As a back-end guy, whatever they use that lets me use a clean, well-defined API is fine in my book. They can bloat it up as much as they like as long as I don't have to see a single line of HTML, CSS or JavaScript. JSON is bad enough.
Judging from the very harsh sentences masters who are caught (let alone brag about) dumping waste overboard, you'd rather think there's a conspiracy in favour of rather than against these jackasses.
Iron seeding for plankton is a pretty well talked about solution to introducing forces to work against the warming of the planet. It's not like he's concocted some wild new idea.
Since those things are already so riddled with DRM, why not simply make the internal builds phone home to an activation server that only allows IPs assigned to Microsoft?
The story, like a lot of stories on the Old New Thing, appears to be from a now faraway time (in Information Technology terms). Think Windows 95 timeframe.
They are practically always worth a read, by the way. I'm a huge fan of the blog.
So, default wallpapers in early Windows 95 builds.
The first Preliminary Development Kit had an "Under Construction" wallpaper. The second one had the same wallpaper but tiled. Beta 1 had a different "Under Construction" wallpaper.
Of course, after PDK1 leaked far and wide, MS implemented some serial protection in PDK2 up to beta 2 (different from the one in the RTM; however the RTM's setup has remnants of it). Given that the leakers were involved with the warez scene, however, the skilled reversers that the builds were passed to easily found the backdoor that had been put in so that those on MS' internal network didn't have to enter the serial, and just patched a few bytes in the setup to abuse that.
The interesting part of this serial was that it was in two parts. One part was the "beta site ID" and half of the "password"; if this was valid, but the second half of the password wasn't, setup would appear to continue... until the point it would copy files, upon which it errored out with a message "General error 57, please contact your beta administrator".
This misdirection was discussed at the time, with some people believing the error at face value. This continued with the foundation of communities to preserve and discuss such builds several years onwards.
The last half of the password was the hex form of the first 16 bits of an MD4 hash (this code was written in around autumn 1993!) of the beta site ID, the first half of the password, and... a string inside the setup that was used as the titlebar text for the error message, which would be something like "Microsoft Chicago Preliminary Development Kit 2, November 1993".
This part of the serial algorithm was finally reverse engineered, and a key generator made....in 2014.
Afterwards, some early Internet Explorer 4.0 builds were discovered. They used the exact same serial algorithm as the early Windows 95 builds. And had the exact same "MS internal" backdoor.
(Um, I think I may have just ruined one of Raymond Chen's future blog posts.)
As already pointed out, he was a drug user ("I like the Fed-Ex guy because he's a drug dealer and he don't even know it").
But the delivery is his style. Whether it's natural or not I don't know, but it certainly was an integral part of his comedy, similar to the monotone of Steven Wright (whom Mitch Hedberg is the spiritual successor to, in my opinion).
EDIT: Curiously, Hedberg suffered from terrible stage fright. I find him funny to listen to, but almost uncomfortable to watch because he would often stare at the stage or close his eyes.
I can understand why the big banks are reluctant to re-write the big systems now that they have painted themselves so far into the corner, but what I don't understand is why they seemed so disinterested in the massive advances that were made in the 1970s that would have made COBOL and IMS long obsolete already then.
