...So then why is "${SIGNIFICANT_YEAR}" secure, but not words? Four-digit numerical PINs are secure now, but lower-case dictionary words aren't?

Passwords became unwieldy because we tried to improve security by mandating complexity, but suddenly 'limiting tries' is all it takes for four-digit numbers to become 'secure' again?

https://kagi.com/ ...for good and for ill, it's a subscription service, so while users (like me) pay directly, there's no ads or anything like that. It's pretty solid at not-ignoring keywords, and the results are typically as good as Google, again in both directions (obscure error codes that don't give useful results in Kagi tend to yield equally-bad results in Google, for example).

Not a shill or anything, just an extremely satisfied customer.

Yes, Microsoft had a Maps app. And, of course, it was excellent until market winds shifted.

See kids, the ancient sages used a compass and a Hagstrom map they could never fold twice, regular-old folks printed directions off Mapquest, and the young kids just assume Google Maps has always existed and has trouble understanding how Moses got lost in the desert.

But, for a brief window of time, there were PC-based mapping tools. I was a huge fan of Delorme Street Atlas (arguably the pioneer in the space, with CD-ROM releases going back to 1991), and Microsoft was a direct competitor with their admittedly-prettier Streets and Trips alternative. In addition, there was Microsoft MapPoint, an onramp into the GIS market - I once used it to make a map of all of my contacts in Microsoft Outlook...but, I digress.

For that window between about 2004 and 2010ish, it was possible to use one's laptop and a USB GPS receiver to navigate to a destination.

Then, of course, the idea of having a laptop-sized screen in a car went out of vogue, and it was tough to sell map data on CD-ROM anymore, so the data was basically used to feed Bing Maps, which was part of the Windows Phone 7/8/10 releases...and, I'm pretty sure you know the rest.

Now, the app being killed here, specifically, was the one that first shipped with Windows 8 and was the default "map app" in Windows 10's early releases, but to your point, exceedingly few people used the app, because they were much more likely to go to Google Maps or Bing Maps in a browser, and the desktop app was little more than a wrapper around the website data anyway. I tried it once, just for kicks, to see if I could get the app to work with the Streets and Trips GPS. It took a bit to find a compatible driver, but I did, and while my old copy of Streets and Trips picked it up just fine, and while Windows itself liked having another source of location data, the Maps app wouldn't perform the same task as Streets and Trips, even with a first party GPS. Apparently the use case wasn't meaningfully considered, so there was literally no advantage to using the app over web-based solutions.

On the one hand, yeah, it's kinda crappy.

On the other hand, Synology does a LOT for nothing more than the price of the hardware. I've gotten phone support on three-year-old appliances. Their Active Backup for Business application allows the automatic backup of unlimited Hyper-V/VMWare VMs *and* workstations. They have dozens of plugins, a DDNS service, and mobile apps, all bundled in with the purchase price. ...and what they're paywalling here is a health check system that would likely be unreliable on uncertified hard disks anyway. Dell, HP, Sun, Oracle, NetApp, and all the other storage vendors refuse to initialize third party drives at all, let alone give any sort of health verification.

So yes, I realize my argument boils down to "at least they're not as bad as Oracle", but I mean, if the options are paywalling a particular function that was likely the cause of a high amount of support calls, overall higher prices for the hardware, or a shift in their business model to post-purchase monetization...I'm willing to consider this particular choice the 'least-bad'.

So, ESXi 3.5 worked exclusively with a downloaded application that was installed on one's workstation...

Ahhh, around 5.x days they had a hybrid mode, where one could still use the installed management client, or the webUI...and yeah, the webUI definitely had some growing pains. The earliest iterations were in Flash, then they used some hackneyed AJAX implementation that was somehow worse...and we all ignored it and still used the client.

It took until 6.5 for the WebUI to actually be useful, which was good because they depreciated the local client around that time. Honestly, the WebUI was basically-perfected by 7.x; feature complete, functional, responsive, and only needed a small application install for more comprehensive console usage, but even that could be done serviceably in the browser.

...neither can anyone else who's had to deal with Broadcom's shenanigans.

Proxmox is free, and I've yet to find a function that a homelab would need, which isn't available in Proxmox...and a plethora of functions in Proxmox that aren't available in VMWare. The ESXi interface is a bit more intuitive, I'll grant, and Proxmox similarly requires a bit more fiddling to get things like GPU Passthrough working optimally....but with Proxmox's ESXi import tool and Veeam support on the free versions, and with ESXi's next step up being thousands of dollars annually instead of $700 once, I can't see the use case.

Plus, anyone hitching their wagon to Broadcom after two years of horror stories is just asking for trouble.

Probably not, because at the end of the day, the iPad is a consumption device. They can be effectively leveraged for some purpose-built functions - point-of-sale terminals, punch clocks, photo booths, and customizable MIDI controllers are a few go-to examples that spring to mind, but for every iPad implemented in such a way, 100 more are used for e-mail and Tiktok and video games.

The iPad doesn't need to be a general purpose computer because the overwhelming majority of use cases - including most of the productivity-related use cases enumerated, don't require it to be, and making it so adds needless complexity on a number of levels.

So, while it is *my* logic that iOS should focus on being the best mobile consumption OS available, and that MacOS should focus on being the best general purpose computer OS available, with easy interconnects for messaging and file sharing (problems already solved by iMessage and Airdrop), in reality, each will likely get bolt-on additions between the two until the bolt-ons will be the worst elements of the other, because $deity forbid that Apple be seen as taking a break from incrementing operating systems and releasing something new that doesn't a month's salary for half the population.

For all of the MANY, MANY, MANY annoying things that have been added to Windows over the years that make its use a begrudging concession rather than enthusiastic selection, I will see what things I can concede were added to Windows that were genuinely useful since TCP/IP was added in Windows 95...

1. 64-bit support (would you really want to be using 4GB of RAM in 2025?).
2. Desktop compositing (transparency, shadows, variable DPI support, GPU acceleration).
3. Memory management (no more one-app-crashes the OS).
4. Better account and multi-user support (remember that Windows 95 allows you to get past the login prompt by clicking 'cancel'; UAC was off to a bumpy start but running applications in a user context rather than an admin context by default was a net positive all around).
5. Overall disk support (SATA, NVMe, >137GB drive sizes, and on a tangential note, UEFI support).
6. Overall improvements to the hardware abstraction layer and class compliant drivers (Remember how many hardware drivers you had to install in Windows 95? Around a dozen, probably...but it's 2-3 at most on Win11...and not that it's a generally-useful thing, but cloning a hard drive to dissimilar hardware works WAY better than even the Win7 era).
7. Networking improvements (IPv6 support, Windows Firewall, SMB 3.0, optional NFS support).
8. DirectX improvements (90's era games have their own look and a nostalgia feel, but games that look like Cyberpunk simply weren't possible on DirectX 2.0).
9. Peripheral support (USB 4.0 is a bit sluggish out of the gate...but do you REALLY want to go back to the bad-old-days of SCSI, Parallel ports, and 12Mbit/sec USB 1.1?).

There are a bunch of more specific ones (Windows Media Center was the BEST cable box to ever exist and it is a CRIME that none of the OEMs ever mass produced a PC as a purpose-built DVR), and of course there are 10,001 security fixes that have been implemented since then, but those are just a handful of Windows improvements that I'd at least give credit where it's due.

That's a feature, not a bug.

Lots of the people they're selling to pitched the benefits of return-to-office mandates, so this too sounds like a feature, not a bug.

Because this wasn't a solved problem with VPNs and RDP, or Dropbox or Nextcloud, a decade ago...

vague...

Clippy and Cortana didn't excite anyone; Copilot won't, either...

You can't get more than 5TB of storage in Microsoft365 at any price.

For Microsoft shareholders, probably. For folks who realized that Office has been basically feature complete since 2010, that there sounds like some Hollywood Accounting. I'd call it Microsoft Accounting, but that was discontinued in 2009.

Bold of you to assume the certs are going to nginx or apache servers or something else that will serve up an HTTP request like that. Now, to be fair, you may be right that 51% of them are, but the majority of the certs I implement aren't.

Many go to firewalls; Fortigate, Sonicwall, and Sophos all have HTTP frontends to their VPN services; it's not like I can just throw a text file into the server's /var/www folder. Others go to reverse proxies, that don't themselves host the file in question. I've been able to use acme.sh to script the stop-renew-start process needed for nginx at 4AM to make it happen, but the fact that the script has to stop nginx as part of the process means there's a bit more to the process than maybe there should be. Oh, and I've still got 2-3 Exchange servers I haven't decommissioned yet; you haven't LIVED until you've had to renew one of those monstrosities via Powershell...and no, you can't just HTTP that one easily; it's always easier to do it via DNS. Finally, I've got some folks who I have to renew their certs and give them to their web developer, who won't really assist in the process, so it's either DNS or e-mail for them, infuriatingly enough.

There are plenty of places SSL certs are used where the HTTP validation is more headache than it's worth.

You had me in the first half - we agree that 100mph isn't easy to do by accident.

The abuse comes in later on. Give it a year or two, and it'll be amended so it's "automatic at 100mph, on the table starting at 80", and a year or two more before it's an option for *any* speeding violation...

I say this because my county, many years ago, told us that they were going to implement red light cameras. ONLY at the 20 most dangerous intersections to begin with, and the county had a MAXIMUM of 50 they could EVER implement. I really should have bet money, because I *knew* before the motion even made it to the voting stage that we were going to end up with 150 cameras eventually. A year after the first 20 were installed, they placed the order for the back 30 cameras...and twice, they voted to increase the number of cameras, so we've got 150 cameras, like clockwork.

I'll agree with you here, as long as the governor is JUST a governor. How much you want to bet that there will be telemetry data collected and then sold to insurance companies? A speed governor shouldn't require an internet connection, so who wants to bet that putting the thing in a faraday cage will constitute 'tampering'? I'd agree that it's *probably* less oppressive, but unless the law also stipulates that the only information insurance companies will get is whether or not you have a governor, there's every incentive to turn an installation into a data collection racket.

Good news: both iTunes and Amazon still sell many of them in this way. Not all of them, of course (infuriatingly, Apple still won't sell episodes of For All Mankind as episode downloads, despite the existence of Blu-Ray releases...), but many can still be purchased this way.

This has been a pretty big issue for years now. It's exceedingly rare to find something that connects to Wi-Fi and doesn't demand a first party app and an account to be created. I literally couldn't find a smartwatch that didn't require one; I tried several. A client bought an HP scanner that had a very, very indirect way of setting up the printer without an account. Another client who set the printer up without me made one, and the all-in-one won't scan to a computer on the LAN without providing HP account credentials.

No.

I'm glad this guys' story got a bit of traction. What makes it particularly annoying is that none of this is divulged to users up front. One has to Google around enough to hope someone has indicated whether a particular function is account-walled, and hope that someone is able to articulate it enough to make a decision before the purchase.

Here's to hoping Bosch is shamed enough into unlocking this functionality, but even if they did...it would have to come through a firmware upgrade...which one would have to create an account to install....

It's probably worth looking into the rabbit hole of hands the brand has went through over the years.

Back in 2005ish, a company with that name attempted to go legit, selling DRM'd WMA music downloads. They were also pretty innovative in that they were the first company to sell a music subscription service, where you could spend $15/month and download everything you wanted, as long as you synced up your player once a month to reset the timer on it (Slashdot decried the practice at the time, but what happens when you don't pay your Spotify bill in 2025, and how would you implement that in the pre-smartphone era? ...basically this).

The single biggest issue they had was that they weren't compatible with iPods, which meant that their target demographic were the handful of folks that had players from Creative Labs, iRiver, and Samsung, who were also willing to pay a subscription for music despite Limewire being fully operational at the same time.

After that venture imploded once the iPhone showed up on the scene, and Windows Mobile (also compatible with DRM'd WMA files including N2G) lost pretty much all of its market share in a year or two, the company got bought out by Rhapsody. Rhapsody pursued a bit more indirect revenue stream, making deals with cable companies for music streaming channels, and in-store music systems akin to Muzak of the 80's; their direct-to-consumer subscriptions were a bit of a niche. They coasted on that for a bit, keeping the Napster name on the books, possibly a few patents and contracts, but largely sitting on it and focusing on the Rhapsody branding. Rhapsody had a mobile streaming app in the early days, but they were never able to get the general appeal that Pandora did, and later Spotify.

I hadn't heard from either company in years, having lost track of them...but Napster had a much longer lifespan as a legitimate music service than it did as the gateway to copyright infringement for the masses.

I've got at least some backhandedly good news for you...

While technically still available, it's gotten so slow that it's not much of a selling point anymore. I moved to VoidTools' Everything years ago for file searching, and it's instant in terms of looking for file names and types. Of course, if you're looking to search document contents, searching is also instant in Office365...but it's a bit of a headache on a local machine.

The Start Menu has been ground zero for Windows enshittification for over a decade now. Started in Windows 8 because Ballmer's swan song was trying to turn the desktop into a tablet. That got ratcheted back a bit in Win10, but Classic Shell / Open Shell has been a near requirement ever since, if you wanted the experience you're looking for. Windows 11 made it even worse because they rearranged things to make Classic Shell much more annoying to use without ExplorerPatcher bringing back the non-craptastic taskbar, but it's a cat-and-mouse game between Windows updates oh-so-conveniently breaking ExplorerPatcher, and the EP devs fixing it. Of course, the fact that the Start Menu is where Windows has a propensity to put "app recommendations" has nothing to do with breaking things that enable users to avoid them, I'm sure...

This is still semi-true - the Open/Save dialogs have undergone some small iterations over the years; some show the QuickAccess folder tree on the left, while others are the Win95 style that doesn't...while ultimately close-enough to not be confusing, and I do appreciate the commitment to backwards compatibility in this respect, it's something that has at least a few iterations that can be confusing for users who can't find where their shortcut sidebar went.

Definitely still has this, definitely miss it in most desktop environments i've tried on Linux. DIY desktop shortcuts from the applications menu is inconsistent-at-best, and it's not terribly obvious how to make them most times I've tried.

I don't know if Windows still has those things - the last version I had any real experience with was XP. But I sure do miss them just about every day, even 15+ years later.

Well, the good news is that Windows is still trying to appeal to the MacOS and Chromebook crowd, so most of these functions are being removed from Windows in the name of "ease of use" or something...so, whatever you've picked up in terms of getting your Linux environment to work to your needs, keep doing that, because you'll pretty much have to go back to Windows XP to get the desktop to work the way you want...unless, of course, the ReactOS folks manage to make some solid headway...I'm rooting for them!