It seems to me they could redirect the 10 figures a year they are spending on building a VR world no one wants or will use. Or did they cannibalize that already?

It's $10 for one person, but take 1 million people, and it's $10 million

Right, that's why this makes sense for Gmail. The spreadsheet says make the free tier extraction percentage number go up, and they value noncomplying users' time at zero. The math should is different for company-internal email.

The operative question should be, how much do you want to spend on employees sorting email instead of writing code or whatever you hired them to do? Because that's how you're buying your disk storage savings.

Different places have different considerations - as I mentioned above, my employer now clearly values reducing litigation risk over my productivity. In the past at startups, my decision was to give folks huge quotas and treat it like any other capacity management problem for scaling/budgeting.

There has to be some limit, and if someone somehow bounces off of it nobody thinks it unreasonable to tell them to fix it. And anyway there's usually a reason like a misconfigured something that infinitely-spams about whatever it is upset about. Otherwise they can worry about work instead of email management make-work.

Should be a knock-off for $500 soon enough.

Of course it'll be a little rough around the edges, and the solar panel won't work, and instead of growls it makes Bart Simpson jokes, but I'm sure it'll be fine.

Apparently, the elite also own all the newline characters.

Pica FTW!

When I was directly admining systems, I didn't have time to argue with people over a couple dollars worth of storage.

I also didn't want people wasting time worrying about quotas or other artificial limits unless they were abusive. (The dude who wrote something that was authing against LDAP 10s of millions of times a day got a talking-to.)

A lot of people confuse "I can't imagine doing or needing X" with "there is a good reason to deny the ability to do X." Honestly, I think most people are Doing It Wrong, most of the time. So? If they're getting shit done, none of my business until they are making unreasonable demands that impact operations. And 100G of mail is peanuts.

My current complaint is the opposite - I can't keep mail longer than a year now, lest it be discoverable in some potential future lawsuit. I've gotten better at predicting what I'll need to know later, but still miss things I should have saved somewhere, and that absolutely damages my productivity.

You got your timelines wrong. When Hayes went bankrupt, hardly anyone had DSL.

In 90s, people used to access internet via dial up modem and the largest modem manufacturer was Hayes. Suddenly, they went bankrupt.

What went wrong?
The highest data rate, a phone modem can support is 56 kbps. They made 56 kbps. Unfortunately, ISPs were not ready. They were still on 28 kbps. Since Hayes 56 kbps model were expensive, they had to heavily discount them and went into a big loss.

What was their response?
They retooled the manufacturing to produce 28 kbps. By the time, they went into full production, the ISPs switched over to 56 kbps. They couldn't sell their obsolete 28 kbps modems.

I see some parallel here.

We get it. You don't like Beyonce. Neither do I, but I'm not making a scene over that fact.

I suspect part of it is that the mitigation for DirtyFrag covers it, so everyone who blocked all the modules in question when that had only an incomplete patch probably hasn't unblocked them yet. I think this is the 4th patch for these modules, and only got a new name rather than just "there's still a way to get this code to do the wrong thing" because a different outside team found this one.

What I'm hearing is "But, I'm a highly-compensated professional! Not like all the plebes we spy on constantly to compensate me."

I do agree that they should stand up for themselves, and they have my support, once I'm done supporting causes I consider more important, like toe lint eradication.

Facebook headhunters used to bug me constantly. I put up an autoresponder telling them what I thought of their business model, leadership and general behavior, and that I would wash dishes for a living before working for a degrading, anti-human shithole like FB. Eventually they got the message.

I ended up in a fairly heated argument with some FB employees several years back when I mentioned that. It was obvious they felt stung by someone rejecting the choices they made and kept leaning in to, "but I make more money than you". Which was I was happy to concede, it was true. Suggesting that my self-esteem costs more than theirs didn't seem to be what they wanted to hear..

I wonder if those folks are still there, protesting about their workplace privacy.

Around 1990, I worked for a couple months on an embedded device that had an 80186 and a megabyte of RAM. At one point, I had access to a huge pile of 1MB SIMMs and took a stack home for the evening and using memory boards that allowed you to stack up to 8 of them into one SIMM slot in your computer to figure out just how little RAM Windows NT 3.5 really needed to boot. It booted successfully with 12MB of RAM. It really wasn't usable, but it did boot up. Nowadays, Windows is probably only marginally usable with 12GB of RAM.

The headline may as well be "Rose maintains transactional relationships with tech media after all these years".

At this point I think if a good idea walked up and smacked him on the head, the name alone might doom it. It has been an also-ran in a confusing number of categories, so depending on your age you may remember it as a very different kind of failure than I do. Sort of the converse of trademark dilution - it is clear what the name is and who owns it, what's muddy is what the service is supposed to be.

That's the thing with metaphors, they have similarities but there are also points of divergence. Point is, my metaphor was not meant to be understood as a technical description of the system's workings.

For the unsuspecting soul who approaches this modern oracle without the faintest idea of how it works, the experience of facing unexpected demons could serve as a warning of the dangers they may face if they approach the tool without caution.

They work for Meta. I would expect them to be miserable.

The company has been dumping 10 figures a year into trying to build a VR world no one wants, with nothing to show for it after the better part of a decade. At some point, you expect morale to decrease.

They'll use the same excuse when AI perfects the Torment Nexus, I'm sure.