Aceticon

Read The Fucking FAQ.

1990s Usenet reference.

Let me be more precise: the Defrauding Of Investors for which she was convicted in Court was that her company was getting people's blood samples and claiming to be analyzing them on their own special machines, whilst in reality they were sending those samples to labs to be analyzed in the traditional way and their machines never worked.

Maybe amongst her various claims she made one as you said (frankly, I don't remember anymore), but that was not what landed her in jail, hence I only mentioned the machines as being the scam.

I supposed one could say both things were elements of her con, even if only one of those amounted to Fraud.

The poster before you was explicitly talking of Iraq,

Her con was that her company had machines that could do all the analyzing automatically in seconds, it wasn't than blood analysis had predictive value for at least some diseases.

I don't think that even back then anybody disputed that at the very least doing DNA sequencing of the cells found in blood could predict the likelihood of certain diseases for a person, as the concept of some people having a genetic predisposition for certain diseases was already accepted at the time.

The scam was the "magic" machine that could do it fast and cheaply, not the concept that it can be done.

As the Official British Report On The Iraq War showed, both the Brits and the Americans (more the latter than the former) committed the War Crime of Pillaging by forcing the Iraqi Administration they themselves put in place after conquering the place to give Oil Exploration contracts to British and American companies.

Saddam (for decades supported by America) was shit and the self proclaimed "Liberators of the Iraqi People" were almost as bad, so that "infinite" money hasn't been for Iraqis in a long time.

Talentless hack and way out of his depth grifter who knows the position he has reached and the money he makes in it is really just supported by cultivated connections and his bullshiting ability, rather than any superior strategical capabilities, when the business "strategy" he chose as CEO merelly because "everybody else is doing it" starts to be perceived as not just broken but a bit of a shit show, keeps on trying to push the impression that, actually, he's just a misunderstood visionary and it's others that don't yet recognize how wonderful the direction he chose for the company is.

By using such arguments, maybe once again he'll "fake it until you make it" his way into success (after all, that's how he became MS' CEO in the first place) or, at worst, it will extend how long he can keep on getting paid the big bucks for nothing more than being a lucky bullshitter with the right connections.

I've been in Tech on and off since the 90s, including in Tech Startups, and nowadays "leaders" in it are pretty much all grifters, not techies with a vision.

I've been reading the posts here and most people are coming from a "decent honest person trying to do his jobs as well as possible" point of view in their reading of the guy (probably because that's the kind of person they are) and thus giving this guy the benefit of the doubt, whilst from what I've seen in that world this guy is almost certainly a talentless hack at anything other than grifting and who, lacking any above average strategical thinking abilities, went for the "everybody else is doing it" strategy which is now blowing up, so of course he'll use typical grifter skills to try and dig his way out of that hole or, at least, stave off the innevitable end of getting big fat $$$ for holding a position he's not actually competent at.

The guy is gaslighting because he's a grifter not a strategist and the "it's others, not me" line of argument is a common "defend & delay" tool in a grifter's toolbox.

Innovation as an inherently good thing (rather than merelly new) has always been a mantra and a slogan of the post-2000 Crash generation of Tech "Leaders", who unlike the ones in the 90s, are almost always grifters rather than techies.

A grifter, when his personal upside maximization (in the form of keeping his job and performance bonuses) is at stake, will say whatever it takes to try and push the impression that his strategical choices as head of a Tech company are "visionary" rather than "blind fad following" because at best he might succeed at "fake it until you make it" and at worst he's delaying the moment when he stops getting the big bucks for what is mainly bullshitting abilities.

So maybe Mustafa Suleyman smokes the tech bollocks he sells and genuinelly thinks that this stuff is an improvement for customers, but personally and having been in Tech (and the Tech Startup world) on and off since the 90s, my bet is that his words are nothing more than a grifter grifting because that's the kind of person that world has been rewarding the most since the 2000 Crash.

Overheard at the German-Poland border:

• "Name?"
• "Klaus Winkle"
• "Occupation?"
• "No, just visiting".

Using Wine directly is a bit of a pita.

Hence why there are things like Bottles.

"There's this obscure function in Excel that I know somebody who knows somebody who used it that won't work in LibreOffice Calc"

I bet that, like most Arch users, that one kept on thinking "So far, so good" all the way down.

On a serious note, having used Linux on and off since the 90s (aah, Slackware, how I miss installing you from floppies ... not), Linux has, IMHO, actually been desktop ready for ages (though definitelly not in the days of Slackware when configuring X was seriously interesting for a geek and pretty much an impossible barrier for everybody else).

The problem have always been applications not having Linux builds, only Windows builds, not the actual desktop Linux distros being an inferior desktop experience than Windows (well, not once Gnome and KDE emerged and made things like configuring your machine possible via GUIs - the age of the RTFF and editing text files in the command line before that wasn't exactly friendly for non-techies).

In other words, from maybe the late 00s onwards the problem were mainly the "networks effects" (in a business sense of "apps are made for Windows because that's were users are, users go for Windows because that's were the apps are) rather than the "desktop" experience.

The almost unassailable advantage of Windows thanks to pretty much just network effects, was something most of us Linux fans were aware since way back.

What happened in the meanwhile to make Linux more appealing "in the Desktop" was mainly on the app availabilty side - OpenOffice (later LibreOffice and derivatives) providing an Office-style suit in Linux, the movement from locally hosted apps to web-hosted apps meaning that a lot of PC usage was really just browser usage, Wine improving by leaps and bounds and making more and more Windows applications run in Linux (most notably and also thanks to DXVK, Games) and so on.

Personally I think Linux has been a superior experience on the server side since the late 90s and, aside for the lack of Linux versions of most commonly used non-OS applications, a superior experience in the desktop since the 00s.