The annoying thing with Windows is that Microsoft doesn't improve the OS for the benefit of its users, it "improves" it for the benefit of itself. Users (its "customers" really) are just pawns to be monetized. This is a fundamental cultural thing. I don't forsee them changing it, not unless their self-centered philosophy hits their bottom line too much (as happened with Win8). Even then the course correction was minor - they still managed to push people off Win7 onto the telemetry heavy Win10, while also pushing unrequested BS like Onedrive and Office subscriptions.
With the Win11 push I am exploring a different route. I decided to virtualize my Win10 PC and run it on top of a Linux host (Manjaro). I managed to image the Win10 PC into a qcow2 file, setup a VM, and surprisingly got the Win10 key to accept this as a "hardware change". To keep some performance I installed a 2nd GPU for looking-glass and maxxed the ram (128GB DDR4 - not too expensive - I imagine people will be dumping used DDR4 soon). This virtual setup runs quite well - when the VM is full screen it is indistinguishable from a Win10-only PC.
But the real purpose of this experiment is software - how much Win software do I really run. Interestingly, games are the least trouble to run on Linux (I don't play MMOs, yes I am aware of anti-cheat topics). Literally every single thing I've run off Steam works perfectly fine. Web browser, Youtube, all run fine. At least mostly - I have found Firefox after being up for a few days and having multiple Youtube tabs open will start to lag and act strange - not exactly a memory leak (nothing obvious on btop), and after restarting it runs fine again.
The actual hangups I have found are 1) Fusion360 - I don't think this runs on Wine or has native linux and 2) Portable apps. I make heavy use of USB Portableapps setup - while many Portableapps have native linux versions, they are - not portable. I did try using Wine in combination with the Portableapps exe files, but that was a failure. I don't know if there is a native-linux equivalent of Portableapps, but if so that would reduce my Windows usage to basically only Fusion. And I am OK running Fusion in a Win10 setup indefinitely if needed. Although being tax-season I can forsee other things like tax software being a problem. The experiment remains on-going.
Unfortunately while I can do all these modifications on a desktop PC, I expect the laptops in our house will simply end up on Win11 (or abandoned due to old hardware).
And, arguably, the current crisis at Tesla is because Musk is playing President rather than being "out on the factory floor".
The "current crisis" is manufactured and amplified externally. Nobody is doxxing Tesla owners with maps using Molotov cocktails as map cursors or burning lots full of vehicles in for service in some way that is a function of whether Musk is personally present on the factory floor vs doing something else he thinks is vital to our economic survival. All of it is ginned up hate based on the politics surrounding the pruning of vast left slush funds and debt-funded waste that has to go away. That's an entire industry with vested interests, and acting against it certainly brings out the coordinated hate, attacks on stock value, media smearing, and of course thousands of people who now say he's a nazi though they can't actually articulate why they think that.
No, him being "on the factory floor" or off it doesn't precipitate some "current crisis," except in the sense that entrenched interests currently having their oxen gored by drying up things like the NGO money laundering industry are doing their best to try to wreck the company to make a point.
Our current situation remains unchanged: CloudFlare is still blocking our access to websites through the challenges, and the captcha/turnstile continues to hang the browser until our watchdog terminates the hung script after which it reloads and hangs again after a short pause (but allowing users to close the tab in that pause, at least). To say that this upsets me is an understatement. Other than deliberate intent or absolute incompetence, I see no reason for this to endure. Neither of those options are very flattering for CloudFlare.
I wish I had better news.
It cost 3.7 million. There should be no just here. Okay that's like a tenth or less than what usually is spent but still.
So the people who made it should have been earning minimum wage, is that your point? Spread that dollar amount across five and half yeads and even modest team of people and their overhead, and they're making middle five figures after taxes. Is that a lot, to you?
Just 3.7 million. Just. lol.
It took five and a half years to make it. So, in perhaps over-simplified terms, that's ~$670k year working on it. Let's say you had six people working on the project, and had NO overhead at all beyond their personal income while making it. That's roughly $100k per person before they paid taxes, which is either pretty good or not very good at all, depending on where you live and how. But one supposes they also had some overhead. This wasn't done on their kids' laptops at night. There was music to compose, audio to record and design, and a lot more.
So, yeah. "Just" 3.7M is a fair characterization.
Live within your income, even if you have to borrow to do so. -- Josh Billings
