Nothing wrong with that setup if everyone is on board with it.

The fuckery Microsoft has been doing with trying to outright trick people into signing in to the OS with a Microsoft account and using things like OneDrive combined with just how good Proton has gotten pushed me to make the switch full time a year or so ago for my personal usage.

I don’t have any hard numbers, only what I have seen out in the world. But a good number of POS systems, embedded things like MRI machines, tire balancers in mechanics shops and ATMs run some flavor of embedded Windows.

It is not nearly as huge as *nix is, but it is not exactly uncommon either.

Smartphones are actually a good window into what computers in general would have been like had the IBM bios not been reverse engineered and survived a bunch of legal challenges.

If they aren't going to charge for access otherwise then I don't think being ad supported is such a bad thing. Much more honest than subscription pricing and ads in my opinion.

Every time I think about the kind of car I want the next time I need to replace mine I am reminded that I miss my old 1994 Chevy S10, and options for something like that these days is rather limited.

As much as I like Linux, and use it almost exclusively on desktop/laptop, every time I see something like this I am reminded how much I hate the fact that Apple of all companies is about the last bastion of commercial and consumer operating systems who isn’t trying to derive the bulk of their revenue from advertising.

People need to stop holding Jobs up as some deity of tech. He was a marketing and hype man that was in the right place at the right time and knew how to take advantage of that luck. Nothing more, nothing less. It is equally possible his leadership style would have squandered the opportunities Apple has had since his death had it been him and not Cook in charge.

By any metric other than "line must always go up" Apple is doing just fine.

"Oh no, they haven't found another multi hundred billion dollar product to release since the iPhone, even though there are no signs that the iPhone won't continue to be a very profitable business for years and years to come...better go dig up Steve jobs, shove a stick up his back, magic his corpse back to life, and beg him to save the shareholders profit margins", the horror.

This sort of thing is why I dislike legislation that mandates the use of something very specific. Things change and it is better to create laws that don’t become outdated as fast as tech tends to.

When do the alcoholics get to sue the bars/pubs for "forcing" them to walk through the door and order a drink?

Another good thing falls to the whims of lack of personal responsibility, parenting, and Helen (won't someone think of the children?!) Lovejoy syndrome. Now the predators will just continue to do there thing in a darker hole that is even harder to find.

Snowden is a textbook example of why organizations should not be allowed to police themselves or control the avenues of reporting misconduct.

There should be a memorial to him in DC. Ruined his life to tell the people what their elected officials are doing with all of the power we grant them.

But no, to save face, ego, etc we drove him into the willing arms of Putin to be able to use as a propaganda tool so he wouldn’t be killed for daring to speak truth to power.

Support for prosecuting him did untold damage to my opinion of Obama.

Jokes on my employer, I have been effectively working less than 3 days a week in active hours actually doing something productive beyond meetings and forced chit chat for years.

Most employers in my experience care far more about the appearance of working than they do actually working. Once you realize this it is amazing how little actual work you need to do to make them happy.