#history of Joel #Spolsky at #Microsoft, as he tells it, anyway. “Bill doesn’t really want to review your spec, he just wants to make sure you’ve got it under control. His standard M.O. is to ask harder and harder questions until you admit that you don’t know, and then he can yell at you for being unprepared. Nobody was really sure what happens if you answer the hardest question he can come up with because it’s never happened before.”
on 02026-08-20#Firefox still supports #uBlock Origin, but #Microsoft Edge is dropping support for it, by following #Google in dropping support for Manifest V2.
on 02026-08-18getting the CPU temperature is hard on #Microsoft Windows
on 02026-05-27#history of #Microsoft and #IBM and their respective management structures, and the TAB key for moving between fields in OS/2.
on 02026-05-05104093 people laid off from big tech companies so far in 02026 in 254 #layoffs, from #Meta, #Microsoft, #Amazon, and #Oracle. Author uses "existential threat" in a way that makes it clear she does not know what it means.
on 02026-04-23summary and aftermath of #Microsoft nuking #VeraCrypt and #WireGuard
on 02026-04-10announcement of the #WireGuard #Microsoft reprieve
on 02026-04-10#WireGuard apparently got a reprieve from #Microsoft. Discussion.
on 02026-04-10this guy, "Mark K", says he can’t put a photo of his face on his #Microsoft account because it gets flagged as child pornography by #PhotoDNA. #privacy
on 02026-04-09LibreOffice developer Mike Kaganski got his account locked by #Microsoft last year for trying to post a message to the mailing list. His appeals were rejected.
on 02026-04-08discussion of #Microsoft nuking #VeraCrypt and #WireGuard. #privacy #human-rights
on 02026-04-08Scott Hanselman (#Microsoft VP) claiming #Microsoft nuked #VeraCrypt and #WireGuard by accident. #privacy #human-rights
on 02026-04-08Scott Hanselman (#Microsoft VP) claiming #Microsoft nuked #VeraCrypt and #WireGuard by accident. #privacy #human-rights
on 02026-04-08the announcement of #Microsoft nuking essential #security software #VeraCrypt. #privacy #human-rights
on 02026-04-08discussion on the new #Microsoft revocation of #VeraCrypt and #WireGuard signing keys, possibly in an attack on #privacy and #human-rights.
on 02026-04-08archive of <https://www.404media.co/microsoft-abruptly-terminates-veracrypt-account-halting-windows-updates/>: #Microsoft terminates the signing accounts of #VeraCrypt and #WireGuard, essential #encryption #security systems for Microsoft Windows. This prevents any future versions of the software from being installed, but does not disable existing installs, until July: “Users who have enabled system encryption with VeraCrypt may face boot issues after July 2026 because Microsoft will revoke the [certificate authority] that was used to sign the VeraCrypt bootloader.” #privacy #human-rights
on 02026-04-08supposedly everyone in Seattle hates #AI because #Amazon and #Microsoft have screwed up their handling of it
on 02025-12-03#Zig is moving from #GitHub to #Codeberg because #Microsoft. “Putting aside GitHub’s relationship with ICE, it’s abundantly clear that the talented folks who used to work on the product have moved on to bigger and better things, with the remaining losers eager to inflict some kind of bloated, buggy JavaScript framework on us in the name of progress. Stuff that used to be snappy is now sluggish and often entirely broken.”
on 02025-11-26#tutorial #video says #Microsoft Office 365 Excel now supports Python; type =py in a cell and then you can use Pandas functions as pd.whatever, with an xl("B3") function to read cell B3. Seaborn is sns.
on 02025-09-29#Microsoft blocks #Azure’s use by #Israel’s #IDF to spy on Palestinians: “Tech firm ends military unit’s access to AI and data services after Guardian reveals secret spy project”; Unit 8200 had 8000 terabytes (8 petabytes) of captured phone calls in a Netherlands Azure data center. “Within days of the Guardian publishing the investigation, Unit 8200 appears to have swiftly moved the surveillance data out of the country. (...) Intelligence sources said Unit 8200 planned to transfer the data to the Amazon Web Services cloud platform.” #news #politics
on 02025-09-28Andi McClure complaining about #Microsoft shoving #Copilot down her throat. Other people hate it too. #AI #politics
on 02025-09-06#Microsoft has open-sourced Microsoft #BASIC for the #6502. #retrocomputing
on 02025-09-03tens of billions of US$ spending on #AI in 02024 by #Amazon, #Google, and #Microsoft
on 02025-08-27#video by a guy who moved from #Microsoft Windows to Linux a year ago and has found it boring and predictable and easy to use. The video is 100% talking-head filler occasionally overlaid with meme images or intercut with stock footage.
on 02025-07-25#Secure-Boot stops working on #Linux in September because #Microsoft’s signature on "shim" expires
on 02025-07-20#Microsoft has locked the International Criminal Court (#ICC), including Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan, out of their email because of #Trump #sanctions #politics over #Israel.
on 02025-05-20#Sky #news propaganda #video opposing #solar #photovoltaic #energy. Shows the nameplate of a house-sized Mitsubishi Hitachi hydrogen-cooled steam turbine generator (310RK09-776-1) producing 3-phase 20kV at 50Hz and what looks like 17984 amps, saying it produces 570–580MW, though my calculation gives 360MW from those numbers. Shows a real-time power price of [AU?]$235, presumably per MWh, attributing the high price to a cold snap in Victoria. Says 1200 tonnes of cheap brown coal per hour produces 1140 megawatts electric, which works out to 3.4MJ/kg, which would be about 15% efficiency, which seems improbably low. “[In the past] you were seeing wholesale prices around (...) $20–40/MWh”, says a guy who’s been working in the field for only 30 years; that also seems improbably low. “10 Australian coal-fired power stations closed in the last decade. There are 15 still running, but most are slated to close in the next decade.” 62% of electric generation on #Australia’s main grid is from fossil fuels, the other 38% from renewables. At 7'51”, it profiles Belinda Jones, a pensioner who’s paying AU$1073.31 per month (US$697/month) because she’s paying AU$0.191/kWh for 3410kWh (AU$651, becoming AU$716.63 after GST) and AU$0.216 for 2700kWh (AU$582, AU$640.10 after GST), from which subsidies are deducted. That implies her house is averaging 8400 watts! Possibly in part because she’s using resistive space heaters instead of heat pumps, but more likely it’s not actually a one-month bill — yes, in fact, at 9'13” we see it’s for 92 days, but she’s still averaging 2800 watts around the clock. (The average comes out to 11.4¢/kWh, which is very cheap by retail standards.) Also, we see at 9'22” that the previous bill was only AU$457.45. A different power bill shown at 45'04” shows someone paying $415 with time-of-day billing — also for 92 days. “Energy scarcity emerges everywhere #wind and solar become the dominant form of electrical generation.” Shows the #LNG export gas terminal at Gladston, the Petra Nova #carbon-capture pilot plant in Houston, and a US$21B #nuclear power plant in Georgia, the second to be built in the #USA in the last 30 years. #Microsoft has signed a deal to reopen #Three-Mile-Island. #politics Viper-7 reports paying 27.56-67.44c/kWh: Peak time (4:00pm to 7:59pm): 67.44c per kWh; Shoulder time (7:00am to 3:59pm, 8:00pm to 9:59pm): 29.65c per kWh; else 27.56c per kWh, including GST.
on 02024-11-27disquieting #Microsoft #censorship news about the #Gaza war: “Palestinians calling home to Gaza on #Skype have had their digital lives destroyed, after Microsoft closed their email accounts without warning. BBC News has spoken to 20 Palestinians living abroad who say Microsoft, which owns the voice and video chat app, kicked them out of their accounts. The total number affected is thought to be much higher. In some cases, these email accounts are more than 15 years old and the users have no way to retrieve emails, contacts or memories.”
on 02024-07-11#video on a #Microsoft Windows enthusiast moving to Linux at last because he’s “sick of this”. He was impressed that Linux Mint just worked out of the box on his NVIDIA Optimus Alienware laptop. He uses Inkscape, KiCad, and DaVinci Resolve, and plays games, and they all worked. But the video is almost entirely just a bunch of screenshots with the Ken Burns Effect. He does include a little bit of footage from Helldivers II. Shows Steam statistics and mentions Linux now has 1.9% market share to MacOS’s 1.35%. But he’s sticking with Microsoft Windows 10 for now.
on 02024-05-31#Microsoft currently supports #dotnet core on #Debian 10, 11, and 12, and has instructions for installing from their servers
on 02024-05-11#Microsoft provides a script to install #dotnet core on #Debian, and also .debs and tarballs
on 02024-05-11Rumor has it that #Lennart #Poettering is now an employee of #Microsoft
on 02023-07-13#Microsoft #SQL Server 2022 supports #embedded-SQL in not just C and COBOL but #MUMPS
on 02023-06-24report of #Microsoft making #Edge into #malware that sends them every image you view so they can substitute a falsified “superresolution” version
on 02023-06-12discussion of #Microsoft installing #malware with #Edge
on 02023-06-12#Argentina #politics put our government’s email directly into #Microsoft’s hands
on 02017-03-11#Microsoft researchers catch up in English to Andrew Ng’s team’s achievement almost a year ago, getting speech recognition better than human level. #AI
on 02016-10-19Explanation of the #Microsoft Windows RT signed policy #security vulnerability that allows jailbreaking those devices to run #free-software
on 02016-08-12Tandy Trower writes the #history of the #Microsoft Windows releases that he managed, which were 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0.
on 02016-04-16Discussion of #privacy issues in #Microsoft Windows version 10. Apparently Microsoft isn’t actually uploading your disk contents to their servers to scan them for “pirated” files yet.
on 02015-08-23#Microsoft Windows 10 sends parents a weekly activity report on their kids’ computer use. #privacy #humanrights
on 02015-08-10