Professional software developer and all-around geek in Seattle.
I have no idea how you browse the internet with uBlock Origin. It’s literally unusable to me. It’s free, and you should always have it installed, it’s simply essential.
Because uBlock Origin doesn’t work on all platforms and browsers. Notably, it doesn’t work with Apple’s plugin system, so anyone using Safari or an iOS device cannot use it.
Try chatgpt 4 premium. I have heard it automatically auto correct itself with code.
I regularly use gpt-4 for coding since it’s the backend behind github copilot, and my company has approved use of copilot (and I have copilot plugins installed for vscode and vs2022). It’s useful for autocompleting boilerplate code, but gets things wrong all the time about anything more complicated.
That’s a good point, but I’m fairly sure culture plays a part as well. It’s likely some combination.
Yep. Musk is basing his idea about having an “everything app” on WeChat’s success in China, which basically does what he’s talking about. The problem is that he doesn’t seem to understand that there are cultural differences at play between Chinese users and western users that prevent mass-adoption of a single app to do everything in the west, and that WeChat already exists and isn’t popular in the west at all.
ChatGPT and Bard?
Doubtful, considering ChatGPT has only been public since late last year, and Bard’s even newer. I also really hope those aren’t a large factor, since most coding examples I’ve seen from ChatGPT only deal with questions of a really rudimentary nature and have given useless or wrong information about anything more nuanced or complicated.
High interest in something isn’t the same as bubble. Where’s the overvalued assets that are out of touch with reality? The guy quoted in the article even referenced Google losing value after the lackluster launch of Bard, which is kind of the opposite of a bubble. The dotcom bubble wasn’t a bubble because everyone was talking about the Internet… it was a bubble because companies were severely overvalued for putting literally anything on the web without having functional business models. The businesses were the bubble, not the Internet.
Could AI become a bubble? Possibly. But we’re nowhere near anything like that at this point in time. It’s just got mindshare, not overvalued assets.
The super secret conference room is a maybe. Factories though? If you’re going to be wiring up factory machines, you can easily just add one more cable for ethernet and it’d probably be cheaper and just as secure. We’d have to be talking about machines/devices that are in a large warehouse-like space and frequently moved around (thus requiring wireless networking) and that require either the security or bandwidth benefits of Li-Fi (most don’t). That limits the applications significantly.
Kinda curious what the actual use cases for this are. It’s not going to replace consumer wi-fi, since walls exist. And we already have light-based transmission within cables (fiber-optic networking). So, is this supposed to provide fast networking to locations where installing fiber isn’t feasible? What’s the effective range on this?
It’s the first change to the Office default font in more than 15 years.
Man, I remember the change to Calibri, and now I feel really old.
This is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve seen lately. I assume whoever is behind this is relatively new to the Internet, because the “small web” has been how the Internet has worked for decades now. We’ve been able to have our own web presence nearly since the web was invented in the early 90s, and affordable self-hosting has been available since the late 90s. Furthermore, the claims on that site that “all our developer tools and technical infrastructure comes from Big Tech and the Big Web” is so divorced from reality it’s astounding. The Internet largely relies on open source software and frameworks that have been developed over decades by volunteers.
If you want to have your own “small web” presence on the Internet, there’s nothing that’s stopping you. You could’ve set that up a long, long time ago using open-source software on cheap hosting providers. The problem with the so-called “small web” is that you usually also want to interact with other people when online, and that’s why things have gotten centralized over the years.
There are larger macroeconomic issues at play here which are a big contributor to it. High inflation and an uncertain US economic situation has caused tech companies (as well as others) to lay off people and is making it harder for startups and smaller companies to raise capital to keep the lights on. So yes, there is something bigger going on that is indirectly causing all of this.
Your first mistake is assuming that Elon Musk uses any kind of logic.
Yep, you’re absolutely right. I think my main point is that switching to only offering a cloud-streamed OS as their only offering would kill off a massive market where they have market dominance (enterprise desktops). It doesn’t make business sense for them to leave that market. If the demands of that market change, then you’re right – they’re going to do whatever is most profitable. But we’re nowhere near there yet.
Perhaps I’ve just read too many Microsoft business documents (I used to work for them years ago), but that’s not how I interpret that slide. It looks more to me like they want to “cloud-ify” functionality that could be used either from a desktop install or from a cloud streamed version. The key phrase in that slide to me is “Use the power of the cloud and client to enable improved AI-powered services and full roaming of people’s digital experience”.
That kind of fits with what they’ve been doing by moving Windows login to use a Microsoft Account by default (which I hate, btw – I’m one of those local account people), as well as integration of OneDrive as default file save location. It’s the same kind of thing Apple’s been doing with macOS for the past few years, adding iCloud integration with everything. If you move that functionality for desktop installs to mostly be cloud-based, it also allows you to create a more viable cloud-only offering. But it doesn’t mean there’s a reason to stop selling a desktop-installable version.
Microsoft is still a business, and they’d lose a ton of market-share by killing off desktop installs, especially in the enterprise sector, which is their bread and butter. They’re looking to expand into other markets, not kill off large existing ones.
And even if an average user gets things installed and running, they’re going to run into graphical issues and lack of polish that pretty much every Linux DE and application has. Stuff like dialog boxes opening up that are too big to fit on a smaller-resolution screen; inconsistent use of widgets, fonts, and icons; help strings being misspelled or completely missing; applications that look wildly different from each other just because they use different GUI frameworks; etc.
Linux “just works” in the loosest sense possible, and I say this as someone who has been using Linux for many years. It’s certainly much better than it used to be in the early 2000s, but it continues to lack the design polish and cohesion of Windows and macOS, and that makes it rather off-putting for an average person to use.
I think it’s basically the same idea as Citrix. They’re targeting the same market, anyway, as far as I understand. I assume they each have their own pros and cons.
That’s a click-baity headline that doesn’t really match the content of the article. Microsoft isn’t going to be replacing desktop Windows installations with cloud installations, and nowhere in the article does it suggest it is. Many, many businesses require Windows installed on the desktop (and no, many of those can’t switch to Linux, because the software they use is usually Windows-only). The article doesn’t dig into who is currently using Windows 365 to stream the OS, but I would assume it’s companies that are running computer kiosks, point-of-sale systems, or systems that would otherwise be extremely locked-down (like bank teller systems). Businesses that need system flexibility and resource-intensive applications aren’t going to be using a cloud-based OS. Pretty-much any business that does engineering or creative work falls into that bucket.
My interpretation of the article is that they want to extend cloud-based Windows to other users that have extremely lightweight requirements. The biggest market I see is the education market, where you generally want to provide students with very locked down functionality. The article mentions competition with Chromebooks, which is also huge in the education space. I could see this as a competitor to an iPad/tablet too, for those who mostly do browsing, email, or lightweight web-based MS Office tasks and want to have a keyboard and mouse.
TL;DR: People are wildly misinterpreting this article, and there isn’t going to be any kind of mass exodus to Linux because of Microsoft investing in Windows 365. Microsoft isn’t going to stop selling installable copies of Windows.
Not really. There’s something called Firefox available and it’s published by Mozilla, but Mozilla has to deal with Apple’s restrictions on web browsers by using the webkit rendering engine and Apple’s proprietary plugin system. So it’s not real Firefox.