Everything needs to be branded or monetised.

It's why I want large commercial organisations as far away from my data, computers and workflow as possible.

I do not care about you, I don't want to be reminded you even exist, and I certainly don't want to give you money. Go away.

I want to turn on my computer, load up the browser of my choice, and that's it. I don't need to see a single brand, no "notifications", no messages of your choosing, nothing. My boot screen is a spinner. My desktop is a flat, blank, plain colour. I have my browser pinned as a single recognisable icon (doesn't even have the name).

That is what an OS should be. That is what most services should be. We shouldn't be spending our life subject to the whims of a corporation trying to wheedle money out of us or "foster brand engagement" or whatever nonsense they class it as.

The one good thing about hitting limits on CPU clock speed, memory shortages, etc. is that they might finally have to start actually making programmes vaguely efficient again.

There's also yet-another reason that I don't use Windows, and that's that everything seems to want an app running on startup to cache what it needs to to present these shitty web UIs with any semblance of performance, to do the most worthless things.

There are far too many programmes that just don't function correctly if you have a software firewall other than Windows Defender and you deny them web access, for instance. Windows Defender just lets it all through, but if you have a "ZoneAlarm-type" firewall, you see that EVERYTHING wants to talk-home or connect to a local web service and, when denied, it hangs up and falls over itself rather than deals with it gracefully.

Not what you want to see in critical services, for example.

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.

https://www.ibm.com/history/th...
"An ad hoc lecture [from 1915] from IBMâ(TM)s future CEO spawned a slogan to guide the company through a century and beyond"

https://humancenteredlearning....
"And we must study through reading, listening, discussing, observing and thinking. We must not neglect any one of those ways of study. The trouble with most of us is that we fall down on the latter -- thinking -- because it's hard work for people to think. And, as Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler said recently, 'all of the problems of the world could be settled easily if men were only willing to think.' (Thomas Watson, IBM)"

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/...
"All the problems of the world could be settled easily if men were only willing to think. The trouble is that men very often resort to all sorts of devices in order not to think, because thinking is such hard work. (Nicholas Murray Butler, often misattributed to Thomas J. Watson)"

So, yeah, echoing your point, make programmers do the hardest parts of their job all the time -- especially reviewing code from inconsistent-to-put-it-politely AI contributors -- and no wonder they feel "fried".

Does AI support for programming need to be this way? I might hope not, but we are also mainly hearing about AI used within a short-term-profit-maximizing hyper-competitive corporate social context. Like I say in my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

Let them do all their code with AI. Please. When it all comes crashing to the ground, they will have to hire real developers for real money to come in and try to fix the slop.

It's because in both of those worlds, the US was effectively destroyed. In Nineteen Eighty-Four it was part of the same nation as the UK (Oceana) and in V for Vendetta, it was destroyed by infighting. The UK is presumed stable enough to survive cataclysmic events. The US is presently demonstrating it really isn't and is far more Orwellian than the UK's worst nightmare. I can still criticise the UK leader, Kier Starmer (yes I can, Joe Rogan was talking complete bollocks as per usual), hows that working with you being able to critisise Trump or Charlie Kirk (even daring to repeat what Kirk actually said).

In fact the only UK politico who is likely to come after you for criticising him is the Far-right fascist frog-faced fucktard Nigel Farage... Odd that but as he's never going to get anywhere near power I can still tell Frog Face to Fuck Right Off.

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.

Tell me how you're ever going to implement this on any open-source operating system ever?

Because people will just patch it out.

It's not like it's even a boot-time requirement (thus necessitating it being in the kernel/initrd, etc.). It's an account requirement. Which means that it can be patched out in no time at all.

As far as I know, not one single open-source OS has actually implemented this requirement (they put a field that would be useful for it into systemd, but nobody's actually using it).

Apple push an silent automatic update just for your computer that the next time you type in that key, it sends it to the FBI.

Next?

We're not dealing with a bit of software piracy or finding out who stole someone's Bitcoin, you're talking about agencies dealing with anti-terrorism and wars.

Only in America could you legally argue that an unnecessary profit-making middle-man was legally required and that it would somehow "reduce costs".

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.

There's legitimacy to that. Taking a potentially dangerous drug under the supervision of a doctor who knows how things are supposed to work, what side effects look like, with drugs of consistent purity and dosage, has a lot of advantages over winging it with stuff made up random chinese chemicals and toilet bowl cleaner.

Unless you're talking about cocaine etc. brought to the penthouse by a personal assistant or something. Plenty of ultra-rich celebs have killed themselves that way.

How can it be that? Survival has never been more assured. I wonder if we'd be less depressed if we had to do physical labor for food and fight the neighboring tribe once in a while to punctuate life with more immediacy and urgency.

Windows has been pretty damned stable since Windows 7 was released, that's 2009 for anyone not paying attention. Microsoft changed it so that one bad driver can't crash the entire OS.

Seems Apple is going all out with the paid propaganda of late... Because there's no way they're cheaper. If anything keeping hardware for longer makes it more expensive as you have to deal with more hardware failures, extended warranties, outages, et al. I suspect Apple is using very, very funny maths.