This type of supply chain breakage is why I think we have already passed peak automobile lifetime (cars built 1990-2010): in the future when critical parts fail there won't be any spares, and unless one is willing to take on 10s of thousands of dollars of firmware modding no workarounds either. I would not expect cars sold after 2010 to have lifetimes of more than 10 years or so.
Everything RFK Jr does is related in some way to his network of scam companies making money. Trying to figure out how this seeming nonsense fits into that MO.
USB was around as early as 1996, many intel motherboards included it, including socket 7 and socket 8 based boards.
Windows didn't support USB until 95 OSR2.1, and there were few peripherals on the market so the ports (if present) sat unused.
A lot of OEMs ignored USB - although the motherboard technically supported it, it would be disabled in the bios and the headers on the board weren't wired to any sockets on the outside of the case.
There's a lot of inertia to overcome, people had a lot of peripherals using legacy ports and were reluctant to replace them with new ones even when usb offered significant benefits. A lot of printers supported both usb and parallel ports, and yet i saw a lot of those printers connected via parallel ports to computers that had usb ports too.
Also, the whole point of VMWare is to save money off of buying the hardware. If the price gets high enough that it's cheaper to just buy the hardware, what's the point of using it at all?
Well, actually hardware consolidation is a use case, sure, but I think nowadays it's more about redundancy, fault tolerance, rapid deployment/decomissioning. If you are doing it right, your "OS" boot volumes should be considered disposable, but a lot of shops do it wrong and want the OS volumes to be hosted in centralized storage, which is much easier with a virtual machine approach (yes you can SAN/iSCSI boot, but it's not very appealing).
Of course your first point stands, that VMWare has competition with adequate capability and until now vmware could largely get by because the customers are too lazy to move and the price wasn't enough to make them look hard at options. It's not like mainframe style lock in where the porting effort is supremely daunting, though what you say about they don't need it to last too long for it to have been worth it also stands.
Of course, the nice meaty IBM locked in ecosystem is far stickier than VMWare.
That replacement for a mainframe, can it run exactly the same software? Generally not, it has to be ported, and porting is risk.
For VMWare, the replacements can run the same exact applications (the processor architecture and software stack have nothing to do with vmware's part of the solution). A customer may be *somewhat* stickier as they bought into vmware-centric solutions with partners, but as they migrate to newer hardware platforms, they can comfortably look at alternatives without terror that their applications are doomed if they try.
There's some friction against migration of course, but no where near what mainframe enjoys.
Reading into the article and his choice of words, sure some get some negotiated break, but the key is his use of the phrase:
complaints "don't play out"
What he means is that the customers complain, but the complaints are invalid because the customer isn't using as much of the feature set as they *could*, and so the complaint has no merit because they are getting what they paid for even if it's useless to them.
He then goes to either fabricate or cherry pick a few examples of what a customer might say when they recognize what fools they have been and how much more they could get out of their vmware purchase.
Well clearly you just need to start using 31.1k/year of the additional value you will be getting
Yeah, the "real" power move: putting someone who called you out and showed how you were wrong on your foes list! Well done!
Moving the goalposts much?
I love it when people try to "win" an argument by denying what they wrote earlier.
All you demonstrated is that context determines whether "more" refers to a count or an uncountable quantity, unlike your claim that '"more" is a quantity word, not a weight word.'
There isn't even a disagreement here! If you say "but the mass of the oranges is greater"
You don't even have to use the word mass to change the meaning of "more" here, just make "oranges" and "grapes" singular and one can clearly interpret this as weight, not count:
"there is more orange than grape"
Context is everything
"more" is a quantity word, not a weight word.
More can be used for both countable and uncountable measures. You appear to be thinking that the fewer/less dichotomy applies to more. But it doesn't.
If I'm honest about it? I feel like it's been years since any one web browser felt "better" than another to me for technical reasons like speed/performance or ability to work properly with web sites I needed to use.
My preference for FireFox has more to do with such things as the UI layout and the way it "compartmentalizes" certain things. (EG. On a Windows platform, it still manages SSL certificates in their own place, vs. sharing the common set of them stored and managed in Windows itself.) The fact it's NOT another Chromium-based browser means it's handy for troubleshooting too. (If I have issues with a web site, I like to have both a browser like Edge or Chrome AND FireFox to use so I can test it with both web engines.)
Who are these people who care SO much about how fast a browser renders content, anyway? It's the ongoing joke over on Apple forums with Safari browser.... "New MacOS release makes Safari snappier!" On any non prehistoric computer, web browsers performing poorly almost always have more to do with either the speed of the Internet connection itself, memory issues from somebody leaving a million tabs open, or poorly written web site code. I don't care what a stopwatch says. I care about the overall user experience, and it's fast enough in any decent browser.
Old software generally still works too, i have stuff that was written for VAX systems that can still successfully compile and run on today's linux machines.
The Linux kernel is pretty good at keeping userland compatibility. In some cases the old libraries will be missing from newer distributions but there's nothing stopping you from bundling old libraries up with your old apps if that's what you need to do.
For anything with source code it's often not much more than a recompile.
For private use with a prescription, I don't see why it should be illegal.
Because the US patents make it illegal to import without permission from the patent holder. I don't think there are any personal use exceptions for patents.
Recently, I find that Firefox sometimes suddenly uses large amounts of memory, effectively locking up my Linux system. However, looking at "about:power", it's the tabs open on Microsoft pages that are taking more memory than any others.
If I hit quickly enough I can usually kill some tasks to recover.
Any circuit design must contain at least one part which is obsolete, two parts which are unobtainable, and three parts which are still under development.
