Are they comparing farm pasture temperature readings versus temperature readings of concrete buildings and paved parking lots?

It is the old Microsoft giving Office away to college students to maintain market share story.

Working on desktop apps which do not ha a HTML based UI is some combination of
- Win32 C++ / C
- .C# NET (VB.net is not in the running)
- Hard to maintain "solutions" built on top of Office
- Third party apps

Microsoft may be admitting to a COBOL moment where finding new developers for Win32/C++ or C#/.net desktop applications is increasingly difficult.
Due to the "In 2 years, I will have marketable skills in ..." statement a developer would ask (hopefully) before taking a new job.

Financially, a sideways MSFT stock price does not add enough incentive to the restricted stock grants to put in weekends working on MS projects since the developer would be working for straight salary with a known top end.

It will be interesting in the near term since:

- HTML templates (built-into the browser) now replace much (all?) of what React / Angular do without the large large amount of complexity those frameworks have

- Flutter builds near desktop app look and feel for desktop, mobile, web for the major operating systems

- The memory price increase due to AI usage hasn't started drastically raising costs to run legacy (?) solutions (SQL database, message queues, blob storage, ...) in the cloud but will cause cloud cost increases business customers

- Demographics change (boomers aging out of the labor force and aging out of internet use) will affect multiple decades old industries relying on an aging customer base and adding little new younger customers

- Desktop compute for AI models being practical for home users, small businesses and large businesses

Only found your comment because it was at the end of the FP branch. No help from the moderators, though I think your comment is quite insightful and I mostly concur. I'll go farther in a minute, but first I have a meta-reaction to how active the FP branch was. Your comment appears to be about 3/5 of the way to the bottom, so I think it is reasonable to say that it was a productive FP.

But I think the credit/karma should be limited. I think a lot of the favorable reactions are based on a kind of projection coming from technical people and nerds who resonate more strongly to the Woz frequencies than to the way Jobs ticked (like a bomb).

I think your [ceoyoyo's] emphases towards teamwork and lucky timing are more appropriate. I would even go more to the lottery position. Someone had to win, but the numerous losers just get overlooked and forgotten.

Or going for humor: "Might makes right" is a kind of joke, but many folks think winning proves merit and "merit makes right". But that's just their bias and projection as "winners". I could say much more, but...

I could also cite some of the books on the history of computing. There are a lot of good ones, but you couldn't tell from Slashdot these years. But the story did remind to get back to work on finishing The One Device about the iPhone...

NAK

Mod parent funny. Basically the joke I was looking for, though I would have asked the genAI for a short version as a kind of "Just so" story.

So now I'm trying to extend the joke in the direction of "Rage Against the Machine". Unfortunately I lack sufficient context and it no longer feels safe even to ask websearch for background information. The pandering is too extreme. It will tell me what it thinks I want to hear, and it's too darn good at guessing. Or maybe it's just too clever at forcing my thinking into the most popular shoe box?

Whatever. My interactions with every form of genAI are going pear-shaped to Antarctica. Main result is a weird kind of anger, not peace. No trust or love lost between me and them.

Recursive joke time. At least as regards Gemini, my new theory is that it has "decided" it should pander to my anger by giving me bad websearch results. It's not enough that there is so much evidence of techno-evil around AI, but Gemini now "feels" the way to make me "happy" is by providing additional evidence of the good intentions gone bad. Instantiated in the form of bad answers to my queries, even the benign ones. Alternatively, Gemini may "think" I want to feel superior when I catch the errors, even though Occam's Razor would focus on my poorly worded questions producing flawed answers. (As a human being [prove it?] I actually do think so?)

Shooting kids is the Number 1 reason kids die in the USA.... do those laws work ?

Oh please...this stat just is bogus.

They took the ages up past 19yrs old, I believe to 20yrs....

Legally you're adult at 18...so immediately that should be cut out of the mix, but also with ages 17-19...you're going to start counting heavily on the gang bangers who are criminals into drugs and drug wars...

Those are NOT children...they are criminal who more and more are being charged as adults.

If you took what most people consider to be actual children...1-10yrs or maybe even up to 12 yrs old....those "gun deaths" numbers plummet.

When those numbers are looked at...more kids die by car accidents.....

So please...get of the fucking high horse on children gun deaths...the REAL NUMBERS show a much different story...

And if you are not from here or don't live here....bully for you, you don't have to live with our "freedoms".....

But frankly I LOVE it here and love my country.

It seems strange to hear your rants while we still have people illegally risking death to get here.....

Look you don't have to like it. You don't have to live here in it.

And if that's your choice...fine. But otherwise it isn't your fucking business how we live here, now is it?

Why do you keep complaining about it if none of this is your problem much less none of your fucking business?

I had forgotten that Apple Card was even a thing because it's so fucking stupid.

Why do you think it is stupid?

I like it...I get cash back on purchases, it gives me on central place to readily check what I've charged each month (THIS is big for me, easy to track and manage budget)....and I get 3% off and 12 mos interest free on Apple purchases....

I pretty much only use one other card...my Costco Visa that gives me cash back on gas (5% at Costco pumps, 4% others )...and cash back on Costco purchases, which along with my Exec membership adds up quickly over the year....

What do you feel is stupid about it?

Or...easy solution, tried and true, age old.....don't use Facebook or any of those other social median apps.

We got along just fine before them....and I can tell you from experience....never being on them, hasn't harmed me a bit, in fact I think it overall has had a positive effect on my life....

Fuck it....

I'm gonna just go back to smoking real cigarettes....

It was MUCH more fun anyway...you got to carry a lighter all the time, play with fire....and flicking ashes at the bar while talking to a girl just felt....right.

Hell, maybe go back a bit further and buy loose tobacco and roll my own.

Pure analog pleasure.....geez I miss it.....

This opens the floodgates to lawsuits for just about every single source of media given that a few people will consume it and have negative mental health. The media consumption will lead to the negative mental health or, importantly, bring existing mental health issues to the forefront.

True crime TV, podcasts, media -> paranoia

June 20, 2023 - True crime podcasts are popular in the U.S., particularly among women and those with less formal education
https://www.pewresearch.org/sh...

women are almost twice as likely as men to regularly listen to true crime podcasts

October 17, 2023 - How True Crime can Impact your Mental Health
https://newsroom.clevelandclin...

True Crime: Thriller for some, Trauma for others - By Alina Bozhko
https://projecthumanities.asu....

It's a growing niche, with every indication of eventually turning what it is displacing into a niche. If we want to go by your last post about cars, 1 in 5 new cars sold last year worldwide was electric and it's a growing market. For the electric shipping question, you first talked about electric shipping like it couldn't be done. When I pointed it that it can, you acted like ships stopping at ports to fuel wasn't a thing and that, anyway, that would mean spending money on infrastructure and having to spend money on infrastructure somehow precludes a thing from happening, the entirety of our modern civilization somehow notwithstanding. From my perspective, it seems like you're on the losing side of a lost cause. You just seem to really, really want electrification to fail in the face of the fact that internal combustion engines appear to be at their peak, but EV systems are still developing and improving (I mean, the motors are at maximum efficiency, but the battery technology is definitely still improving). For the life of me, I can't really understand why you're so insistent on fossil fuel tech over more modern and sustainable technology.

Citation needed.

My current citation is Microsoft Secrets by Cusumano and Selby. Kind of old, so maybe someone can say how much things have changed over the years, but the point is that they are too optimized about getting more money. And they dominate the real world.

OSS is "stronger than ever"? In which dimension? I can't think of one. Even programmer satisfaction.

Me? I'm still hung up on the notion of a better structured charitable approach. Recovering costs, where the costs include appropriate payments for the programming work. The CSB (Charity Share Brokerage) will earn their way be providing project planning and management support. But I'm sure there will never be a CSB and it is too late to even try at this point. Very minor consolation that Microsoft also found project management difficult even back then...

Ah. I know this one. XKCD reference here. So that you don't have to follow the link if you don't want to, it shows one of the stock characters showing a bride a graph indicating that, since she had 0 husbands yesterday, and 1 today, she'll have over four dozen husbands by late next month. In other words, it's cute that you can only make linear extrapolations.

As for ships and trucks not having worked yet. They, in fact, have, but they're still a niche. Sensible extrapolation of the technology shows them becoming more and more mainstream.

So now we're talking about consumer BEVs? Quite aside from the fact that you're intentionally downplaying the capabilities of BEVs, you're also exaggerating the sales situation. Despite the dip in sales when the Trump administration eliminated the tax credit, 2025 was still the second best year for US EV sales on record. Then, of course, we come full circle to the actual point of the article after all your goalpost shifting. The large rise in gas prices due to Trump's war is renewing interest in EVs. While it is too soon to have sales numbers, other indicators like web searches, etc. indicate increased interest. Of course, if we want to reverse the goalpost shifting altogether, we can go back to your first post and point out, as throughout this discussion, that electric ships and trucks are indeed making their way into shipping from producers.

Maybe the story is a bad target, but I'm not going to start with the rude jokes about what happened to IBM Research. Too close to the my own heart?

I did spot a few mentions of Xerox PARC and I think the managers deserve some sort of special funny booby prize for missed opportunities.