That would be decades of legacy. I mean, with people paid to survive rewriting that legacy, should happen - if and when Linux is a mainstream platform. EDIT: … for companies’ workstations.

Calling objections to what some unelected jerks in the foundation (which is a supposedly public organization) are doing is not “anti-Mozilla”. And I would first suspect of astroturfing everyone pretending it is.

Raising voices and putting pressure about things spoiling something is caring about it. And yes, people who care try to make real effect and not just safely complain to be ignored.

Mozilla honestly has been becoming worse and worse since Australis.

Modern version of “suicide is a sin and we don’t condone it, but if you have problems you’re devil-possessed and need to repent and have only yourself to blame”.

Also probably could be countered by their advertising contradicting their ToS. Not a lawyer.

internship

As in getting interned and working for a bowl of rice

Microsoft’s oligopoly (officially sanctioned and enabled by US society) has cost the world hundreds of billions of dollars if not more.

It has cost everything the tech industry made since then and everything it could have made if MS and its helpers hadn’t killed most of the interesting companies, from DEC to Nokia. I’m not naming Sun, because honestly they are seen through rosy glasses by many today, they were the dotcom bubble locomotive and in general had that weird authoritarian vision of future tech which is similar to what we are getting, but without cool industrial design of Sun. They were not the corporation of good.

Microsoft’s oligopoly is a device of fate for the world similar to what tech monopolies were for Japan, leading it into recession, or to China’s isolation policies that led to its 200 years old catastrophes. It’s not something that will be hidden by bigger events or undone. It has defined our world for many decades.

Perhaps it will be named in the future as one of the main reasons for WWIII.

That being said, I don’t think everyone at Microsoft or Google is evil, but a far larger percent of their employees are evil than one would think (i.e. it’s not only the senior executives).

Not even evil, just spineless apes who shouldn’t have civil rights (it’s not a dog whistle, I mean independently of race, such people actually tend to be racist when they can get away with it).

Most people do, feeling of power or at least positive connection to someone’s feeling of power are very intoxicating. I even wonder how many 16 years old girls you knew when you were in high school. No justice or mercy there if you try to keep moral high ground and ignore that component. (I did, LOL.)

The thing about Nazis is that they’ve lost, so one could get pretty believable feeling of power from their own military and patriotic aesthetic in most of the western nations and socialist bloc, while Nazis would be something of that past with fraktur lettering and stylish evil. A bit like vampires.

Now, today both western and Soviet patriotic aesthetic have kinda rotten. The Soviet kind is associated with murderous madness between two strongest former members, the western kind is associated with paying 20x the right money to kill brown people in their homeland without even getting their oil in the end.

While Nazis, eh, lost. So haven’t lived till now and are remembered young and cute, so to say.

I mean, yes, they gave him that title. Roughly translatable as “the leader” or “the chieftain”.

What’s the problem?

Britannica, for comparison, has contained and still contains Armenian genocide denial in plenty of its articles touching upon Armenia even in little ways. It’s honestly not that good on most other subjects I know anything about. It’s good enough, I’ve heard, on scientific and technical subjects, point in time year 1960. And its articles are, eh, far less detailed than Wikipedia, usually. Yet people don’t bark at Britannica because that’s not in fashion. Actually people still recommend Britannica as a beacon of sanity in the age where anyone can silently abuse a Wikipedia article, or something like that.

Come on, it’s just another internet encyclopedia which is like Wikipedia, but with creators’ truth not burdened with proof and all wrong people banned without bureaucracy, “truth” and “wrong” being up to subjective interpretation here.

They understand what they’re doing. They’re treating the problem as a black box - they want to decide what you can do in the field where they are strong, making laws and rules as the (in their piss cockroach opinion) dominant apes in the crowd. They are breaking the technical possibility for you to avoid that. They don’t see a problem with breaking it for everyone, because if some use they need as well is broken so, they can make an exception for themselves, it’s in the domain of making rules too, and they can make punishments so gruesome that nobody will bother except for mafia and law enforcement, just like with heroine.

And the answer doesn’t lie in protecting VPNs or making technical means to avoid them further, by using plentiful possible information channels in the standards comprising the Internet. The answer lies in dipping them face into their own shit and saying “don’t do that again or I will kill you”. Because it’s a social, not technical, problem. It can be reduced to unauthorized people telling you what to do and you obeying.

That’s not just MS, that’s all the world. I think it can be called pessimism at rational design. With Apple’s 90s decline and rebirth, and with many things in the 90s dying, the idea that you can’t ever rationally predict what humanity will need, or at least what will win markets, has become the easiest for executives and public alike.

So they, like everyone else, were trying to catch the vibe. This has recently culminated in jumbo extrapolators being stuffed as a solution for every purpose involving computers. Honestly if before that mess someone would tell me that computers are going to present a text prompt as the universal human interface again, and it would be conversational, I’d be excited and say that this is all I need.

I think that it’s similar to many other things - the first attempt at solving the problem is the wisest and the deepest. Machines had controls before computers available to everyone. Computer displays show UIs as those controls, traditionally. The same rules then apply that did before, control elements should differ by purpose and that purpose should be clearly indicated by form, color, feel and well-readable label. Computers also had, since teletypes, command line as a UI - you send a message of input, you get a message of output. A clear concept, connected to what a computer is.

We don’t need to go further and invent some new UI paradigms just because we’re not in digital-assisted heaven yet. But until the wide mass of users too knows that there’s no digital heaven, they will want it, and they will want to break paradigms and be given something new, not what they have, but the better thing that their magic thinking tells them they can have, because of human instincts.

We have been there with metaverses in early 00s, people still use Second Life. Most of us have grown and understood, internalized there’s no metaverse that can be built to create a digital heaven, or at least a digital space of cleaner philosophy and insight, like Lukyanenko’s “Depth” (sorry, I have a limited cultural context, and this in feeling seems to fit better than classical cyberpunk).

Now we are living through a new wave, of people and families and social subcultures that didn’t want to find such a metaverse, or create such a space, ever in their lives, and so didn’t learn the lesson, personally or collectively. But they do want another heaven, one mixed with reality, more similar to Star Trek, and they are hungry for it, and they are trying to find it similarly to how 9yo me was trying to find knowledge how they make all those 3d games and how can you make one not just draw objects, but live.

Sorry for an emotional dump.

Not better, it’s more of rules of punctuation and word order and such, in their normalized forms, being more fit for one use or another. At the expense of something.

Like those enormous sentences in German building up to unload like a cannon volley with one verb in the end. I also hate German capitalization. But it’s impressive how many floors an atom can have, so to say, in one literate German sentence. Perhaps their capitalization is too caused by necessity, I can’t bear trying to read Dutch, the eye has nothing to cling at.

Or in Russian there’s no strict word or sentence order, but playing with them one can give different flavors to whatever they are saying. Where you should use commas and where dashes (and sometimes semicolons), and where you can skip those and where you can’t, and whether you are giving a different intonation or meaning to your phrase or just making a mistake ; taken together - whether such a thing as “author’s individual punctuation” exists in Russian or not.

(All people actually writing well in Russian whom I know, BTW, make mistakes all the time by common rules and definitely have their own punctuation. And this is not much of a rebellion, they praise Zhukovsky - he made his own rules, they praise Pushkin - that punk not only made his own rules, he also used lots of Church Slavic not knowing the difference between that and archaic Russian, they praise Mayakovsky - well, that type wouldn’t object to any abuse of formal rules.)

I mean, I admit I often write in very bad English, but saying “you should proofread your texts” was absolutely useless, that person could just quote the specific place politely.

I actually kept it in dual boot alongside Linux to play SWTOR.

You’re just an all around shitty human being.

Says some anonymous moron.

No it’s not, it’s just you talking outta your ass ascribing your wishful interpretations to others. Your interpretation doesn’t obligate anyone other than yourself and your butt buddies.

Side thoughts in the middle of sentences are definitely weird in written form.

That depends on the language. Similarly to how different prosody doesn’t indicate different national character or whatever.

In Russian that’s normal enough, in German much more. Considering some weak sides of the English language, might not work.

Ah. OK. So I speak a language, where such constructions are a bit more normal, except commas and dashes are used more generously, and synthetic grammar helps.

“You can fit a (can’t stress how good) planetary map into RAM wholly” might be a bit better? Anyway. OK, they’re struggling. They are choosing a weird way to inform me of what.

One can resize the Windows partition from Windows itself, then install Linux alongside it. But have backups and be careful.

I remember. I also remember Windows 8 which was supposed to make everything metro stylish and convenient, with tiling, ARM version, claims of being optimized and good for updating even on oldish boxes.

Same times as Nokia Lumia.

Very cool. If only there were things similar to RSS for things other than news feeds.

Like XHTML, that “semantic web” thing of old.

Another argument in favor of living in a police state of rich blokes doing banking for mafia and dictators, which doesn’t need any surveillance because police already sees everything, and what it doesn’t notice, it chooses not to, and also it can legally bend you over when required. I mean, OK, nobody’s inviting, LOL.

I mean, seriously I like such news, every polity gets its turn to be a force for good.

There’s even been news of an attempt by a group of Swiss politicians to create a committee on Nagorno-Karabakh refugees’ return and future political existence.

And they are propping up Taler.

Just - I value this family of technologies for one main trait, it’s destructive to superficial authorization. As in - where in the olden days bot campaigns in social media could just work, possibly unnoticed, now you can be certain it’s mostly bots unless you can’t transparently establish connection to a person, backed by cryptography.

But OK, a public confirmation bot is good, especially if it talks in your Jura dialect unintelligible not just to me, but to most native German speakers.

But it’s funny