I generally agree with your sentiment, but your individual debt figure is off by over an order of magnitude. The debt per citizen is a bit over $62K, while the debt per taxpayer is over $168K.
Since when did software reuse become a bad thing? It's foolish to build something at great cost that's already been designed, built, and tested by others. That's especially true if that software doesn't reflect your company's your core competency. Where exactly do you draw the line about which software you're supposed to write from scratch?
Everything we do as software developers is, to a large degree, resting on the shoulders of software developers that came before us.
Product decisions like this are the reason MS will eventually lose the desktop OS market.
How many decades is "eventually"? Windows 8 was probably the best chance ever for Linux to capture more of the desktop market, and it barely shifted - the only thing that happened is that Windows 7 users declined to upgrade.
Even as someone who primarily uses Windows, I desperately wish Microsoft had more competition. Companies become arrogant and complacent when they have no competition. Windows 8 was a beautiful example of that arrogance and tone-deaf attitude on display, and I feel some of the more consumer-unfriendly decisions in Windows 10 wouldn't have occurred if Microsoft felt *any* threat from macOS or Linux in the desktop space.
I'd love to know how this random anonymous fired person could say this with any certainty. You have to be *very* careful about taking the word of recently-fired employees as gospel. Obviously, they're not going to be feeling very happy about Telsa at the moment. Even those who knew they were slacking off at work or not getting along with peers won't admit that to anyone else. In fact, those types of people are probably the most likely to slander your company after they're fired.
Granted, it's not like we should take Tesla's word as gospel, but if they actually are getting rid of poor performers or troublemakers, it will result in a healthier and stronger company. Done poorly, (like evaluations via stack ranking), it can have the opposite effect, but as harsh as it sounds, a company has a duty to consider the welfare of the greater good over that of an individual, especially if that individual is causing more harm than good.
Your Red Hat server is going to run the same software from 10 years ago most likely, whereas Windows is bad at doing this.
Uh, what? Windows is well known for its outstanding backwards compatibility. I can run many binaries from the Windows 95 days on a Windows 10 machine. You know, Windows has many issues, but backward compatibility really isn't one of them.
Honestly, I'm not sure why you're comparing Red Hat servers with Windows desktops, either. Windows is clearly dominant on the desktop, with Linux clearly dominant in the server and mobile spaces.
They're less "snake oil" than "yesterday's solution."
At this point, for Windows users, I'd simply recommend using the built-in AV and some common-sense precautions. No, it's never rated quite as highly as 3rd party AVs in the number of viruses they catch, but it's completely unobtrusive, lightweight, and has very few compatibility issues. And for any MAJOR attacks, it's typically updated fairly promptly.
These days, the security vulnerabilities they may introduce by hooking deep inside your system are no longer worth any minor benefits they may provide.
In short, I'd recommend uninstalling Kaspersky or any other AV, not because of "Russian Hackers", but for more pragmatic reasons.
You have to understand that retaining rights to any code you write is completely pointless for some types of contract work. I've taken several contracts to work directly on upcoming commercial videogames. In these cases, I'm typically contributing to the main body of work on a company's flagship product.
It really has nothing to do with "courage", "standing up for my rights." No one who demanded ownership rights of the code they produced while contracting would be hired for the type of work I do, period. And in fact, it wouldn't even make sense for either party. The code I wrote would be useless to me on its own, because it's a part of a larger project, and in fact, highly specific to that product. Why demand a change to a contract for rights that don't benefit me?
I'm getting that you do work in which you can benefit from the reuse of your code, and are providing more of a comprehensive service or product of some sort. In this case, it certainly sounds like you benefit from being able to retain the rights to advancements in the product / service you provide. In that sort of situation, I'd absolutely stipulate ownership rights as you've done. But I've never been asked to do that type of contract work before, and I suspect most programmers that do contract work have similar experiences to mine, rather than yours.
The issue isn't the quality of implementation, it's that the phone can be unlocked by anyone who holds it up to your face. With either this or fingerprint unlocking the government no longer needs to be able to hack the phone's encryption.
As with fingerprint readers, simply use a passcode if this is a concern to you. You're not required to use this feature.
You think? Apple has a pretty good track record of understanding how to properly secure sensitive information in hardware. For instance, fingerprint data for their phones is hashed and stored locally in a secure enclave, where APIs have no access to the raw data. Face ID works the same way. This means that there's also no way for malware or software-level backdoors to bypass or extract this information from the phone, because the only hardware-enforced API to the secure enclave is essentially "are you authorized? y/n".
Does anyone actually bother with learning about how the hardware actually works and the implications of that functionality? I'm no Apple fanboy, as I own an Android phone, but that doesn't prevent me from trying to view this feature objectively.
Well, as you suggested, I'm going to say you're probably in the minority in that one.;-) There are many movies I enjoy watching multiple times, so I agree that surprise isn't essential to enjoyment. But having watched that movie and experiencing the twist first-hand, non-spoiled, it was a rather enjoyable mind-bending moment that isn't nearly the same as watching it knowing the ending. That foreknowledge completely colors your movie-watching experience. I think this is why movies with big twists often replay key scenes in some sort of brief montage, which allows the viewer to re-watch those scenes to confirm the double meaning for themselves.
Surely you wouldn't have wanted to hear about the ending of Sixth Sense before you saw the movie, or other films with a wicked plot twist.
For many movies, the plot is almost incidental, perhaps focusing more on characters, action & effects, or drama. But for some movies, experiencing the plot first-hand for yourself is a large part of the fun.
Interestingly, this is the second AI hype cycle I can personally recall, and I'd say it's probably the third or fourth one overall, depending on how you measure such things. After some of the early failures and disappointments, the last hype cycle was largely about "expert systems", as I think people wanted an AI term that wasn't already poisoned (this also occurred between then and the current boom). Apparently, it's been long enough since the last AI bust that we've resurrected the type.
From a artistic standpoint, "Star Wars" is a piece of crap, with terrible acting, cliche' plot that would have fit about as well in a B Western, and an entirely predictable ending. Oh, and it was not too far from a scene-by-scene remake of "The Hidden Fortress", so also not original. But people liked it because it has cool (astonishing for the time) effects and a lot of spaceships blowing each other up.
Also, during the mid 60's and 70's, it became fashionable for movies to be incredibly cynical or depressing (e.g. Easy Rider, Planet of the Apes, Rosemary's Baby, etc). My parents told me they simply stopped going to see movies during that time. Star Wars completely bucked that trend. It was such a breath of fresh air, our family went to see it three times, which was completely unprecedented. As you said, Star Wars was a movie tailor-made for ordinary people, not film snobs.
Ugh, this bothers me too. I have pretty good audio-visual memory. Far too often I can predict the plot while watching the movie simply because I've seen the trailer, and I remember key upcoming scenes. I certainly don't *mean* for that to happen, but a particular set may trigger my memory, and I'll think "Oh, I know that something scary is going to pop out here", or whatever.
One of the problems with general-purpose reviews is that they don't take into account the specific tastes of the viewers (or in games, the player). They're a pretty good indicator of general quality, though. For specific tastes, you could probably move the bar up and down another good 20% of a total rating.
Fir instance, I generally enjoy science fiction, fantasy, or historical dramas. Anything with these characteristics will probably get an automatic 10% ratings bump. On the other hand, I really couldn't care less about most horror films, which get an automatic 10% penalty.
I've also found that I often disagree with the tastes of professional reviewers as well. I sometimes get the impression that they see so many movies, they tend to automatically latch onto anything that feels new, fresh, unique, or surprising, even if it really isn't all that great of a movie otherwise. By contrast, I see so few movies that I'm perfectly content with classic tropes, so long as they're well executed and engaging.
Knowing the taste of your audience gives you a better chance at finding shows they enjoy. I'm actually pretty good at finding movies and TV shows my parents might enjoy, simply because I have a reasonably good idea about their general tastes.. Personal recommendations for movies, shows, books, and games is one area that I think AI could do a *really* good job at if it were trained well enough.
We're still so far away from anything remotely as capable as "writing code", because a huge part of "writing code" is actually communicating with the rest of the team and stakeholders, understanding the problem to be solved, and determining exactly what the result is supposed to be. Writing code is simply a distillation of those requirements into a form a machine can understand at a very low level. In essence, a programmer is a logic and specifications bridge between humans and machines.
Until there exists such a thing as a machine with near human-level intelligence, we're nowhere near close to replacing all programmers. For anyone who actually believes otherwise, I suggest you buy yourself an Echo Dot and have a conversation with Alexa to find out just how incredibly lame the current state of the art digital assistants are. It will put your mind at ease. The best AI systems in the world are STILL just glorified pattern-matching algorithms. The only difference is that the problems they're solving are bigger and more complex, such as being able to beat a Go master instead of a Chess master.
I just did, and it seems like the summary is a bit misleading. To quote:
Geologist have been aware of fresh magma moving in the Yellowstone's super volcano system. Previously this was thought to precede an eruption by thousands of years. Recent evidence by Hannah Shamloo, a graduate student at Arizona State University, demonstrates that perhaps the timeline from the underground basin filling to eruption is more on the scale of decades.
This sounds like "fresh magma moving" means "fresh magma is NOW moving", implying that an eruption may be only decades away. Or at least that's how some people, including me, seemed to interpret that paragraph.
The article states it thus:
The early evidence, presented at a recent volcanology conference, shows that Yellowstone’s most recent supereruption was sparked when new magma moved into the system only decades before the eruption.
This makes it more clear that the process of magma moving hasn't started yet, but when it does, the process may occur quite rapidly. This seems like a far more sensible prediction than what I assumed based on the poor wording of the summary.
So, thanks for the correction. I'll retract my criticisms, which was based on an incorrect assumption thanks to a misleading summary. In fact, the scientists also come to the same conclusion I did - that a super-eruption in the near future is highly unlikely.
Equifax was responsible for setting up a separate website to deal with this hack. Doing so increased the likelihood of stuff like this happening (which it has, apparently *twice* now). So, even if this "wasn't Equifax", I'm still going to blame them for failing web security fundamentals.
The geologic timescale is exactly why the odds are against an eruption in the next few decades. And with an eruption that massive, there are likely to be years of very clear and indisputable warning signs all over the region. I highly doubt a supervolcano eruption will catch civilization by surprise.
As a recent (by geologic scales) example, no one was surprised by Mt St Helens actually erupting. Everyone knew it was coming. Only the precise timing was unknown. And the way it erupted was surprising, of course. But at this point, scientists are pretty good at predicting impending eruptions. I just don't think predicting one decades out is anything more than speculation, considering that this is a pretty radical departure from conventional wisdom.
For extra-ordinary claims like this, you'll need fairly extraordinary evidence. And not to impune Ms. Shamloo, but this is a grad student we're talking about, not a professional volcanologist with decades of actual experience. As such, it's wise to consider the source of this theory in regards to its feasibility.
The wealthy aren't affected by these breaches. They can simply hire other people to worry about that sort of bothersome thing on their behalf. Any sort of problem like "identity theft" is resolved with a simple phone call to their bank's manager, with whom they occasionally golf on the weekends.
It has a commercial-free tier, with some network-exclusive content. That was the only time they interested me. I'd have never paid them to watch commercials. Once you go commercial free, you really can't go back.
Only it was "mostly" commercial free (a few exceptions). And they also pasted a bug in the corner of the screen advertising the local affiliate station, which was distracting to me (that's an awesome way to make torrents look better than paid subscriptions). And I found I just didn't watch all that much TV anyhow, certainly not enough to justify subscribing to yet another streaming service (which may very well happen to Disney as well).
Looking at all your exhibits, I don't see how they've changed from benefiting their stockholders to benefiting humanity. More non-free software and mostly-exclusive platform.
Exactly what sort of bizarre standard are you holding Microsoft up to? Benefiting humanity has nothing to do with ANY for-profit corporation. They exist to earn a profit - nothing more. I think a corporation is doing pretty damn good if it's not being slimy (i.e. Uber). Simply trying to earn an honest profit by creating valuable services and products and selling them at a reasonable price is a paragon of virtue for a corporation. Don't expect anything more than that, except for charity donations for PR purposes.
So, you're correct that points A to E have nothing to do with benefiting humanity - it was what their customers wanted. Those were simply smart business decisions that are embracing, rather than fighting against, new market realities. That is, the role of the PC is waning while cloud and mobile are advancing, where Linux and open source have more significant inroads.
The way I see it, Microsoft has two really big black marks under Nadella. First, they way they tried to ham-handedly trick Windows 7 and 8 users into upgrading was inexcusable. Second, Windows 10 didn't respect user's privacy enough regarding telemetry, updates (slightly improved, but still not great), and advertising.
Slashdot Mirror
CPU cycles equals wear and tear, slower performance, and likely more bandwidth consumption.
Huh... sort of like ads then. Only less visibly intrusive.
I generally agree with your sentiment, but your individual debt figure is off by over an order of magnitude. The debt per citizen is a bit over $62K, while the debt per taxpayer is over $168K.
Source: http://www.usdebtclock.org/
Also, I'm not sure how you figure deficit spending is "unconstitutional". The US does not have a balance budget amendment.
Since when did software reuse become a bad thing? It's foolish to build something at great cost that's already been designed, built, and tested by others. That's especially true if that software doesn't reflect your company's your core competency. Where exactly do you draw the line about which software you're supposed to write from scratch?
Everything we do as software developers is, to a large degree, resting on the shoulders of software developers that came before us.
Product decisions like this are the reason MS will eventually lose the desktop OS market.
How many decades is "eventually"? Windows 8 was probably the best chance ever for Linux to capture more of the desktop market, and it barely shifted - the only thing that happened is that Windows 7 users declined to upgrade.
Even as someone who primarily uses Windows, I desperately wish Microsoft had more competition. Companies become arrogant and complacent when they have no competition. Windows 8 was a beautiful example of that arrogance and tone-deaf attitude on display, and I feel some of the more consumer-unfriendly decisions in Windows 10 wouldn't have occurred if Microsoft felt *any* threat from macOS or Linux in the desktop space.
I'd love to know how this random anonymous fired person could say this with any certainty. You have to be *very* careful about taking the word of recently-fired employees as gospel. Obviously, they're not going to be feeling very happy about Telsa at the moment. Even those who knew they were slacking off at work or not getting along with peers won't admit that to anyone else. In fact, those types of people are probably the most likely to slander your company after they're fired.
Granted, it's not like we should take Tesla's word as gospel, but if they actually are getting rid of poor performers or troublemakers, it will result in a healthier and stronger company. Done poorly, (like evaluations via stack ranking), it can have the opposite effect, but as harsh as it sounds, a company has a duty to consider the welfare of the greater good over that of an individual, especially if that individual is causing more harm than good.
and then they end up re-doing the whole thing from the ground up to be faster. Every time.
Except with more ads in prominent spots on the home screen. Sort of funny how that ends up as their top priority. Every time.
Your Red Hat server is going to run the same software from 10 years ago most likely, whereas Windows is bad at doing this.
Uh, what? Windows is well known for its outstanding backwards compatibility. I can run many binaries from the Windows 95 days on a Windows 10 machine. You know, Windows has many issues, but backward compatibility really isn't one of them.
Honestly, I'm not sure why you're comparing Red Hat servers with Windows desktops, either. Windows is clearly dominant on the desktop, with Linux clearly dominant in the server and mobile spaces.
They're less "snake oil" than "yesterday's solution."
At this point, for Windows users, I'd simply recommend using the built-in AV and some common-sense precautions. No, it's never rated quite as highly as 3rd party AVs in the number of viruses they catch, but it's completely unobtrusive, lightweight, and has very few compatibility issues. And for any MAJOR attacks, it's typically updated fairly promptly.
These days, the security vulnerabilities they may introduce by hooking deep inside your system are no longer worth any minor benefits they may provide.
In short, I'd recommend uninstalling Kaspersky or any other AV, not because of "Russian Hackers", but for more pragmatic reasons.
You have to understand that retaining rights to any code you write is completely pointless for some types of contract work. I've taken several contracts to work directly on upcoming commercial videogames. In these cases, I'm typically contributing to the main body of work on a company's flagship product.
It really has nothing to do with "courage", "standing up for my rights." No one who demanded ownership rights of the code they produced while contracting would be hired for the type of work I do, period. And in fact, it wouldn't even make sense for either party. The code I wrote would be useless to me on its own, because it's a part of a larger project, and in fact, highly specific to that product. Why demand a change to a contract for rights that don't benefit me?
I'm getting that you do work in which you can benefit from the reuse of your code, and are providing more of a comprehensive service or product of some sort. In this case, it certainly sounds like you benefit from being able to retain the rights to advancements in the product / service you provide. In that sort of situation, I'd absolutely stipulate ownership rights as you've done. But I've never been asked to do that type of contract work before, and I suspect most programmers that do contract work have similar experiences to mine, rather than yours.
Never let simple logic get in the way of a good conspiracy theory.
The issue isn't the quality of implementation, it's that the phone can be unlocked by anyone who holds it up to your face. With either this or fingerprint unlocking the government no longer needs to be able to hack the phone's encryption.
As with fingerprint readers, simply use a passcode if this is a concern to you. You're not required to use this feature.
You think? Apple has a pretty good track record of understanding how to properly secure sensitive information in hardware. For instance, fingerprint data for their phones is hashed and stored locally in a secure enclave, where APIs have no access to the raw data. Face ID works the same way. This means that there's also no way for malware or software-level backdoors to bypass or extract this information from the phone, because the only hardware-enforced API to the secure enclave is essentially "are you authorized? y/n".
Does anyone actually bother with learning about how the hardware actually works and the implications of that functionality? I'm no Apple fanboy, as I own an Android phone, but that doesn't prevent me from trying to view this feature objectively.
Well, as you suggested, I'm going to say you're probably in the minority in that one. ;-) There are many movies I enjoy watching multiple times, so I agree that surprise isn't essential to enjoyment. But having watched that movie and experiencing the twist first-hand, non-spoiled, it was a rather enjoyable mind-bending moment that isn't nearly the same as watching it knowing the ending. That foreknowledge completely colors your movie-watching experience. I think this is why movies with big twists often replay key scenes in some sort of brief montage, which allows the viewer to re-watch those scenes to confirm the double meaning for themselves.
Surely you wouldn't have wanted to hear about the ending of Sixth Sense before you saw the movie, or other films with a wicked plot twist.
For many movies, the plot is almost incidental, perhaps focusing more on characters, action & effects, or drama. But for some movies, experiencing the plot first-hand for yourself is a large part of the fun.
Interestingly, this is the second AI hype cycle I can personally recall, and I'd say it's probably the third or fourth one overall, depending on how you measure such things. After some of the early failures and disappointments, the last hype cycle was largely about "expert systems", as I think people wanted an AI term that wasn't already poisoned (this also occurred between then and the current boom). Apparently, it's been long enough since the last AI bust that we've resurrected the type.
There's apparently even a specific term for describing the lulls between hype cycles: "AI Winter" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
From a artistic standpoint, "Star Wars" is a piece of crap, with terrible acting, cliche' plot that would have fit about as well in a B Western, and an entirely predictable ending. Oh, and it was not too far from a scene-by-scene remake of "The Hidden Fortress", so also not original. But people liked it because it has cool (astonishing for the time) effects and a lot of spaceships blowing each other up.
Also, during the mid 60's and 70's, it became fashionable for movies to be incredibly cynical or depressing (e.g. Easy Rider, Planet of the Apes, Rosemary's Baby, etc). My parents told me they simply stopped going to see movies during that time. Star Wars completely bucked that trend. It was such a breath of fresh air, our family went to see it three times, which was completely unprecedented. As you said, Star Wars was a movie tailor-made for ordinary people, not film snobs.
Ugh, this bothers me too. I have pretty good audio-visual memory. Far too often I can predict the plot while watching the movie simply because I've seen the trailer, and I remember key upcoming scenes. I certainly don't *mean* for that to happen, but a particular set may trigger my memory, and I'll think "Oh, I know that something scary is going to pop out here", or whatever.
One of the problems with general-purpose reviews is that they don't take into account the specific tastes of the viewers (or in games, the player). They're a pretty good indicator of general quality, though. For specific tastes, you could probably move the bar up and down another good 20% of a total rating.
Fir instance, I generally enjoy science fiction, fantasy, or historical dramas. Anything with these characteristics will probably get an automatic 10% ratings bump. On the other hand, I really couldn't care less about most horror films, which get an automatic 10% penalty.
I've also found that I often disagree with the tastes of professional reviewers as well. I sometimes get the impression that they see so many movies, they tend to automatically latch onto anything that feels new, fresh, unique, or surprising, even if it really isn't all that great of a movie otherwise. By contrast, I see so few movies that I'm perfectly content with classic tropes, so long as they're well executed and engaging.
Knowing the taste of your audience gives you a better chance at finding shows they enjoy. I'm actually pretty good at finding movies and TV shows my parents might enjoy, simply because I have a reasonably good idea about their general tastes.. Personal recommendations for movies, shows, books, and games is one area that I think AI could do a *really* good job at if it were trained well enough.
We're still so far away from anything remotely as capable as "writing code", because a huge part of "writing code" is actually communicating with the rest of the team and stakeholders, understanding the problem to be solved, and determining exactly what the result is supposed to be. Writing code is simply a distillation of those requirements into a form a machine can understand at a very low level. In essence, a programmer is a logic and specifications bridge between humans and machines.
Until there exists such a thing as a machine with near human-level intelligence, we're nowhere near close to replacing all programmers. For anyone who actually believes otherwise, I suggest you buy yourself an Echo Dot and have a conversation with Alexa to find out just how incredibly lame the current state of the art digital assistants are. It will put your mind at ease. The best AI systems in the world are STILL just glorified pattern-matching algorithms. The only difference is that the problems they're solving are bigger and more complex, such as being able to beat a Go master instead of a Chess master.
I just did, and it seems like the summary is a bit misleading. To quote:
Geologist have been aware of fresh magma moving in the Yellowstone's super volcano system. Previously this was thought to precede an eruption by thousands of years. Recent evidence by Hannah Shamloo, a graduate student at Arizona State University, demonstrates that perhaps the timeline from the underground basin filling to eruption is more on the scale of decades.
This sounds like "fresh magma moving" means "fresh magma is NOW moving", implying that an eruption may be only decades away. Or at least that's how some people, including me, seemed to interpret that paragraph.
The article states it thus:
The early evidence, presented at a recent volcanology conference, shows that Yellowstone’s most recent supereruption was sparked when new magma moved into the system only decades before the eruption.
This makes it more clear that the process of magma moving hasn't started yet, but when it does, the process may occur quite rapidly. This seems like a far more sensible prediction than what I assumed based on the poor wording of the summary.
So, thanks for the correction. I'll retract my criticisms, which was based on an incorrect assumption thanks to a misleading summary. In fact, the scientists also come to the same conclusion I did - that a super-eruption in the near future is highly unlikely.
Equifax was responsible for setting up a separate website to deal with this hack. Doing so increased the likelihood of stuff like this happening (which it has, apparently *twice* now). So, even if this "wasn't Equifax", I'm still going to blame them for failing web security fundamentals.
The geologic timescale is exactly why the odds are against an eruption in the next few decades. And with an eruption that massive, there are likely to be years of very clear and indisputable warning signs all over the region. I highly doubt a supervolcano eruption will catch civilization by surprise.
As a recent (by geologic scales) example, no one was surprised by Mt St Helens actually erupting. Everyone knew it was coming. Only the precise timing was unknown. And the way it erupted was surprising, of course. But at this point, scientists are pretty good at predicting impending eruptions. I just don't think predicting one decades out is anything more than speculation, considering that this is a pretty radical departure from conventional wisdom.
For extra-ordinary claims like this, you'll need fairly extraordinary evidence. And not to impune Ms. Shamloo, but this is a grad student we're talking about, not a professional volcanologist with decades of actual experience. As such, it's wise to consider the source of this theory in regards to its feasibility.
The wealthy aren't affected by these breaches. They can simply hire other people to worry about that sort of bothersome thing on their behalf. Any sort of problem like "identity theft" is resolved with a simple phone call to their bank's manager, with whom they occasionally golf on the weekends.
It has a commercial-free tier, with some network-exclusive content. That was the only time they interested me. I'd have never paid them to watch commercials. Once you go commercial free, you really can't go back.
Only it was "mostly" commercial free (a few exceptions). And they also pasted a bug in the corner of the screen advertising the local affiliate station, which was distracting to me (that's an awesome way to make torrents look better than paid subscriptions). And I found I just didn't watch all that much TV anyhow, certainly not enough to justify subscribing to yet another streaming service (which may very well happen to Disney as well).
So, no more Hulu for me.
Looking at all your exhibits, I don't see how they've changed from benefiting their stockholders to benefiting humanity. More non-free software and mostly-exclusive platform.
Exactly what sort of bizarre standard are you holding Microsoft up to? Benefiting humanity has nothing to do with ANY for-profit corporation. They exist to earn a profit - nothing more. I think a corporation is doing pretty damn good if it's not being slimy (i.e. Uber). Simply trying to earn an honest profit by creating valuable services and products and selling them at a reasonable price is a paragon of virtue for a corporation. Don't expect anything more than that, except for charity donations for PR purposes.
So, you're correct that points A to E have nothing to do with benefiting humanity - it was what their customers wanted. Those were simply smart business decisions that are embracing, rather than fighting against, new market realities. That is, the role of the PC is waning while cloud and mobile are advancing, where Linux and open source have more significant inroads.
The way I see it, Microsoft has two really big black marks under Nadella. First, they way they tried to ham-handedly trick Windows 7 and 8 users into upgrading was inexcusable. Second, Windows 10 didn't respect user's privacy enough regarding telemetry, updates (slightly improved, but still not great), and advertising.