Mentions Microsoft

And you try telling the kids of today that…

That first version only had 14 commands. They included: PRINT, IF and THEN, and, the soon-to-be infamous GOTO. Thanks to GOTO, the famous Dutch computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra said, "It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: As potential programmers, they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."

With GOTO, it was all too easy for would-be programmers to write what would become known as spaghetti code -- a tangled mess of source code that was almost impossible to understand or debug. Yes, BASIC was easy to write simple programs in, but it was awful for writing anything complex.

Still, the keyword was "easy." So, early developers kept using BASIC and porting it to one computer after another. 

Then, as the years rolled by, another paradigm for computing power emerged: The PC. In 1975, instead of sharing computers, you could have one of your very own with all the power of a 2MHz Intel 8080 processor.

Two young men, Paul Allen, and Bill Gates, proposed to the maker of the first PC, Ed Roberts' Altair 8800, that they port BASIC to his computer. He agreed, and shortly thereafter, they founded Micro-Soft. You know it better as Microsoft.

Yes, that's right. Without BASIC, you're not running Windows today. At about the same time, Steve Wozniak was working on porting BASIC to the first Apple computer, the Apple I. BASIC was essential for Apple's early growth as well.

BASIC also became a staple in home computers like the Atari 400, Commodore 64, and TRS-80. It was featured prominently in early computer magazines, where readers could find and then type in BASIC code all by themselves. Or, you could pay real money and get a cassette tape with such popular games as Lunar Lander.

Then, when IBM came out with its first PC, Gates and Allen were ready to take advantage of this new platform. As IBM President of Entry Systems, Don Estridge, said, "Microsoft BASIC had hundreds of thousands of users around the world. How are you going to argue with that?"

Microsoft is starting to enable ads inside the Start menu on Windows 11 for all users. After testing these briefly with Windows Insiders earlier this month, Microsoft has started to distribute update KB5036980 to Windows 11 users this week, which includes “recommendations” for apps from the Microsoft Store in the Start menu.

“The Recommended section of the Start menu will show some Microsoft Store apps,” says Microsoft in the update notes of its latest public Windows 11 release. “These apps come from a small set of curated developers.” The ads are designed to help Windows 11 users discover more apps, but will largely benefit the developers that Microsoft is trying to tempt into building more Windows apps.

America’s military-industrial complex has been rapidly expanding from the Capital Beltway to Silicon Valley. Although much of the Pentagon’s budget is spent on conventional weapons systems, the Defense Department has increasingly sought to adopt AI-enabled systems. Big tech companies, venture capital, and private equity firms benefit from multi-billion dollar Defense contracts, and smaller defense tech startups that “move fast and break things” also receive increased Defense funding. This report illustrates how a growing portion of the Defense Department’s spending is going to large, well-known tech firms, including some of the most highly valued corporations in the world.

Given the often-classified nature of large defense and intelligence contracts, a lack of transparency makes it difficult to discern the true amount of U.S. spending diverted to Big Tech. Yet, research reveals that the amount is substantial, and growing. According to the nonprofit research organization Tech Inquiry, three of the world’s biggest tech corporations were awarded approximately $28 billion from 2018 to 2022, including Microsoft ($13.5 billion), Amazon ($10.2 billion), and Alphabet, which is Google’s parent company ($4.3 billion). This paper found that the top five contracts to major tech firms between 2019 and 2022 had contract ceilings totaling at least $53 billion combined.

From 2021 through 2023, venture capital firms reportedly pumped nearly $100 billion into defense tech startup companies — an amount 40 percent higher than the previous seven years combined. This report examines how Silicon Valley startups, big tech, and venture capital who benefit from classified Defense contracts will create costly, high-tech defense products that are ineffective, unpredictable, and unsafe – all on the American taxpayer’s dime.

A good explainer:

In 2017, the body responsible for standardizing web browser technologies, W3C, introduced Encrypted Media Extensions (EME)—thus bringing with it the end of competitive indie web browsers.

No longer is it possible to build your own web browser capable of consuming some of the most popular content on the web. Websites like Netflix, Hulu, HBO, and others require copyright content protection which is only accessible through browser vendors who have license agreements with large corporations.

[…]

These roadblocks were primarily introduced to appease the media industry.

[…]

Since the introduction of EME to web standards, the ability for new browsers to compete has become restricted by gatekeepers, which goes against the promises of the platform.

When we simplify complex systems, we destroy them, and the devastating consequences sometimes aren’t obvious until it’s too late.

That impulse to scour away the messiness that makes life resilient is what many conservation biologists call the “pathology of command and control.” Today, the same drive to centralize, control and extract has driven the internet to the same fate as the ravaged forests.

The internet’s 2010s, its boom years, may have been the first glorious harvest that exhausted a one-time bonanza of diversity. The complex web of human interactions that thrived on the internet’s initial technological diversity is now corralled into globe-spanning data-extraction engines making huge fortunes for a tiny few.

Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within.

[…]

Up close, internet concentration seems too intricate to untangle; from far away, it seems too difficult to deal with. But what if we thought of the internet not as a doomsday “hyperobject,” but as a damaged and struggling ecosystem facing destruction? What if we looked at it not with helpless horror at the eldritch encroachment of its current controllers, but with compassion, constructiveness and hope? 

Now, if you read your contract and EULA closely, you might have noticed, as Office Watch did, that Microsoft promised Office 2019 and Office 2016 would have support for another two years. Now, they find "that they have no guarantee that they can connect to Microsoft’s own services for two years less than what they paid for."

Oh, and by the way, there will be no Extended Security Update (ESU) program. Your Office 2016 and 2019's lifespan is now up in the air.

Instead, Microsoft recommends…, well, go ahead and guess what it recommends.

Yes, that's right, Microsoft suggests you "upgrade" to Microsoft 365 E3. For a mere $36 a month, you can still have a Microsoft 365 app for your desktop. If you can live with a pure web-play take on Office, you can subscribe to Office 365 E3 for $23 a month.