I don't doubt that the previous requirements were effectively impossible for nontrivial portions of the industry and their customers; though, given the wall-to-wall dumpster fire that is IT and IT security; I can only see the attempt to treat that as evidence that the regulations were unrealistic and unduly burdensome as either myopic or deeply cynical.

Commercial software and both commercial and institutional IT operations are much more an example of the fact that you can absolutely run on dangerous and unsustainable shortcuts so long as there are no real consequences for failure than it is a case of a competent and successful industry at risk of being stifled by burdensome regulation.

I don't know what the researchers were thinking call it a "reverse solar panel". Infrared panel would be a better name. Reverse implies it takes electricity and converts it to light. aka. light bulb.

You've been around a while, and you are not ignorant when it comes to computers, and yet people who are completely ignorant about computers (and generally incompetent at life) have no problem using Android. The obvious conclusion is that you are exaggerating the problems you had for rhetorical effect.

People who don't know better may be excused, but you have intentionally chosen to be locked in the garden. You disgust me in that way.

Most phones "just work."

That's not an Apple special trait.

That's a hypothesis, but it doesn't explain the change. There is nothing particularly interesting in the current iPhone lineup (one phone is thin, one phone is powerful, one phone is cheap, etc). Of course, carrier subsidization scams aren't new either, so they don't explain the growth.

Somehow they managed to open a new market or market segment somewhere, but it's not clear how.

The concept is cool, but I'm afraid the gameplay would have as much interest as the prompt. That is, the game itself would only be fun for a few minutes.

Use a trash benchmark, get a trashy result.

But hey, at least they got to publish and not perish.

Orphanages exist today; you don't see them because they're called the foster system. And it's still a hard knock life.

The reasoning is honestly just baffling. Apparently the old requirements "diverted agencies from developing tailored assurance requirements for software and neglected to account for threats posed by insecure hardware." by requiring that people keep track of what software they were actually using.

Aside from the...curious...idea that knowing what your attack surface looks like is a diversion from developing assurance requirements; the claim that the old policy about SBOMs is being revoked for not focusing on insecure hardware is odd both on the obvious point that basically anything with a sensible scope only focuses on certain issues and leaves other issues to be handled by other things and the only slightly less obvious issue that most 'insecure hardware', unless you've qualified for a really classy covert implant or have high sensitivity TEMPEST issues or something, is not actually hardware problems; but firmware problems; which are just software problems that aren't as visible; exactly the sort of thing that SBOMs help you keep an eye on.

Not like anyone expected better; but this is exceptionally poor work.

What percentage of the US budget goes to defense spending?

Welfare isn't bankrupting us, it never was. Welfare is a very small portion of the national budget. If you look at the budget, the largest expenses are social security and medicare. Incidentally, those could be considered a form of basic income.

Why did you leave out Windows ME

The usual term with things like plumbers is "rollup". Even the most delusional excel jockey probably doesn't believe he has 'operational alpha' vs. a veteran plumber in matters of plumbing; but he(correctly) knows that local plumbing outfits are a fairly heavily fragmented industry with a lot of relatively small players; the sort of quaint folksy thing that looks like one of those competitive free markets they told you about in EC101. And, if you, purely hypothetically, can borrow money for a pittance, you don't need to improve operations when you can just buy a bunch of the small players, consolidate them, and then raise prices to match the newly reduced level of competition.

Same deal works with more or less any business with a lot of mom 'n pop operators; as well as things like rental housing. Maybe there are some marginal efficiency improvements in back office functions because it's not eleventy zillion individual copies of quickbooks; but most of the actual margins come from the higher prices you can command from customers and the lower prices you can offer to suppliers and employees once you consolidate a given sector in a given area. The effect is particularly lurid when it comes to thinks like small medical and dental practices; or care homes; since there it's about the money; but being about the money is also about pushing your employees to recommend unnecessary implant surgery and cutting patient/staff ratios as hard as you can without anyone noticing too many bedsores. Fantastic stuff, really.

"There is existential risk for a number [of funds] because of the fundraising environment,"

I'm not sure words can adequately express the hubris and myopia of someone who blames "the fundraising environment" for the fact that their heavily leveraged buyout of a bunch of things they had no actual plan to improve value of is catching up with them.

In the strict legal sense it might not be a ponzi scheme; you can end up depending on new suckers to pay off your current creditors through incompetence as well as malice; but 'existential risk' because you've potentially run out of new suckers means that you are running a ponzi-tier business regardless of the exact motivation.

This does not really seem to be the case as Microsoft seems to be trying to abandon Xbox hardware more than leveraging it as an anticompetitive measure. The main reasoning is that Xbox Game Studios is worth more than the Xbox hardware division. Limiting games only to Xbox hurts overall sales of those games and those studios. Rather Microsoft is rebranding everything as "Xbox" to save face. For example the newest Asus gaming handheld, the ROG Xbox Ally X does not run Xbox games but Windows PC games. Personally I am waiting for some sort of class action lawsuit when unsuspecting people buy it and realize they cannot use their existing Xbox library.