It's inertia, largely from government, but also institutionally. When businesses originally adopted Windows (3.x) there was a massive cost difference between Windows and anything else capable of doing the job of allowing users to run business applications, and in many cases the software simply wasn't there. Putting everyone on a Unix workstation would have cost 3x as much or more, even if the software existed. Putting them on X terminals and using centralized systems to support those would not have saved any money vs. Windows, at least not up front, and required a strong network.

Today they could switch, but now would have to face the cost of switching itself, and they would also find themselves incompatible with government in a number of cases.

Which word confused you, not-a-car-guy-coward?

Corvette is no longer a sports car. Some would argue it never was, it was just a muscle car with better handling. But now it's a supercar, and it needs to be bigger. A smaller car doing the speeds it will do will be unstable. You need both some wheelbase and track, and you also need the wheelbase to be significantly greater than the track, or you will have a twitchy deathtrap.

If you live in the USA and want a sports car, the answer has been Miata since it was introduced. It used to be 240SX, but nobody knew, because Nissan is shitty at marketing. (You needed more power, but the stock "truck motor" used in the USA would do 300hp with a turbo on stock internals reliably, and there is a shitload of room for engine swaps in that vehicle.) The 240SX used to absolutely dominate autocross when it was in the E/SP class. Then because they won too much the SCCA moved it to D/SP where it had to compete with M3s and other shit with twice the power, which was some absolute clown shit. Nissan never brought us the S15 Silvia which would have been the post-1998 240SX, so the Miata has been the answer ever since unless you want AWD, then it's been Impreza. They still have a model or two with a stick.

When you load an Explorer window in Windows 10, the window loads and then it loads the stuff that's supposed to be in it. In Windows 11, in an apparent attempt to hide how the sausages are made from the user, it loads the stuff that's supposed to be in it before it draws the window. That way it's usable shortly after it appears. But what happens if you have a network failure? Now the explorer window no longer appears until after the network timeout passes, even if you open e.g. "explorer c:\". This means that you cannot use Explorer to load local resources during a period of network failure without waiting for at least a few minutes. If I want to open a local document I therefore either have to load it from within the application (which itself may have a variation of the same problem related to file dialogs not becoming usable until the network timeout passes) or go find and "start" it with the CLI.

While I'm complaining about stupid by-design fuckups in Windows 11, I used to use Notepad as part of my workflow in Windows 10. Not only does all text appear the same with no formatting, but it strips formatting, so if you paste something into classic notepad and then C&P it out later it goes without any of the text formatting. Sometimes this is exactly what I want. Windows 11's notepad breaks both of these things by supporting RTF, and by having a shitty autosave feature which you cannot disable. You can stop Notepad from loading its prior state on launch, but you CANNOT disable autosave. If a network share goes away while a document is open, NOTEPAD HANGS. If it doesn't come back before the timeout is exceeded, THE DOCUMENT IS UNLOADED. It literally just closes the tab, ALONG WITH YOUR CHANGES.

Microsoft has always been incompetent but this is well beyond the pale. This is beyond amateur hour level bullshit, this is a new low of incompetence even for Microsoft. And since their servers are pathetically fragile and need to be rebooted once a week or more for something simple like file services to even work reliably, this is causing me real life problems which result in less work being done.

The current system has well known and expectable failure modes. This, unfortunately, cannot be true of any replacement system.

Real D&D didn't involve computers. (It often did involve painting purchased figurines.)

Actually, I expect that parts of the TSMC assembly factories are automated, which would make them "AI factories". A computer center is not an "AI Factory" unless it is running a factory.

Another plausible meaning would be an organization that turns out AIs, like OpenAI or Anthropic.

Most other uses are abuse of the language.

I don't think "most likely" is a suitable basis for safety rules. OTOH, one also shouldn't demand certainty, as that's not going to be possible. Say a solution that would work in over 97% of the cases...perhaps even a bit more conservative.

OTOH, nothing will protect you against an ID10T error.

I know I do, but I mean more specifically, do enough people seek out OSS to keep it around? I go looking for OSS solutions both to save money of course but also to be able to have the code so that I can update it if it breaks later. I have successfully done this several times despite not being much of a programmer, getting hints by googling compiler errors.

You should play GTA V to find out. It does have a black guy in it, but it also has two white guys including a meth head.

The drawbacks of sodium include making a restart much harder and also every time it's been tried there's been show-stopper corrosion which they thought they had solved in their design already. That doesn't guarantee that it will happen again, but...

The management system won't support the new version of Windows...

Insert meme of Zapp Branigan saying CYANOTIC! here

Yeah but instead of making the drones drop safety triangles, you have them be the triangles. Carry four so that you have a spare. Ideally you also make them able to pick up one which has failed while sitting. Drones are cheap.

In some cases it's one thing, in some cases it's the other, in some it's even both — someone is looting a company and the people they're replacing are crucial. They can claim they were suckered in by AI companies' promises.