I want that to be true, but judging from their financials, their big problem send to be just massive costs. They have more revenue than AMD despite their technical challenges, but they spend way way more to get it.

Part of it is not having a lot of fab customers yet having their own fabs, part of it is a whole bunch of Intel projects you've never heard of that will never amount to anything, but still cost lots of money. Part of it is essentially bribing vendors to favor Intel products even as amd makes more sense in a lot of those products.

Better engineering would certainly help, but they are just bleeding money all over the place largely owing to bad business bets.

I heard a story about how in world war 2 British and American generals got into an argument about the importance of a certain matter.

The British thought the matter needed to be tabled and the Americans were shocked and thought it must not be tabled.

Took some time for them to realize "tabling" an issue meant the exact opposite in America and UK

Since hearing that story the exact expression came up for me online once and on a work call once with British and American speakers.

No foreign language, but still.

I will confess that I think making windows UI appropriate for tablet or phone has to be more than a skinning exercise. E.g. software interacting with a mouse pointer unable to deal with more vague and multiple touches. UI elements needing different spacing for the form factor. A different scheme for switching full screen tasks and recognizing that traditional windowing isn't going to be very helpful in a smaller than 9" format.

Unfortunately windows basically favored touch at the expense of traditional desktop, when their home turf was very much not touch enabled.

I'd flip that around to say people shouldn't seek to be a fan of a "franchise". To be a fan of a franchise in general is to put a big sign on your back saying "I'm a sucker for whatever company owns the rights and I will spend money if you vaguely make it themed along the lines of the franchise".

Star Wars has been constantly retconning itself, from the beginning.

The first film was not really produced as "Episode IV", it was "Star Wars", a standalone film. It was a movie about a farmer orphan who goes on a swashbuckling space adventure with laser swords and space wizards. The good guys are unambiguously good, the bad guys are just bad guys. Everything is pretty much just as it seems, no secretly alive people, no secretly related people. Lucas may have had nebulous plans/hopes for follow ons, but they weren't baked and the overall concept is standalone.

Then ESB came along and retconned the Skywalker family, and produced cliffhangers knowing there'd be a third film. However, I'm pretty certain that "there is another Skywalker" didn't specifically have Leia in mind at the time, mainly because of how it's handled in the follow up.

Then ROTJ came along, and that little tease about 'there is another Skywalker?' just a kind of casual "oh yeah, that's Leia, and she's your sister, and we are going to do absolutely nothing serious with that, just consider the matter closed even though they were clearly setting up for... something with that".

A lot of things in the franchise have this feel. Like "Rei's provenance is mysterious and significant" swinging in the next film to "the parents are nobody, parents don't matter" and then swinging again in the last of that set of three to "just kidding, her provenance is very significant".

Well mine is pretty petty. Every time I start up my system I'm spammed by epic advertisements in the lower right. It's just so obnoxious, particularly since I'm on my couch and using my controller, so I have to pick up keyboard to dismiss those.

I'm so lazy I haven't bothered to investigate options to be fair, but broadly speaking I don't like how much it screams "look at me, look at me!" when I had no intention of interacting with their store/launcher at all that time.

Yeah, I strongly suspect there was a camp within Microsoft that was 100% pushing for 'rolling release' model for the OS versus another traditionalist camp that said there would be new major upgrades. Further, I bet rather than reconciling those perspectives, they just let both camps continue on under their own assumption, until eventually the traditionalists won out and got 'Windows 11', finalizing which way the company was going to actually go.

But alas, Windows 8 was the 'oh crap, tablets and phones might eat our lunch' release and the focus was throwing the desktop/laptop experience under the bus to try to cater to sensibilities of markets they were never going to capture. Also, to have their own 'app store' to try to wrestle a google/apple like revenue model for applications running on the platform.

Windows ME was actually some Windows 2000 bits glued onto Windows 98. That's why it was so terrible, it was kind of an afterthought when initial plans for '2k for everyone' got abandoned as they realized the home app ecosystem needed more compatibility workarounds than they were prepared to offer. So instead of completing the 2k based product line, they just '2k'ed up Win98 to satisfy their then-current release cadence and make sure home market had a 'current' OS to go with the 2k professional line.

Note that my three monitor setup with an nvidia GPU actually works better in Linux.

Mainly because when I plug the laptop in, I have to turn the third monitor off and on again to make it 'wake up', but in Linux, all three reliably start displaying.

Yeah, as much as Windows feels... subpar for my day to day vanilla, it really turns crappy with my corporate's mandated load. System is constantly chewing on some bloat from one of the various 'security', monitoring, or fix management solutions that they have on this.

Unfortunately, if a company pitches their extra crap as 'enhancing security', the execs just have to say yes, because to be an exec who ever said 'no' to more security is to put your job at peril. Even if three of that vendor's competitors already got their equivalent solutions into the load already...

I'll admit to some 'asterisk' to that.

So a developer evangelist said "because Windows 10 is the last version of Windows, we’re all still working on Windows 10". So the media ran with the most intuitive interpretation of that language and expanded on it and declared that Microsoft was basically changing to a rolling release model. Note that folks say "he meant latest, not last".

Meanwhile, Microsoft's formal lifecycle statement said, from the onset, that it wasn't going to be supported in 10 years.

However, Microsoft did nothing to clarify the rampant coverage. So I'm still on the side of "the popular impression among people was eternally supported rolling release". Just acknowledging that, formally, they did designate 10 the same way they had designated previous versions.