The anti-trust cases I am familiar with spanned decades. Perhaps it's not a representative sample, yet it also makes sense. Anti-trust basically says they're doing something that is normally legal, but they're abusing their power over the market in a way that makes those actions illegal. You're moving from prosecuting actions to intent. That is a whole lot more difficult to prove.

I'm also uncertain how I feel about prosecuting a company just because it is a monopoly. I absolutely hate monopolies, and large monopolies almost certainly got to where they were by illegitimate means. On the other hand, it is difficult to untangle legitimate consumer choice from a monopoly manipulating the market to remove that choice.

They also cannot do much about fixed costs; postponing maintenance typically increases long term maintenance costs; postponing upgrades, cutting amenities, and raising prices may deter even more customers (keep in mind, nearly everyone is feeling the pinch these days). That is assuming that the business isn't doing that already.

It looks like the vast majority of clones used a (near bit-by-bit) copy of the original ROMs. I've only heard of one company using licensed ROMs and one company using reverse engineered ROMs in the American market.

> And let's not forget the ubiquitous S-100 bus, with hundreds of different companies making hardware for. In 1983 you could assemble a computer around your choice of processor, graphics (or not), IO, mass-storage, and so on.

These machines, in conjunction with CP/M, were the closest thing to what the IBM compatible would become, in terms of it being an open platform. Unfortunately, they were also notorious for being incompatible with each other. As you noted, they didn't have to use even remotely similar processors. Heck, you couldn't even exchange disks between many variants (the format was incompatible).

> Entirely accidental. What really started this was the reverse engineering of the BIOS.

Not really. IBM didn't intend the clones, but the effort to create clones was intentional. Not only did you have the outright rip-offs and famously cleanroom reverse engineered ROMs, but you had many companies making machines with various levels of compatibility while trying be legal. Once the PS/2 arrived, IBM's attempt to regain control of the platform, there was a concerted effort by their competitors to ensure they (rather than IBM) defined the standard.

That said, there may be contexts where their advice would help. It's likely useless in all organizations that have a human resources department, since they will be dictating policy and may even be doing the initial screening. But smaller businesses? Quite often their handling of applications isn't all that different from my grandparent's day. Replacing that emailed resume with a hand delivered one may be enough to get their attention.

I also wonder how applicable modern approaches would be in towns and smaller cities. Something tells me they would rather only deal with local candidates and not have a bunch of people who apply from out of their area.

While someone can probably cite a more intricate machine that can reasonably be held within a hand, the assemblage of features in a phone certainly makes it one of the more complex machines of its size. Especially when you consider how many fields it draws upon. Digital electronics is sufficiently different from RF electronics, the RF spectrum behaves differently (from an engineering standpoint) from the optical spectrum. That accelerometer may be packaged like an IC but MEMS are quite different from a CPU or solid state memory. The list could go on.

Fun tidbit, I remember visiting Edmonton (Alberta, Canada) in the early 2010's. Boom times for them. It was a bit like walking into a different era with respect to job seeking since many business (again, entry level jobs) were advertising with help wanted signs in their windows.

I'm not sure that is any less true today. If you were looking for a job, people used to go to a job centre or look at the classifieds. Since everyone did it, those were also the jobs with the most competition. Swap job centre and classifieds for online job boards, and you have the situation today. Yes, you have more people applying for the same jobs. On the other hand, that is balanced out by people applying for more jobs. It's hard to claim that applying for more jobs involves more work, though there is certainly a negative psychological impact.

On the other hand, knowing where to look (then or now) cuts out a lot of the competition. Having a social network feeding you that information cuts out even more competition.

Of course, talking to anyone about a job within the building was an entirely different matter.

From a vintage computing perspective, possibly. The only question is whether they will work. Oddly, I have found USB sticks to be less reliable than floppy disks. (Odd because I would think that semi-conductor memory would last longer than a ferrous coating glued to a plastic substrate that is dragged along both the read/write head and the shell and is known to be susceptible to mould.)

Other uses, I just don't know. Floppy disks have a well defined appearance that means they are iconic. (Sometimes literally so!) USB sticks vary so much in size and appearance that it will be difficult to earn the iconic status. Floppies also have more to work with when it comes down to arts projects.

Even today, C is not a terribly portable language when compared to it's modern peers. It is portable when compared to assembly languages and languages contemporary to its creation.

There are definitely better apps out there, unfortunately my area requires Maps for transit data.

Perhaps the problem is our desire to have everything, no matter what the compromises are. Perhaps the problem is our inability to say, I'm going to go with product X even though it lacks Y because we actually own X. There is virtually no incentive for competition to pop up in such an environment since established companies have a lead of years, decades if you consider the size of the established companies, so consumers will follow their lead.

I don't mean to suggest that buying alternatives is a solution to the problem as a whole, but doing so may allow enough niche products to survive to give those of us who are interested in alternatives and alternative to choose from.

That said, real people write for all sorts of reasons. Money is definitely one of them. Sometimes it is out of ignorance (e.g. they don't know that few books earn much money). Sometimes it is out of delusion (e.g. some authors are clearly raking in the money, they think they will too).

I'm not sure if I'm using the right term here, but publishers have been using rotating ghost writers to write series for generations and many of the authors have been happy to translate outlines into books just to earn a living. (I know of ghost written series that my father read as a child. I'm by no means young, and he had children late in life before it became fashionable to wait to have children until they were older.)

> In the vast, vast majority of cases it is not to make money (virtually none of them do).

If you're suggesting that virtually no authors write books to make money, I would suggest that is not true and the landscape is going to change for the worse. There are constraints on how many authors write books purely to make money because writing takes time and effort, with the returns being notoriously low. AI eliminates the time and effort factor. Returns don't have to be high if it is being generated by a content mill. If anything, diluting the market will result in lower returns for human authors -- discouraging them from writing in the first place.

As for AI assisted edits, the article is quite clear about the labelling covering AI generated content. If you "hire" the AI as an editor by asking it to check your grammar or point out weak arguments, then do the rewrite yourself, it almost certainly wouldn't be covered. It sounds like it wouldn't be covered if you asked it to apply edits for style either, just be sure to log the changes since it would clearly be in an AI's voice.