device in preview that's all local. Arstechnica did a review of it.

People often point out in this DeepSeek debate that the LLM is open source. So while you can ban the iOS app or the service, there shouldn't be any issues in just using the LLM provided as open source code. Thus hey US companies, let's just take DeepSeek's LLM model and plug it in, crisis averted.

Open source code is only as good as far as it's audited and checked. Otherwise you have things like the attempted Jia Tan vulnerability in an extremely common Linux util (XZ utils). Had that gone unnoticed, a ton of Linux distributions would have been effectively backdoored by default.

Open source is not a silver bullet, and open sourcing code that has not been thoroughly reviewed should not create the assumption that it is free of attacks/vulnerabilities.

Chrome Sync isn't mandatory (you can disable it), and you can enable it to use a local passphrase (that must be entered manually on each device) that will encrypt all of the synced contents client side before uploading it to Google if you do have it on.

People that don't trust either option (that disabling sync truly disables the synchronization of data with Google, or that the local passphrase doesn't really meaningfully encrypt the data in a manner in which Google can't read it later) are likely using alternative browsers (Chromium based or not) or a Chromium build that is "de-Googled".

Polymarket deals in betting in US regulated markets, including betting amounts. Polymarket deals in crypto and never registered with identification information, betting limits, reporting, etc. to have US citizens betting. They knew this was almost certainly illegal and halted offering betting to US citizens in the US while allowing crypto bets regardless on theoretical ignorance of the source.

Now they get raided for allowing US citizens to bet in an unregulated market and cry foul about how it's political persecution before Trump takes office (after saying they'd allow US citizens back in when Trump takes office).

You can argue over whether or not such betting should be regulated. They fucked around and they found out, and judging by this raid, they almost certainly knew that US citizens were betting contrary to the law on Polymarket, and the FBI was aware of this and took the cell phone as evidence under probable cause/warrant.

Either Polymarket is vindicated or it isn't, they will have their day in court.

Trump has 30% of the Republican party, the rabid type who would split off with him in an independent run, in the palm of his hand. Haley, Ramaswamy, Desantis all still tried and failed. The GOP was forced to.

Biden faced no serious challengers as an incumbent running for re-election, and the party leadership backed him as the incumbent president. The problem is that if Biden had honored his promise to be a "transition" to "a new generation of leadership", then without him there, the 2024 dem primaries would have been far more competitive with far more entrants. At best, the DNC leadership didn't know how bad Biden's mental decline had become, or at worse, they were complicit in pretending that the deck chairs were merely being moved on the Titanic.

It's very questionable how "american" UltraAV is. UltraAV is owned by Pango, a site which owns multiple VPN companies and a VPN review site (not suspicious at all).

Pango is in turn owned by WC SACD Holdings Inc, a Massachussets company. The CEO, Hari Ravichandran, is the CEO of Aura and talks as Pango as a subsidiary. Aura in turn has a technobabble about us page that says nothing.

The UltraAV software itself isn't signed by Pango, WC, or Aura. It's signed by "Max Secure Software India Private Limited". Which, at best, means that Pango subcontracted an Indian AV to brand as American so Kaspersky could claim they swapped out an AV for an "American" one. MaxSecure is generally considered sketchy software and has asked to be unlisted as a potentially unwanted program among other AV/antimalware apps, and that it will false positive files for the illusion of being effective.

This is sketchy as hell, and never should have been done without user consent, much less with the company they chose to contract.

When I had an iPhone 13 Pro Max and looked at a trade-in offer for a 256GB iPhone 14 Pro Max, they offered $720 versus a $1200 purchase price. For that, I got an always on display (in Android phones for many years, I know), included satellite SOS (I regularly spend large amounts of time in areas with zero cell reception, a separate device would cost more than the difference between device and a pretty damn good camera upgrade.

Looking now at the same upgrade, they still have another year of satellite SOS coverage included on my current phone, the battery is fine, the display is marginally larger, the camera has seen minimal upgrades, the AI features are...unproven, the haptic button is not a reason to upgrade, the camera upgrades are not huge, and USB-C. Oh, and they're only offering $500 trade-in.

Even my upgrade from the 13 Pro Max to the 14 Pro Max was a stretch on a generous trade-in value and a niche use case for most. I'm not surprised demand is weak.

Another aspect is that there's no large FOMO factor in design to say you're not rocking something since the 14. 14 took the face ID bar at the top to "dynamic island". Other than colors (largely missed in most cases), there's no large design factor that screams you're using an iPhone 14/15/16 versus the others. This leads to less of a need to "keep up with the Jones'" on not using an obviously older iPhone model (for those who care about that; personally, I don't).