The company-wide margin is a very important metric for investors and the stock price generally. When Amy Hood says to Asha, "you need to increase your margins" that means either you increase your business unit's margins by whatever means necessary, or you're out on the street looking for a new job.

There were three big problems at MSFT - first that they wildly overpaid for Activision, they paid $95 per share (peak was $104* from Covid) at a time when it was worth barely half that. There are companies that when acquired unlock more value (say a small company acquired by Oracle, now Oracle's sales team can sell it -- or it can be bundled into a bigger product) but Activision was not such a company -- there was nothing MSFT could do that would generate more revenue or have less cost than Activision alone. If anything, the politics at Microsoft were inevitably going to drag down Activision's performance. (I am really understating this last point but I don't want to get bogged down here.)

Two, Gamepass. When Gamepass first came out, the third party publishers freaked because they predicted it would suck all the oxygen out of the room. Like, a gamer might have $100 a year to spend on games, and if it all gets spent on Gamepass then it's not being spent on third-party games. That in turn means that Xbox is less appealing for publishers and for casual gamers -- if you're the kind of gamer who only plays one game like Animal Crossing, you don't want to spend $100 a year on a Gamepass subscription and/or you probably want a game that now isn't being made on Xbox, now Xbox isn't the platform for you. I can tell you that MSFT was excited that Activision would turbocharge the Gamepass offering, because the Gamepass subscriptions had stalled below expectations -- but common sense would tell you that there was no way this was going to work from a revenue standpoint. I.e., you can't increase overall revenue by putting Call of Duty on Gamepass.

Third, the Series S. The Series S is far less capable than the Series X, and is the least powerful console in the market (after Switch 1), but it sells a lot more units than the Series X. Having to target the Series S makes the Xbox unappealing as a platform to target, on top of the fact that, as mentioned above, gamers won't buy many copies of the game because all their money is going to Gamepass already. That's coming off of the Xbox One which MSFT wildly mismarketed as a set-top box so MSFT was already starting from behind in the PS5/XSX generation.

* Yes yes I'm handwaving over debt but Activision didn't have a lot of debt.

Did you look at the black hole simulation software? That is the craziest fucking thing I have ever seen. Like, I know I'm a better C programmer than 90% of programmers out there but this guy just grinds me into dust with his boot.

The CIA doesn't do a lot of the overseas work with its own hands (putting aside the death squads made of former special operations soldiers). It's the "how do you do fellow kids" problem - how would anyone from the CIA infiltrate an organization overseas when the CIA officers are clearly not native? Finding competent sociopaths who speak the right language is hard enough (i.e., some white guy speaking Arabic could be sent to Africa), but even if the CIA officer happened to be of the right ethnicity there would be obvious differences in accent, local knowledge etc.

What the CIA does is it cultivates local sources, and those local sources need to be paid. Sometimes the payment is semi-honorable (e.g., pulling strings to get a kid into a good US college) but usually it's gold or a fancy watch. So this bozo claimed to have a bunch of sources who needed payment and thus requisitioned gold and watches to pay them, only he didn't. And he didn't realize that this is such an obvious way to steal that the CIA actually checks up on this.

The problem is that chips like the Vortex86 (still in production) are getting caught up in this. I use the Vortex86 for other purposes, but by losing Linux support the Vortex86 will go out of production that much sooner. (Of note, gamers like the Vortex86 because it runs classic videogames natively.)

More generally this is a sign of a kernel-wide "cleanup" effort where stuff that's old is getting yoinked for no particular reason. I used the Minix filesystem pretty regularly and I am certain that is going to be removed before too long.

Xenix was $500, which was the standard price for major software back in the day. That's what WordPerfect cost, etc. Yes that was insanely expensive in inflation-adjusted dollars however the productivity gains over a typewriter made it absolutely worth it. And Xenix was super cheap (comparatively) because Microsoft did a bulk buy from AT&T which drove the cost of their licenses down. AT&T was not a monolith trying to maximize profit across the whole corporation - the licensing division at AT&T did not want the hassle of selling jelly-bean software so they set the price high. Xenix was pretty popular for what it was -- common office applications were ported over Xenix and you can still run those Xenix applications on Linux today (in theory -- I am sure the iBCS code in Linux does not get the love it did 20 years ago).

Minix was never a commercial operating system, though very late in its life it did get used for some specific use cases such as the Intel Management Engine. One reason Minix wasn't popular in the 1980s was because it wasn't licensed to be. Two, because it was designed to replicate Seventh Edition Unix for educational purposes. If you've ever tried to port over software to Minix you've found very quickly that calls which were quite standard and expected by the late 1980s (e.g. select, or named pipes, sockets, or the curses library) were not implemented at all, or were implemented in a perfunctory way which didn't match the contemporary Unix API.

I don't know that Coherent ever had much in the way of applications, you'd really be relying on it being compatible with other unices.

I think the bigger reason Unix never took off in the PC mass market is that there was no reason for it. In law firms, there is an obvious advantage in document sharing and centralizing backup and version management, and it was easy to quantify productivity gains that justified the cost. (I.e., lawyers billed by the hour, but secretary cost was covered by the lawyers' billable hours.) For most users, this was not the case -- if you needed a heavy duty Unix system for CAD or whatever that's what you'd buy. Otherwise MS-DOS did the job. There were always tons of "make the PC more industrial-grade" products like DesqView but the reality is that very few people needed that stuff until Microsoft brought it to the masses with Windows.

Aka the government agency which is #1 in violating domestic civil liberties. They have access. Even though Anthropic is currently on the do-not-purchase list by the feds. Also the UK "intelligence" agencies. And a few dozen other organizations.

This is either because (a) Anthropic doesn't have the datacenter capacity to roll this out to the world all at once, so they are only letting the chosen few access for now or (b) because they really and truly believe it is too dangerous for the world at large to have which is unbelievably dumb. The only reason we have "responsible disclosure" bullshit is to avoid accusations that cybersecurity researchers are engaged in illegal hacking -- and we've moved from not allowing the open discussion of security issues to not even allowing people access to AI tools because security issues could be discovered.

The Internet Archive has taken so many slings and arrows for posting clearly copyrighted content on the Internet. You'd think they'd have learned by now - plenty of well-funded media libraries are out there that could digitize the recordings and make them available for research at the physical library and there would be much less risk that the recordings would be taken down and lost permanently.

There are low-end third-party SoC CPUs out there such as those made by DM&P which are not necessarily fully Pentium compatible and those CPUs are still being made and used. The DM&P chips are particularly popular with retrogamers because you can install an ISA card or a PCI card (depending on the model) and thus use period-correct sound cards or video cards. Whichever chips are no longer supported by Linux will probably no longer be used in new embedded designs going forward and thus will likely hasten the discontinuation by DM&P, meaning no more available for retrogamers or legacy OS hackers.

"Clean-room" means you have one group of engineers study existing code and create a specification and then another group of engineers takes that specification and writes new code that does what the original code did. This is because copyright protects expression, not ideas, AND that independent creation of the same expression is not infringement either.

If you have the same person reading the old code and writing the new code, then to whatever extent the expression is similar there is no protection under copyright law. If this harebrained process was enough to get around copyright law, then anyone translating a book into another language wouldn't run afoul of copyright law.

Here you have the same harebrained process only with a computer doing the reading and writing not a person, but that changes nothing because the expression of the input can affect the expression of the output. If there's a lawyer who signed off on this, he should really find another line of work like traffic court defense.

It was absolutely not the case that "there was always an eye towards how would this get deployed to a market as a product". Look at how much energy went into building Belle, the first chess machine to achieve master-level play. And it wasn't a simple computer program, it had a full-on chess board with pieces. When dignitaries toured the labs the tour guide would have to invent some bullshit reason as to how this chess machine benefited a telephone company.

Or just read the biographies and interviews of the people who worked there. They'd work on things they found interesting and there was no pressure to make commercially viable stuff. Now it sometimes happened that for budget reasons they'd work on particular projects, e.g., the computer science team got the AT&T patent department to pay for a PDP-11 with the promise that the computer science team would develop document preparation software (funnily enough, this same excuse was used elsewhere, e.g. at the University of Nottingham the computer science department got money to help with typesetting exams).

I don't even know what you mean by "long-term tech development is heavily done in an academic setting." When I look at papers from, say, SIGGRAPH these look like exactly the kinds of things you'd get from a handful of grad students and a PI, i.e., work that can be busted out by a few people in a couple years. When I think of "long-term tech development" I think of something like all the work Google did in AI which spanned decades. The projects that were done by Bell Labs in CS mostly took a few weeks and were done by one or two people -- like how much work really went into the first version of "pic." Most of the Unix work at Bell Labs was passed over to the commercial group (AT&T's Unix Support Group, as well as licensees which fed their work back to AT&T) after Version 7 was done.

Unless you do something stupid of galactic proportions like using the Macbook Neo to farm Chia tokens, the RAM and SSD will last the life of the computer. What will break are: battery wears out, keyboard and screen break, USB ports break. These are cheap and easy repairs. Apple is intending to disrupt Chromebooks from schools, so it is likely that district-wide there will be enough repairs needed to justify having an employee who does internal repairs. These are much easier for such an employee to do than having them all farmed out for Apple to do.

If that's the best excuse he can come up with, the PC laptop industry is fucking cooked. No it's fucking not a "content consumption" device -- most people use their laptops to use Chrome and MS Office or the free equivalent (which, incidentally the Macbook Neo comes with ... no PC laptop comes with MS Office anymore). They use laptops to do schoolwork, to send e-mails, to do their taxes, to shop online, all the stuff normal people have done with a computer for the last several decades.

The hint that it's not a "content consumption" device is that it ... wait for it ... has a keyboard attached. No it doesn't have the horsepower or RAM to do heavy duty software development or video editing, and the display is not quite good enough for professional photo editing, but those are a tiny minority of users, except among Youtube creators. Oh and yeah, it's bad at gaming. Funny thing though - the PC market for gaming is so unhealthy that Sony has announced that its titles generally won't get PC ports anymore because they sell so poorly, so that probably doesn't matter.

I really wonder who it was inside Apple who made the brilliant proposal that maybe instead of positioning its products as luxury goods (Angela Ahrendts was the worst hire ever) it should use its massive scale and efficiency to dominate the market at every level.

When a company is in decline you can either wait until the company is completely broke and it can't misses payroll (or misses payments on its loans), or it can hit the big red button and get bought out by a company like Broadcom or Bending Spoons that cuts costs and sucks the marrow from the bones. While it sucks for the company to die like that, it's better than the alternative and nobody should have been caught off-guard. Unless you were specifically paid a retention bonus to see the transaction through, your resume should have been updated the day you heard about the transaction.

Private equity is different because private equity intends to on-sell the company within five years (they get five year loans, and refinancing will be hard after PE has damaged the company). PE comes in to a fundamentally sound company, makes bone-headed changes like cutting product quality, skims a bunch of cash off the top and then sells the company. Completely different from a grim reaper company like Broadcom or Bending Spoons.

The worst part of Workday is that they transmit your personal information to pretty much every other company out there. Ever notice that when you go to Docusign it knows all the e-mail addresses of your company employees? Have you ever gotten calls on your personal cell phone from vendors you have absolutely not given the number to? Have you noticed that you start getting very specific spam IMMEDIATELY after joining a new company and you haven't even updated your linkedin yet? The privacy violations are out of control and even when I've talked to the head of privacy at companies where this is happening, they admit they don't have control over it.

As far as managing HR files I don't give a shit one way or another. There's got to be some software to manage HR data and Workday works as well as anything else. But the way that they misuse the personal data of US employees is something that regulators need to crack down on hard.