I remember a time when any stupid idea that you could put ".com" on would get shit tons of investor money. The only thing it produced mostly was bankruptcies and the opportunity for small companies to buy needed equipment for pennies on the dollar. This AI craziness strikes me the same way. AI can be useful but it'll never be the "be all things", they rarely to live up to the hype. I've seen it too many times, the dotcom boom-bust, nano-technology, Ruby on rails; anyway COBOL had a good run.

Into a hole.

It isn't.

Apple has all the money, they can afford to do both things and it's weird they haven't. Having a meaningful management system is a huge part of selling computers, to corporate and educational users. Back before all computers were on an IP network, when they didn't have security beyond antivirus, you could get away with not offering management.

Apple has a solid alternative to Windows for business use, if only they offered a full suite. They could be digging into that market. That's what NeXTStep really was supposed to be, a Macintosh-ish system for business use. Their prices were even more hallucinatory than Apple's at the time, which prevented any real adoption more than any lack of software, especially since they had very good compatibility with other environments (including, for example, a Netware client.) It's quite confusing what made them think they could get those kinds of dollars for a 68k when the PC was just getting fast. We can't ask Jobs now, though.

That's OK

  I'd rather win the battle for the TV I possess now and take the risk of losing an industry-wide war for TVs I may never purchase in future.

Otherwise, I lose both the battle and the war

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

The MPA member movie studios would probably withdraw their respective streaming services from Vizio's platform on grounds that a user-modifiable free operating system fails to satisfy the "compliance and robustness" rules of whatever digital restrictions management protocol they use.

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.

First, the user needs to know that "a cheap little computer" exists and can be connected to a TV. Walmart and Best Buy haven't been doing a good job of marketing these to the public. Second, the user needs the spare time to learn to administer yet another computer. Third, the user needs to be satisfied with some services limiting streams to 480p because a desktop computer running Linux and Firefox has a low "integrity level" in Widevine.

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.

I am in favor of Microsoft releasing Linux distributions, donating code for Linux distributions and for the Linux kernel, supporting Linux on their cloud infrastructure, et cetera. I am not in favor of anything which involves Redhat even peripherally as long as they (IBM, really) continue to mount an attack on the GPL by continuously violating the clause about additional restrictions not being allowed, hiding behind the corrupt US court system, and exploiting the fact that approximately no one can afford to sue IBM.

To return to my point, I remain unsurprised.

The issue is that I use Microsoft software every work day, and it is shit all day every time.

cron daemons still exist. Some of them are fairly fancy. I am running the default one for debian (as in, I installed "cron") and even that conveniently creates cron.{daily,hourly,monthly,weekly,yearly} where I can just dump scripts instead of editing crontab, if one will suit anyway. And then there's also at.

That's /etc/boot.d

Windows 8 was the single biggest change in all of Microsoft UI history, and even then they didn't actually change any of the most important parts. All windowing operations are still based on IBM CUA and... work like dogshit.

Every single Windows version has the same problem, some things just won't multitask. If you try to drag an Edge window while the browser is opening a tab, you can't. That's because the application is responsible for that. On Unix systems this isn't a thing because the Window Manager is responsible.

What's especially frustrating about this is that Windows actually has some cool UI features like detecting when you're connecting to some displays you've connected to before, and arranging them logically the way you had them arranged before. But then the process fails as Windows forgets which windows were maximized, or the application doesn't restore to the same size window it had before because of some weird interaction. So Windows has this awesome feature... which doesn't actually work. I still have to rearrange my windows every time because they do actually do it, but they do it incorrectly.

But with that said Windows has never, ever, EVER changed the basic way Window management has functioned since Windows 3.0. It is still basically the same, the only significant difference is where minimized windows go.