Maltodextrin is easy to buy online and I imagine you could get it in stores that sell supplements for athletes (it's a common quick-energy booster, being a very rapidly-absorbed carbohydrate). The emulsifier and color you don't really need, though I suspect you could find them pretty easily if you wanted. The emulsifier is mostly to increase shelf life, and the color is for color.

Blue Origin is far, far from having "caught up". They've had three launches, with a 33% mission failure rate. They are now where SpaceX was fifteen years ago, but with a much worse record (Falcon 9s first mission failure was launch 19, though it did have a partial failure on launch 4 -- primary payload successful, secondary payload failed). New Glenn has done better on booster recovery, but they weren't the ones learning how to do it.

And even if SpaceX never manages to make Starship fully-reusable, they can always punt, build a lighter, fully expendable second stage and have a launch platform that blows every other heavy lift vehicle in the world away.

The Chinese are moving pretty fast but they're also a generation behind.

All true, but it's worth pointing out that if the Starship lander succeeds it will enable us to do a lot more, a lot faster. The whole "15 refueling flights for every moon trip" seems kind of crazy on its face, but if you look at the costs (assuming Starship works and become fully reusable), it makes the total cost per kilogram delivered to the surface of the moon insanely low and enables comparatively massive payloads to be delivered.

Big risk, big (potential) reward. Running both the Starship and Blue Moon projects in parallel is probably a good risk mitigation strategy, but if Starship succeeds completely, Blue Origin's lander will be a relic. Of course, it's also possible that Starship will just fail, or that it will succeed but be difficult to man-rate, in which case it may become the delivery service for lunar cargos, while people fly on Blue Moon.

Fair, though my data -- and Play purchases -- were my bigger concern when they first started talking about just ending legacy GSuite.

You must have signed up to change over before they backed off. They announced that everyone would have to switch and pay, but I waited because I didn't think it would stick, and it didn't. I have about 25 users on mine, so paying wasn't really feasible.

I searched for it and found it. I can't check now; I left Google last year.

That's fake news, actually. A very widespread misunderstanding, but incorrect regardless.

What Google actually did was move "Don't be Evil" from the introduction of the code of conduct to the summary at the end.

It's a widespread but inaccurate belief that Google kills everything. If you look closer, there's a distinct pattern to what they kill and what they keep, and it's mostly based on adoption. If a Google service -- free or paid -- has 100M+ monthly active users, it won't be killed. That number is a guideline, not a hard requirement. If it appears that a service is on track to attain that sort of "Google-scale" user base, and it has some monetization mechanism (usually a place to put ads), then it will survive.

Paid services are a little different. Google is much more reluctant to kill any service that people are paying money for. That's not to say they won't do it, but they're less likely to, and if they do they'll bend over backwards trying to make it right. Stadia is a good example. Stadia didn't get enough adoption to be worth Google's time/effort, so they killed it... but they refunded every penny of what the users had spent on hardware, monthly subscription fees, game purchase fees, etc. I still have (and use) the rather nice Stadia controllers I got for free. I'd rather have kept the service, but I definitely don't feel like I was ripped off.

There's no free option for new signups. Lots of us who set this up still have the legacy free G-Suite accounts. I'm not sure what triggers the "you might be using this for a business" check. My family is still using mine and Google isn't telling me we're a business.

The biggest problem with it, frankly, is that Workspace accounts have lots of restrictions that regular gmail accounts don't have. There's lots and lots of stuff that just doesn't work, and the list is growing year by year. This isn't specific to the legacy accounts, though, it's all Workspace accounts, because Workspace is intended for business use. I've had to migrate various things to a personal gmail account, even though I'd really rather keep it all on my primary account (which is a legacy G-Suite/free Workspace account).

The "upgrade path" thegarbz mentioned is mostly that you can convert your legacy G-Suite account to a regular Gmail account, porting all of your data, Google Play Store purchases, etc., over to it. That won't have a custom domain, but if you want to keep your custom email address you can use one of many services (probably not free, but quite cheap) to forward.

Agreed - I'm also a light user of KDE and exactly the same as I said about the Mac applies to KDE. The Mac improved a lot, although it's still more flexible to use 3rd party stuff. I'm not aware of any extra window management available in KDE although as stated I'm only a light user of it really (my gaming box is a Bazzite install with KDE).

People switched to Google because it had a nice clean white page with a single search box, while AltaVista was going the 90s fad portal route. Clean interface and simplicity was thee key,

There's lots of talk about how Google's search algos were better than AltaVista but honestly, at first, they weren't. They were close and they improved, but the loading speed and simplicity advantage that Google had over AltaVista is what bought them time to improve. Remember too that one reason AltaVista was better was that people optimised to be found by it, and not for Google. As time went on, more people learned what Page Rank was (long since gone) and started to optimise for that instead, thus speeding up the switch.

Lesson: Don't go complex. Don't go shoving extra stuff at people that they haven't asked for. Give them the simplest thing possible, and they will use it.

Depends on your definitions, I suppose. You could argue that engaging in blatant market manipulation and insider trading from the Oval Office for 16 months and only netting $750M in profits represents a failure. Someone more competent could have made a lot more.

How do you know they exist in the first place? Start menu is a copy of the Apple menu as enhanced by an ancient shareware utility called "Hierarchical Menus". That add-on does exactly what the start menu does, allowing shortcuts to be grouped in folders etc. and for nesting of folders. It predates the Start menu by a few years.

One of the points was to be able to organise by category. I might not know what the thing-to-set-up-a-disk-partition is called, but it's probably in a menu hierarchy called "Utilities" and I can go look. It's discoverable, and it should be there.

Pinned things? Probably a set of defaults that are easily removable would be my preferred answer (which is what they do), but I could also settle for none until you put it there. But I very much disagree that nothing at all should be in the Start menu except your own choices.

I mean - the Apple's "Microsoft - Start Your Photocopiers!" definitely applied to the start of the Win 7 era. It was pretty much a straight lift of Aqua, ironically (given this post's subject) with more flexibility on positioningthe task bar vs the Dock. Certainly Windows didn't introduce pinning apps.

By the end of it though, I thought that Win7 had better actually window management than the Mac did, and even with the split view stuff etc. that's been introduced since I still feel that in order to get the same flexibility of window management that I get in Windows I need to install 3rd party stuff on the Mac.

Admittedly I haven't sat down and done a feature-to-feature comparison for a while there, but yep: will definitely give MS the edge of the ability to re-arrange your windows on the screen.

Yeah, but I heard exactly the same thing about Windows 7 (although admittedly never about 8). If you're using Windows, you will eventually move for something. Whether it's hardware, or some new app you want...can't predict it. Just that looking at the pattern over many years, you will.

I have an install of it. I don't use it, I'm Mac for my main platform and Linux for my gaming. But I still have a Windows partition, and it's Windows 11 too, mostly to handle odd manufacturer firmware update programs for external hardware. Even I moved to 11, and eventually people will do need to do so if they want to stay on the Windows platform. In my case, even if they don't want to stay on that platform in fact.