MinWin was the response to Longhorn. When most of the major goals of Longhorn failed to ship and those that did resulted in Vista, Microsoft did a reset. The MinWin project was a massive cleanup effort that promoted cleaner API boundaries and layer separation that defined a minimal bootable NT core at the bottom with reduced overall dependencies.

WinRT was introduced as an alternative API/runtime layer alongside Win32. Both WinRT and Win32 used COM concepts and ran ontop of the NT executive. WinRT was a modern async first object oriented natively sandboxed capability-based runtime that supported built-in projections over manual COM.

Microsoft tried to encourage everyone to adopt WinRT and the new sandboxed App Model on Windows 8, Windows RT, and Windows Phone. It used modern concepts and was more secure than the uncontrolled legacy surface area that Win32 exposed. They shipped those devices with Metro, a new "desktop" interface and didn't allow Win32 Apps. Unfortunately they shot themselves in the foot by shipping full Win32 based Office on Windows RT. This demonstrated that yes Win32 could run on ARM. After that, things fell apart and Microsoft decoupled many WinRT features from the WinRT/UWP model.

WinUI is an interesting UI framework that sits on top of this stack and is decoupled from it. This allows it to be updated independent of the operating system.

The pandemic caused once such boom-bust that resulted in a rather large downturn in demand in 2022-2023 referred to as the pandemic hangover. During that time demand dropped following overspend during the pandemic and members of the cartel drastically cut production at times to keep prices above cost. Even after the demand recovery began in 2023, the cartel members were slow to increase production and made little to no investment in production capacity in 2024-2025. Creating a shortage.

The AI hype cycle has exacerbated the shortage by creating speculative purchases and then panic buying. Remember the shoe company that pivoted to AI?

So Cartel market manipulation is partially to blame for the over 100% increase in prices and the shortages.

Were people actually doing that?

I feel like their messages are designed to derail people's train of thought.

People start to realize that technology isn't fulfilling and they need to re-access their lives? Nah... introspection is a modern invention and that act of reflection is actually the source of your discontent. Stop thinking about it and just go with the flow, you'll be much happier when you stop concerning yourselves with the state of the environment, other people's well being, if your work is fulfilling, or the fact that you have no retirement.

In many US municipalities the cost of infrastructure is rolled into the per unit fee meaning high consumers pay more. This works fine until folks adopt solar and their consumption goes negative.

The right answer is a connection fee based on the cost to maintain your hookup to the grid.

That's a common line by conservatives who are actively sabotaging government with policies and laws which they then point to as evidence of such inefficiencies.

At that time AMD wasn't in the custom CPU business, AMD64 was a new unproven ISA, and x86 based CPUs of that time were notoriously hot for a console. These were also some of the reasons why Microsoft moved away from the Pentium III it had used in the original Xbox.

The PS3 was launched in 2006 but the hardware design was decided years earlier to provide a reference platform for the software.

IBM's Power was the only logical option at the time.

These consoles were being designed around 2000. Intel and AMD weren't partnering on bespoke CPUs at that time. I don't even think AMD would have been considered a viable partner. Neither had viable 64 bit options and part of console marketing at the time was the ever increasing bit depths.

Prior console generations had use MIPS which wasn't keeping up with ever increasing performance expectations and players like Toshiba and Sony were looking for a higher performance CPU architecture. IBM's Power architecture was really the only option. Sony, Toshiba, and IBM partnered to develop their a new 64 bit microarchitecture called Cell.

Microsoft's first console was basically a PC and that's how everyone saw it. The 360 was an opportunity for Microsoft to show that it could compete with the big boys. It was also an opportunity to keep a toe dipped in RISC, because it had dropped support for RISC CPUs with Windows 2000.

I would argue that the hardest part is correctly recognizing that it's being addressed. 98% of my frustration with voice assistants is them not responding when spoken to. The other 2% is realizing I want them to stop talking.

It happens to us all of the time.

My partner is on a conference call, I hop in the car to go run an errand. Suddenly I'm on a conference call.

My partner is in the kitchen listening to a podcast, I hop in our other car and suddenly I'm listening to a podcast.

My partner is sitting in the car having a driveway moment, I arrive home with the other car and now I'm having her driveway moment.

My partner is on a conference call at her desk and picks up her phone to respond to a message and then you hear "shit shit shit, hold on a moment!" and then frantic typing and clicking.

Banias was hyper optimized for power, the mantra was to get done quickly and go to sleep to save power. Somewhere along the line someone said "hey what happens if we don't go to sleep?" and Core was born.