It depends on what they've purchased. Microsoft's basic licenses haven't gone up by that much in five years. The top tier E5 license was $57 per month in 2020, and today it's $54.75 (albeit without Teams, which costs $8 per month with a phone number attached). European prices are probably a bit different, but the price changes in percentages won't be notably different. Even add-ons like Entra Suite or Intune Suite won't add 72%. It's more likely that they have Azure VMs or other services, and that's where the majority of the cost increase came from. If they're not planning on bringing that on-prem, they'll see some savings, but it may not be all that much.

I almost wonder if that's actually a dude who was on the flight or someone taking advantage of an opportunity to get in the news.

Seems so unlikely.

Yep. At list price, an M365 E5 license is $657 per year in the US. For every thousand dollars of lost productivity per person due to the change, they could get 1.5 years of Microsoft licenses at one of the highest tiers.

> Since it is Linux it could be android compatible and capable of running anything an android phone can run

"Could be" is pretty far from "will be," and even further from "is."

> android is 99.9% Linux

Android is based on Linux, and there's a lot of overlap, but it's not as close as you claim. If it were, it would be a lot easier to run Android apps on Linux. As it is, you have to jump through some hoops. Even using tools like Waydroid, you're having someone else jump through those hoops for you, and you're not getting native performance. Taking "Linux" to mean a distribution like Debian, the two environments differ substantially. Even the kernels have diverged in notable ways, though Google still uses the Linux kernel as the upstream source.

Ubuntu tried to make a mobile OS, but eventually dropped it. Pine64 has one, but it's more a hobbyist platform. Purism has PureOS, derived from Debian, but it's market is negligible. It's not easy.

It's not the first time we've seen this idea. The others all failed for a simple reason: no compatibility with the Google or Apple app stores. Without that, it just won't catch on.

> The fact of the matter is, open source IS better because it written by people who are doing it for love or reputation, and are motivated to make it as good they possibly can.

Maybe it was that way one time, but most of the major projects that we rely on are written more by professional developers with decent to large paychecks that depend on them writing good software. LibreOffice is not immune from this, with Collabora providing a lot of the development output because their business depends on moving LibreOffice forward.

I think Munich has switched back and forth a few times. They kept finding that FOSS was ultimately more expensive because of training and compatibility issues.

> Companies will require its use just to check email, though any IMAP client would work if the Exchange admin allowed it.

Exchange admins are a dying breed because on-prem Exchange is vanishing in favor of M365. Microsoft is slowly making IMAP and POP3 less viable, removing basic authentication a couple of years ago. If your client can't do OAuth 2.0, it can't access M365 over IMAP. It will not be surprising at all to see IMAP and POP3 deprecated entirely in the next few years, requiring all connections to go via API over HTTPS.

> Moving off of MS Word doesn't hurt their budget if you still need a license to MS 365 to get your email.

You can get less expensive licenses that give access to email. The F-series licenses give only web versions of Office access, though Outlook (which comes with Windows now) works just fine.

The reason that we have M365 E5 licenses, though, isn't so much the Office suite. It's everything else that comes with it: OneDrive, SharePoint (which we use almost entirely for file storage, not internal websites), PowerBI, and the security and compliance features. On top of that, we don't have to manage any of the patching or uptime of the services. They (mostly) just work. That Office comes with it is almost a bonus. For a small company, it's a godsend. For a medium-sized company like ours, that's a significant savings, probably several million dollars that would have gone to IT above and beyond what we already spend with Microsoft. Larger enterprises may have a different view, which is why so many are moving back on-prem for some services.

I would love to see some alternatives that could be run on-prem. LibreOffice Online development was stopped five years ago. Collabora Online offers its development edition that can be run locally, but support is limited. Realistically, almost any company is going to use Microsoft, Google, or (distant third?) AWS WorkDocs, and it will be that way unless and until open-source can come up with something that is relatively easy to set up and covers at least what M365 Business Premium or Google Workspaces provides.

FB is bad enough for those who dislike the current US government to be constantly seeing things shared.

BlueSky is that times a thousand. While there are other topics discussed, the political posts overwhelm the feeds, and 'bleed' into the other topics you might have tried to make special feeds for. Disney, National Parks, Muppets, Science, Star Trek - everything has a political angle that somebody is going to bring up.

So I quit (or rather, stopped visiting). I can't live with outrage-generation 24-7, but BlueSky has turned into that (and Threads is pretty full, too).

they're the late adopters, yes...but also the biggest financiers. They may be the late adopters but very much drive the current directions.

The term 'design language' has been in use for decades now. It isn't "bullshit", it is just the term that is used within the industry.

I own a tiny indie studio in Chicagoland and my peers own the some of the huge studios in Chicagoland.

Cinespace is dead right now. It has ONE show active. The other studios are so dead that they're secretly hosting bar mitzvahs and pickleball tournaments for $1500 a day just to pay property taxes.

My studio is surprisingly busy but I'm cheap and cater to non-union folks with otherwise full time jobs.

It's not well defined what he's defending against or what it looks like when an agent goes bad (or how to check their motivations, etc). This is a money grab, nothing more.

The show fell off a cliff with Jodie Whittaker and not at all because of her. The first three or so episodes I watched she put on a reasonably good performance. But the material they gave her to work with was just atrocious. Utter crap. Stuff they must've dug out of the very bottom of the "rejected ideas" bin.

The ensemble cast didn't work, like at all. I never cared for any of them even the tiniest bit. The Doctor, the most feared creature in the universe, a being able to rip reality apart and put it back together, someone who can start or end wars with a few words. The Doctor who literally said to the Aliens of the universe assembled above Earth as he announced he'll stand in their way and he has neither a plan nor any weapons, to "do the smart thing. Let somebody else try first." - and they all decided to fuck off instead.

So THAT Doctor suddenly became a bumbling idiot who succeeded only through luck and plot convenience.

So maybe going back to Rose is a chance of a restart. After all, she _was_ Bad Wolf. Though I fear they'll just cheap out with some "oh, I just picked a familiar face at random" bullshit.

I wish, but nah, this is pure SciFi.

Why? Because it's not all in the brain. The brain is connected to the entire nervous system. The "mind-body duality" doesn't exist. You're not a mind that has a body, you're a body that has a mind. We know that the body can survive without the mind (coma patients, some extreme cases of mental or debilitating illness, etc.) - but there isn't one case of a mind without a body.

Even if you could upload yourself to a supercomputer with the same processing power as your brain, I'm pretty sure the first dozens or hundreds of such experiments will go the SpaceX Starship way - lots of fireworks for every tiny bit of ground gained.

I personally think that we should do work on replicating less complex parts of the nervous system first. One, we'll need it if we want to do full mind digitalisation. Two, it can help people today (amputees, etc.). Three, there is already some work with great progress going on.