Sigh... the good old days. I ran Word 2.0 on WFW 3 with 16MB of memory. That was extravagant - they recommended 2MB.

And it did 95% of what I've ever done with a word processor.

They won't. Some misguided twits seem to think it's a kind of badge of honour to remain backwards. It stopped being an omission and started being a decision long ago.

Those are both the same stalker troll, I've seen it post over a dozen replies to a single post of mine, pretty much all pro-US propaganda. A lot of its post are just bot-like, and may be a poorly programmed bot, but the rest indicate a truly pitiful life. It may be the same one who stalks rsilvergun, although not quite as fanatically.

The 'Business Ethics' classes are what taught the up and coming execs that ROI, share price, and quarterly results are the only thing that matters.

Check out Clive Sinclair - he was an engineer and did pretty damn well selling his computers in the UK.

Kinda, I mean he did well, but it went under. Acorn did somewhat better and parts of Acorn are alive and well to this day.

Furber and Wilson lacked that marketing muscle. Were they a unique talent? I mean... no one else did that. Their CPU worked first time, outperformed their contemporaries, ran at a fraction of the power cost a fraction of the amount and went on to become massively popular.

Maybe Woz couldn't have done that, but it doesn't mean Jobs was the one required to help him, any competenant marketing type could have done the same. Vew few people could have designed the hardware and software that Woz did at the time.

I'd argue that Jobs was unusually good at marketing. Maybe as rare as Woz. I mean, look at the cult of personality that's developed around him where people think Apple (or really Jobs himself) invented all sorts of things which were actually popularized by Apple, but invented by someone else.

His schtick works.

Wait what?

Are you also dating that love does not in fact transcend the fifth dimension and interstellar was also bullshit?

Come on man.

Jobs gets all the accolades and fame but he was just a pushy sociopath in a suit,

Suit? The guy who famously wore a black turtleneck all the time?

Anyhoo. I think people outside tech overestimate the importance of CEOs and people in tech underestimate it. Without Jobs, Woz probably would have been a really great engineer in some company and you'd never have heard of him at all. He wasn't a product guy, and you need a product not just raw tech to sell. Selling stuff being somewhat important for a company.

Steve Jobs also had a functioning reality distortion field, something not all that many people have and that's really important for building a company...

It's too convenient to just write off Jobs. The truth is somewhere in the middle, as it always is. The idea that plenty of others could have done what he did is just too dismissive. When he died the company was worth a third of a trillion dollars. Not just any sociopath can pull that off.

Philips and Bell had executives who had come up through the ranks, knew their industry, and intended to stay with the company long term. Today's executives are uniformly MBAs and lawyers who have spent their entire careers hopping from one job to another in a game of 'Executive Musical Chairs', bumping up quarterly profits with short term fixes to ensure their bonuses, hoping to not be in the corner office when the music stops and the results of their bad decisions tanks the company. What interest do they have in long term investment when by the time it bears fruit someone else will be reaping the benefits?

When my wife started working at Target the CEO had started on the sales floor three decades earlier, by 2010 there wasn't a single person in the executive offices who had ever worked at a low level retail job. The entire company was being run by people who had no idea what the employees who kept it functioning day to day actually did, and the decisions coming from Minneapolis showed it.

For their money, large companies want the proverbial throat to choke - even when they've never successfully choked the throats they've paid for. The footprint of open source in these companies often grew through bottom up implementation. The moment that somebody has to pay an ongoing support contract, it will become a financial and strategic decision. That means vendor management, tech and vendor downselection, risk analysis... the best-effort maintainer isn't going to fly.

If I were a betting man, I think the result would be a decline in usage - and that might be fine. If the model isn't working, that definitely needs addressing. But the companies most able to afford licensing are probably the ones least likely to pay for it.

I put an awful lot of the blame on the introduction of the 'Business Ethics' courses in the '70s, and the flood of MBAs with no real-world employment experience in the '80s. When you have guys that have never worked a day in their lives (and six figures of debt) coming in to manage businesses about which they know little to nothing, having been erroneously taught that their one and only duty is to enrich shareholders, it's a recipe for disaster. Then combine that with executive pay plans hyper-focused on quarterly returns, and the resulting meltdown was utterly predictable and unfortunately unavoidable.

If your Apple account was created more than 18 years ago - as mine was - no proof of age is required.

Age verification is an outgrowth of the christian nationalism, it is a core part of Republican identity politics.

It may be many things but it ain't that.

Slavery was once legal because there were not laws AGAINST it. Laws don't make things legal, they make them illegal.

What utter bullshit.

The state of slavery is of such a nature, that it is incapable of being introduced on any reasons, moral or political; but only positive law, -- Lord Chief Justice William Mansfield

And you know that general line of reasoning was why slavery had to be actually recognised in the constitution because if you have a nation of any laws at all you need to pass a law to not have them apply to some people.

Tencent?

They are on the steering committee.

no matter how "open source" they claim the process to be, and subject to American export laws.

What? A process isn't open source, code is. There are open source implementations of AV1 (or 2) and H.265 (and 6). Anything can be subject to American export laws, whether or not it makes sense, but America can't enforce that outside America (or even inside some of the time).

You can get porn for free you know, there's no need to wait 5 years for your fridge to show it to you.