The last major antitrust action on this scale in the U.S. 8 years to process.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System
This type of lawsuit is why the billionaire bro’s are backing the senile rapist and felon. Making them play somewhat fair ruins their business plan.
Firing middle managers is a fun way to kill the company. Not that cleaning house is a bad idea. Unfortunately the people making decisions of who to keep and who to let go are usually idiots.
Middle Managers are promoted for two reasons: technical expertise and ass-kissing expertise. Now the technical experts tend to not mix well with incompetent parasitic c-suite types idiots. The ass-kissers are beloved by the c-suite as that is their only role in life.
So when firings come around guess who they get rid of? Then 1-3 years later everyone is shocked when everything starts to fall apart.
They also need to remove the limited liability from companies for intentional illegal activities.
illegal business practices should be charged to the people involved instead of the company. The executives who made the decision to break the law lose personal assets.
Otherwise the shitheads just pass the company losses onto the employees: no raises, hiring freezes, layoffs, reduction in benefits, etc…
I have been using custom start menus since the whole win8 full screen disaster. Every time I see the default win 10 or Win 11 menu I cringe. So much crap in the way.
Process optimization reaches a point of diminishing returns. Then if tweaked further it degrades the performance. Microsoft reached the close to the optimal OS design at Win7. It’s all been downhill since then.
The mobile OS systems are reaching the same point. Optimization has occured and most of the “new” additions degrade the user experience.
Large corporations rarely innovate and try new things. Most innovation comes from smaller players with limited market share taking risks.
Large companies buy out smaller ones who create cash cows from taking large risks. The large company then milks the cash cows until they are completely dead.
The consolidation of studios to a few megacorporations has led to this inevitable end. The solution is simple: break them up. If we have 30 or so similar sized studios competing, we will get better movies/TV again.
Windows did a few vital things that Apple failed miserably on in the 90’s.
Mac dropped support for legacy software and hardware on every new OS in the 90’s. Microsoft maintained backwards capability. It was a major reason windows was more resource intensive and had more bugs. It was a smart move because windows OS was able to handle more software and hardware than Macs. This is the top reason why windows demolished Mac in sales.
Microsoft’s business model allowed greater range of pricepoints. Most users in business or at home do not need the capabilities of the lowest priced Mac model. You don’t need much to check e-mail, browse the web, and do some basic word processing. Apple did not service this largest section of the market at all.
Why is basic math.
In a made up scenario let’s start with a dumb 50"ish TV. That cost them around $100 to build. Add in another $50 for shipping and distribution fees. It’s at the store for $150 cost. If they set the price at $400. There is $250 dollars of profit to share between the store and the manufacturer. The manufactuerer likely gets under $100.
Now for a smart TV the revenue stream looks different. First their costs only go up by a few dollars for adding the “smart” chips. So let’s say $155 cost. Then they collect revenue from the streaming providers to be supported by their smart TV say $30 per set. Then they collect the $20 per set per year in user data collected. So if they price the smart TV the same as the dumb one they generate $95 from the sale of the set.
So the profit from a dumb TV is $100 at he point of sale.
The profit from a smart TV is $225+ in a constant revenue stream over 5 years.
And this is why we see so much advertising for smart TV’s as being the best thing.
They were a bit more tricky than that I believe. They capped the user page at 3 years of search. So when you delete everything using those scripts it deletes the newer stuff but misses all the older ones. Then after the script runs it shows - no comments.
The heyday of the forums. For about 2 years the combination of Tapatalk and forums was awesome. Centralized interface with no ads, all the discussion.
Then they both gutted their functionality and spammed in the ads.
Go back and check again. They are actively restoring deleted comments. About once a month I log back on and delete another round. Usually another 10-15 “mysteriously” pop back up again.
That’s an ad for Mormons. The Mormons are a corporation disguised as a church that has gained extreme wealth. They own a huge real estate empire, universities, and farms plus over a hundred billion in one investment fund.
Thy have been caught numerous times breaking all sorts of financial laws but because of their status as a church it’s hidden.
For the Mormons it’s all about profit and hoarding wealth.
Them “Just order on the Kiosk”
You mean the thing that takes 20x longer to order and tosses all sorts of bullshit ads at me?
Me “No.”
They made it the default option for businesses that routinely buy computers with less local storage than their users need. Pretty much every company I have worked for.
They then pushed it out hard into the consumer market when SSD came out and the average storage space on lower end models dropped by 75%.
I see why they did it, how they did it was in usual Microsoft fashion, idiotic.
It’s sort of their pattern.
Introduce new changes.
Screw it up royalty.
Fix the features that are salvageable and revert most of the remaining except: Double down on the shitty ones that they think will make them more money.
Rinse and Repeat
Forums were awesome until the ads took over. Then apps like Tapatalk made reading them easier. Then Tapatalk went to shit and power users migrated to reddit (mainly for the easy to use wepage and awesome independent apps.).
Then reddit shit the bed so now Lemmy is filling the gaps.
Windows 11 adoption to business customers is really bad. Most of the adoption to 11 has been from people purchasing new home computers and being stuck with 11 (I have two win 11 computers now).
Since the bulk of Microsoft’s revenue comes from business customers, they have a huge impact on decisions.
At this point the only decision Microsoft can make is to write off win 11 as a failue. Resuming feature upgrades to win 10 makes business sense.
My wife has a chronic illness with expensive drugs.
Healthcare is around 35% of our families gross income when you include in the cost my employer pays, what I pay, plus deductable and copays.
I avoid going to the Dr as much as possible because I have a separate deductible. If I went for everything I should it would be closer to 40% of our gross income.
The issue is most of these anti-vax dumbfucks have never lived, seen, or been around infectious disease killing or disabling people. It’s all theoretical to them and wild stories. They have no personal experience with the disease.
Vaccines had sufficient public buy-in when they were introduced because a large portion of society knew or were related to someone that had suffered the consequences.
Let’s put it into some perspective. The Spanish flu pandemic is estimated to have killed between 25-50 million people. The population of the globe at that time is estimated to be around 2 billion. That’s 1.25-2.5% of the globe died. 1 person out of 40-80 died. Everyone knew somebody or was related to somebody that died of the flu.
So even though there has always been dumbfucks who refused vaccination, the majority of the population complied.
I don’t know anyone personally that died of covid. Currently estimates show 14.8 million excess deaths since 2020. This is likely the number of people who died of covid. Out of 8 billion. Or 1 out of 540 people died, mostly in countries with below average medical care.
Not quite, in my experience on really cold days my heat pump struggles to keep up. This is expecially true when the outside unit is frosting up. The unit has to reverse and pump heat out of the house.
That’s one of the reasons i run my wood pellet stove on those days. The secondary source of heat takes the load off the heat pump.
I upgraded from Windows XP to Vista after the 2nd servicepack fixed most of the shit. By that point it was a tolerable OS.
I am currently hoping for a major service pack next year to fix all the stupid shit they did in Windows 11.
You know kind of like when they fucked up windows 8, attempted a quick fix in 8.1 and finally fixed it in win10.
Of course they are at 4 major updates with win11 and it’s still shit so the hope is very thin.