Microsoft, like most corporate giants, started small with a founder or founders who had a good product or service. He/She/They proceeded to build the business, expand the product line, grow the customer base, and ... go public - effectively selling partial control to investors (who generally do not intimately know the business or industry and have only injected cash, but who get a board of directors and a say in the operation). Over time, as the company grows and time passes, the original person or persons die-off, or retire, or get tired of dealing with the board or the bigness of the business and cash-out.

The board then hires a CEO they think will do well, and it will seem to go well for years as a combination of corporate inertia and loyal employees and a devoted customer base all help to maintain the illusion. The board and its hired-gun CEO, however, were not there at the founding; they did not have the vision nor the drive and commitment to build the business in the first place and they are usually not competent enough to keep it afloat forever. There's always some CEO who is champion of some bright new idea to overhaul or re-do things or take "bold new steps" or some other drivel to "reinvigorate" the business. Everybody has seen Steve Jobs in a turtle neck boldly launching something and all these lesser players know the drill... but they usually so misunderstand the company they are leading that they drive it into the ground. When the incompetence is at peak, they will sell-off units/divisions and claim this retraction from a marketplace their predecessors were competent enough to enter and serve, and claim something stupid like they're "right sizing". It's a delusion, a mis-diagnosis of the actual problem that needs fixing. I suspect we're seeing a form of this common corporate disaster unfolding.

Microsoft's problem is NOT that the products are written in C/C++ (they became a mega-successful company on that very codebase)

Microsoft's problem is that every version of Windows is more bloated and more of a form of spyware than its predecessor. Coding it in Rust won't fix ANY of that. They can re-write their entire codebase in Forth or FORTRAN or any other bleeping language and it will have no impact on the actual problem. The company was born in the American culture with a team of young Americans (for better or worse) and this included the Yankee attitude that a person's personal computer was THEIRS and their data was THEIRS and what a person did with his computer was nobody else's business. Instead of leasing a computer and its OS, you could buy a computer and buy a Microsoft OS and then use it privately and securely and what you did with it was nobody else's business. The company's current CEO is not from the American culture (no, not skin color, CULTURE) and seems to not understand the entire POINT of the 1970s and 1980s microcomputer revolution. Not understanding the point, and not "getting it" on the independence and privacy stuff means he's gonna drive the company into a serious ditch at some point.

There's a massive corporate graveyard somewhere where the corpses of many dead former giants of industry lie, whose ghosts are anticipating the arrival of another former marketplace titan, named Microsoft. The investors need to keep an eye on this one. If the company does not straighten out and re-acquaint itself with the very reasons it exists, it will run out of time and it will become a rotting corpse of itself and get parted-out by some future idiot CEO trying to "right-size" it....

All those things could be true, but there is a threat that needs to be evaluated. Satellites are very easy to dodge as everyone and their mothers knows where they are and where they are going at any given time. The Soviets moved entire divisions while the satellites were elsewhere, and did massive war games when the satellites were overhead only to tow the broken down tanks to new locations for the next pass. They were masters of the art of satellite spoofing.

Anyway, given a few Ukrainian drones have proven capable of sterilizing the Black Sea of surface ships I suspect the Pentagon isn't feeling very secure right now. The Houthis chased off an aircraft carrier last year. Drones had better have the military brass spooked.

One solution could be to put a radar unit on the towers just under the lower blade height to provide an uncluttered view to sea. But hanging military hardware on civilian infrastructure makes it an instant target not that it isn't already. Another question, do you really want and important part of your energy generation way out at the edge of your defensive zone? You don't even have to hit it, get close and the shock wave will snap a blade off. Durable they are not.

Speaking of drones, you might review the damage the kamikazes did in WWII. The AI claims "Kamikaze attacks during WWII sank approximately 34 to 47 Allied ships and heavily damaged hundreds more, with the most intense activity around Okinawa resulting in 26 ships sunk and 168 damaged, killing nearly 5,000 U.S. sailors and wounding thousands more in the fiercest naval battle in U.S. history"

Details here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Now imagine how much worse it will be today. I'm a submariner and got to be on a designated target. The 1980 Mark 48 was already a bitch to evade. It hasn't gotten any better. Now they are too smart to be fooled by a noisemaker. Drones are not as new as people think, but they are smaller.

Neither the West nor Russia has found a defense against drones as of yet. If they had the war in Ukraine would have ended by now. This technology is changing even faster than aircraft in the 1930s. "Aircraft can't carry weapons large enough to to sink a capital ship."; Taranto, Pearl Harbor; "Aircraft can't sink a fully manned ship steaming at sea with modern antiaircraft defenses."; Three days after Pearl Harbor Force Zed goes bloop and we end up at "Battleships shall not venture forth without aircraft carrier escorts."

Even worse, the Zero went from air supremacy in 1941 to flying coffin in 1944. Exciting times have returned.

Oil platforms don't have large rotating parts generating radar returns. You must have noticed the sudden increase in the capabilities of drones in the last few years.

Your comment is the one that lacks logic.

As a nomad traveling around with a phone and ancient Surface

Ugh, I think no matters what happens, you lose. If your car has a CD player and is the main place where you usually listen to music, then it seems you would need to keep your CD collection in the car too, and that puts an upper limit on its size. Between the back seats and trunk, I could maybe fit a dozen or two beer-cases-repurposed-as-CD-boxes, but it would completely take over those spaces. And keeping even that small of a subset of the collection organized enough to be binary-searchable sure sounds annoying.

That was always the problem with CDs as a playback medium instead of just a long-term storage medium: inserting the CD back into the collection after playback. It's not terrible when you have shelving [and enough of it, since it keeps growing] but as soon as you have to pack things in boxes, it gets pretty hard to work with. I remember for a time there, before I had all my music ripped, where we were just listening to same 30 or 40 CDs sitting out in a loose unboxed pile that I jokingly called the "L1 music cache," over and over again. ;-)

Elsewhere you mention that you live in the car and simply don't have anywhere else to store things, so I guess this general kind of problem is going to be recurring. (Where do you keep your air fryer and microwave and coffee maker and stove and your wife's decorative bathroom hand towels that you're supposed to never use, the cat litter box, and the air mattress you put out when you have company staying over at your car for the weekend?) j/k but my point is that the cars have never been really CD friendly but if the car is your house and storage shed too, then .. oy, do whatever you can but it's never going to be convenient.

Music can't be the only thing where the market isn't catering to you. I might even go as far as suggesting the housing market as the number one mis-cater!

do you see how .. the decision to take [CD players] away seems much more to do with power and selling subscriptions than practical engineering capability?

Oh, sure! I didn't know that you couldn't get car CDs players anymore (I'm admittedly very out of touch with the new car market), but it doesn't surprise me that they're no longer something you can just take for granted by default. No doubt pushing subscription services played a later role in de-emphasizing CD players in cars, but you should keep in mind that real consumer demand had been doing that too, ever since around the turn of the century when HD-based MP3 players started to get popular. Subscriptions to proprietary streaming services are a bit of a late-comer to the CD funeral.

Even if there were no such thing as music streaming subscriptions, a lot of people today would be using their phones even in CD-ready cars. They would just party like it's 2001, playing files ripped from CDs. I don't know if that would be enough to remove CD players from cars, but I bet at least some manufacturers would have.

The regulators weren't going to block the deal because they wanted iRobot to die, nor because they wanted it to remain in Collin Angle's hands. They were going to block the deal because they didn't want Amazon to have it. The concern was that Amazon's position of being both a producer AND owner of a global marketplace would put them in a position of too much economic power.

Further, the FTC did not eliminate a choice for consumers. iRobot was already losing to the competition. This bid to be bought was a last-chance effort at putting the product in the hands of a better owner who might be able to make it competitive again.

The FTC didn't drive the business to bankruptcy. Collin Angle did.

So the only consumer benefit here is that Amazon is still just a marketplace administrator, and not also a producer, of at least one consumer product.

There's definitely a scam somewhere in the gift card's history; the guy writing about his situation is upset because Apple glassed his account over it, not over the gift card value. The process of not being credited for the gift card's code and then talking to the retailer to get one that hadn't been tampered with apparently went smoothly; but then the account and everything associated with it got terminated without comment or recourse.

Someone is presumably going to eat the value of the gift card, apparently the retailer either directly or through merchant fees and the payment card processor doing it; but the moral of the story is that you can, without recourse unless you are enough of a VIP to raise a fuss that reaches 'Apple Executive Relations', lose everything connected to your account if you inadvertently interact with a gift card that has been used for some sort of scam activity; even if you have proof that you purchased it from a normal retailer that sells gift cards; rather than some dodgy flea market arrangement that screams 'bagman'/'too good to be true'.

Aimed directly at the scammers? Probably not, unless the penalties for the scam are currently insufficient. Aimed at the ad networks who, currently, have zero to negative interest in ensuring that ad spend isn't overtly hostile before plunking it in front of you? Quite possibly more helpful.

I don't know if Google has been caught out as dramatically as ; but based on the sorts of ad impressions they deliver their standards are clearly pretty low or apathetically applied, and more or less the same perverse incentives exist.

You don't. The CO2 is reused.

Starting the Butlerian Jihad just a bit early, aren't you?

I forgot to add: Nintendo hates the fact that we can legally sell a game cartridge to someone else once we have played a game. They want everyone to have to buy their own copy from Nintendo, without there ever being any kind of used game market. Obviously, they make more money that way!

So if their abusive access-denial policies have the side-effect of scaring people away from the used game market, that is a total win!

We need better consumer protection laws to shut down abuse like this. But getting them is an extreme uphill struggle, given how much political power these super-rich international businesses wind up having.

Apple is pretty bad about this, as per the recently-reported story of Apple revoking a user's access to literally all of his apple hardware and email account because he bought a gift card that someone else had compromised. That's quite a lot worse since people depend on their apple devices much more than on a simple game console.

Google is bad about this too. They will disable your email accounts based on their automated policy violation detection and even though they, in theory, give you a way to get human review, reported cases show that they are notorious for showing no mercy even when you did was innocent and legal (but just has the appearance of risk). They feel justified in this since their services are free to you, but people get very dependent on their emails and a ban can be very life-wrecking.

In the case of apple and Nintendo, they very deliberately protect themselves from criminal harm by deflecting victimization on to their own users instead. Like in the apple case: if you are the victim of fraud (buying a compromised gift card), Apple shuts YOU down, rather than eating the financial loss themselves. And with Nintendo, if you innocently bought a legit used game, but it turns out the previous owner illegally duplicated it, Nintendo shuts YOU down, rather than eating the cost of copyright infringement.

In the very specific case of hardware mods, I can see a justification of denying online use in order to protect players from OTHER players who cheat. Especially in PVP games, people obviously hate cheaters because they ruin the game for everyone, so they are happy to accept control measures that can detect cheaters and shut them down. HOWEVER, even in this case, a permanent account ban is WAY too heavy handed. The obvious reasonable balance is that you are banned so long as your device remains detectably compromised. Once you clean the device up, you should be allowed to play again. MAYBE a perma-ban from online games would be justified for repeat offenders, but only after they have received and acknowledged several warnings to this effect.

Shutting a player down the instant a copied key is detected is outright egregious, as it punishes the victim without proof of guilt (not to mention bypasses any pretension of legal due process). Nintendo doesn't care, of course, because their products are desirable enough (and there is too little competition in the industry realistically), that they can just get away with this. People will put up with this abuse to play Nintendo exclusives. Same for Apple.

The wealthy abuse us because we tolerate it and keep giving them our money. And also because there are too few big-tech companies, creating an effective cartel, leaving us with no-where else to turn (realistically, even if there are theoretical alternatives that come with unwanted sacrifice, cost, or risk, above-and-beyond).

If you don't have a CD drive, then you don't get to rip CDs. You'll have to acquire your files some other way. And/or buy a CD drive.

How can I rip CDs to a phone?

You don't. You rip them to your fileserver at home, and run a subsonic-API server on that. The phone connects to it over a VPN, and a subsonic API player plays it to the car with bluetooth.

seats packed to remind your knees that they are trying to maximize the headcount per square foot(see also, seats in blatantly undesirable positions relative to the screen); dickheads making noise or fucking around on their phones, some asshole who decided to bring a screaming-age child, the works.

I went to a couple movies a few months ago, and I didn't see any of that. My fat American ass had plenty of room in the reclining sear, and the next row of seats was a few feet beneath me and seemingly ten feet away. The theaters have become fucking luxurious.

But it's expensive. And I wonder if that's what's keeping the obnoxious screaming kids away.

And you're totally right about the half hour of ads. That's definitely the worst part, these days.

But the seats and space .. omg those problems are over, at least here in the super-wealthy gigantic metropolis of .. Albuquerque.

Sounds like a program perfectly suited to kicking welfare in the direction of preferred corporate allies(both in terms of what tech gets adopted for federal use; and who gets to use the government payroll as an internship/evaluation program) and for ensuring that none of the departments with significant technical requirements who had their own internal expertise DOGEd to ribbons will get to regain it; instead periodically getting the Accenture Experience from a free-floating layer of loyalists who don't give a fuck because they'll be off to the private sector in 18 months anyway.

When that predictably turns out well; we can presumably grab some folksy Reagan line about how the government can't do anything right; and just directly farm out the contract to palantir or whoever.