My reply was don with all due respect. I was almost certain that #2 was not valid, as IANL. Far from me to catch an online fight with Bruce Perens. A fight which I am certain to lose.
You being a prominent guy in FOSS, probably have more chances of making AST or the Vrije Universiteit to reconsider their stance and either request compliance, or sue Intel for infringement.
In the meantime, again, only AST or Vrije Universiteit can demand intel to comply or sue them, and so far, they do not seem inclined to do so.
1.) AST published an open letter, and the fact that the disclaimers are not posted does not seem to bother him much. See here: http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/intel...
2.) Minix3 License, states that, when distributed in Binary form, the DOCUMENTATION has to reproduce the copyright notice and, well, there is no documentation whatsoever abut the ME. See here: https://github.com/Stichting-M...
Having said that, security through obscurity is not a sensible policy, and AST's courtesy is not enough. If intel is using minix, they should say so and print the license.
[...]Thank you, Debian. I have been using you since Potato on my desktop and servers. You've never let me down. Well, maybe with systemd. But other than that, you've never let me down.;} (please don't start any systemd rants, I was just kidding!)
Cryptocurencies may be the futute, but bitcoin is not.
At worst, bitcoin is a pyramid scheme that consumes vast ammounts of energy, at best, it may take a role similar to the gold igntos in the vaults of the central banks of the world.
Currently, (anonymity and "decentralized control not withstanding") bitcoin is useful for the narrow use case of a bank wire transfer. Around $20 per transaction, and a response time of 12 days (but wasting lost of energy per transaction). To pay for a Latte, or an amazon or steam purchase, as you can see, not.
As I said, maybe another cryptocurency will solve the issues (Volatility, Transaction fees, Transaction time, Energy consumption and decentralization), but bitcoin, not much.
While, in the bad old times of Windows8 Applications like ClassicShell and their ilk were a must, Windows 10 start button and shell are "Pasable".
Do not get me wrong, Windows10's start button/menu/shell leave a lot to be desired, but are functional enough to do the job.
Therefore, the need for this sort of app is diminished. Nonetheles, thanks a lot to "ivo", as ClasicShell was my go-to app for that type of task. May (s)he have success in her/his future endeavours.
My car requires maintenance from time to time. So does my fridge. And my Synology (which seems to have a PSU issue at the moment). QAnd my cellphone. My computer (MacBook Air) needs periodic maintenance too....
Having said that, I've used pretty much everything there is to use on the desktop during my life:
MS-DOS 1.1 Commodore 64. CP/M. Apple ][ MS-DOS 3.2 - 6.2 Windows 3.1 to 98se FreeBSD Linux (Slackware - RedHat 6) NT4-Windows 10 OSX Since 2009.
And I have to say that, in the desktop, the thing that bugs me the less and requires less periodic maintenance, is MacOS (formerly OSX) by a huuuuuuge margin.
At work is a different thing, there I had to sysadmin things like: HP-UX, Solaris, VMS, WinNT4, RHEL, even Sinix for crying out loud!
But now is Linux all the way, either REHL or Suse. All require periodic maintenance (after all, all are enterprise systems) and all behave more or less well.
did not enable root and set a hard to guess password?
I mean, come on, a lawyer, designer, doctor, writter or grandma with a mac, I can understand that is actually BETTER for them to have no root account by default. No disrespect, maybe you Lawyer/designer/writter/doctor/gramma are ultra smart in your field (and perhaps many more). And I am sure know you know way more about your field than I'll ever be....
But Slashdot has a big proportion of programmers, computer scientists, and EETREs (Electrical/Electronics/Telecoms/Robotics Engineers) readers.
Who of that slashdotian demographic in their right mind did _not_ enable root and set a strong password for it on their mac?
I know I did. As is the first thing I do everytime I bring a new mac home.
BTW, for those who did not read TFA, the workaround for the problem is to enable root account and set a strong PWD.
But, normally, I got the next ESR as soon as it hit mozilla servers, and manually installed, without waiting for the update system to offer it to me. The last few months of the life of the ESR was hell, mostly because developers check for the browser, and consider the ESR "Old, insecure and Unsupported" (which is NOT TRUE), so websites throw a lot of warnings and render incorrectly...
This time around, though, I'll hold tight until july 2018 to get it when the dust settles. Too many rabbits in the grill.
I am looking forward for all the under-the-hood changes, and imporvements in speed and security. And all my Extensions are compatible... I do have a LOT of NPAPI Plug-Ins, but I do not mind getting rid of a lot of that crap when the time comes (good ridance WebEx, Citrix, sharepoint, GoogleTalk and SabaMeetng!)
But, My browser is a WORK tool, I can not be re-adapting to new quirks and changes in the UI each and every 8 weeks or so....
So, to all you guys on the standard release channel, thank you very, very much for doing the Gamma Testing for us. Yes, you get to enjoy the new features sooner than anyone else, but then again, If I wanted fast releases, I'd go for chrome.
BTW I use a mac. So Edge is not an option (at 1 release every 6 months is more stable), and Safari is crap (unpredictable update schedule, very few plugins, not crossplatform). So, FireFox ESR it is.
So, the Top 500 list of computers was dominated by many Variants of Unix, with a little sprinkle of other weird stuff (among those, VMS). Which is not a monoculture
Then, as the other weird stuff waned, Windows took it's place (for a short while). Not directly as a replacement of course, but rather as a percentage of Top500 systems.
On the other side of the fence, Linux began to take increasign market share of the Top500 because of low cost, shallow learning curve from *nix, and posibility to modify source code, in an accelerated path to become a monoculture (at least where the Top500 is concerned).
And now, finally, we are on a monoculture in the Top500, with Linux all the way in the Top500... No *BSD, no AIX, HP-UX, or Solaris. Just Linux all the way.
Better not catch anyone complaining about Chrome Monoculture, Windows Monoculture, or Android monoculture! M'kay?;-)
The cost of building and maintaining ever faster telecoms networls (celullar and otherwise), paired with smaller cell sizes, and NIMB syndrome were communities reject cell towers (but demand service nonetheless) for aesthetic or "health" reasons (in the case of celullar), lead to this.
Fisrt came the sharing of the long range towers (think microwave repetition and concentration points), then came the sharing of rural cell towers, then urban cell towers.
The next step is RAN Sharing. And is being baked in 5G standards (and backported to 4G).
And before I have to duck for cover, I'll have to say I favoured Munich move to FOSS, I used it as a case example advocating for similar moves (while also pointing out the errors, of course). I've been to Munich (Siemens Training OMC-S, great memories from Kunstpark-ost), and I love the city and its people.
If you are going from Closed source to open source, there are a few pitfalls to avoid.
First, for a project like Munich, the LAST thing you replace is the Desktop OS of Users. You first replace the apps. And DO NOT EVEN CONSIDER a rip and replace strategy.
You replace the apps it in waves, using your chosen crossplatform FOSS alternatives (I understand Munich did something along this lines).
And ALSO for each wave you have a SWAT/Crack team on the Helpdesk specificaly dedicated to help the users master that specific wave of the transition.
And ALSO adequate training for each and every wave to boot (and the training for each specific wave has to be done BEFORE the wave starts, and for Every employee)
Remember, for us techies, changing from IE11 to Firefox, or from word to Libreoffice writer may seem easy, but for a public servant who was trained as, say an administrator or lawyer, it may not come so naturaly.
First you start with the low hanging fruit of things like Your users' browsers (perhaps with a creative use of a plugin like "use IE here", prepopulated with suitable lists) and PDF viewers/generators.
Then along Comes Powerpoint (please notice that I said Powerpoint, not Office), with the trick of setting up PowerPoint Viewer as the default PowerPoint program and things like publisher.
Then comes the turn of Word. This will be a problem because all the damaged formats. Here Word Viewer and your SWAT transition team will prove invaluable...
Then comes a hard nut to crack. Excel. But by now, your users should have the perception that changes from Comercial SW to FOSS are not "that hard", and that the SWAT Team has their back.
Then, comes the boss fight: Exchange Server. Please remeber that exchange server is not only email, but also calendaring, and many of those functions are still unmatched by FOSS alternatives. Let alone migrating the historic data stores....
After all apps are more or less migrated (Including rewriting web apps to be crossbrowser, creative use of wine for some custom apps, directing user to web interfaces of certain packages instead of using custom clients), is the turn (finally) of the OS itself.
And here is were I explain why LiMux was a mistake. If you have limited resources, why on earth would you squander thoise resourses doing your own distro? And with NO commercial support to boot!
Instead they should have choosen a specific distro as prefered parthner, working with them on the distro (trying to steer them to a mutualy agreable middle ground) and then making a complementary package to further customize the distro. In the UE alone there are two well known players (Mandriva and Suse in alpha order). One of then (Suse) is even in your home country. Surely there are many more...
But nooo, for some reason, someone decided to re-implement the weel (without commercial support), henceforth LiMux.
Here in Venezuela, the same happened, instead of using an already created distro, they created something called Canaima (a distro to be used for both Desktops and Servers), with no commercial support, and is just a re-spinig of debian, squandering precious resources...
I am sad to see Munich retreat back to Windows. But I can also understand why they do it, and some of the mistakes they made along the way....
That is, if you want a somewhat MODERN system, with a good keyboard. Is a tad expensive, but that's life for you...
Otherwise, go for one of those second hand old computers of yore. Your best bet for a good keyboard is an old laptop.
The quest to make thinner/lighter/smaller laptops has taken it's toll on the keyboards...
Less bessel on the screen means less surface area for the Keyboard (although the move from 4:3 to 16:9 helped a lot in this department), meaning less space and misisng keys.
Thinner and lighter means smaller keys with less travel, and smaller key mechanisms with worse tactile feel.
Me? I use the laptop docked most of the time, which means I use a nice HP Keyboard salvaged from a workstation (PA-RISK ultra 5000). Which has a windows key with a diferent logo, ideal for my mac;-) When on the go, I try to survive with the crappy laptop chiclet keyboard.
boy, i left windows for greener mac pastures in 2009, and never looked back on the SW side (on the HW side is another matter). Having said that, I keep a Windows BootCamp partition for work, but my "windows skillz" are fuzzy, so I do not know if I'll be much help
Here are some basic sugestions in no particular order:
Get Windows 10. As long as he is going to windows, my as well go to the newest one. Do not heed the siren chants of "Downgrade". You know what happens to those sailors who heed the sirens chant...
Use Windows Defender as antivirus, is light on resources, good enough, and updates through the same mechanisms as the rest of the OS. Schedule scans agresively.
Do not let the guy be admin.
Set up some backup solution. Having said that, windows backup solutions do not hold a candle to timemachine, so expect to work your ass out on this one.
Make a full image of the HDD every 4 moths or so.
Configure defrag if you have an HDD. Completely disable defrag if you have an SSD. (it should be done by the OEM, but, check nonetheless)
Windows has a niffty feature (that MacOS does not have) which allows you to mark a connection as "Metered", meaning that is charged per GB, or subjected to Data caps. use accordingly.
Get Windows Pro. Enable Updates. DO NOT DISABLE updates, but Deffer updates.
Do not unistall ie11 and Edge, but HIDE them.
Install CCleaner (is analogous to Onyx or Yasu on OSX), use it bi-monthly. Aaaaaand install Recuva (allows you to recover files even after they are purged from the recycle bin/trash) on day one. You will thank me (eventually).
Restrict telemetry. There are tons of guides on the net on how to do it.
Just like on a mac, install a better compression/decompression uttility than what comes standart from the OS. WinRAR, 7Zip and Winzip are popular choices.
Install VLC (but then again, you do that on OSX too).
Install irfanview as a complement to the preview utilities.
Put at the very least uBlock Origin, EFF privacy Badger and HTTPS everywhere in the browser (browser being chrome or Firefox ESR).
Configure the browser as you would do on a mac from a privacy standpoint.
Windows has very rich parental controls (richer than mac's). Use them as you see fit (I am not a parent, so, aside from knowing they exist, and thart are better than mac's, can't say much more).
Install window on a bootcamp partition of YOUR mac, and make it so that this partition can ALSO be used from your Parallels/Fusion/VirtualBox. Many of the parental controls benefit from a second machine for control and supervision.
Do not trust the parental controls on Windows alone. A determined 14yo looking for porn will defeat them on ANY OS. Do something in the router as well (and he will defeat that too, but at least make it hard, so that he learns something along the way, trust me, I was a 14 YO once, I got my porn [also, talk to him about sex and porn, before "the internet" does the talk]).
Install some office suite. Libreoffice or Office 365, HIS choice (not yours, HIS).
Unistall all the trialware/bloatware, including antivirus trials, office365 trials (unless the guy wants office 365 and you want to save a few bucks), and all other shit. (Macs also have bloatware, we just do not think of it as such, if you do not believe me, check how much space garageband takes on your SSD. Yes, for musicians, garageband may be great, but for nonmusicians, just check how much space it takes).
Win10 has built in PDF readers and PDF generators, but those are crappy. Depending on his usage, that will suffice, or you will have to install something different.
Since the laptop is for gaming, I assume you get a dGPU, update drivers and enable whatever autoupdater is there for graphic drivers.
As soon as you get the laptop out of the box, update all manufacturer utilities.
Enter the Bios (is like a primitive conbination of UEFI/NVRAM/PRAM) and do a quick sanity check.
In the USA I've only seen those in very old houses, they fell out of fashion before the mid-20th century many homes even today are like mine where the front door opens right into the living room or a small hallway next to it with no walls much less doors separating them.
The apartment of my mom in Ft. Lauderdale (1970s vintage), my flat in spain (1960s vintage) and many of my friends houses in Venezuela (60s to 90s Vintages) beg to differ...
In many homes and apartments in many countries (Venezuela and the USoA included), the main door does not lead right into the house. Instead, the main door leads to a small space (zaguan, salita de estar, pasillo, sort of a small hallway). If I can put an interior door separating this space from the rest of the house, and if I used amazon a lot, then I would gladly go for this Amazon service.
the guy opens the main door, enters, drops the packet, leaves. All on camera
He can not see inside the house (because of the extra door), if he tries to enter the house, he has to force the extra door, and gets recorded on camera...
If, on the other hand, the main door leads right into the house, with no way to separate a small area from the rest, no fucking way I would go for this. Not only for the risk of being robed and what not, but also, for the invasion of privacy (i do not want the delivery guy seing the mess of my house, or what paintings I have on the walls), or getting frinedly with my rottwiler;-)
Just Slice the three movies and the extra footage in a slightly different way, and ther eyou have it.
If Amazon (or any other party), wants better material for a TV series, get the rights on "The Silmarillion"...
Plenty of material, for many, many seasons, plenty of latitude for variation from book to TV (as it was not nearly concluded as is), more sex (including incest, like Game of Thrones), and no pesky comparision to the movies (with it's big budget actors and big budget FX)...
As in, two or more people. Let's call them Bob and Margareth.
So, as a proactive workers they are, Bob and Margareth do their modules, and do a first bit of QA on their modules themselves, and then Bob reaches out to one of his teamates (let's say, for the sake of argument, Margareth) and say:
If you do second level QA for my module, I'll do second level QA for your module...
Heck, a wise manager (Let's call him Bill), may catch wind of this technique and make it official and standard procedure inside his group. And maybe, you know, present it to the company, so that it becomes standard procedure company-wide.
But, on a more serious note, as the summary said, Tor browser on windows is not affected. But, as the summary did not say, Tor Browser on TAILS is also not affected.
So, grab an ISO for TAILS 3.12, liveboot it in a VM and keep Tor Browsing away...
Slashdot Mirror
Info is wrong, this does travel over the distribution lines.
By bad, sorry
IIRC what I read on other sources, this time around, AT&T is using the three TRANSMISION lines (115KiloVolts to 500KiloVolts) as a waveguide.
This is not your BPL stuff to the home. This is not going in the 110/220/480volts powerlines.
And If they intend to transmit 1Gbps, they better operate at VERY high frequencies. Higher than HAM.
Probably intended to feed data to basestations in rural areas.
I came back to add an addendum:
My reply was don with all due respect. I was almost certain that #2 was not valid, as IANL. Far from me to catch an online fight with Bruce Perens. A fight which I am certain to lose.
You being a prominent guy in FOSS, probably have more chances of making AST or the Vrije Universiteit to reconsider their stance and either request compliance, or sue Intel for infringement.
In the meantime, again, only AST or Vrije Universiteit can demand intel to comply or sue them, and so far, they do not seem inclined to do so.
The license actuall says documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
So, your legal theory doesn't fly, sorry.
I know #2 does not fly.
But, who is going to sue intel for infringment?
The copyright holder is AST, and he is quite ok with the current state of affaires.
The other Option is Vrije Universiteit, and considering the amount of graduates that go work for ASML/Intel, I seriously doubt it...
... For now.
1.) AST published an open letter, and the fact that the disclaimers are not posted does not seem to bother him much.
See here: http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/intel...
2.) Minix3 License, states that, when distributed in Binary form, the DOCUMENTATION has to reproduce the copyright notice and, well, there is no documentation whatsoever abut the ME.
See here: https://github.com/Stichting-M...
Having said that, security through obscurity is not a sensible policy, and AST's courtesy is not enough. If intel is using minix, they should say so and print the license.
[...]Thank you, Debian. I have been using you since Potato on my desktop and servers. You've never let me down. Well, maybe with systemd. But other than that, you've never let me down. ;} (please don't start any systemd rants, I was just kidding!)
Too late bro. ;-)
SystemD is shite. SystemD is the gretatest.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Slashdot herd, please carry on!
Cryptocurencies may be the futute, but bitcoin is not.
At worst, bitcoin is a pyramid scheme that consumes vast ammounts of energy, at best, it may take a role similar to the gold igntos in the vaults of the central banks of the world.
Currently, (anonymity and "decentralized control not withstanding") bitcoin is useful for the narrow use case of a bank wire transfer. Around $20 per transaction, and a response time of 12 days (but wasting lost of energy per transaction). To pay for a Latte, or an amazon or steam purchase, as you can see, not.
As I said, maybe another cryptocurency will solve the issues (Volatility, Transaction fees, Transaction time, Energy consumption and decentralization), but bitcoin, not much.
It's only passable if you remove the animated tiles.
Which you can do in a relatively simple manner, without the aid of an Application.
While, in the bad old times of Windows8 Applications like ClassicShell and their ilk were a must, Windows 10 start button and shell are "Pasable".
Do not get me wrong, Windows10's start button/menu/shell leave a lot to be desired, but are functional enough to do the job.
Therefore, the need for this sort of app is diminished. Nonetheles, thanks a lot to "ivo", as ClasicShell was my go-to app for that type of task. May (s)he have success in her/his future endeavours.
Nothing "Just Works".
My car requires maintenance from time to time. So does my fridge. And my Synology (which seems to have a PSU issue at the moment). QAnd my cellphone. My computer (MacBook Air) needs periodic maintenance too....
Having said that, I've used pretty much everything there is to use on the desktop during my life:
MS-DOS 1.1
Commodore 64.
CP/M.
Apple ][
MS-DOS 3.2 - 6.2
Windows 3.1 to 98se
FreeBSD
Linux (Slackware - RedHat 6)
NT4-Windows 10
OSX Since 2009.
And I have to say that, in the desktop, the thing that bugs me the less and requires less periodic maintenance, is MacOS (formerly OSX) by a huuuuuuge margin.
At work is a different thing, there I had to sysadmin things like:
HP-UX, Solaris, VMS, WinNT4, RHEL, even Sinix for crying out loud!
But now is Linux all the way, either REHL or Suse. All require periodic maintenance (after all, all are enterprise systems) and all behave more or less well.
did not enable root and set a hard to guess password?
I mean, come on, a lawyer, designer, doctor, writter or grandma with a mac, I can understand that is actually BETTER for them to have no root account by default. No disrespect, maybe you Lawyer/designer/writter/doctor/gramma are ultra smart in your field (and perhaps many more). And I am sure know you know way more about your field than I'll ever be....
But Slashdot has a big proportion of programmers, computer scientists, and EETREs (Electrical/Electronics/Telecoms/Robotics Engineers) readers.
Who of that slashdotian demographic in their right mind did _not_ enable root and set a strong password for it on their mac?
I know I did. As is the first thing I do everytime I bring a new mac home.
BTW, for those who did not read TFA, the workaround for the problem is to enable root account and set a strong PWD.
That was part of the title of TFA.
Too bad 2018 is a month and change away.
By then FFox will be the browser for 2017, and some other will be the browser built for 2018 (and beyond)
Why cahnge now? I am on ESR 52.
But, normally, I got the next ESR as soon as it hit mozilla servers, and manually installed, without waiting for the update system to offer it to me. The last few months of the life of the ESR was hell, mostly because developers check for the browser, and consider the ESR "Old, insecure and Unsupported" (which is NOT TRUE), so websites throw a lot of warnings and render incorrectly...
This time around, though, I'll hold tight until july 2018 to get it when the dust settles. Too many rabbits in the grill.
I am looking forward for all the under-the-hood changes, and imporvements in speed and security. And all my Extensions are compatible... I do have a LOT of NPAPI Plug-Ins, but I do not mind getting rid of a lot of that crap when the time comes (good ridance WebEx, Citrix, sharepoint, GoogleTalk and SabaMeetng!)
But, My browser is a WORK tool, I can not be re-adapting to new quirks and changes in the UI each and every 8 weeks or so....
So, to all you guys on the standard release channel, thank you very, very much for doing the Gamma Testing for us. Yes, you get to enjoy the new features sooner than anyone else, but then again, If I wanted fast releases, I'd go for chrome.
BTW I use a mac. So Edge is not an option (at 1 release every 6 months is more stable), and Safari is crap (unpredictable update schedule, very few plugins, not crossplatform). So, FireFox ESR it is.
[...] so I'm not sure if you're complaining, and if so, why? [...] I hope I understood your comment correctly.
Right at the end of the comment, there is a ;-) emoticon.
You may have missed it.
So, the Top 500 list of computers was dominated by many Variants of Unix, with a little sprinkle of other weird stuff (among those, VMS). Which is not a monoculture
Then, as the other weird stuff waned, Windows took it's place (for a short while). Not directly as a replacement of course, but rather as a percentage of Top500 systems.
On the other side of the fence, Linux began to take increasign market share of the Top500 because of low cost, shallow learning curve from *nix, and posibility to modify source code, in an accelerated path to become a monoculture (at least where the Top500 is concerned).
And now, finally, we are on a monoculture in the Top500, with Linux all the way in the Top500... No *BSD, no AIX, HP-UX, or Solaris. Just Linux all the way.
Better not catch anyone complaining about Chrome Monoculture, Windows Monoculture, or Android monoculture! M'kay? ;-)
Not In My Backyard
The cost of building and maintaining ever faster telecoms networls (celullar and otherwise), paired with smaller cell sizes, and NIMB syndrome were communities reject cell towers (but demand service nonetheless) for aesthetic or "health" reasons (in the case of celullar), lead to this.
Fisrt came the sharing of the long range towers (think microwave repetition and concentration points), then came the sharing of rural cell towers, then urban cell towers.
The next step is RAN Sharing. And is being baked in 5G standards (and backported to 4G).
[Carefull, PDF]
https://www.gsma.com/publicpol...
For more info on the topic, and in particular, specific provider cases, google is your friend.
And before I have to duck for cover, I'll have to say I favoured Munich move to FOSS, I used it as a case example advocating for similar moves (while also pointing out the errors, of course). I've been to Munich (Siemens Training OMC-S, great memories from Kunstpark-ost), and I love the city and its people.
If you are going from Closed source to open source, there are a few pitfalls to avoid.
First, for a project like Munich, the LAST thing you replace is the Desktop OS of Users. You first replace the apps. And DO NOT EVEN CONSIDER a rip and replace strategy.
You replace the apps it in waves, using your chosen crossplatform FOSS alternatives (I understand Munich did something along this lines).
And ALSO for each wave you have a SWAT/Crack team on the Helpdesk specificaly dedicated to help the users master that specific wave of the transition.
And ALSO adequate training for each and every wave to boot (and the training for each specific wave has to be done BEFORE the wave starts, and for Every employee)
Remember, for us techies, changing from IE11 to Firefox, or from word to Libreoffice writer may seem easy, but for a public servant who was trained as, say an administrator or lawyer, it may not come so naturaly.
First you start with the low hanging fruit of things like Your users' browsers (perhaps with a creative use of a plugin like "use IE here", prepopulated with suitable lists) and PDF viewers/generators.
Then along Comes Powerpoint (please notice that I said Powerpoint, not Office), with the trick of setting up PowerPoint Viewer as the default PowerPoint program and things like publisher.
Then comes the turn of Word. This will be a problem because all the damaged formats. Here Word Viewer and your SWAT transition team will prove invaluable...
Then comes a hard nut to crack. Excel. But by now, your users should have the perception that changes from Comercial SW to FOSS are not "that hard", and that the SWAT Team has their back.
Then, comes the boss fight: Exchange Server. Please remeber that exchange server is not only email, but also calendaring, and many of those functions are still unmatched by FOSS alternatives. Let alone migrating the historic data stores....
After all apps are more or less migrated (Including rewriting web apps to be crossbrowser, creative use of wine for some custom apps, directing user to web interfaces of certain packages instead of using custom clients), is the turn (finally) of the OS itself.
And here is were I explain why LiMux was a mistake. If you have limited resources, why on earth would you squander thoise resourses doing your own distro? And with NO commercial support to boot!
Instead they should have choosen a specific distro as prefered parthner, working with them on the distro (trying to steer them to a mutualy agreable middle ground) and then making a complementary package to further customize the distro. In the UE alone there are two well known players (Mandriva and Suse in alpha order). One of then (Suse) is even in your home country. Surely there are many more...
But nooo, for some reason, someone decided to re-implement the weel (without commercial support), henceforth LiMux.
Here in Venezuela, the same happened, instead of using an already created distro, they created something called Canaima (a distro to be used for both Desktops and Servers), with no commercial support, and is just a re-spinig of debian, squandering precious resources...
I am sad to see Munich retreat back to Windows. But I can also understand why they do it, and some of the mistakes they made along the way....
It was released a couple of months ago.
That is, if you want a somewhat MODERN system, with a good keyboard. Is a tad expensive, but that's life for you...
Otherwise, go for one of those second hand old computers of yore. Your best bet for a good keyboard is an old laptop.
The quest to make thinner/lighter/smaller laptops has taken it's toll on the keyboards...
Less bessel on the screen means less surface area for the Keyboard (although the move from 4:3 to 16:9 helped a lot in this department), meaning less space and misisng keys.
Thinner and lighter means smaller keys with less travel, and smaller key mechanisms with worse tactile feel.
Me? I use the laptop docked most of the time, which means I use a nice HP Keyboard salvaged from a workstation (PA-RISK ultra 5000). Which has a windows key with a diferent logo, ideal for my mac ;-)
When on the go, I try to survive with the crappy laptop chiclet keyboard.
boy, i left windows for greener mac pastures in 2009, and never looked back on the SW side (on the HW side is another matter). Having said that, I keep a Windows BootCamp partition for work, but my "windows skillz" are fuzzy, so I do not know if I'll be much help
Here are some basic sugestions in no particular order:
Get Windows 10. As long as he is going to windows, my as well go to the newest one. Do not heed the siren chants of "Downgrade". You know what happens to those sailors who heed the sirens chant...
Use Windows Defender as antivirus, is light on resources, good enough, and updates through the same mechanisms as the rest of the OS. Schedule scans agresively.
Do not let the guy be admin.
Set up some backup solution. Having said that, windows backup solutions do not hold a candle to timemachine, so expect to work your ass out on this one.
Make a full image of the HDD every 4 moths or so.
Configure defrag if you have an HDD. Completely disable defrag if you have an SSD. (it should be done by the OEM, but, check nonetheless)
Windows has a niffty feature (that MacOS does not have) which allows you to mark a connection as "Metered", meaning that is charged per GB, or subjected to Data caps. use accordingly.
Get Windows Pro. Enable Updates. DO NOT DISABLE updates, but Deffer updates.
Do not unistall ie11 and Edge, but HIDE them.
Install CCleaner (is analogous to Onyx or Yasu on OSX), use it bi-monthly. Aaaaaand install Recuva (allows you to recover files even after they are purged from the recycle bin/trash) on day one. You will thank me (eventually).
Restrict telemetry. There are tons of guides on the net on how to do it.
Just like on a mac, install a better compression/decompression uttility than what comes standart from the OS. WinRAR, 7Zip and Winzip are popular choices.
Install VLC (but then again, you do that on OSX too).
Install irfanview as a complement to the preview utilities.
Put at the very least uBlock Origin, EFF privacy Badger and HTTPS everywhere in the browser (browser being chrome or Firefox ESR).
Configure the browser as you would do on a mac from a privacy standpoint.
Windows has very rich parental controls (richer than mac's). Use them as you see fit (I am not a parent, so, aside from knowing they exist, and thart are better than mac's, can't say much more).
Install window on a bootcamp partition of YOUR mac, and make it so that this partition can ALSO be used from your Parallels/Fusion/VirtualBox. Many of the parental controls benefit from a second machine for control and supervision.
Do not trust the parental controls on Windows alone. A determined 14yo looking for porn will defeat them on ANY OS. Do something in the router as well (and he will defeat that too, but at least make it hard, so that he learns something along the way, trust me, I was a 14 YO once, I got my porn [also, talk to him about sex and porn, before "the internet" does the talk]).
Install some office suite. Libreoffice or Office 365, HIS choice (not yours, HIS).
Unistall all the trialware/bloatware, including antivirus trials, office365 trials (unless the guy wants office 365 and you want to save a few bucks), and all other shit. (Macs also have bloatware, we just do not think of it as such, if you do not believe me, check how much space garageband takes on your SSD. Yes, for musicians, garageband may be great, but for nonmusicians, just check how much space it takes).
Win10 has built in PDF readers and PDF generators, but those are crappy. Depending on his usage, that will suffice, or you will have to install something different.
Since the laptop is for gaming, I assume you get a dGPU, update drivers and enable whatever autoupdater is there for graphic drivers.
As soon as you get the laptop out of the box, update all manufacturer utilities.
Enter the Bios (is like a primitive conbination of UEFI/NVRAM/PRAM) and do a quick sanity check.
Install DosBox (good games a
In the USA I've only seen those in very old houses, they fell out of fashion before the mid-20th century many homes even today are like mine where the front door opens right into the living room or a small hallway next to it with no walls much less doors separating them.
The apartment of my mom in Ft. Lauderdale (1970s vintage), my flat in spain (1960s vintage) and many of my friends houses in Venezuela (60s to 90s Vintages) beg to differ...
In many homes and apartments in many countries (Venezuela and the USoA included), the main door does not lead right into the house. Instead, the main door leads to a small space (zaguan, salita de estar, pasillo, sort of a small hallway). If I can put an interior door separating this space from the rest of the house, and if I used amazon a lot, then I would gladly go for this Amazon service.
the guy opens the main door, enters, drops the packet, leaves. All on camera
He can not see inside the house (because of the extra door), if he tries to enter the house, he has to force the extra door, and gets recorded on camera...
If, on the other hand, the main door leads right into the house, with no way to separate a small area from the rest, no fucking way I would go for this. Not only for the risk of being robed and what not, but also, for the invasion of privacy (i do not want the delivery guy seing the mess of my house, or what paintings I have on the walls), or getting frinedly with my rottwiler ;-)
Just Slice the three movies and the extra footage in a slightly different way, and ther eyou have it.
If Amazon (or any other party), wants better material for a TV series, get the rights on "The Silmarillion"...
Plenty of material, for many, many seasons, plenty of latitude for variation from book to TV (as it was not nearly concluded as is), more sex (including incest, like Game of Thrones), and no pesky comparision to the movies (with it's big budget actors and big budget FX)...
As in, two or more people. Let's call them Bob and Margareth.
So, as a proactive workers they are, Bob and Margareth do their modules, and do a first bit of QA on their modules themselves, and then Bob reaches out to one of his teamates (let's say, for the sake of argument, Margareth) and say:
If you do second level QA for my module, I'll do second level QA for your module...
Heck, a wise manager (Let's call him Bill), may catch wind of this technique and make it official and standard procedure inside his group. And maybe, you know, present it to the company, so that it becomes standard procedure company-wide.
So? Separate QA department? I'll vote no.
But, on a more serious note, as the summary said, Tor browser on windows is not affected. But, as the summary did not say, Tor Browser on TAILS is also not affected.
So, grab an ISO for TAILS 3.12, liveboot it in a VM and keep Tor Browsing away...