Until some regulation is passed and enforced that they have to be closed loop, it’s cheaper for them to fuck up the local ecosystem by using evaporative cooling or local water sources as a heat sink.

Limited supply leading to the same stock being sold at over 300% of the MSRP five years ago. The demand is definitely there. The supply and pricing is the issue, not a lack of interested buyers.

“Market” my ass.

Don’t need classes to make functions (depending on the language of course).

I’ll openly admit that I’ve made comments that could be interpreted as this comic. That said, I don’t hate Linux or look to “dunk on” people, I just see a lot of really uninformed takes about Windows being tossed around and can’t help but try to correct people.

Like someone said something abysmally wrong and very confidently, I asked them when the last time they used Windows, and they said it had been over a decade. I get that people pull that sort of thing online all the time, but when I see it it bothers me.

So I end up making the occasional comment defending Windows from blatant misinformation in a Linux thread, or insisting that the Linux experience still isn’t as smooth as it needs to be for non-tinkerers.

Usually someone will pop up and call me uninformed or something, which is rich given I’ve been casually messing with Linux since before USB thumb drives were ubiquitous, and I have a little more than a decade of career experience in IT support and systems admin/engineering/architecture neck deep in a Microsoft environment.

I love Linux and open source software. I want it all to succeed. But Windows does have its place, it is valid for certain use cases, and is not anywhere as awful as it’s made out to be. Especially if you have the tech chops to switch to Linux, de-crappify-ing Windows is of comparable difficulty and I have not had any of the supposedly unavoidable Windows issues people regularly cite in around a decade.

Switching to Linux is a more than valid choice, but I hate to see it happen only because someone isn’t getting good troubleshooting information for a Windows issue.

I also have a seriously hard time keeping my mouth shut when Linux users claim daily driving a Linux Distro as a smooth process. It is leagues better than it used to be. Mind bogglingly so, and getting smoother every day. But it is still inevitable that you will hit a point of major friction and have to get deep into tinkering, and you will still likely need to make concessions in terms of hardware feature support.

I’m no stranger to tinkering. No stranger to compiling things myself, or even troubleshooting an error all the way down to a specific line of source code and making a PR to correct it.

But I’ve reached a point in my life where I don’t want to be spending hours troubleshooting things that in my mind should “just work”. I want more control than Apple offers, and less tinkering than Linux tends to expect.

So I keep up with the Linux space, use it on VMs personally semi-regularly, and maybe once a year give it a serious try as a daily driver. For now, stripped down/customized Windows installs on my gear is more than good enough.

Anti spam tools are pretty damn good nowadays, and then you have things like “focused inbox” features on top of that. Plus all the laws about simple unsubscribe options.

Not sure there’s much dry brush to catch on that front.

I legitimately have not had virus issues with Windows in over a decade. Using uBlock Origin for ad blocking and the built in Microsoft antivirus. Every few months for the first few years I’d put it through the wringer of a bunch of USB-bootable antivirus scanners. They kept finding nothing, so I slowed and eventually stopped bothering.

Common sense and an ad blocker do wonders.

Usually not ones that are still compatible with modern cell tower networks.

You absolutely can remove every app (including hidden base OS functionality that is packaged as an installed app) through ADB, or through tools like Shizuku that give you effectively “on-device” ADB. There are GUI based apps to do this for both PC and runnable on Android itself.

It’s not easily accessible for the average user, but it’s literally easier than flashing a custom OS, if you’re already looking into that level of things.

It’s one of the better ones, and basic functionality is braindead, but I’ve definitely found some pain points.

• My work requires us to use company branded video chat backgrounds 🤮. Whatever way my co-worker deployed them, they aren’t available through the mobile app.
• There’s a feature to create unified groups (Teams groups) with membership lists hidden from non-members. It is only available through PowerShell.
• Got users that want to use their group like a distribution list? They all have to personally choose to subscribe to incoming email. You can set the group to auto-subscribe new members, but subscribing existing members requires some basic PowerShell fuckery.
• Sharepoint backend for file sharing. Less said about that shit the better.
• If a user’s display name updates, how it syncs to different places that display their name in Teams and how long that takes is inconsistent as all hell.
• Better hope you never get a ticket from your legal team to pull chat history. Pain in the ass to do, horrid fucking output format.
• No way I’ve found to disable the damn upsell “Get Premium” button. Granted I haven’t checked in a while.

Paywall. What is visible indicates cuts to arts and languages degrees.

Lol, are you kidding? IT gets to experience the suck of using it, and of administrating it. For as bad as the front end of Microsoft stuff is, the back end is usually worse.

Yeah, this particular “orbiting circles” thing is somewhat common in sci-fi media, even the “it lines up and stops” part.

I think that’s likely why you’re getting negative responses. People look at your (neat) animation and go “oh, look generic sci-fi macguffin” but see you acting like you think it’s some sort of hidden or alien knowledge then think you’re a crackpot.

Wish I could say I’m surprised.

Only 6?

Elias Thorne, goblins and ghouls, is there somewhere all these “sticky topics” have been aggregated?

fun fact: a few months before the big crowdstirke incident, they did the same thing to their Linux customers. I can only assume it didn’t make headlines due to lower adoption rates and what I suspect was far easier remediation.

“memory famine” -> “AI data center greed”

One of my favorites is “can the network handle a loop?” Plug one port into another, it’ll be fun.

More seriously, that doesn’t look like a passive dumb switch/hub/splitter so you should be fine. Kind of regret not taking the chance in school to bring down the whole network back when dumb ones were more common.

“no, I prefer my brain to stay asleep thank you. asleep, smooth, and pristinely unwrinkled.”

Statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged

Yeah, why would you ever hang those upside down unless that’s what you were going for? Or you could just cut or snap off the handles.