Except how bad was it for Microsoft?

They didn’t lose share. For the people that rightfully saw Metro as a painful dumb direction in Windows design language, they just stuck with Windows 7. Microsoft didn’t have upside they wanted, but they didn’t have the downside.

They tried to pump life into their mobile platform by throwing their desktop platform under the bus. Because they have zero competitive pressure, they attempt to do that with essentially zero downsides. Just like now they can make their OS little more than an advertising platform for the Microsoft Store and Microsoft services without real repurcussion.

Guess it’s a matter of degree, that was the sort of stuff I was alluding to in the first part, that you have all this convoluted instrumentation that you can dig into, and as you say perhaps even more maddening because at some times it’s needlessly over complicating something simple, and then at just the wrong time it tries to simplify something and ends up sealing off just the flexibility you might need.

The things is you really can’t be that good with windows.

Sure you can get good with registry and group policy and other stuff that is needlessly complicated to do relatively simple stuff. You can know your way around WMI and .net and powershell…

But at some point, the software actively hides the specifics of what is wrong. You can’t crack open something to see why it’s showing some ambigious hexadecimal code or a plain screen. You can’t add tracing to step through their code to see what unexpected condition they hit that they didn’t prepare to handle. On Linux you are likely to be able to plainly see a stack trace, download the source code, maybe trace it, modify the source code.

Windows is like welding the hood shut and wondering why mechanics have a hard time with the car.

I’m not familiar with AWS myself, but they seemed to be referencing something they vaguely characterized as ‘security infrastructure’, kind of as a handwaving for why they thought it made sense to be single point of failure because to enable distribution of it would somehow be insecure…

I frankly wasn’t interested in delving deeper, because that excuse sounds pretty stupid, but I’d be trying to get details I don’t personally need about something I probably shouldn’t be arguing about. I’ve gotten burned too much by someone championing something stupid ostensibly in the name of ‘security’ to try to sign up for another one of those arguments.

I’m also skeptical that any payment processing networks were impacted. I would be surprised, but less so if they couldn’t manage their account online which might have similar effect. I’m not surprised at all of the grocery store or restaurants were significantly impacted. I know a lot of the apps were broken and I could imagine someone used to apping everything leaving their cards at home and unable to get lunch. Might have some aggressively “modern” establishments that are kiosk only and I could imagine them getting downed by aws outage.

outside a single DC?

I’m told that a lot of the companies did all the right things but still got taken down because some dependent Amazon services are tethered to that single DC and only Amazon has the power to change that.

1.1.1.1 went down for a while not too long ago

Question is to what extent it is the breed versus the owners drawn to or scared away from the breed. These things can be self fulfilling.

So a fan of squirting?

Yeah, that’s generally the issue with a ‘Fuck<whatever>’ mentality.

Not “YayTransit” or something, but just relentless bemoaning cars and all who dare to use them. Such a community approach may serve the circle-jerk of those in agreement, but doesn’t really do anything to change the status quo closer to what they want.

Walkable stuff is nice, as is transit as it works so I’m on board for improvements to make that more feasible, but it’s kind of off putting the way they counduct themselves a good amount of the time.

If you see a polite obviously rural person who has not said anything remotely questionable, a common comment is “but you probably wouldn’t want to know their political opinion” or “you probably don’t want their take on minorities or women”. To be folksy is to guarantee progressives brand them as right wing racist sexist bigots.

When it’s totaled, then you get a cash payoff for what they declare it to be worth. It being the other person’s insurance does give you a bit more leverage than is it were your own.

At least in my case, I was able to negotiate a bit and got the other person’s insurance to at least go up to paying the blue book retail for mint condition of the car. They also tossed in a few thousand for pain and suffering and covered a full month of rental car. In my case someone in the other car was unresponsive and needed an ambulance ride, and on my part I had been very thorough in documenting everything that legally would count including damaged contents in the trunk, missed work, and other things.

However ultimately it is a check and car sales can be rough. So it may be that they were underpaid, or that the car’s general book value didn’t match their subjective value for the car, or they were thinking they should get what they paid for it. I could imagine if they bought a 2015 in 2019, they were probably getting a decent, off lease practically new car. Now they have a check appropriate for buying a 2015 of the same make and model and the 2015s now available are in worse shape than they kept their own, previous owners that neglected their car over a longer period.

So obligatory that no one wanted to be that guy…

Pretty much any opening by Megumi Hayashibara…

Generally I see a few:

• People wanting the highly deterministic, but slower behavior of the rc scripts.
• People liking the fact that the rc startup was generally almost entirely defined in plain script files
• Some folks criticizing certain opinionated things in systemd, as systemd delves deeper into things like capabilities and users.
• Systemd can sometimes be a bit weird about how it does/does not capture stdout/stderr as one might guess in some situations.
• Some folks not liking the journald angle of binary-only files

Mainly the last point is the only one I personally find potentially aggravating, but since I never really am in a broken system without journalctl I’m not too bothered by it. I have saved myself some effort thanks to systemd including stuff that the daemons used to provide for themselves.

AI because its dumber than them and useless.

I am much better at washing dishes by hand than my dishwasher. I still mostly let my dishwasher have a crack at things to spare me from usually having to bother.

It’s a bit trickier with AI, as it’s more obnoxiously screwing up when it screws up, but at least upon occasion it’s able to spit out a few mind numbingly obvious lines of code that would have taken me longer to type myself, because I can only hit keyboard buttons so fast.

I didn’t suggest that people who are abused tend to go down this path, I’m saying of those that abuse others, they themselves were likely abused.

I don’t know the percentage, but hypothetically if 2% of people abused go on to abuse others, this would be true without even saying anything about 98% of abused people.

Abusers often are “paying forward” abuse they suffered.

Note that even if by all practical terms a business isn’t growing, then it’s still growing.

Part of the whole deal is that there’s an intent for the money supply to change for a roughly 2% inflation. In an oversimplified sense, the idea being that everything gets 2% more expensive, everyone gets 2% raises, and investments at least generate 2% returns.

We’ve basically decided that we need to trick ourselves into feeling progress by making “standing still” look like growth. So if someone had flat income year over year, they actually lost in real terms.

Like I’m going to look it up. Feel like he went MAGAing recently and I haven’t heard he died, so I’m guessing he is still kicking.

What would shock me is if someone pointed out a MAGA celebrity that has actually been relevent in the last 20 years, other than as a MAGA personality. Only one I can think of is Kanye West, but he clearly went deep off the end of crazy very publicly.

At least for a time, many of the big distributions focused exclusively on Gnome, and for KDE users it was kind of frustrating as everything would be all wired up for Gnome, and either KDE wasn’t packaged at all and you had to go third party, or it was a clearly second class citizen where the packagers just didn’t bother to wire up equivalent features. You would look it up and see how KDE had the same capability implemented, but the packager just hadn’t included some dependency or configured something to manifest it.

Now I feel like the distributions take Plasma more seriously and so it’s easier to just ignore whatever Gnome is doing… Except for the occasional horrible UI presented by a Gnome app in your otherwise credible desktop. Since Gnome is both a DE and a UI framework, the UI framework gets to rear its head even if you largely ignore the DE.

Then of course you have the tiling window managers/compositors, but those projects tend to be less ambitious anyway, and what the audience wants is pretty much what they can get from packages, even if the packagers aren’t quite as invested to know what can be done.