""These are speed holes. They make the car go faster."

This is one of those rare comments that needs to end up with (-1, Funny)

I'm slightly more willing to give a pass to Xorg applications because it's not a monolithic environment supposedly under the control of a corporate entity that should be able to enforce its own standards.

of course you have to authenticate, but you run all of the software to administer it on a client, not sitting at the console. The console had only the most barebones capability, usually user management. The tools to administer ran on the client.

...it makes sense to have a headless server operating system when you're mostly running commodity spin-up/spin-down headless servers. Microsoft's server operating system was still largely based on the idea of running on a baremetal self-contained box, even though Microsoft servers had long, long since been used in the virtual machine space. If anything they're quite far behind the curve on this.

The Novell Netware model adapted to the VM era is what makes sense, where the tools don't require logging in to the server at all in order to administer the environment.

IBM is and has always been a services/consultant business, even when they made products.

I'm not so sure about the UI. The history of Microsoft and UI for the past 40 years is that they're happy to abandon their incumbent UI for different. We saw that with Windows 3.x to '95 and NT4, with Windows 98 and the integration of Spyglass Mosaic Internet Explorer, with the transition from Windows ME and Windows 2000 to Windows XP, the subsequent further transition from XP to Windows 7, and the rework from Windows 8.x to Windows 10. We even saw it with Windows 10 to Windows 11.

They change their UI because their customers don't see the OS being new/different unless they change their UI. If the UI looks the same then the average untrained end user doesn't know the difference and doesn't see a value in spending the money to upgrade.

Neither is Elordi

Class rank exists and can be used to determine relative capability though.

I have no complaint with the idea that most students simply won't be able to achieve an A-grade if the material is both challenging and taught to proper standards, but I have a major problem with the notion that teachers are required to deny students that have mastered well above 90% of the material an A-grade because other students managed to yet outperform them. I hate the idea of grading on a curve. One should be judged against the mastery of the material, not comparatively against other students during that particular semester.

That said, I have also had college classes where I really should have failed the class but because of the curve, I got an A because I had the highest scores. While some of that reflects upon me, a good chunk of that reflects upon the instructor, the department and its head, and the curricula for that particular course. If students are to be held to high standards then instructors should likewise be held to high standards, and so should their institutions. If they cannot produce results then that should reflect both upon them and upon the revenue they receive in tuition.

The good thing is hiring 9,000 H1Bs now could cost $900,000,000 in filing fees, and visas are weighted so that the highest wage H1Bs are given 4x the weight of the lowest wage H1Bs. I've noticed the number of H1B “entry-level openings" meaningfully decrease, which means it was never actually about talent "scarcity" and all about talent "cost". The H1B funnel is also getting a double whammy with AI consuming exactly the offshore-able, entry-level work the H-1B and offshore IT models were built around. The cost advantage that enabled both to work is at the point of economic unviability.

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.

There is zero chance I'd go back to an ICE car. The maintenance, reliability, and fuel costs are not even comparable. The math behind driving an ICE car today only makes sense if you need to tow large loads for significant distances. The caveat is that you need a place to charge them for it to be stress-free. We calculated not long ago that it would take $0.25/gallon gas to make an ICE car break even with what we're spending on EVs.

I hope you find something good soon.

"Windows is more for power users and MacOS is more for people who want their hand held"

That's the funniest thing I've read all day. Let me be blunt: macOS is an engineer's machine, Windows is for Susan in accounting. I spend 90% of my day in terminal windows on macOS, using make and compilers. I write code running on more machines, including Linux and Windows, on my Mac that you can even begin to imagine. I agree that Linux workstations tend to be used by more technical people. I have an ARM64 Ubuntu workstation myself, but to state that Windows is for "power users" shows that you have never worked in Silicon Valley circles. Virtually nobody in any form of advanced engineering uses Windows. The notable exception are a handful of terrible PCB design tools that are Windows only that everybody hates with a passion. Funny enough, most of them are now using AI agents to drive those tools ... from their Macs.