Amazon took nine years to reach profitability.
I'm not sure Amazon is a good example here. The company famously opted to reinvest its free cash flow into growing the business, rather than saving them and booking them as net income. They likely could have been profitable sooner otherwise.
Also, I am not aware of Amazon receiving billions in government support in the 1994-2001 timeframe.
> Meta doesn't really know how to do anything else with any skill.
They don't know how to do Facebook very well either: it's been pretty much stagnant and enshittified to death for the past 22 years, and it feels like a forum for greying people whose greying friends haven't bothered to move on either, or to get the date of the next annual meeting of the bridge club.
one of those companies whose sole purpose seems to be annoying you by slapping their name as a watermark on a generic image you'd like to use in a meme, and force to spend 10 seconds finding somewhere else because you were never going to pay a stupid company to remove their mark on a bad picture you can find everywhere.
I wonder how those companies still exist, let alone make any money.
Anyway, the modern way to use copyrighted photos for free is to ask stable diffusion to regenerate it, because the AI companies have done all the data stealing for you and repackaged the stolen data into "models" you can use for free.
Score one for K'Breel and the Council of Elders, I guess. We'll get you next time, you crafty Martians!
Pages, Numbers, and Keynote are still included with every Apple device. The current versions are fully up to date and are free for any device owner.
What Apple has done is put the AI features and licensed stock images behind a paywall. Which isn't great, but those weren't core features to begin with; the iWork apps existed long before they were added.
To quote Apple: "Yes. You can continue using Keynote, Pages, Numbers, and Freeform for free. And while these apps remain free for everyone, an Apple Creator Studio subscription offers premium templates, a library of high-quality, royalty-free photos and graphics, and powerful intelligence features."
Why would an otherwise routine software update even come with new EULA terms?
Off the top of my head, I can't recall an Office for Mac update ever coming with a new EULA.
While Office 2021 is affected by the expiring license, it's still under support until Oct 2026 and users just need to update. It only reverts to read-only if you don't update.
Thank you. I had been wondering about this precisely because Office 2021 is still receiving updates.
So this is really only an Office 2019 issue. Which still isn't great, but it is at least older.
And from the sounds of things, this only impacts the retail-licensed version of Office 2019. The volume licensed LTSC version doesn't rely on an activation server or certificates.
1994: I want an OS for my PC. There are already options like Windows 3.1. Why do I want to run XWindows on Slackware, which might do most of what I want it to do, but poorly and with constant handholding? Linux should stay with their strengths.
People with my genetics start dying around age fifty - polycystic kidney disease.
I'm ten years older than that, my blood pressure earlier this evening was 120/70something, my last fasting sugar was around 85, I weigh ten pounds more than I did in college, and I've walked 1,393 miles in the last year. My last vice is caffeine and I will go off it periodically, in one instance for seven years.
I got dealt a terrible hand, health wise, Lyme at forty that triggered a complex immune condition, but I refuse to feel (or look) bad. A lot of it IS in your hands, you just need the will to change. It's not easy
I download all my books DRM-free from bittorrent.
My ebook reader is an ancient Sony PRS-650, it still works fine and it has no trouble reading files that haven't been messed up by Amazon. What a concept eh?
"What about the book's authors who aren't getting paid when you download their stuff for free?" I hear you say:
Yes, I wish I could pay for what I downloaded. But I can't. The best option I could find was to buy the paperback as well, so some of my money would trickle back to them. But that's mighty stupid and totally not environmentally-friendly.
I did try to pay an author directly once (the late Ian M. Banks) but he send me an angry email back saying even if he got money from me, I was robbing his editor and distributor, and I should just buy his book normally - which I would, if that didn't entail leaving an undeserved cut to effing Amazon.
So there we are: there's no mechanism to legally buy books that aren't hamstrung by DRM. So honest people who value their consumer rights can't be honest.
"The use of wood as an energy source is a relic of the past, one that should not be relived if given a choice.
Wood burning is very much alive - both old-stylee polluting open-fires and stoves, and ultra-efficient pellet, wood-chip and wood dust burning in power stations. And it's renewable. Try visiting any nordic country some day...
Also, just because burning wood has downsides doesn't mean it has to be ditcheds it entirely. Solve the downsides instead...
While universal basic income is a useful policy tool and I think we WILL reach it eventually, there are economics papers out there that demonstrate that, sans Pigouvian transaction tax, AI is a race to the bottom.
The AI Layoff Trap by Brett Hemenway Falk and Gerry Tsoukalas is still sitting on my desktop. A quick Google search reveals they are not the only ones who are pursuing this line of thinking.
BUt here in the U.S. "muh freedumb" will ensure that we run that race till the bottom falls out. Hopefully Asia and Europe play this transition a bit smarter, so something of our society continues.
It's modded funny because OpenCL is all but dead for new projects. It got weighed down by industry infighting to the point that the big feature of OpenCL 3.0 in 2020 was undoing everything added to the spec after 2011.
So the idea of using OpenCL as a CUDA replacement, rather than something like ROCm or OneAPI, is funny. It's like rewriting C++ programs to use Pascal.
Their idea of an offer you can't refuse is an offer... and you'd better not refuse.
