Performance is also degrading on iphones as software bloats, and/or they're up to their old shenanigans and making older phones unbearable to force people to buy the newest ones.
Big tech is reaping what they've sown in a very satisfying way.
Don't forget Apple handwaving serious security issues of their devices - users still cannot even check if their devices are compromised and only thing Apple can do here is "lockdown mode" - which again, after compromise is likely useless anyway.
The problem with the Microsoft features is really not excessive ambition.
Half of the time it's open user hostility and blatant incompetence. The other half it's just the incompetence. Ambition doesn't enter the picture at all.
Yes, and those ideas are user hostile and poorly conceived, badly executed, and incompetently built.
A remote code execution exploit in notepad?! That's not professional, or skillful, or well done. Unnecessary feature bloat and change for the sake of change, because some MBA dork wants to justify their department and continued employment by checking boxes on spreadsheets.
There's no innovation or skillful, well built features. There's hardly any consideration of users at all, except as net continuing depositors of money into Microsoft coffers. Features and updates are nothing more than marketing slop and manipulation of enterprise into renewing subscriptions and purchasing the latest version of new hardware.
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I just don't think that you can point at a company whose entire foundational product, Windows, the operating system that's pretty much default for most of the world, and say that they're not completely and utterly failing as a company when their single most compelling "feature" is that the OS can run Excel.
It's the year of the Linux desktop, fire it up and never look back!
Seasons 2 through 4 were vastly more interesting. We've seen Joel a hundred times. Donna and Cameron and Gordon felt less worn, and Donna and Cameron's relationship vastly more interesting than Gordon (the skeptic) and Joel (the believer!) in Season 1.
If you prefer "great men" stuff, I can see preferring Season 1.
But it's not exactly a story you can't watch elsewhere.
I've heard of Season 1 described as "Don Draper teaming up with Walter White", which makes it sound far more juicy than it is. The entire show gets way into the melodrama of the characters' personal lives, but S1 is no better than the rest in terms of that; it's strongest when the personal melodrama is rooted in the tech, like Joe's self-sabotage of their COMDEX demo followed by the fateful realization in the hotel room of their doom. There's a really great article in Grantland about HCF, Silicon Valley, and Microserfs by Douglas Coupland which points out that these characters are not great men, because they are but footnotes of history:
> The story twists again: Joe loses his nerve. The Giant goes to market as a regular old fast/cheap PC. Then, in a Comdex hotel room darkened as if for a séance, Joe comes face-to-face with his first Macintosh, and realizes he’s made the wrong call: “It speaks,” he says, his voice full of wonder and dread. We realize we’ve spent the better part of a season watching these characters fail — that Gordon and Joe aren’t going to become the Jobs and Wozniak of this world because Jobs and Wozniak are the Jobs and Wozniak of this world.
Cameron is just sort of an unstable tortured genius with a lot of baggage, and while Donna ends up being the responsible "den mother", it is really far from girlbossing, and rather trivializes those seasons and the characters to put it in such a way. And Joe does not take a backseat at all! He ends up being the main foil for most of the show, which is a really interesting turn for the character!
I do think Gordon gets sidelined (with a debilitating disease, no less!) far too easily. But then he's also sort of doomed to be a footnote, his fate is just all the more tragic for it.
And eventually, future calculations from CBS about whether they have more to lose by suppressing the story or airing it will favor the latter. Or so few people will still watch CBS that their business fails. Either way, it's a win.
So you believe universities have taken advantage of students by crafting, encouraging and financing education programs with an understanding that those programs would not result in jobs which would be sufficient to repay the debt needed to complete them, but you think the 18 year olds who were taken advantage of should be forced to suffer for their failure to make perfect decisions at 18.
It's a question of supply and demand though. Sure we should fund science post grad, I'm not so sure about humanities (supply already outstrips demand there). Saying we should fund "post grad" in general elides this complexity.
Public school is as much about providing babysitters for parents that have to work as it is about education. Notice how hard it is to be expelled from public school. Grades are irrelevant. This is very different from how post secondary education operates.
When compulsory education became a thing it met resistance from families that didn't wanna lose another pair of working hands on the farm. Babysitting is a 20th century post agrarian phenomenon.
The decision to invent a new special type of debt for student loans was a political decision made by our representatives. To the extent that the voters/taxpayers are responsible for anything: this is our shared mess.
I mean, the whole premise of representative democracy is that we’re responsible for the messes we send representatives to make. If we don’t want that responsibility, I guess we’d have to look at alternatives to representative democracy, but that’s a pretty big topic.
I’d probably pause loan repayments (no need to dig a deeper hole), make student loans dischargable via bankruptcy, wait a bit for the market to figure itself out. Once we’ve figured out what the value of each degree is, we can refund the difference to everyone who’s paid.
There’d be a bit of fudging as we’d need to adjust for inflation and the reputation of colleges fluctuate over time, but this seems like the fairest way to do it.
Do I believe in community, empathy, kindness toward my fellow human beings? Why, yes. Yes I do. Am I willing to pay a few bucks to put my money where my mouth yes. Why yes, yes I am.
What if someone else thinks that there are better (more kind, empathetic) uses of that money than funding someone's college? Why is "free college" the most kind and empathetic thing we can do with this money?
The unfortunate reality is that your kindness and empathy is a resource that is being exploited by unseen actors.
You are being taken for a ride and you feel good about it.
I absolutely support maximizing access to education and I'm willing to pay for it. I'm not willing to prop up a giant unsecured-loan grift that transfers financial risk onto those least able to bear it, while universities jack up their tuition to grab their slice of this new pie.
You are correct and I am making a conscious choice. I'm not being taken for a ride, I'm willingly offering one, even to those who would rob me blind given the chance.
Of course there are those who would exploit. But I'm not going to punish the well-deserving masses because of the unscrupulous few. It's a very small sacrifice I can make each year, which has the potential to positively impact the lives of thousands of families, and for generations to come.
Were I to refuse participation in such an opportunity to "protect" myself, I'd be no less selfish and greedy than those you warned me about.
We don't have the option to "refuse participation," so that's not really the point. We can feel better or worse about it, and you feel good about it, and that's great. I feel good for the individual students who benefit but do not feel good about the institutional corruption that this system represents.
If we were to finally reform the student loan process without any protections for the students themselves, it'd be a painful correction for everyone. But the current system has massive pain in the form of students taking on massive debt to go to places like the University of Phoenix, and they often don't even end up with a degree. Some of them do, of course, so maybe under the current system we end up better off as a whole. It's hard for me to know one way or the other.
But it is painfully obvious who the winners and losers are. The winners are the universities, debt collectors and loan servicing companies. The losers are some percentage of low-income students who get screwed and saddled with debt, the well-meaning taxpayers who fund the loan scheme, and the middle-class parents who pay ever-rising tuition that is fueled by loan money that they don't even qualify for.
How could a public repository of unverified skills that can be downloaded by casual users for a software tool that allows for un-gated access to private information, including financial information, possibly go wrong?
Microsoft releasing overly ambitious features with disastrous consequences.
Apple releasing features so unambitious it's hard to remember they're there.
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