I think I’ll continue to enjoy my pseudonymity for the time being. Besides, I could link you to some rando’s modules, claim to be that person, and you’d have no way of verifying anyhow since this nick has no resemblance to the handle I used. But let’s just say, I shipped well-tested, thoroughly documented modules with very high “kwalitee” used by fortune 100 companies.

Processors change? Non-sequitur. Spectre an its ilk arrived on the scene at least a decade after MS had developed a reputation for shipping shit code.

Libraries become deprecated or vulnerable? Non-sequitur. Whose libraries? Who deprecated them? Remember, this is a company that personified Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. If they picked shitty vendors for libraries and did no due diligence on that source code, why are the externalities foisted upon users? Also, libraries don’t “become vulnerable” through some magical process. Either the bug was there from the beginning, or a shitty change was introduced and not caught.

Design paradigms shift? And this is an excuse for writing shitty code? I don’t buy it.

New integrations require new code and that means taking into consideration the new shape of the system. Sounds like they did a really shitty job of that and they make it the user’s problem.

Should we blame the old house builders for using asbestos? Unequivocally, yes. Those shitheads knew or should have known. Don’t believe me? Here is a handy link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169500224003623

Do note the decades between when it was understood the shit was dangerous and when the decline as a building material happened.

So, no, MS still does not get a pass.

False dichotomy. That was a business decision with externalities foisted upon users.

Go ahead, bro. It’s on CPAN.

Why did they write such shit software in the first place? No, they don’t get off the hook.

You can manage an install-less solution with a docker container assuming you can get docker on the client machines.

There are numerous PDF cli tools that will split pages for you, so the challenge is finding the right one that is trivial for you to use with docker.

My internet sleuthing revealed that there is already a ready-made docker image for an older version of Apache PDFbox, but there are likely other docker containers you could use.

You can incorporate usage into the above snippet pretty easily if you ask one of the AI chatbots. Your prompt will be something like: “Given this one-liner in Powershell (copypaste the one-liner), I want you to change it to also use this docker container (link to github) of Apache PDFBox 2.0 (link to PDFBox docs) to split PDFs into pages. Rewrite the one-liner to do this.”

Recently there was a SciShow vid on youtube about delousing salmon, if you’d like to know more.

https://youtu.be/xWciW1y18O0

If you get a Quest 3, it should play those kinds of games stand alone, no problem. No gaming laptop required. If it is going to be a more graphically intense game, or the games are only on Steam or whatever (so needs Steam Link), you are going to need a gaming laptop with a discrete GPU (released from the last 3-4 years). To do the wireless link, you’ll need a wifi6 capable access point/router, and wifi6 capable chipset in the laptop, or a dongle, or a gigabit ethernet cable from the laptop directly plugged in into the access pointer/router.

Many such pieces of software exist both backed by non-profit foundations, and not. Before the Linux kernel was running the world, it was primarily maintained by volunteers. Also consider the myriad of Linux distributions that don’t have corp overlords. Or pick a *BSD. Or anything you watch video content with: ffmpeg, vlc, mpv. Or even various programming languages such as ECMA Script, Python, Ruby, C, C++, etc. Hell, even Lemmy fits into this category. There literally is a whole slew of software not directly backed by money and still maintained that literally runs the world.

Not all software needs to be backed by money. Money helps, of course, and I would support a non-profit financially that is focused purely on browser development. Right now, the only game in town doing that is Ladybird. But honestly, I think building upon a firefox fork makes more sense than starting from scratch.

TIL. Super disappointing. Thanks for the additional info. I’ve changed my mind. Mozilla can just go poof completely.

Mozilla corp is trash and deserves to fail. The non-profit Mozilla however, can remain and steward Firefox and friends just fine.