The problem is people don't trust this particular President, not that a President expects the executive agencies he is in charge of to do what they are told. That is the primary function of the President, to control and lead the executive branch. Rather than have a king with absolute authority, the President is a king with absolute authority over the execution of the law, appointment of justices in the highest court, and the ability to check congress by vetoing their laws.
The purpose of the President isn't to charge congress with making the changes people want to legislation, that is just what politicians have to promise to do in order to get elected, the purpose of the President is to command the executive and it's varied agencies. We might not approve of the orders this President is giving but we shouldn't confuse that in a way that cripples the next President from being able to run the executive.
On the other hand, the role of the federal government changed drastically after the civil war. There is nothing within the original purpose of the federal government that would require an FBI or federal laws you and I could break and go to prison for or all these government agencies. The federal government is supposed to provide a central currency, the military forces that are by nature multi-state (Navy, Air Force), and to police the state governments. The federal government isn't even supposed to have a standing army let alone additional military agencies like the NSA, CIA, and Homeland Security. These were created by acts of congress but its kind of a stretch to create these sort of entities without constitutional amendment.
Informative if accurate. Hopefully someone moderates that way.
The GP was likely making a redundant snarky remark about there being a strong incentive to cheat both in the West and in China without details on the Chinese pressures. Based on your details there is even greater incentive to cheat in China although it also remains true that there is a great deal of incentive in the West as well.
Even worse than incentive to outright fake data is incentive to be selective about researched topics and slant in the direction of research not to mention slant in the conclusions and summaries of papers. For example, a conclusion that chemical x is indeed harmful because data showed any sort of potential harm and completely disregarding the relative potential harm vs other used substances either related and commonly used or generally considered low risk. When there is a very small number of large players funding an area of research an extreme bias can be presented with any search on the safety of chemical x possibly returning nothing but dozens of negative seeming papers all technically true and seeming to provide an overwhelming mountain of negative evidence which is largely vapor.
While it is nice for the journal to effectively run on auto-pilot in that way it seems like a poor plan overall for peer review. Obviously the person submitting the article will be most familiar with those working on the most related research but that is just setting dishonesty as low hanging fruit tempting frustrated researchers to compromise their integrity.
Right, if you are doing private sector research it is basically the same pressure but all your grants come from a single source. There is a extreme bias in this case which compromises the integrity of your results but it is at least partially tempered by the fact that in general the private sector won't tolerate results that can't be turned into solutions which actually work indefinitely.
Do you work as a researcher? This is technically true at most places but in reality being able to afford and justify spending money on you ultimately depends on grants. Also, there are often others working under a researcher on various projects doing research, computation, administering the systems and if funding goes away those people will all be out of the job. Unless they are a sociopath a researcher does feel some level of responsibility for those people.
Plasma were beautiful, during that generation of tech I was a big plasma fan. Sadly they have pretty severe burn-in issues and ridiculous power consumption. BTW if you don't know already if your TV does 1080i it probably has a 720p mode which is actually superior resolution to 1080i. 1080i was really just a way to be able to label TV's as 1080 when they weren't.
"Similarly for audio, there is dynamic range compression, which is only good if you need to keep your TV really quiet for others to sleep - not for everyday use. Yes, movies get loud and soft at times without it. It's supposed to."
I have to disagree with you and most audiophiles here. I have a powerful center channel on my THX certified and installed surround system and there are still movies that you can't turn up enough that dialog can be heard clearly at all points without shaking the walls. This isn't just my subjective analysis, this is my decibel meter agreeing that the dialog is at range of normal human speech and the explosions are close to or pushing the limit where they can damage human hearing and that is with an EQ giving a couple decibels of boost to the speech range.
The gun shots don't need to be as loud as actual gunshots and the whispers so quiet you actually have to strain to hear them to give an immersive and theatrical effect in the film. This is just something being done because they can and I believe I speak for almost the entire movie watching population when I say we wish they'd cut it out.
I fail to see why this is cruel or dictatish (kings english), not that I disagree those terms apply to Iran.
IP is a completely artificial concept, there is no such thing as rights here. There is no such thing as "theft of another's work" just infringement of these artificial grants to stimulate creativity. It makes perfect sense that a government wouldn't extend the grant to limit itself allowing creative people to profit from their work while allowing the government to utilize the best the citizenry has produced to govern as well as possible. If the US did the same it would save taxpayers billions, if not trillions of dollars.
It seems like it would be much more newsworthy when a government limits itself with copyright or the equivalent thereof.
Actually he apparently had the fixings for some DIY improvised explosives. If the nuttball didn't have the guns he would have gone with the bomb option which would have had a much higher death toll. Good luck outlawing everything that can be used to make a bomb.
I don't know really. It would probably depend on your specific setup. Some things are definitely more visible on my projected display like compression artifacts. The latest YIFFY rips that everyone loves and look just fine on a 42" screen look terrible projected out with obvious pixilation. That is purely the size of the display, the improved blending and softer edges of projection would otherwise make the technology more resistant to that kind of thing otherwise.
In general I agree with your conclusion though. I expect a big boost to 4k and not as much to 8k. But there are probably others who need the 8k for maximum viewing experience. They are definitely pushing pixels because of the boost from SD to HD sales but regardless of motivation I'd like to see them keep pushing that train until there is no benefit to pushing it further with even the largest consumer screens displaying passive 3D (resolution cut in half per eye) all the way down to perfect viewing in tiny HMD applications. Not because I personally need a resolution that high but because I want everyone to have a high enough resolution for their use case and want all my source material to be at a high enough resolution for whatever I might find myself doing with it in the future.
Most people do that, it's called a living room. We like a relaxing and subdued light level in our living room anyway and with a decently bright lamp in the projector this works great. Does it fade in the day vs the night? A bit, but it hardly compares with the sharp glare and reflections on most screens.
It isn't for everyone. I love movies and I have a large enough room that there is a 12ft viewing distance in the living room and 20ft from the kitchen which is open concept and that large screen fits nicely with that. I also have a full THX certified surround system to go with it and am extremely frustrated by the lack of good surround audio in streaming services. At about $2500 all in for both and a decent screen the entire setup cost less than many 42" TV's and seems quite reasonable to me. YMMV. For others no matter how bright projection won't ever be the answer. They are used to those super sharp images of modern TV's and projection of the same brightness and resolution, depicting the same level of actual detail, will always have less jarring and smoother blending at the edges.
People can make up their own mind about anything but random pixilation, motion tearing, time adjustment (sudden pause and then fast forward), ghosting, etc are objectively bad things that distract the viewer from what they are watching.
The problem is that they use specially produced content and image slideshows to demo the TV's in the showroom so the hyper-real soap opera effect is "looks like 4k" to many people. For the most part none of these sets have a refresh low enough to cause ghosting without these options and they are just there to oversharpen images to create a more stark visible difference with 4k sets in demo mode. It's a sales trick, nothing more. There is no objective advantage to running your TV with these options on.
There are jobs that don't suck but this is one of those myths that floats around and makes people feel dissatisfied thinking the grass should be greener. If people genuinely loved their jobs companies would make you pay to get to do it rather than pay you for doing it. That is how life works.
Whatever your job satisfaction level, your satisfaction level with your free time, family, and friends is going to be higher so there is plenty of reason to be happier about the weekend and have some level of reduced satisfaction about it ending and having to go back to work without being miserable in your job.
If your dad ends up with a better image it is well worth it. There is nothing worse than laying out the cash for a shiny new 4k TV and secretly feeling like your image is crap when you get it home and the new toy buzz wears off.
From what you describe I'd also particularly check anything related to sharpness/noise and anything you'd make a reasonable guess could be a marketing term for an algorithm playing with the same. Also trying all the overarching preset options and turning them off as well, a movie or cinema setting is sometimes a shortcut to a good image with sports or gaming settings being overly brightened with motion compensation and sharpening. I'd definitely try tweaking in the opposite direction of what is expected as well, you'd expect something for "Noise Reduction" to if anything blur your image but sometimes it doesn't work that way or would work that way but the internal hardware just isn't fast enough to keep up with applying the filter on fast moving images.
You also might check the net for a set of options from someone else who has done the work for you. You can usually ignore the color/brightness/contrast rabbit hole on these since they will only be applicable to the specific set they adjusted and in the viewing conditions where adjusted and good general settings are generally applied out of the box.
Also, there is the issue of DRM in 4k sets. Either the set or the sending box will downsample a stream if they don't both support the right HDCP levels. How to check this in practice depends on both devices but one shortcut is often to check Netflix and see if the Netflix titles which should support 4k have the little logo indicating 4k.
You are right, for most screen sizes and viewing distances a high quality 720p stream is going to look just fine and higher resolution isn't actually needed so your 720p might look just as good as his 4k but his 4k set shouldn't look like crap either. If all else fails and it is just some poorly spec'd low refresh rate off brand that can't be salvaged, get him to return it and replace with a new Samsung quantum dot display with at least 120hz native refresh. LG has a slightly better technology for black levels but the samsungs still have fantastic blacks, the best color on the market, and are a fraction of the price. No, I have no affiliation with Samsung it's just the truth. You'll still have to fix the out of the box settings though.
I'm a 3D fan so I've been buying 120hz+ (real 120hz not the overinflated software enhancement specs) for the last several sets anyway. That hasn't stopped manufacturers from enabling motion compensation or backdoor enabling with things like HDR if you switch those on. Reality doesn't matter much, oversharpened images on specially made demo reels in Nebraska furniture mart and best buy sell TV's.
Given that the actual content is 30fps or less even 60Hz (60 updates per second) is refreshing the screen twice as often as the content changes. Of course, you can update as often as you like and it will never matter if the pixel response time isn't fast enough to keep up with it and nobody likes to publish their response times in the consumer market unless it is a gaming display.
Honestly, almost everything we watch is compressed and the compression/source quality tends to make a bigger difference than the resolution in image quality at that point.
That said, some of us use projectors and 4k, even 8k would make a huge difference in the quality of my 120" screen in the living room.
For your father's sake. There are a couple of features, like HDR and other "motion compensation" features, these turn on a soap opera like look which looks super realistic and heavily oversharpened. Turn this crap off, it's what causes the pixilation and edge tearing... it doesn't fix motion, it causes terrible motion related artifacts and it is enabled on every new TV out of the box. There are probably a lot of things that could be tweaked or tuned in the set but many of them will turn this crap back on even when it is explicitly disabled so learn to recognize that oversharpened overly "real" looking soap opera image and turn anything that brings it back off.
There is probably a great picture hiding in there.
What is dumb is motion compensation algorithms that do the opposite, they cause speed shifting and tearing with fast motion and on slow motion cause the soap opera effect which gives ridiculously oversharpened images. They put this crap out in 4k sets by default across the board and they'll do it again in 8k. As long as they do this nobody is going to have a truly enjoyable viewing experience... and there is certainly nothing in the settings indicating you should turn it off. Maybe the reason why is they want people to be somewhat dissatisfied with their current device so they'll be quick to upgrade on the next round.
"They HAD to try and be the next Apple and lock everything down and deny any and all meaningful user choice or customization"
I think you meant Apple had to be the next M$ when they entered the phone market. Lock-out, intentional incompatibility, and lack of user choice are patented by Microsoft and merely licensed by Apple.
"Please refrain from speaking about things you clearly know nothing about."
Sorry armchair pro. Go back to fantasy land.
"This may be true for small shops where the IT force is one person with zero automation. But anything enterprise these days is automated to a large degree."
LOL Sounds like you are drinking the koolaid big time. Let me guess, you are a dev? I hate to break it to you, automation frameworks don't actually deliver on their promises for one very simple reason, execution across the environment is the smallest time delay in a real environment. Admins already have scripts and solutions in enterprise that could rapidly deploy patches and have no trouble whipping something up to make a change across hundreds of systems even without an automation framework. Also, you are definitely delusional if you think "anything enterprise these days is automated to a large degree" if you are implying a fully deployed and comprehensive automations infrastructure and not the cobbled together scripts of administrators and some kind of framework like openview.
An enterprise environment consists of not one but many companies all with different authorization chains and differing procedures, even different ticketing systems and everything silo'd all to hell. Many of those pieces are and always will be one person with zero automation infrastructure but all the overhead of a change approval process that must go through multiple committees and multiple sub environments. The people who have to install them are usually not one person, usually it is a small team responsible for hundreds or even thousands of servers running many applications.
"As noted elsewhere in this topic, They have nearly 2k employees world-wide. They can serve queries at pace with no delay."
What does serving queries have to do with anything? It's easy to serve boatloads of requests for a single application, there are maybe 5-6 server roles each horizontally scaled across a large count of individual members. In fact, it is so easy to handle the operational issues that go along with that the operational team who handles it will be responsible for another 20-50 unrelated applications and trimmed down to the number of people it takes to handle the operational issues on a day-to-day basis leaving zero bandwidth for tasks that actually require investing time.
But hey, you just go off and live in your fantasy land where large enterprise environments are actually secure and fully patched. That is the kind of bullshit you say and pretend at work when it's your job but if you think it actually reflects reality at ANY fortune 500 OR government agency you are completely delusional.
Do you know what automations frameworks did for this process? Instead of writing a 5min quick and dirty script you can run and then quickly run through any edge cases that went wrong you now have to formally develop and debug a module to coding standards (hours for even the simplest module), write test cases (just as long again, testing frameworks double bugs, not reduce them), run the entire thing through formal approval process.... depending on what scale it is applicable to that could be one change committee, two, or could require an individual sign-off from one or dozens of departments, you might even had to silo your automations framework up in a way that lets you apply it group-by-group as you get the approvals or the different groups might all be silo'd and have to write their own modules that do the same thing. Finally you get to actually run your module and find all the bugs weeks later, for the first time. The problems and bugs are far far more likely in your module logic than the actual patch. And you know what, all that siloing and overhead? That is the best case scenerio because if the enterprise didn't have all that overhead, you could actually break hundreds or even thousands of systems in a single shot with your automations framework.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is people don't trust this particular President, not that a President expects the executive agencies he is in charge of to do what they are told. That is the primary function of the President, to control and lead the executive branch. Rather than have a king with absolute authority, the President is a king with absolute authority over the execution of the law, appointment of justices in the highest court, and the ability to check congress by vetoing their laws.
The purpose of the President isn't to charge congress with making the changes people want to legislation, that is just what politicians have to promise to do in order to get elected, the purpose of the President is to command the executive and it's varied agencies. We might not approve of the orders this President is giving but we shouldn't confuse that in a way that cripples the next President from being able to run the executive.
On the other hand, the role of the federal government changed drastically after the civil war. There is nothing within the original purpose of the federal government that would require an FBI or federal laws you and I could break and go to prison for or all these government agencies. The federal government is supposed to provide a central currency, the military forces that are by nature multi-state (Navy, Air Force), and to police the state governments. The federal government isn't even supposed to have a standing army let alone additional military agencies like the NSA, CIA, and Homeland Security. These were created by acts of congress but its kind of a stretch to create these sort of entities without constitutional amendment.
Informative if accurate. Hopefully someone moderates that way.
The GP was likely making a redundant snarky remark about there being a strong incentive to cheat both in the West and in China without details on the Chinese pressures. Based on your details there is even greater incentive to cheat in China although it also remains true that there is a great deal of incentive in the West as well.
Even worse than incentive to outright fake data is incentive to be selective about researched topics and slant in the direction of research not to mention slant in the conclusions and summaries of papers. For example, a conclusion that chemical x is indeed harmful because data showed any sort of potential harm and completely disregarding the relative potential harm vs other used substances either related and commonly used or generally considered low risk. When there is a very small number of large players funding an area of research an extreme bias can be presented with any search on the safety of chemical x possibly returning nothing but dozens of negative seeming papers all technically true and seeming to provide an overwhelming mountain of negative evidence which is largely vapor.
While it is nice for the journal to effectively run on auto-pilot in that way it seems like a poor plan overall for peer review. Obviously the person submitting the article will be most familiar with those working on the most related research but that is just setting dishonesty as low hanging fruit tempting frustrated researchers to compromise their integrity.
Right, if you are doing private sector research it is basically the same pressure but all your grants come from a single source. There is a extreme bias in this case which compromises the integrity of your results but it is at least partially tempered by the fact that in general the private sector won't tolerate results that can't be turned into solutions which actually work indefinitely.
Do you work as a researcher? This is technically true at most places but in reality being able to afford and justify spending money on you ultimately depends on grants. Also, there are often others working under a researcher on various projects doing research, computation, administering the systems and if funding goes away those people will all be out of the job. Unless they are a sociopath a researcher does feel some level of responsibility for those people.
"America's most anally active zip code?
Which neighborhood in America is best for 3-somes?
"
Actually we are already running the data. Turns out my own zip code is the best for females who enjoy anal and threesomes.
Plasma were beautiful, during that generation of tech I was a big plasma fan. Sadly they have pretty severe burn-in issues and ridiculous power consumption. BTW if you don't know already if your TV does 1080i it probably has a 720p mode which is actually superior resolution to 1080i. 1080i was really just a way to be able to label TV's as 1080 when they weren't.
"Similarly for audio, there is dynamic range compression, which is only good if you need to keep your TV really quiet for others to sleep - not for everyday use. Yes, movies get loud and soft at times without it. It's supposed to."
I have to disagree with you and most audiophiles here. I have a powerful center channel on my THX certified and installed surround system and there are still movies that you can't turn up enough that dialog can be heard clearly at all points without shaking the walls. This isn't just my subjective analysis, this is my decibel meter agreeing that the dialog is at range of normal human speech and the explosions are close to or pushing the limit where they can damage human hearing and that is with an EQ giving a couple decibels of boost to the speech range.
The gun shots don't need to be as loud as actual gunshots and the whispers so quiet you actually have to strain to hear them to give an immersive and theatrical effect in the film. This is just something being done because they can and I believe I speak for almost the entire movie watching population when I say we wish they'd cut it out.
Or just live with not owning the platform once and make windows office apps available for the other platforms.
I fail to see why this is cruel or dictatish (kings english), not that I disagree those terms apply to Iran.
IP is a completely artificial concept, there is no such thing as rights here. There is no such thing as "theft of another's work" just infringement of these artificial grants to stimulate creativity. It makes perfect sense that a government wouldn't extend the grant to limit itself allowing creative people to profit from their work while allowing the government to utilize the best the citizenry has produced to govern as well as possible. If the US did the same it would save taxpayers billions, if not trillions of dollars.
It seems like it would be much more newsworthy when a government limits itself with copyright or the equivalent thereof.
Actually he apparently had the fixings for some DIY improvised explosives. If the nuttball didn't have the guns he would have gone with the bomb option which would have had a much higher death toll. Good luck outlawing everything that can be used to make a bomb.
I don't know really. It would probably depend on your specific setup. Some things are definitely more visible on my projected display like compression artifacts. The latest YIFFY rips that everyone loves and look just fine on a 42" screen look terrible projected out with obvious pixilation. That is purely the size of the display, the improved blending and softer edges of projection would otherwise make the technology more resistant to that kind of thing otherwise.
In general I agree with your conclusion though. I expect a big boost to 4k and not as much to 8k. But there are probably others who need the 8k for maximum viewing experience. They are definitely pushing pixels because of the boost from SD to HD sales but regardless of motivation I'd like to see them keep pushing that train until there is no benefit to pushing it further with even the largest consumer screens displaying passive 3D (resolution cut in half per eye) all the way down to perfect viewing in tiny HMD applications. Not because I personally need a resolution that high but because I want everyone to have a high enough resolution for their use case and want all my source material to be at a high enough resolution for whatever I might find myself doing with it in the future.
Most people do that, it's called a living room. We like a relaxing and subdued light level in our living room anyway and with a decently bright lamp in the projector this works great. Does it fade in the day vs the night? A bit, but it hardly compares with the sharp glare and reflections on most screens.
It isn't for everyone. I love movies and I have a large enough room that there is a 12ft viewing distance in the living room and 20ft from the kitchen which is open concept and that large screen fits nicely with that. I also have a full THX certified surround system to go with it and am extremely frustrated by the lack of good surround audio in streaming services. At about $2500 all in for both and a decent screen the entire setup cost less than many 42" TV's and seems quite reasonable to me. YMMV. For others no matter how bright projection won't ever be the answer. They are used to those super sharp images of modern TV's and projection of the same brightness and resolution, depicting the same level of actual detail, will always have less jarring and smoother blending at the edges.
People can make up their own mind about anything but random pixilation, motion tearing, time adjustment (sudden pause and then fast forward), ghosting, etc are objectively bad things that distract the viewer from what they are watching.
The problem is that they use specially produced content and image slideshows to demo the TV's in the showroom so the hyper-real soap opera effect is "looks like 4k" to many people. For the most part none of these sets have a refresh low enough to cause ghosting without these options and they are just there to oversharpen images to create a more stark visible difference with 4k sets in demo mode. It's a sales trick, nothing more. There is no objective advantage to running your TV with these options on.
There are jobs that don't suck but this is one of those myths that floats around and makes people feel dissatisfied thinking the grass should be greener. If people genuinely loved their jobs companies would make you pay to get to do it rather than pay you for doing it. That is how life works.
Whatever your job satisfaction level, your satisfaction level with your free time, family, and friends is going to be higher so there is plenty of reason to be happier about the weekend and have some level of reduced satisfaction about it ending and having to go back to work without being miserable in your job.
If your dad ends up with a better image it is well worth it. There is nothing worse than laying out the cash for a shiny new 4k TV and secretly feeling like your image is crap when you get it home and the new toy buzz wears off.
From what you describe I'd also particularly check anything related to sharpness/noise and anything you'd make a reasonable guess could be a marketing term for an algorithm playing with the same. Also trying all the overarching preset options and turning them off as well, a movie or cinema setting is sometimes a shortcut to a good image with sports or gaming settings being overly brightened with motion compensation and sharpening. I'd definitely try tweaking in the opposite direction of what is expected as well, you'd expect something for "Noise Reduction" to if anything blur your image but sometimes it doesn't work that way or would work that way but the internal hardware just isn't fast enough to keep up with applying the filter on fast moving images.
You also might check the net for a set of options from someone else who has done the work for you. You can usually ignore the color/brightness/contrast rabbit hole on these since they will only be applicable to the specific set they adjusted and in the viewing conditions where adjusted and good general settings are generally applied out of the box.
Also, there is the issue of DRM in 4k sets. Either the set or the sending box will downsample a stream if they don't both support the right HDCP levels. How to check this in practice depends on both devices but one shortcut is often to check Netflix and see if the Netflix titles which should support 4k have the little logo indicating 4k.
You are right, for most screen sizes and viewing distances a high quality 720p stream is going to look just fine and higher resolution isn't actually needed so your 720p might look just as good as his 4k but his 4k set shouldn't look like crap either. If all else fails and it is just some poorly spec'd low refresh rate off brand that can't be salvaged, get him to return it and replace with a new Samsung quantum dot display with at least 120hz native refresh. LG has a slightly better technology for black levels but the samsungs still have fantastic blacks, the best color on the market, and are a fraction of the price. No, I have no affiliation with Samsung it's just the truth. You'll still have to fix the out of the box settings though.
I'm a 3D fan so I've been buying 120hz+ (real 120hz not the overinflated software enhancement specs) for the last several sets anyway. That hasn't stopped manufacturers from enabling motion compensation or backdoor enabling with things like HDR if you switch those on. Reality doesn't matter much, oversharpened images on specially made demo reels in Nebraska furniture mart and best buy sell TV's.
Given that the actual content is 30fps or less even 60Hz (60 updates per second) is refreshing the screen twice as often as the content changes. Of course, you can update as often as you like and it will never matter if the pixel response time isn't fast enough to keep up with it and nobody likes to publish their response times in the consumer market unless it is a gaming display.
Honestly, almost everything we watch is compressed and the compression/source quality tends to make a bigger difference than the resolution in image quality at that point.
That said, some of us use projectors and 4k, even 8k would make a huge difference in the quality of my 120" screen in the living room.
Not at all. The point of higher densities is projectors. 4k or 8k might not matter on your 40-50" TV but it definitely matters on my 120" projector.
For your father's sake. There are a couple of features, like HDR and other "motion compensation" features, these turn on a soap opera like look which looks super realistic and heavily oversharpened. Turn this crap off, it's what causes the pixilation and edge tearing... it doesn't fix motion, it causes terrible motion related artifacts and it is enabled on every new TV out of the box. There are probably a lot of things that could be tweaked or tuned in the set but many of them will turn this crap back on even when it is explicitly disabled so learn to recognize that oversharpened overly "real" looking soap opera image and turn anything that brings it back off.
There is probably a great picture hiding in there.
What is dumb is motion compensation algorithms that do the opposite, they cause speed shifting and tearing with fast motion and on slow motion cause the soap opera effect which gives ridiculously oversharpened images. They put this crap out in 4k sets by default across the board and they'll do it again in 8k. As long as they do this nobody is going to have a truly enjoyable viewing experience... and there is certainly nothing in the settings indicating you should turn it off. Maybe the reason why is they want people to be somewhat dissatisfied with their current device so they'll be quick to upgrade on the next round.
"They HAD to try and be the next Apple and lock everything down and deny any and all meaningful user choice or customization"
I think you meant Apple had to be the next M$ when they entered the phone market. Lock-out, intentional incompatibility, and lack of user choice are patented by Microsoft and merely licensed by Apple.
Imagine how much sympathy we all have for Microsoft having to face a target market completely locked in by one or two competitors.
"Please refrain from speaking about things you clearly know nothing about."
Sorry armchair pro. Go back to fantasy land.
"This may be true for small shops where the IT force is one person with zero automation. But anything enterprise these days is automated to a large degree."
LOL Sounds like you are drinking the koolaid big time. Let me guess, you are a dev? I hate to break it to you, automation frameworks don't actually deliver on their promises for one very simple reason, execution across the environment is the smallest time delay in a real environment. Admins already have scripts and solutions in enterprise that could rapidly deploy patches and have no trouble whipping something up to make a change across hundreds of systems even without an automation framework. Also, you are definitely delusional if you think "anything enterprise these days is automated to a large degree" if you are implying a fully deployed and comprehensive automations infrastructure and not the cobbled together scripts of administrators and some kind of framework like openview.
An enterprise environment consists of not one but many companies all with different authorization chains and differing procedures, even different ticketing systems and everything silo'd all to hell. Many of those pieces are and always will be one person with zero automation infrastructure but all the overhead of a change approval process that must go through multiple committees and multiple sub environments. The people who have to install them are usually not one person, usually it is a small team responsible for hundreds or even thousands of servers running many applications.
"As noted elsewhere in this topic, They have nearly 2k employees world-wide. They can serve queries at pace with no delay."
What does serving queries have to do with anything? It's easy to serve boatloads of requests for a single application, there are maybe 5-6 server roles each horizontally scaled across a large count of individual members. In fact, it is so easy to handle the operational issues that go along with that the operational team who handles it will be responsible for another 20-50 unrelated applications and trimmed down to the number of people it takes to handle the operational issues on a day-to-day basis leaving zero bandwidth for tasks that actually require investing time.
But hey, you just go off and live in your fantasy land where large enterprise environments are actually secure and fully patched. That is the kind of bullshit you say and pretend at work when it's your job but if you think it actually reflects reality at ANY fortune 500 OR government agency you are completely delusional.
Do you know what automations frameworks did for this process? Instead of writing a 5min quick and dirty script you can run and then quickly run through any edge cases that went wrong you now have to formally develop and debug a module to coding standards (hours for even the simplest module), write test cases (just as long again, testing frameworks double bugs, not reduce them), run the entire thing through formal approval process.... depending on what scale it is applicable to that could be one change committee, two, or could require an individual sign-off from one or dozens of departments, you might even had to silo your automations framework up in a way that lets you apply it group-by-group as you get the approvals or the different groups might all be silo'd and have to write their own modules that do the same thing. Finally you get to actually run your module and find all the bugs weeks later, for the first time. The problems and bugs are far far more likely in your module logic than the actual patch. And you know what, all that siloing and overhead? That is the best case scenerio because if the enterprise didn't have all that overhead, you could actually break hundreds or even thousands of systems in a single shot with your automations framework.
"If you cannot keep up with this reality, quit the IT sphere !"
Easy to say. Hell, those patches will often be over 90 days old when rolled out by OS vendor and they only have that one job.