I didn't get the feeling that the GP post was claiming it was valueless. I got the feeling that the concern was it would get out of the control of its creators, manage to mutate or evolve past a death in five generations, and become a threat to everything we know and love.

I would really prefer the other way around, invoking Windows containers for the few Windows apps that I am stuck running.

Just because someone is stupid doesn't mean that they aren't subject to specific protections under law.

Ernesto Miranda, for whom the Miranda Warning is named, was by accounts a terrible person. Miranda's conviction was thrown out on those technical grounds that his confession should not have been permitted, then he was retried and convicted of the crime without his confession as evidence. Once he was released from prison he died in a bar fight.

The point of protections are that they apply to everyone, guilty or innocent, and are supposed to regulate the way that the legal system all the way from the patrolman to the attorney general behave. That doesn't mean that criminals aren't still criminals, but it does mean that the government has to provide proper justification for its actions against persons. If someone really did commit a crime then the government should be able to show cause, and this keeps everyone else from being scrutinized when the government has no business scrutinizing.

I don't wonder what PJ is up to. I can't even remember the site name/URL that originally was covering that and had forums, but when the password restrictions because utterly freakin' stupid for a new aggregator and discussion forum I just stopped bothering to visit.

I'm slightly more willing to give a pass to Xorg applications because it's not a monolithic environment supposedly under the control of a corporate entity that should be able to enforce its own standards.

of course you have to authenticate, but you run all of the software to administer it on a client, not sitting at the console. The console had only the most barebones capability, usually user management. The tools to administer ran on the client.

...it makes sense to have a headless server operating system when you're mostly running commodity spin-up/spin-down headless servers. Microsoft's server operating system was still largely based on the idea of running on a baremetal self-contained box, even though Microsoft servers had long, long since been used in the virtual machine space. If anything they're quite far behind the curve on this.

The Novell Netware model adapted to the VM era is what makes sense, where the tools don't require logging in to the server at all in order to administer the environment.

IBM is and has always been a services/consultant business, even when they made products.

I'm not so sure about the UI. The history of Microsoft and UI for the past 40 years is that they're happy to abandon their incumbent UI for different. We saw that with Windows 3.x to '95 and NT4, with Windows 98 and the integration of Spyglass Mosaic Internet Explorer, with the transition from Windows ME and Windows 2000 to Windows XP, the subsequent further transition from XP to Windows 7, and the rework from Windows 8.x to Windows 10. We even saw it with Windows 10 to Windows 11.

They change their UI because their customers don't see the OS being new/different unless they change their UI. If the UI looks the same then the average untrained end user doesn't know the difference and doesn't see a value in spending the money to upgrade.

Class rank exists and can be used to determine relative capability though.

I have no complaint with the idea that most students simply won't be able to achieve an A-grade if the material is both challenging and taught to proper standards, but I have a major problem with the notion that teachers are required to deny students that have mastered well above 90% of the material an A-grade because other students managed to yet outperform them. I hate the idea of grading on a curve. One should be judged against the mastery of the material, not comparatively against other students during that particular semester.

That said, I have also had college classes where I really should have failed the class but because of the curve, I got an A because I had the highest scores. While some of that reflects upon me, a good chunk of that reflects upon the instructor, the department and its head, and the curricula for that particular course. If students are to be held to high standards then instructors should likewise be held to high standards, and so should their institutions. If they cannot produce results then that should reflect both upon them and upon the revenue they receive in tuition.

I spent 20 years working in K-12 in a suport role. The issues vary greatly across population densities and social and economic status. The large district I worked for (~55,000 students) featured everything from schools where every kid must be prepared to go to college, to trying to arrest the pregnancy and dropout rates.

The problem is when education is treated as a monolithic bloc. Issues vary incredibly widely from school to school, from neighborhood to neighborhood. An additional problem is the attack stemming from the anti-tax crowd on public education, eroding budgets and thus paychecks, generating disrespect for teachers, and causing many to leave the profession for something that pays better. That leads to erosion of the system and it starting to break down.

The broader dataset also shows July dominating the hottest days of the year while January owns the coldest..."

"No shit Sherlock",
Captain Obvious

What an epiphany it must have been for them when they "discovered" Summer is hotter than Winter in the USA.

I didn't really use Works, but I supported enough PCs that had it that I had a lot of exposure to it. I didn't use it because the file formats for it were annoying when I had access to Office.

It was pretty common OE software on new computers too.

If I didn't have access to Office, I tended to use WordPad. It was nearly always good enough honestly.

That's plausible.

I still hate it though. My first version of Office was 4.3, which included Word 6.0 and was ostensibly for Windows 3.1. I'd previously used Clarisworks on Macintoshes in school and before that I used a ghetto cheap program that called itself a word processor but was more of a glorified text editor in MS-DOS that worked well with an Epson dot matrix printer's formatting, so for me Word was great. I felt like the bumpers from Clarisworks had been removed, I had a lot more control over what I could do to a document.

Ribbon feels like they decided that power users didn't matter, and also corresponds with the end of the free Wordpad light-duty word processor and long after Microsoft Works was killed off.