I am in favor of Microsoft releasing Linux distributions, donating code for Linux distributions and for the Linux kernel, supporting Linux on their cloud infrastructure, et cetera. I am not in favor of anything which involves Redhat even peripherally as long as they (IBM, really) continue to mount an attack on the GPL by continuously violating the clause about additional restrictions not being allowed, hiding behind the corrupt US court system, and exploiting the fact that approximately no one can afford to sue IBM.

To return to my point, I remain unsurprised.

The issue is that I use Microsoft software every work day, and it is shit all day every time.

cron daemons still exist. Some of them are fairly fancy. I am running the default one for debian (as in, I installed "cron") and even that conveniently creates cron.{daily,hourly,monthly,weekly,yearly} where I can just dump scripts instead of editing crontab, if one will suit anyway. And then there's also at.

That's /etc/boot.d

No doubt Microsoft's agenda today is different from what it was 30 years ago, but it's still Microsoft's agenda. Microsoft can be relied upon to do what is good for Microsoft, and any dependency you form on their products can and will be used as leverage to extract money from you.

Windows 8 was the single biggest change in all of Microsoft UI history, and even then they didn't actually change any of the most important parts. All windowing operations are still based on IBM CUA and... work like dogshit.

Every single Windows version has the same problem, some things just won't multitask. If you try to drag an Edge window while the browser is opening a tab, you can't. That's because the application is responsible for that. On Unix systems this isn't a thing because the Window Manager is responsible.

What's especially frustrating about this is that Windows actually has some cool UI features like detecting when you're connecting to some displays you've connected to before, and arranging them logically the way you had them arranged before. But then the process fails as Windows forgets which windows were maximized, or the application doesn't restore to the same size window it had before because of some weird interaction. So Windows has this awesome feature... which doesn't actually work. I still have to rearrange my windows every time because they do actually do it, but they do it incorrectly.

But with that said Windows has never, ever, EVER changed the basic way Window management has functioned since Windows 3.0. It is still basically the same, the only significant difference is where minimized windows go.

Journalists want to use the terms that are being given to them by the people involved in the story. It's a vulnerability in the basic concept of journalism.

Also 90% of our news media is owned by billionaires now and they are exerting their power so any attempt to push back against any narrative that inconveniences the ultra wealthy just gets you fired. During the last election I watched Donald Trump lose his marbles multiple times on stage without it being covered meanwhile Joe Biden stutters a bit and we get a 3 week media cycle.

I watched a couple dozen journalists get dog walked because they pushed back against that narrative and were immediately fired by their billionaire bosses.

The fourth estate has fallen. Virtually all the institutions designed to protect you have broken down. That is going to get real bad real soon and there's fuck all we can do about it

I did a google search, then I wanted to do another related search, google figured out accurately what I wanted on the second one based on the first, and offered as a suggestion exactly the search I had in mind. Could they do this without AI? Maybe, they were doing it before, but rarely did it actually give the suggestion I wanted. I might not have thought anything of it but there were interface appearance changes at the same time.

We literally made Biff Tannen presidents of the United States. Honestly Trump is probably worse as far as I know Biff wasn't a pedophile.

Problem is, lawmakers are too often on the teat. A proper response to this would be to not only force them to restore literally all of these domains but also allow people to use them for commercial use after this, just to remind Google that they don't run the world.

That was the last great windows, for windows values of great. I refuse to go find out, but I bet someone has even figured out how to get it past the 2GB limit and implement USB.

There is a massive automation push going on. And it's naive to think that it doesn't work at all.

At the very least you can use it to get quick answers that would normally require more skilled googling than most people can do.

Those kind of productivity boosts quickly turn into layoffs and reductions in force.

And remember good enough is always good enough when you have no competition because you haven't been enforcing antitrust law in decades. Yes the quality of AI generated products might be shit but you're going to have to buy something at some point to live and you're going to have to buy it from one of seven companies because they own basically everything.

And if a competitor does start to come up they will either be run out of business or bought and there's nothing anyone can do about it because we're not going to start voting for politicians who will enforce antitrust law. Even if you do your neighbors don't.

Seems like it would be an improvement.

Every wavelength of IR is attenuated by cloud cover to some degree, some more strongly than others. Absorption is also not the only issue.

What? You absolutely had to authenticate to administer a Netware server, unless you did it from the console in the early days. That is logging in. If you don't think so, then neither is passwordless rsh, or ssh with a key and no password.

Most of the basic behavior of the UI used in Windows was inherited from IBM CUA, and is also shared by all of the commonest DEs for Linux. They also all have an analogue of the start menu. It's unclear what you're talking about here.