also distributed on thin records inserted into computer magazines

https://obsoletemedia.org/floppy-rom/

yes, as long as you signed in once while online. windows caches the creds locally and afaik they do not expire

What happens if you disable the account online, then, or change its password? I haven't worked through this before and I'm curious about it.

password changes or deleting the account will lock out the local credential .

How, if the computer's offline?

yes it would wait for the next online check. But what are offline computers doing these days?

If you own more than one computer, the microsoft account syncs your desktop contents and other parts of the environment.. desktop background is one I've noticed. That can be nice

You certainly can log into a Windows machine without a microsoft account. It's actually still quite common in businesses that you log in with an account managed by your organization, although this is changing as more and more businesses migrate to MS Entra ID. This still isn't exactly a "microsoft account" but its similar.

You can also still log in with a completely local account as well. It takes a few extra minutes to set up but once configured it works fine.

The system is full of dark patterns and roadblocks that steer users towards an MS account, but you don't have to use one.

there were tons of smartphones on the market prior to the iphone. i used several of them. mostly windows mobile devices that required a stylus or keypad for input. they had apps stores, web browsers, email, etc. copy and paste, which the iphone lacked at release. from a functionality stance there were many options very much like the iphone available. the interface on the iphone was nicer for most things, and it had a nicer web browser. not a different world of functionality at all, just a bit nicer overall but also with some big trade offs.

A world of difference. Completely different products.

Couldn’t agree more. Those amalgam windows mobile devices were an interesting for the time, but hellish experience imho.

i don't understand this take at all. what did the iphone do that the existing devices did not do?

Multitouch

thats certainly a nicer input method, but is that what you're referring to when you say its an entirely different product?

To me the primary answer was a fully functional web browser. the mobile web was extremely limited; I know, I used to use it on a windows pda device.

Wait, were you not there? Did you not see how much the world changed pre vs post iPhone? In 2007 some nerds failed to see the forest for the trees and bitched about MMS but we have 2 decades of hindsight so let’s not. Why are we having this discussion

hail RPN

i used to set up webmin for the linux challenged admins so they could do basic tasks. it was nice because you could lock them to specific functions in certain modules and make it difficult for them to break things

yeah! I had some things through there early on when I was building sites. I had some custom scripts that could also be triggered by the users.

interesting video I recently watched about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJcyDOjFLwQ

tl;dw - They say Vegas visitor numbers are down, but profits are actually up. This is because the tourism industry there has refocused on higher end clientele

Now instead of using the excuse that "Apple does it too" they can use the excuse "Apple does it even worse"

outlook.com and Office 365 are very different beasts. with the latter problems are more often something (mis)configured by the customer/administrator of the 365 account rather than microsoft themselves, and there are steps the customer can take to work around the issue. With outlook.com there is nothing the recipient can do.