There is of course more to it than that. Phrasing it as "some trolls on facebook" makes it sound like a handful of basement dwellers just posting whatever they think will annoy people, when it was actually a deliberate and co-ordinated effort of telling certain groups of people what they wanted to hear.
And of course, just throwing a lot of money at something does not equal results; strategy and effective use of what resources you assign does come into it. And besides that even, Trump didn't actually win the popular vote. The electoral college put him in.
The OS doesn't seem to matter much anymore to more than a few people.
This does seem to be true. On the other hand, I am one of those few people. With that said, though I definitely prefer Apple laptops running MacOS, PC laptops running Linux are also generally fine, depending on a lot of the details of the PC laptop in question. But I point blank refuse to use Windows as the primary operating system on any computer I own.
Half a terabyte of SSD in a laptop is pretty respectable; it's only "puny" compared to being able to shove a few large hard drives in a desktop or a NAS box. Get a NAS if you're the the 'want a laptop as sole computer but have lots and lots of data' type. You're seriously unlikely to really need more than 512GB of storage on the go, and if you do, you're unlikely to want it all tied up in the laptop anyway.
As for RAM, again, 16GB is pretty respectable for a laptop. Hell, my desktop doesn't have quite that much, and basically never hits swap. Maybe you have some really heavy computing you're doing that does need that and more, but that kind of computing really isn't for laptops.
the macbook "air"....which IMHO, isn't quite a laptop either.
Someone who had a MB Air...likely isn't doing heavy/real computing.....and with the filesystem now on iPad PRO....and the screen and processor, its definitely powerful enough to do a lot with.
What I do with a MacBook Air isn't really heavy computing and depending on who you talk to might not count as "real" computing, but it's sure as hell not a use case compatible with an iPad, whatever power it might have.
The issue here is governments don't like having no control over cryptocurrencies. People don't know to what degree the governments will eventually regulate them or ban them, leading to the increased risk being priced in. People aren't willing to gamble as aggressively when there's an imminent threat of a government crackdown.
For a lot of people, governments having no control over cryptocurrencies was a desirable feature of them. If they actually thought things through, they'd have realised that this means their use would sooner or later be banned or regulated in some way, which severely limits - if not eliminates - whatever usefulness they actually have as currency, which was always a bit iffy to begin with.
"But with cryptocurrencies, governments can't fuck with their value or prevent you spending on what you want," was a common claim, but proving absolutely untrue.
In other words, Visa will have CORRUPTED the free market through this cheating tactic by paying off / colluding with / restricting the behavior of players who would otherwise act in their own best interests, and ELIMINATED government-backed cash as a competitor: Without the bribe, the markets would likely succeed and the merchants would still take cash --- because It is in their best interests to trade with everyone they can make a profitable trade with, but WITH the bribe, the free markets will fail perhaps, because in many venues there might not be quite $10k a year spent in CASH FORM, AND establishments that take in $20k or $30k in cash might go negotiate their own private deals with Visa to get a % point taken off their fees or something in addition to the $10k.
Don't like the merchant's practice, shop somewhere else.
That's not an adequate answer to address the corruption of the marketplace.
Corrupted? That is the free market, through and through: people/corporations coming to an agreement via money without any regulatory interference. That it results in a net negative outcome for the end consumer is not a sign of the free market being "corrupted", it's a sign that the free market magically being fair and beneficial to everyone is and always was a load of horse shit.
All these details are all well and good, but ultimately don't solve the root problem for me: I just don't like having something strapped to my wrist. I've been through countless different watches with a variety of different bands, but none of them ever really felt right. If something about my occupation or hobbies made a wristwatch a necessity, I could find the least bad option and put up with it, but absent an actual need it's just jewellery. Nothing wrong with someone wearing jewellery if they want to, but I don't want to.
To me, wearing a watch at all was always uncomfortable and troublesome, and barely worth the effort just for being able to have a timepiece handy. Upon getting a mobile phone which told the time, I happily gave up wearing a watch. In smartwatches, I see much the same thing as the old-fashioned kind: it's an inconvenient thing strapped to the wrist that doesn't do anything that the phone more conveniently out of the way but still easily accessible in my pocket does.
There are arguments to be made regarding ease/convenience of contactless payment - ie not even needing to get the phone out of one's pocket, but I find that offset by needing to twist the back of the wrist around to meet the EFTPOS terminal. Something that would allow just waving the palm of the hand at the terminal would be better in that regard, but more troublesome in others - needing to wear some kind of glove with a chip located where it would be uncomfortable when doing just about anything else with one's hands. The potential answer to that might be implanting the chip, but that presents its own issues.
And smartwatches are the most promising - or maybe least unpromising - of the bunch. Smart glasses with augmented reality functionality have a decent amount of potential, but there is a lot wrong with them from a general privacy point of view, and even the early adopting nerds and geeks aren't about to be told that we should abandon the idea of privacy, never mind society at large. Fitness tracking devices are a nice idea in theory, but so far have tended not to actually make things better. And no other form of wearable technology really has any advantage over a smartphone in your pocket.
Even then, the amount of energy it uses isn't the entire point; Bitcoin is less efficient than other payment methods in every way by a large margin, and doesn't actually offer any practical advantages.
Anybody still believe Linus Torvalds about how Linux was just for fun?
Of course. Linux was just for fun; now he makes a living out of it. A person's motivations for doing something don't have to remain exactly the same for the whole time they do it.
Sure, that'll change it so it isn't exact, but good duplicate image detection can deal with differences in format and resolution by looking for something that's similar enough. Even the so-so software I occasionally run over my desktop wallpaper collection to weed out duplicates does it pretty well, even if there is the odd false positive.
As you say, humans fuck up. An amazingly common form of fuckup is making the assumption that the person you're dating/fucking is completely trustworthy. When people are in love (or just really, really horny, as the case may be), they're just not prepared to think that this person would betray them.
A low false accept rate is all well and good, but what's the false deny rate like? Also, I'm a bit dubious on tying authentication to a specific physical object. For all the problems with SMS 2FA, at least if something happens to my phone, I can replace it and it doesn't impact what I can and can't get into. If my authentication object gets lost or damaged, then what? "You can use a body part as your object," they say. Right, because nothing disfiguring can ever happen to those, they don't naturally change over time, and no-one's ever lost a body part.
But not all of Microsoft has been crap. The Windows NT line was decent for its time, and Windows XP gradually evolved into a good product. Windows 7 was a good operating system. Microsoft's hardware has usually been good enough for the price. Even Microsoft branded phones weren't all that bad IMHO, they just failed to catch on. The Xbox ecosystem is going strong, and even their server products have been a viable alternative for those who just wanted to click away and get things done.
Debatable. I'll at least concede that some of their products are less crap than others and some were at least kind of tolerable. But even for their time, they still had shortcomings that other systems at the time didn't. I think people have a certain amount of rose tint on their glasses regarding XP; I still need to use it at work, and while it gets the job done and a lot of issues have been fixed with it by now, I still can't call it good. It and their other otherwise "good" products still have UI issues to varying degrees, at the least. I can't really speak about the Xbox and its ecosystem, but I do hear more grumbling about it from my gamer friends than for the other consoles. As for their phones, I know a couple of people who have them, and I've only ever heard neutral or negative things about them, never positive.
If they go, they go. I just hope that they don't extinquish any other ecosystems on their way out. And while I don't hold a soft spot for Microsoft in my heart, even Microsoft counts as an alternative, and more choice is always good, even if Microsoft's own attitude hasn't traditionally exactly reflected this philosophy.
Personally, I don't think we have to worry there. The ecosystem that really counts - the Free Unix-like one - they've been deliberately trying to extinguish and failing at it as it is; kind of hard to imagine them managing to succeed in their death throes. I can't agree with the position that a crap option represents a choice and is therefore a good thing, especially when without the interference of this crap option we had no choice but to go with for a long time, there would be more actual options around.
And while I know I do come off as very anti-Microsoft here, I am considerably less so than many people I know.
You're a bit off on your timing there. At least as at 2005, when this printer was purchased, not absolutely every new printer sold featured its own networking.
Nope, pure LAN. The server and most of the clients are on the domain, except these two machines which can't join it because they're only Windows Home Edition or something, not Professional. Not being on the domain, they can't authenticate to the print server, and neither have we had any luck trying to set up the print server so it doesn't need any authentication for print jobs.
At some point while tearing my hair out over that, I was grumbling that I could get the Linux machine on my desk to print to a Windows print server more easily than I could get a Windows machine to print to a Windows print server, when inspiration struck. So I shared that printer over Samba, pointed those two Windows clients at it, and it worked. It was intended as a stopgap while we figured out that authentication issue, but since we've got something that works, we never got around to that.
Something of an edge case, I know, and could be solved by shelling out for some new Windows licenses, but it really shouldn't be necessary. Linux is just fine with authenticating with these domain credentials despite not actually being on the domain, kind of ridiculous that it can and Windows can't.
Windows Server is better at the first two (for Windows clients)
I'm not certain that's true, at least for printing. At work, I've had to get Windows clients to print to a Linux machine that then bounces the job to the Windows print server because we couldn't get the Windows clients to talk directly to the Windows server.
Slashdot Mirror
While there is that too, I'm not thinking their history after the 50s-70s, I'm thinking their history before.
Yep, they're about the only ones in tech that I can honestly respect anymore.
IBM's forgotten history and impact is what rules them out for me.
There is of course more to it than that. Phrasing it as "some trolls on facebook" makes it sound like a handful of basement dwellers just posting whatever they think will annoy people, when it was actually a deliberate and co-ordinated effort of telling certain groups of people what they wanted to hear.
And of course, just throwing a lot of money at something does not equal results; strategy and effective use of what resources you assign does come into it. And besides that even, Trump didn't actually win the popular vote. The electoral college put him in.
This is why I use an adblocker, and am not moved by any given website's pleas for me to deactivate it for their site.
Now how about a way to stop it collecting the data in the first place?
The OS doesn't seem to matter much anymore to more than a few people.
This does seem to be true. On the other hand, I am one of those few people. With that said, though I definitely prefer Apple laptops running MacOS, PC laptops running Linux are also generally fine, depending on a lot of the details of the PC laptop in question. But I point blank refuse to use Windows as the primary operating system on any computer I own.
Half a terabyte of SSD in a laptop is pretty respectable; it's only "puny" compared to being able to shove a few large hard drives in a desktop or a NAS box. Get a NAS if you're the the 'want a laptop as sole computer but have lots and lots of data' type. You're seriously unlikely to really need more than 512GB of storage on the go, and if you do, you're unlikely to want it all tied up in the laptop anyway.
As for RAM, again, 16GB is pretty respectable for a laptop. Hell, my desktop doesn't have quite that much, and basically never hits swap. Maybe you have some really heavy computing you're doing that does need that and more, but that kind of computing really isn't for laptops.
the macbook "air"....which IMHO, isn't quite a laptop either.
Someone who had a MB Air...likely isn't doing heavy/real computing.....and with the filesystem now on iPad PRO....and the screen and processor, its definitely powerful enough to do a lot with.
What I do with a MacBook Air isn't really heavy computing and depending on who you talk to might not count as "real" computing, but it's sure as hell not a use case compatible with an iPad, whatever power it might have.
The issue here is governments don't like having no control over cryptocurrencies. People don't know to what degree the governments will eventually regulate them or ban them, leading to the increased risk being priced in. People aren't willing to gamble as aggressively when there's an imminent threat of a government crackdown.
For a lot of people, governments having no control over cryptocurrencies was a desirable feature of them. If they actually thought things through, they'd have realised that this means their use would sooner or later be banned or regulated in some way, which severely limits - if not eliminates - whatever usefulness they actually have as currency, which was always a bit iffy to begin with.
"But with cryptocurrencies, governments can't fuck with their value or prevent you spending on what you want," was a common claim, but proving absolutely untrue.
If that all means that Visa is a regulator and therefore this is not actually a free market, then the free market is outright impossible.
In other words, Visa will have CORRUPTED the free market through this cheating tactic by paying off / colluding with / restricting the behavior of players who would otherwise act in their own best interests, and ELIMINATED government-backed cash as a competitor: Without the bribe, the markets would likely succeed and the merchants would still take cash --- because It is in their best interests to trade with everyone they can make a profitable trade with, but WITH the bribe, the free markets will fail perhaps, because in many venues there might not be quite $10k a year spent in CASH FORM, AND establishments that take in $20k or $30k in cash might go negotiate their own private deals with Visa to get a % point taken off their fees or something in addition to the $10k.
Don't like the merchant's practice, shop somewhere else.
That's not an adequate answer to address the corruption of the marketplace.
Corrupted? That is the free market, through and through: people/corporations coming to an agreement via money without any regulatory interference. That it results in a net negative outcome for the end consumer is not a sign of the free market being "corrupted", it's a sign that the free market magically being fair and beneficial to everyone is and always was a load of horse shit.
If you don't have a use for watches or like them, don't wear them.
As I said before, I don't. Haven't for close to 20 years now.
All these details are all well and good, but ultimately don't solve the root problem for me: I just don't like having something strapped to my wrist. I've been through countless different watches with a variety of different bands, but none of them ever really felt right. If something about my occupation or hobbies made a wristwatch a necessity, I could find the least bad option and put up with it, but absent an actual need it's just jewellery. Nothing wrong with someone wearing jewellery if they want to, but I don't want to.
To me, wearing a watch at all was always uncomfortable and troublesome, and barely worth the effort just for being able to have a timepiece handy. Upon getting a mobile phone which told the time, I happily gave up wearing a watch. In smartwatches, I see much the same thing as the old-fashioned kind: it's an inconvenient thing strapped to the wrist that doesn't do anything that the phone more conveniently out of the way but still easily accessible in my pocket does.
There are arguments to be made regarding ease/convenience of contactless payment - ie not even needing to get the phone out of one's pocket, but I find that offset by needing to twist the back of the wrist around to meet the EFTPOS terminal. Something that would allow just waving the palm of the hand at the terminal would be better in that regard, but more troublesome in others - needing to wear some kind of glove with a chip located where it would be uncomfortable when doing just about anything else with one's hands. The potential answer to that might be implanting the chip, but that presents its own issues.
And smartwatches are the most promising - or maybe least unpromising - of the bunch. Smart glasses with augmented reality functionality have a decent amount of potential, but there is a lot wrong with them from a general privacy point of view, and even the early adopting nerds and geeks aren't about to be told that we should abandon the idea of privacy, never mind society at large. Fitness tracking devices are a nice idea in theory, but so far have tended not to actually make things better. And no other form of wearable technology really has any advantage over a smartphone in your pocket.
Even then, the amount of energy it uses isn't the entire point; Bitcoin is less efficient than other payment methods in every way by a large margin, and doesn't actually offer any practical advantages.
Anybody still believe Linus Torvalds about how Linux was just for fun?
Of course. Linux was just for fun; now he makes a living out of it. A person's motivations for doing something don't have to remain exactly the same for the whole time they do it.
Sure, that'll change it so it isn't exact, but good duplicate image detection can deal with differences in format and resolution by looking for something that's similar enough. Even the so-so software I occasionally run over my desktop wallpaper collection to weed out duplicates does it pretty well, even if there is the odd false positive.
As you say, humans fuck up. An amazingly common form of fuckup is making the assumption that the person you're dating/fucking is completely trustworthy. When people are in love (or just really, really horny, as the case may be), they're just not prepared to think that this person would betray them.
To expand on this: hell no. God no. Fuck no.
A low false accept rate is all well and good, but what's the false deny rate like? Also, I'm a bit dubious on tying authentication to a specific physical object. For all the problems with SMS 2FA, at least if something happens to my phone, I can replace it and it doesn't impact what I can and can't get into. If my authentication object gets lost or damaged, then what? "You can use a body part as your object," they say. Right, because nothing disfiguring can ever happen to those, they don't naturally change over time, and no-one's ever lost a body part.
But not all of Microsoft has been crap. The Windows NT line was decent for its time, and Windows XP gradually evolved into a good product. Windows 7 was a good operating system. Microsoft's hardware has usually been good enough for the price. Even Microsoft branded phones weren't all that bad IMHO, they just failed to catch on. The Xbox ecosystem is going strong, and even their server products have been a viable alternative for those who just wanted to click away and get things done.
Debatable. I'll at least concede that some of their products are less crap than others and some were at least kind of tolerable. But even for their time, they still had shortcomings that other systems at the time didn't. I think people have a certain amount of rose tint on their glasses regarding XP; I still need to use it at work, and while it gets the job done and a lot of issues have been fixed with it by now, I still can't call it good. It and their other otherwise "good" products still have UI issues to varying degrees, at the least. I can't really speak about the Xbox and its ecosystem, but I do hear more grumbling about it from my gamer friends than for the other consoles. As for their phones, I know a couple of people who have them, and I've only ever heard neutral or negative things about them, never positive.
If they go, they go. I just hope that they don't extinquish any other ecosystems on their way out. And while I don't hold a soft spot for Microsoft in my heart, even Microsoft counts as an alternative, and more choice is always good, even if Microsoft's own attitude hasn't traditionally exactly reflected this philosophy.
Personally, I don't think we have to worry there. The ecosystem that really counts - the Free Unix-like one - they've been deliberately trying to extinguish and failing at it as it is; kind of hard to imagine them managing to succeed in their death throes. I can't agree with the position that a crap option represents a choice and is therefore a good thing, especially when without the interference of this crap option we had no choice but to go with for a long time, there would be more actual options around.
And while I know I do come off as very anti-Microsoft here, I am considerably less so than many people I know.
You're a bit off on your timing there. At least as at 2005, when this printer was purchased, not absolutely every new printer sold featured its own networking.
Nope, pure LAN. The server and most of the clients are on the domain, except these two machines which can't join it because they're only Windows Home Edition or something, not Professional. Not being on the domain, they can't authenticate to the print server, and neither have we had any luck trying to set up the print server so it doesn't need any authentication for print jobs.
At some point while tearing my hair out over that, I was grumbling that I could get the Linux machine on my desk to print to a Windows print server more easily than I could get a Windows machine to print to a Windows print server, when inspiration struck. So I shared that printer over Samba, pointed those two Windows clients at it, and it worked. It was intended as a stopgap while we figured out that authentication issue, but since we've got something that works, we never got around to that.
Something of an edge case, I know, and could be solved by shelling out for some new Windows licenses, but it really shouldn't be necessary. Linux is just fine with authenticating with these domain credentials despite not actually being on the domain, kind of ridiculous that it can and Windows can't.
I guess he means File/Print and Exchange.
Windows Server is better at the first two (for Windows clients)
I'm not certain that's true, at least for printing. At work, I've had to get Windows clients to print to a Linux machine that then bounces the job to the Windows print server because we couldn't get the Windows clients to talk directly to the Windows server.