Small teams running the show is the new normal. AI coding assistants mean that software engineers must also be product engineers, well enough to explain how to build features from soup to nuts, to LLMs. I know. this is what I do for a living now.

You can turn off auto-updates, but you'll be sorry in other ways.

When you copy files to your computer, that's after you have clicked 'Install' or whatever (or passed the -y flag on the CLI). That's your consent to install the app, and copy the files that come with it to your computer. There is no additional consent required. What the fuck are they even on about with this clickbait nonsense?

I spent 20 years working in K-12 in a suport role. The issues vary greatly across population densities and social and economic status. The large district I worked for (~55,000 students) featured everything from schools where every kid must be prepared to go to college, to trying to arrest the pregnancy and dropout rates.

The problem is when education is treated as a monolithic bloc. Issues vary incredibly widely from school to school, from neighborhood to neighborhood. An additional problem is the attack stemming from the anti-tax crowd on public education, eroding budgets and thus paychecks, generating disrespect for teachers, and causing many to leave the profession for something that pays better. That leads to erosion of the system and it starting to break down.

When the top ten billionaires have to sell their shares of apple to pay the tax man, it's also your mutual funds and retirement accounts that take the hit on the value as well. When it comes time to pay the tax man, billionaires will have to sell assets to pay the bill. That selling will massively dislocate the markets. Even if only the top 1% of holders have to sell in order to make it happen. Just watch and see. This will be educational.

It'll spread downward pressure on assets that person held and destroy a lot more wealth than they will pay in taxes. This is what will ultimately wake everyone up to the danger of wealth taxes: liquidity issues.

The president has immunity. And he can (probably) pardon himself. We'll see what happens after his second term.

hacking.yeah

This move is driven by Broadcom acting like a private equity manager. They found a place to extract a temporary revenue stream, they're going to milk it, and then sell it off before it becomes too much of a liability.

Broadcom executives surely saw the negative pushback immediately after they started their rug-pulling licensing effort. If they intended to keep this market and their position in it, they would have adjusted their behavior immediately. Instead they're going to rake everyone as they walk out the door. And until they can walk out the door. They knew that they would lose all of these customers in the medium term, but my guess is they figure that the industry is shifting away from paying so much for VMs so they will squeeze the last bit they can out of this dying market. I think they are fully prepared to spin this off if it decides to be a drain on their balance sheet. So far, there's just a lot of angry, paying, enterprise customers giving them free money for something they didn't even have to build. It's a gravy train, quite literally.

There are moving parts in all the cameras, you know, for being abot to focus.

I didn't really use Works, but I supported enough PCs that had it that I had a lot of exposure to it. I didn't use it because the file formats for it were annoying when I had access to Office.

It was pretty common OE software on new computers too.

If I didn't have access to Office, I tended to use WordPad. It was nearly always good enough honestly.

That's plausible.

I still hate it though. My first version of Office was 4.3, which included Word 6.0 and was ostensibly for Windows 3.1. I'd previously used Clarisworks on Macintoshes in school and before that I used a ghetto cheap program that called itself a word processor but was more of a glorified text editor in MS-DOS that worked well with an Epson dot matrix printer's formatting, so for me Word was great. I felt like the bumpers from Clarisworks had been removed, I had a lot more control over what I could do to a document.

Ribbon feels like they decided that power users didn't matter, and also corresponds with the end of the free Wordpad light-duty word processor and long after Microsoft Works was killed off.

They seem to have forgotten why some of their most popular applications became most popular in their respective categories, and that wasn't just leveraging their OS marketshare OEM install dominance. It was a combination of reasonably good UI design that had a degree of intuitiveness along with fairly easy access to more advanced features, with an added dash of the ability to use data from one application in another without major headaches. Arguably MS Office in the days before Ribbon and Metro UIs exemplify this.

Unfortunately they chose to change the UI for change's sake, ie, because users wouldn't recognize that they now had a shiny new version of the product if they didn't flagrantly change the UI, and they chose UI designs that frankly sucked. They also seem to have harmed that interoperability by trying to push too much of it when it doesn't fully work right.

Obviously there have been software companies that had products that for the professionals constantly using them were better, like WordPerfect to Word, but those didn't generally work well for both the power user and the casual user. Originally Microsoft had managed to bridge that gap. But Ribbon and Metro interfaces have harmed the power user, it's now harder to do things than it should be, and power users have incentive to look for software that gives them the features without the bloat.

I doubt that Microsoft is going to understand this in this revamp. They're going to try to cram some UI change solely for the purpose of making it different than the prior version, and even if it's now "native" it's still going to suck. And they're going to try to force any remaining users on prior versions of Windows off of those and onto Windows 11.

s'okay. Biology is the only scientific discipline where division and multiplication are the same thing.