I know in this special case of a semi-totalitarian regime, it's pretty clear why the measure was taken but, to be fair, in a 'normal' country, you would expect some systemic accountability from organisations with such a huge influence.

There, fixed it. Three examples where a good approach failed don’t show that it always fails or that it can’t be improved

I can tell from PowerApps perspective, which was mentioned in TFA, that there are two important things that sales and marketing teams need to understand: 1. The terminology is "low-code/no-code", as there is some tinkering to be done even for the simplest apps 2. These technologies are created for the "citizen developer" or "professional developer" crowds, not for non-technical people. You do need to learn a few things and to have an affinity towards development to work with PowerApps. Having said that, automating many development activities and having standard best practices (like security and data access rules) is a good thing. It doesn't mean that developers won't be needed anymore, just that some bits are automated, in line with other sectors of the economy.

"Not only does Theia allow developers to install and reuse VS Code extensions, it provides an extensible and adaptable platform that can be tailored to specific use cases, which is a huge benefit for any organization that wants to deliver a modern and professional development experience" So how is it different from VS Code? Is 'no Microsoft contribution' the only selling point?

I tried a Lime electric scooter when on holiday in Bucharest, Romania last year. The service had just started and the scooters were all over the place. There are only two ways to ride the scooter - on the pavement, which is not great because of pedestrians and parked cars, or on the road, annoying all the drivers because, although the thing is faster that you'd imagine when you first start to use it, it's no match for the speeding taxi drivers in Bucharest. A third option would be bike lanes but those are very rare out there. Almost nobody was wearing a helmet, although a scooter can reach about 25 km/h. Bottom line is that these things don't seem very safe and a lot of thought needs to be put into teaching people how to use them without wreaking havoc.

Well, TFA does say "machine learning", which, admittedly, sound less sexy than "AI". Saying we've just used an 85-line Python script to train a model from scikit sounds even more boring. What's even more annoying: why is this article behind a $8.99 paywall??

Funny, I was also trying to understand the meaning behind this antonomasia... Which characteristic of the company is so great that we need more of? It doesn't look like scalability is achievable with companies worth close to $1T .

I agree. Plust, to be fair, I would assume Amazon, Microsoft and other cloud providers use similar cooling mechanisms. There's also the question of whether a massive data centre is or isn't more efficient than smaller individual data centres, one per company, that support similar computing needs.

Seeing how much more productive some people are working from home, I expect people to start understanding the importance of asynchronous communication in teams. That is to say, instead of "Can I borrow you for five minutes?", people could send an email and plan a meeting or just get their answer offline. This is so important for people who actually get in the flow when working like developers. I'm definitely planning to work from home more.

If YOU designed a service, how scalable would you make it? 2-3 times normal usage sounds OK but 7x sounds like quite a lot. Adding resources for 775% normal usage doesn't make economic sense for many businesses. Microsoft has clarified that the 775% surge was on Teams, not all Azure: https://www.cloudpro.co.uk/clo... So we don't know what the actual surge is, but would be interesting to see what best practice is.

Couldn't agree more. Putting scientific research behind a paywall doesn't help research very much. Is it too much to dream of Google Scholar or Microsoft Academic Search showing all abstracts and full-text PDFs for all research?