I found out the hard way when I was 19 in the early 90s. A friend and I were driving to meet a couple of friends, and we lived in a small rural area. It was night, and a car came up behind me pretty quickly. It was a 55 mph speed limit, and I was going about 50, being in no hurry. I kind of edged to the right thinking he would pass... he didn't. He stayed right on my ass. I slowed down, and he stayed right on me getting VERY close. We were kind of in the middle of nowhere, and I couldn't even tell what kind of car it was or who was in it. We got a little nervous (lots of drunken crazy rednecks in the area) so I sped up to put some distance between us. BOOM, on went the cherries. It was a local state trooper, and I got a ticket for speeding. I asked him why he didn't pass me, and he said he stayed on me to see what I would do.
A friend of our family worked in the local courthouse, and told us later that he was a notorious asshole for doing things like this. There was also mention that I got caught at the end of the month, when he would be ensuring his quotas were met. I think my dad called the local PD, but since he was a state cop they couldn't do anything about it.
Deterrence is the whole point of having speed traps and police check points... which is completely in-line with people being made aware of them.
Speed traps and check points have NOTHING to do with deterrence. They generate revenue, plain and simple. And perhaps prevention in the case of DWI checkpoints.
For chat, I always found MindAlign to be my favorite. (10 years or so ago) It was essentially a beefed up version of IRC with a few additional nice features. We used it for a dispersed team around the world working on the same development project. Microsoft used the code in Group Chat, then sold off the company. Group Chat was still useful until they decided to make it more Microsoft and summarily killed the usefulness of it.
2nd favorite to MindAlign was good ol' IRC. Slack isn't approved software at the company I work at now, so we have to use Teams. *disgusted emoji*
This is exactly what happens when you buy in to a system that depends on online connectivity.
Fuck that. When I buy a game I want to own the game. You millennials have no idea of the pain you are in for.
I'm probably in the minority here, but is anyone else kind of impressed with how quickly the issue was identified, communicated effectively by MS, and corrected? Sure, some people may have been inconvenienced for at most 3 hours, but that really isn't the end of the world. I guess if you don't follow them on Twitter you might not have known what was going on, but all you'd have to do was... I don't know... wait? I mean, just look at this news story. If you were not paying attention during these 3 hours of the Xboxalypse (tm) you would have never known or had time to be outraged.
I get that it is disturbing that they could all just quit working for a while, but shit happens. That's what we get for expecting everything to just work and be at our fingertips. It's kind of like people complaining about their cellphones all the time instead of appreciating how far we have come in a relatively short period of time. Maybe I'm just old enough to remember when everyone wasn't so intertwined with being constantly bombarded with entertainment.
And to the parent poster, yes you buy into a system that depends on online connectivity. But there are also huge advantages to that as well. I'd say it's a pretty good trade-off for 3 hours of outage a couple of times a year. But, I used to have to ride my bike 5 miles to get to the arcade and wait for the privilege to fill a game with my hard-earned quarters. And I was thrilled to do it.
Kind of from a morbid curiosity standpoint. Where I work we have an enterprise-wide platform that only works with IE11 and Silverlight. I know Silverlight is supposed to 'go away' in 2020, but I don't know what that really *means*. As long as IE is around, and as long as they don't specifically disable Silverlight, our application will still work.
All efforts over the past 5 years to talk Sr Management into rewriting it in HTML 5 haven't worked. They are convinced that we can created replacements in the cloud (on a new technology stack). But it is a HUGE gamble because our clients are notorious for be slow to upgrade, and our platform is pretty large and complex. We are definitely not on track to be done by 2020. So I suspect that any day MS could publish an updated to IE11 or Win10 and we would effectively be dead in the water.
I'm aware of the shadow profile concept. I simply meant that this would "round out" their tracking so they can get more meat on those they can't directly track. I would bet what they know about me isn't very complete. Many of my friends don't use FB, and if they do it doesn't have anything to do with me. I don't go out to eat very often, my friends don't take pics of me and put them online - and if they did, I don't have an account for them to tag.
It does concern me how willing everyone else seems to be about sharing the inane details of their lives online, including the details about everyone around them. I can't stop it and I know it happens, but I do what I can to avoid just offering up my private information to companies that have no right to have that information.
They can also tap into users that don't use all of those platforms. e.g. I used WA for a few years before FB bought them. I abandoned Instagram several years ago, and have never used FB. BUT - now they will be able to more accurately track me, because they will have access to my WA data in FB. I am sure this will be done in a straight-forward way with an amended TOS that I may or may not ever see.
Yes, I can see the efficiencies of combining the back-ends from an operational perspective, but that is only a very small piece of the pie. Being able to more completely track people's information and triangulate on them is much more valuable.
In any case, if you like keyboard use, you should try installing Claws as your Email client- it is extremely keyboard friendly (because it is designed that way) and yet works great with a mouse, too. It is nice that there are programs that let you work they way you want to work. https://www.claws-mail.org/
I remember trying out Claws many years ago, I didn't care for it. I've stuck with pine (now alpine) which I've used for... wow, I guess about 20 years now. Over the years I have tried a couple other mail programs, but none have made me even consider switching. I did run Thunderbird and alpine in parallel for a year or so, but I had to ditch Tbird. Alpine combined with fetchmail is just fantastic.
This is mostly a direct response to incidents that happened in India. People would start rumors of someone being a pedophile, which would then propagate like wildfire via WA forwarding. As a result, some people were killed by mobs. These were malicious rumors that led to people being killed! I was actually visiting India while some of this was going on. I didn't see any mobs, but it was all over the news.
It's SCARY that something like that could happen anywhere. It's a little more extreme than what we have seen in the US, but we've had our fair share of those types of incidents. Like the clown who went to the pizza place with weapons. I am sure there is more of it going on, every day, but that is why I avoid the news. Everyone seems to have lost their minds and information/misinformation is so NOW NOW NOW, REACT REACT REACT.
Will this limit be effective in slowing that kind of thing? I don't know.. but it may help without much harm.
it's very dumb you mean. They've never though of giving the option to login with a username or password? What if I don't want/have a cell phone, or if it is discharged?
Wow, seriously? It's a mobile app. If you don't have a phone then you aren't really their target market. Can you use FB on your computer if it isn't plugged in? What about if you don't have internet access, how are you supposed to use it then?
Your phone has to be on the wifi network that your pc is on... you open up WA, choose Web from the menu, and it turns on the camera and you scan it. Boom, you are signed in, with all of your chats and history. It's pretty slick.
I don't know about you but most people are totally cool with adding me on Facebook as opposed to giving me their phone number... whatsapp is highly primitive, doesn't do anything I couldn't do with ICQ 20 years ago. I seriously don't get wtf is wrong with these people creating new IM programs all the time.
I have a group of friends in another part of the US. They invited me to a WhatsApp group about 4 years ago. I downloaded it and immediately liked it. Here is what it offers for me over my normal texting app: - supports long messages - built-in ability to record audio clips - supports large images - supports large videos... I've gotten 30+MB videos from friends. - ability to send location/audio/video/other files (e.g. txt, pdf, etc). I once sent a 30 MB PDF to a friend via WA. Can't even email that! - group chat - this is the main reason I use it, as there are about 10 people in the current chat. I know you can group text, but this is just done much better. I also have a GC with my wife and daughter. - integrated audio/video calls - works over wifi - this was especially helpful for me when i traveled to india. I could turn off my service and just use wifi. - I can WA with people in India (and when I was there) without phone service - more reliable! I always get WA messages, I often don't get calls or texts. (same with my wife, who has a different phone) - WA web - it is really nice to pull up WA on my computer and use it there.
The serious downside I see is that it is now owned by FB, which I don't use or want to use. But I like WA so much I don't want to drop it.
I have my emails back to 2002. I collect various accounts using fetchmail to my local machine. I read them all, delete as necessary. I save them off into folders by month in the format YYYY-MM so they naturally sort. I also archive my sent mail in the same way.
I have 228 in my inbox now, and that is all of Dec and Jan (so far). I archive manually when I feel the need. If I need to find something, I can just use grep to locate the correct archive, and then either read it in vi or via alpine.
This has worked for me for many years, and only takes up a few GB of space. I have a cron job to zip and archive it all nightly, and move them off to another server. I use a similar archiving system at work, where I store them off in folders for each year-month. It's outlook, so it's slower and I have less control over it.
It's been fairly well researched that speed cameras actually cause more problems than they solve. Actually these cameras are a revenue generating scheme. Arizona did this for a while before ripping out most of them because they caused more accidents than they were hoping to prevent.
I lived there for 8.5 years. I remember those damn cameras. When my wife was in the hospital having our first child, I was driving home around 3AM to get some sleep. I came up to a red light at a 4-way intersection. I sat. And sat. For about 3 to 4 minutes. Not another car in sight - and I could see for a couple miles in all directions, it is the desert after all. So I went through the red light and FLASH FLASH I got nailed. This was in a relatively newly developed area with no streetlights and it was very dark, so the flashes were quite disorienting. Yeah, I just paid the ticket when I got the pic in the mail. Nobody would ever believe me that the light was not functioning properly.
I was a RedHat user back on v5.1. I tried to upgrade my system, and it was awfully painful. But I stuck with RedHat. Then I upgraded again. And again. Every time it got a little less painful, but it still sucked. Then I decided to try out another distro. Mandrake. It was nice, and I liked KDE! I upgraded a couple of times, and it wasn't too bad. So change was good. After a few more upgrades, it still wasn't that smooth. I decided to try out Ubuntu, and I really liked it. Since I was liking KDE I switched to Kubuntu. Change was good! I upgraded a couple of times - near flawless! Change was great! Then KDE started to really annoy me - too much flash, and eventually a bug cropped up that caused me all kinds of headaches. So I switched to Xubuntu. XFCE was great, and change was good! I upgraded that system several times, and it was very smooth. After 7 upgrades, things were getting less stable. Since i was going to reinstall anyway, i looked at other distros.... ah, Linux Mint. Polished, but with XFCE not overly so. I had found my distro, change was great! The method of upgrading was to reinstall cleanly, so I made sure to set up my new system so that was minimally painful. Then I was able to upgrade in place - painlessly! All was right.
Then after one upgrade, I noticed that my machine started having various issues. I couldn't shutdown cleanly. I would take minutes to shutdown, where it used to take seconds. I thought it was hardware at first, but it wasn't. It was systemd. I hadn't noticed before upgrading that they were switching to systemd. I had begun to trust Mint so much that I just thought it would be smooth. I learned more and more about systemd, and tried to fix the issue. No deal. So I gritted my teeth and dealt with it. Change can be bad. Eventually I got a different computer, and then I had complete confirmation that my issues weren't hardware related because they persisted. It was time to find a new distro.
It wasn't an easy search, because by this time systemd had kind of taken over. Mint only went to it because it's a downstream of Ubuntu. Clem (maintainer of Mint) confirmed this to me, that it wasn't his choice at all and it was just the easiest route to take.
I looked at the BSDs, Arch, Slack, and a few others. But because I was familiar with and really liked the apt package manager, I chose Devuan. It was not only a great distro, but I know that it is specifically focused on NOT implementing systemd. It was a simple install and upgrade, and my system is fast as ever and shuts down within seconds again. So again... change is great!
Yes, I know there are plenty of bugs and vulnerabilities to go around, but based on the frustrations that systemd caused me, I think I am afforded a bit of schadenfreude.
...the average inbox had 102 unread and 331 read emails.
That's adorable.
My main inbox has about 1200 emails, almost all read. My archive has about 50,000, with about 600 unread.
Archiving email is important. Many times, I've had to go pull an email from a few years prior to prove that management did actually say that thing, or that a particular job did in fact run, or even just to find information that was long-since forgotten.
Storage is cheap. Missing information is not.
I only have 188 in my inbox now, all read. That is just Dec1 to date (Jan 8). Everything else is saved off off by year/month (YYYY-MM for proper sorting), including my sent-mail in the same fashion. Mine go back to 2002, I am not sure how many there are exactly. But I use fetchmail to pull in several accounts locally so it is fairly complete.
I use alpine for email, and can easily grep my archives to find something/someone if I need to, which does occur. I don't consider it hoarding, it's saving. All of those emails take up 3.5 GB of space, which is nothing, and it's only 2.3 GB in a zipped archive. I have a cron job to back them up nightly. It takes really a very minute amount of effort to do that.
Now pictures/videos are a bit tougher, but just because of the amount of space they require. Especially since my wife started doing digital photography and saving RAW images as well. It's only minimally more work to keep good backups using some rsync scripts.
We have gone back and done some purging though, it's good and healthy to do that.
Ohhh, you mean commercial radio. Because that is all they seem to play. And when they aren't playing commercials, they are playing
1. a song I had heard 1000 times 25 years ago that I hate
2. a song I had heard 1000 times 25 years ago that I like, and I have
3. some awful dreck that makes me turn the channel or turn it off
When I listen to music, it is from my digital collection. If I want to find something new, I can find it on a few youtube channels I frequent. If I want to buy it, I will buy a digital copy - or in rare occurrences a CD - from online retailers like bandcamp, cdbaby, or from the artist directly.
I don't use any streaming services, I have no need for them beyond finding music worthy of downloading.
Our legal system is just a self-fulfilling prophecy. You know who wins in this story? Not the guy, not his wife, not the public. Lawyers. Lawyers win, because they cash in on a system where the people involved in this story spent YEARS arguing about this. I get that it's the principle, and the fact that the law was stupid and ultimately ruled unconstitutional. But WTF is the POINT of it all?
Our laws are written to be abused, then contested, then reworded and amended. Our society is not better off for them, it simply causes us to chase our tails at every turn, and the 'rule of law' become more and more of a joke. All the while, lawyers are cashing in on a system that they built, and it will forever need 'tuning' which can only be done by more lawyers.
I agree with a lot of the other up-modded comments, but let me get this straight... MS worked on EdgeHTML for 4 years, and finally threw in the towel because of changes that Google kept implementing on their sites? Edge hardly even broke 2% of the browser market share - EVER.
Google makes a lot of little changes, all the time. And they probably do get 'insight' into the benefit of those before others. But I think it's pretty clear that MS didn't fail with Edge because of Google. MS failed because they still really don't play well with others. It's just that now, the others are the big dogs in the yard.
Slashdot Mirror
I found out the hard way when I was 19 in the early 90s.
A friend and I were driving to meet a couple of friends, and we lived in a small rural area. It was night, and a car came up behind me pretty quickly. It was a 55 mph speed limit, and I was going about 50, being in no hurry. I kind of edged to the right thinking he would pass... he didn't. He stayed right on my ass. I slowed down, and he stayed right on me getting VERY close. We were kind of in the middle of nowhere, and I couldn't even tell what kind of car it was or who was in it. We got a little nervous (lots of drunken crazy rednecks in the area) so I sped up to put some distance between us. BOOM, on went the cherries. It was a local state trooper, and I got a ticket for speeding. I asked him why he didn't pass me, and he said he stayed on me to see what I would do.
A friend of our family worked in the local courthouse, and told us later that he was a notorious asshole for doing things like this. There was also mention that I got caught at the end of the month, when he would be ensuring his quotas were met. I think my dad called the local PD, but since he was a state cop they couldn't do anything about it.
Deterrence is the whole point of having speed traps and police check points... which is completely in-line with people being made aware of them.
Speed traps and check points have NOTHING to do with deterrence. They generate revenue, plain and simple. And perhaps prevention in the case of DWI checkpoints.
For chat, I always found MindAlign to be my favorite. (10 years or so ago) It was essentially a beefed up version of IRC with a few additional nice features. We used it for a dispersed team around the world working on the same development project. Microsoft used the code in Group Chat, then sold off the company. Group Chat was still useful until they decided to make it more Microsoft and summarily killed the usefulness of it.
2nd favorite to MindAlign was good ol' IRC. Slack isn't approved software at the company I work at now, so we have to use Teams. *disgusted emoji*
This is exactly what happens when you buy in to a system that depends on online connectivity.
Fuck that. When I buy a game I want to own the game. You millennials have no idea of the pain you are in for.
I'm probably in the minority here, but is anyone else kind of impressed with how quickly the issue was identified, communicated effectively by MS, and corrected? Sure, some people may have been inconvenienced for at most 3 hours, but that really isn't the end of the world. I guess if you don't follow them on Twitter you might not have known what was going on, but all you'd have to do was ... I don't know... wait? I mean, just look at this news story. If you were not paying attention during these 3 hours of the Xboxalypse (tm) you would have never known or had time to be outraged.
I get that it is disturbing that they could all just quit working for a while, but shit happens. That's what we get for expecting everything to just work and be at our fingertips. It's kind of like people complaining about their cellphones all the time instead of appreciating how far we have come in a relatively short period of time. Maybe I'm just old enough to remember when everyone wasn't so intertwined with being constantly bombarded with entertainment.
And to the parent poster, yes you buy into a system that depends on online connectivity. But there are also huge advantages to that as well. I'd say it's a pretty good trade-off for 3 hours of outage a couple of times a year. But, I used to have to ride my bike 5 miles to get to the arcade and wait for the privilege to fill a game with my hard-earned quarters. And I was thrilled to do it.
Kind of from a morbid curiosity standpoint.
Where I work we have an enterprise-wide platform that only works with IE11 and Silverlight. I know Silverlight is supposed to 'go away' in 2020, but I don't know what that really *means*. As long as IE is around, and as long as they don't specifically disable Silverlight, our application will still work.
All efforts over the past 5 years to talk Sr Management into rewriting it in HTML 5 haven't worked. They are convinced that we can created replacements in the cloud (on a new technology stack). But it is a HUGE gamble because our clients are notorious for be slow to upgrade, and our platform is pretty large and complex. We are definitely not on track to be done by 2020. So I suspect that any day MS could publish an updated to IE11 or Win10 and we would effectively be dead in the water.
New slogan:
"Alphabet - we're evil from A to Z!"
They can't, they would get sued by Amazon for infringement.
I know the title was just lifted from the article, but it should read "Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs Plans To Sell Location Data On Millions of Cellphones"
The second sentence of the summary says it is being done by an Alphabet subsidiary, which would make it a "sibling" of Google.
I'm aware of the shadow profile concept. I simply meant that this would "round out" their tracking so they can get more meat on those they can't directly track.
I would bet what they know about me isn't very complete. Many of my friends don't use FB, and if they do it doesn't have anything to do with me. I don't go out to eat very often, my friends don't take pics of me and put them online - and if they did, I don't have an account for them to tag.
It does concern me how willing everyone else seems to be about sharing the inane details of their lives online, including the details about everyone around them.
I can't stop it and I know it happens, but I do what I can to avoid just offering up my private information to companies that have no right to have that information.
They can also tap into users that don't use all of those platforms. e.g. I used WA for a few years before FB bought them. I abandoned Instagram several years ago, and have never used FB. BUT - now they will be able to more accurately track me, because they will have access to my WA data in FB. I am sure this will be done in a straight-forward way with an amended TOS that I may or may not ever see.
Yes, I can see the efficiencies of combining the back-ends from an operational perspective, but that is only a very small piece of the pie. Being able to more completely track people's information and triangulate on them is much more valuable.
In any case, if you like keyboard use, you should try installing Claws as your Email client- it is extremely keyboard friendly (because it is designed that way) and yet works great with a mouse, too. It is nice that there are programs that let you work they way you want to work. https://www.claws-mail.org/
I remember trying out Claws many years ago, I didn't care for it. I've stuck with pine (now alpine) which I've used for... wow, I guess about 20 years now. Over the years I have tried a couple other mail programs, but none have made me even consider switching. I did run Thunderbird and alpine in parallel for a year or so, but I had to ditch Tbird. Alpine combined with fetchmail is just fantastic.
This is mostly a direct response to incidents that happened in India. People would start rumors of someone being a pedophile, which would then propagate like wildfire via WA forwarding. As a result, some people were killed by mobs. These were malicious rumors that led to people being killed! I was actually visiting India while some of this was going on. I didn't see any mobs, but it was all over the news.
It's SCARY that something like that could happen anywhere. It's a little more extreme than what we have seen in the US, but we've had our fair share of those types of incidents. Like the clown who went to the pizza place with weapons. I am sure there is more of it going on, every day, but that is why I avoid the news. Everyone seems to have lost their minds and information/misinformation is so NOW NOW NOW, REACT REACT REACT.
Will this limit be effective in slowing that kind of thing? I don't know.. but it may help without much harm.
You should probably send WhatsApp a tersely worded email expressing your outrage.
it's very dumb you mean. They've never though of giving the option to login with a username or password? What if I don't want/have a cell phone, or if it is discharged?
Wow, seriously? It's a mobile app. If you don't have a phone then you aren't really their target market.
Can you use FB on your computer if it isn't plugged in? What about if you don't have internet access, how are you supposed to use it then?
It was all like that before FB bought it, and luckily they haven't ruined it by monkeying with it.
Your phone has to be on the wifi network that your pc is on... you open up WA, choose Web from the menu, and it turns on the camera and you scan it. Boom, you are signed in, with all of your chats and history. It's pretty slick.
I don't know about you but most people are totally cool with adding me on Facebook as opposed to giving me their phone number... whatsapp is highly primitive, doesn't do anything I couldn't do with ICQ 20 years ago. I seriously don't get wtf is wrong with these people creating new IM programs all the time.
I have a group of friends in another part of the US. They invited me to a WhatsApp group about 4 years ago. I downloaded it and immediately liked it. Here is what it offers for me over my normal texting app:
- supports long messages
- built-in ability to record audio clips
- supports large images
- supports large videos... I've gotten 30+MB videos from friends.
- ability to send location/audio/video/other files (e.g. txt, pdf, etc). I once sent a 30 MB PDF to a friend via WA. Can't even email that!
- group chat - this is the main reason I use it, as there are about 10 people in the current chat. I know you can group text, but this is just done much better. I also have a GC with my wife and daughter.
- integrated audio/video calls
- works over wifi - this was especially helpful for me when i traveled to india. I could turn off my service and just use wifi.
- I can WA with people in India (and when I was there) without phone service
- more reliable! I always get WA messages, I often don't get calls or texts. (same with my wife, who has a different phone)
- WA web - it is really nice to pull up WA on my computer and use it there.
The serious downside I see is that it is now owned by FB, which I don't use or want to use. But I like WA so much I don't want to drop it.
I have my emails back to 2002. I collect various accounts using fetchmail to my local machine. I read them all, delete as necessary. I save them off into folders by month in the format YYYY-MM so they naturally sort. I also archive my sent mail in the same way.
I have 228 in my inbox now, and that is all of Dec and Jan (so far). I archive manually when I feel the need.
If I need to find something, I can just use grep to locate the correct archive, and then either read it in vi or via alpine.
This has worked for me for many years, and only takes up a few GB of space. I have a cron job to zip and archive it all nightly, and move them off to another server. I use a similar archiving system at work, where I store them off in folders for each year-month. It's outlook, so it's slower and I have less control over it.
SystemD is putting that feature out in the next version.
It's been fairly well researched that speed cameras actually cause more problems than they solve. Actually these cameras are a revenue generating scheme. Arizona did this for a while before ripping out most of them because they caused more accidents than they were hoping to prevent.
I lived there for 8.5 years. I remember those damn cameras. When my wife was in the hospital having our first child, I was driving home around 3AM to get some sleep. I came up to a red light at a 4-way intersection. I sat. And sat. For about 3 to 4 minutes. Not another car in sight - and I could see for a couple miles in all directions, it is the desert after all. So I went through the red light and FLASH FLASH I got nailed. This was in a relatively newly developed area with no streetlights and it was very dark, so the flashes were quite disorienting. Yeah, I just paid the ticket when I got the pic in the mail. Nobody would ever believe me that the light was not functioning properly.
I was a RedHat user back on v5.1. I tried to upgrade my system, and it was awfully painful. But I stuck with RedHat. Then I upgraded again. And again. Every time it got a little less painful, but it still sucked. Then I decided to try out another distro. Mandrake. It was nice, and I liked KDE! I upgraded a couple of times, and it wasn't too bad. So change was good. After a few more upgrades, it still wasn't that smooth. I decided to try out Ubuntu, and I really liked it. Since I was liking KDE I switched to Kubuntu. Change was good! I upgraded a couple of times - near flawless! Change was great! Then KDE started to really annoy me - too much flash, and eventually a bug cropped up that caused me all kinds of headaches. So I switched to Xubuntu. XFCE was great, and change was good! I upgraded that system several times, and it was very smooth. After 7 upgrades, things were getting less stable. Since i was going to reinstall anyway, i looked at other distros.... ah, Linux Mint. Polished, but with XFCE not overly so. I had found my distro, change was great! The method of upgrading was to reinstall cleanly, so I made sure to set up my new system so that was minimally painful. Then I was able to upgrade in place - painlessly! All was right.
Then after one upgrade, I noticed that my machine started having various issues. I couldn't shutdown cleanly. I would take minutes to shutdown, where it used to take seconds. I thought it was hardware at first, but it wasn't. It was systemd. I hadn't noticed before upgrading that they were switching to systemd. I had begun to trust Mint so much that I just thought it would be smooth. I learned more and more about systemd, and tried to fix the issue. No deal. So I gritted my teeth and dealt with it. Change can be bad. Eventually I got a different computer, and then I had complete confirmation that my issues weren't hardware related because they persisted. It was time to find a new distro.
It wasn't an easy search, because by this time systemd had kind of taken over. Mint only went to it because it's a downstream of Ubuntu. Clem (maintainer of Mint) confirmed this to me, that it wasn't his choice at all and it was just the easiest route to take.
I looked at the BSDs, Arch, Slack, and a few others. But because I was familiar with and really liked the apt package manager, I chose Devuan. It was not only a great distro, but I know that it is specifically focused on NOT implementing systemd. It was a simple install and upgrade, and my system is fast as ever and shuts down within seconds again. So again... change is great!
for me... I switched to Devuan a few months ago.
Yes, I know there are plenty of bugs and vulnerabilities to go around, but based on the frustrations that systemd caused me, I think I am afforded a bit of schadenfreude.
...the average inbox had 102 unread and 331 read emails.
That's adorable.
My main inbox has about 1200 emails, almost all read. My archive has about 50,000, with about 600 unread.
Archiving email is important. Many times, I've had to go pull an email from a few years prior to prove that management did actually say that thing, or that a particular job did in fact run, or even just to find information that was long-since forgotten.
Storage is cheap. Missing information is not.
I only have 188 in my inbox now, all read. That is just Dec1 to date (Jan 8).
Everything else is saved off off by year/month (YYYY-MM for proper sorting), including my sent-mail in the same fashion.
Mine go back to 2002, I am not sure how many there are exactly. But I use fetchmail to pull in several accounts locally so it is fairly complete.
I use alpine for email, and can easily grep my archives to find something/someone if I need to, which does occur.
I don't consider it hoarding, it's saving. All of those emails take up 3.5 GB of space, which is nothing, and it's only 2.3 GB in a zipped archive. I have a cron job to back them up nightly. It takes really a very minute amount of effort to do that.
Now pictures/videos are a bit tougher, but just because of the amount of space they require. Especially since my wife started doing digital photography and saving RAW images as well. It's only minimally more work to keep good backups using some rsync scripts.
We have gone back and done some purging though, it's good and healthy to do that.
Ohhh, you mean commercial radio. Because that is all they seem to play. And when they aren't playing commercials, they are playing
1. a song I had heard 1000 times 25 years ago that I hate
2. a song I had heard 1000 times 25 years ago that I like, and I have
3. some awful dreck that makes me turn the channel or turn it off
When I listen to music, it is from my digital collection. If I want to find something new, I can find it on a few youtube channels I frequent. If I want to buy it, I will buy a digital copy - or in rare occurrences a CD - from online retailers like bandcamp, cdbaby, or from the artist directly.
I don't use any streaming services, I have no need for them beyond finding music worthy of downloading.
Our legal system is just a self-fulfilling prophecy. You know who wins in this story? Not the guy, not his wife, not the public. Lawyers. Lawyers win, because they cash in on a system where the people involved in this story spent YEARS arguing about this. I get that it's the principle, and the fact that the law was stupid and ultimately ruled unconstitutional. But WTF is the POINT of it all?
Our laws are written to be abused, then contested, then reworded and amended. Our society is not better off for them, it simply causes us to chase our tails at every turn, and the 'rule of law' become more and more of a joke. All the while, lawyers are cashing in on a system that they built, and it will forever need 'tuning' which can only be done by more lawyers.
I agree with a lot of the other up-modded comments, but let me get this straight... MS worked on EdgeHTML for 4 years, and finally threw in the towel because of changes that Google kept implementing on their sites? Edge hardly even broke 2% of the browser market share - EVER.
Google makes a lot of little changes, all the time. And they probably do get 'insight' into the benefit of those before others. But I think it's pretty clear that MS didn't fail with Edge because of Google. MS failed because they still really don't play well with others. It's just that now, the others are the big dogs in the yard.