Now Youtube TV costs more than when I first started paying for satellite. I canned Dish last year because the price had creeped to to over twice what it was when I started, and I was getting fewer, worse channels for the cost.
Just use an empty Visa/MC gift card that still had an unexpired date. I'm always getting them from rebates and crap, so I always keep the numbers from an unexpired one handy just for stuff like this.
The feature is notably missing from the S10e, the only one of the three of them that is a reasonable size. Even my S7 is a bit too big, making one-handed use awkward and difficult. The S10e is larger still, but the other two are just ridiculous.
I really wish Samsung wasn't participating in this infuriation game of seeing who can make the largest phone. They're either marketing to people 6'10" with hands the size of my feet, or morons who like looking like fools holding tablets to their heads to talk. I'm neither a giant nor a douchebag, so I'm left with sub-par, handicapped phones to choose from.
I recently had one of our users ask for a Macbook that, with the specs they were requesting, was over $3000.
I then quoted her a Dell Precision Mobile that had better specs, including a more-powerful video card. It also had room for additional hard-drives (or replacement of the existing standard M.2 NVMe drive), removable/expandable RAM, a higher-resolution 4K display ("Retina" isn't 4K) and all the ports she'd need so no dongle-hell. Oh, and she could get an OEM docking station for $140.
She could spend more, get an even MORE powerful CPU, more RAM, more SSD, whatever, and STILL be well below the ridiculous $3K luxury cost of the over-priced and under-powered MacBook.
The demanding apps she uses are available on Windows, and would run better on the more-powerful hardware. The only reason for over-spending +$2K for the MacBook would be a stubborn refusal to learn the radically different process how to move the mouse and click on the Adobe Premiere icon in Windows vs. on a Mac.
I'm hardly a Windows fanboy (I use Linux), but pragmatically the Dells are far superior options. Mac computers are over-priced status-symbol luxury items that have no place in a business or enterprise. They don't play well with corporate networks, they are virtually unserviceable, totally non-upgradeable now, have built-in 2-3 year obsolescence due to the glued-in batteries, and on the whole are a stupid waste of money. It never ceases to amaze me how many mindless Apple zealots will stubbornly defend the abhorrent company who continuously screws them over more and more with each generation, and can't make a quality product without serious manufacturing flaws to save their life (there's the anti-reflective coating issue on the displays, the recent SSD recall on 13" Macbook Pros, the only computer ever to have a systemic HDD cable failure, the GPU failures in pretty much every generation of their products going back years, SMD chips not being properly soldered to the motherboard requiring a rubber shim so the case presses them against the motherboard harder, the failing keyboard that we're getting flooded with, and so on).
How about they give back SMS permissions to the Hangouts app, so that it can register as the default SMS app and those of us who use our Google Voice # as our primary SMS can have the seamless integration back? As it is now, I can't click on a phone # from a contact to launch sending a text... or any other app that shows phone numbers. Instead, I have to go into Hangouts first then initiate the text from there.
I know it's be really complicated for Google to work with the company that makes Hangouts, but I'm sure some sort of channel of communication could be opened so that proper interoperability could be restored like it used to.
...that broke the camel's back? FINALLY? PLEASE?????
Can the idiotic pro-systemd folks finally admit they were wrong, abandon the whole misguided concept, and start the process of moving back to unix philosophies and architecture? The world dropped xfree86 fast as a hat, pretty much spun on a dime and moved to X.org.... let that happen w/ systemd as well.
Or, better yet, just shift support en masse behind FreeBSD and get the hardware and desktop environment and app support back up there like it used to be. Honestly, that'd be the better path and the end result so much better.
Fantastic. I've even gotten deliveries on Sundays without asking. UPS is best, USPS second, FedEx third... but generally I have no issues getting the stuff I order on time. Maybe twice a year or so there's some inexplicable scenic-route that a package takes.
Not often I get to see Vermont in the news. Yay. I'm a multi-generational native (yes, my family makes maple syrup).
In the hopes of dispelling some myths and inaccurate stereotypes, I'm happy to answer questions. I happen to live in a tiny ( under 4000) rural town, and on top of that, on the outskirts of it. Despite that I have 50/25 Mbit DSL. If I lived in the center of town I'd have the option for 100Mbit, 500Mbit, or even 1GBit FttH. So being rural doesn't necessarily mean junk internet... although it can, so check before you move.
In under an hour I can be in Vermont's largest "city" (Burlington). If I need a proper city experience, in just about 2.5 hours I can be in Montreal which honestly I enjoy a lot more than our next-closest big city, Boston. The border isn't an issue, since living near the border makes it easy to get a NEXUS card, which is basically fast-lane across the border for $50/5y and includes PSA pre-check at airports and Global Entry.
Yes, we have farms and cows and cheese and maple syrup and all that. We also have kick-ass skiing and lots of other great outdoor activities. Oh, and if you're not used to it: NO BILLBOARDS. It can be quite the pleasant shock for those new to the area... and jarring for us natives when we travel outside of the state.
The communities can be quite tight which is a nice thing... you really get to know the people in your area, and feel less anonymous than living in a city. People are quite generous and helpful with all sorts of things. Towns love to put on gatherings and events that bring everyone out for some reason or another. There's amazing food, and the proliferation of farms provides no shortage of fresh, high-quality produce and meat if you like to cook (or even if you don't, the better restaurants will use the local farms. Some BnB's even have their own gardens). People really care about the environment here... organic farming, trees, conservation, recycling, renewable energy, etc. Heck, even my house produces more solar power than I consume. You can find many die-hards who are truly "off the grid", self-sufficient and doing the whole homesteading thing. There's even a yearly festival/event/gathering called Solar Fest (not just about solar) if you're really into that.
Older crowd can be a bit conservative (not all, plenty of ex-hippies and all that... we're the source of Ben & Jerry's, Bernie Sanders, Bill McKibben, et al) but the younger generations lean strongly liberal. We currently have a republican governor but oh well... our Lieutenant Governor is progressive/democrat so he keeps him in line.
Home prices are all over the place, depending on where you live. You can get a sub-$100K home all the way up to multi-million dollar mansions (I know of a $10M one specifically). Places like Shelburne, Charlotte, and a few others with properties on Lake Champlain are popular with rich active/retired doctors, lawyers, and 2nd vacation homes for crazy rich people elsewhere.
So yes, worth considering. Questions? Ask and I can try to help.
FreeBSD has so many technical advantages over Linux. It's unfortunate that stupid things held it back in the day and caused Linux to be the one most-commonly adopted.
From the unified kernel and userland environment, to the fantastic ports system, to the documentation, to the ridiculous stability, to the performance, to ZFS, to the LACK OF SYSTEMD... I use it anytime I can. Unfortunately its lack of popularity hold back using it as a desktop (it can be done, but it's gotten to the point that so many things have become dependent on Linux-isms and Linux has gone so off the rails with things that it's too much effort for dev teams to make alternate proper unix versions that'd run on FreeBSD and such. So you have issues with drivers for peripherals, video cards. Popular desktop environments won't compile (the only Gnome that works is an old version). No Dropbox, etc. For years though I ran FreeBSD as my primary desktop on my home computer.
You used to see FreeBSD rule the top uptime lists, and tons of web hosting providers used it. But then when things like cPanel stopped making FreeBSD versions, that dwindled away. Now if you want FreeBSD on a webhost you're going to have to fully manage it from the ground up, and use something like Digital Ocean.
I still use FreeBSD at home in the form of FreeNAS and pfSense. And if I have cause to build a unix server for any reason which I'd be managing from a terminal, I absolutely choose FreeBSD.
I know lots of my clients are sub-10Mbit, with many sub-5Mbit. 3MBit is common. Attempts at streaming are quite painful for them. At least one person I know is 1Mbit DSL.
These are places Comcast will never run cable, nor is it worth the telecom to invest in the infrastructure to improve DSL beyond the token amount it is today.
Without satellite, they're basically done with TV since the mountains around here make OTA basically impossible unless you're in the "city" (I use that term loosely for what constitutes a "city" here), or feel like erecting an antenna tower a few hundred feet high in your backyard.
I wouldn't say it's "bulkier"... you can run it on pretty tiny hardware, like I do (mine is a tiny Jetway box, smaller than most peoples' routers, chassis is metal and functions as the heatsink). Definitely "more complex to administer" but it's right up my alley.
Well, the other difference is that the only credit score they track is about, well, credit -- your ability to borrow money and otherwise incur future debts. And it's not some judgment on your overall fitness for society, it's just a judgment on how likely you are to pay what you owe.
Except that that's increasingly not true. We're now seeing one's credit score being used as criteria for determining what auto insurance rate you get, your ability to get housing, and (ironically) as part of the application review process when you try to get a job.
The negative feedback loop that that last one causes is particularly bad.
...is because the library is fickle, and shrinking. I'm not interested in throwing money down the trash for a "library" where the stuff I love today could be gone next month. And studies have shown that the library is getting smaller and smaller, which more leaving the library than is being added back to it. Sorry, screw you Netflx and all the other streamers... I'll stick with owning my own streaming library via my Plex server and my owned legit 1000 or so discs.
Thing is, what Apple is getting OCD about here is only a subset of what makes Google Maps superior.
The detail of Google Maps is more than sufficient for me to determine where I am and route me from A to B. However, on top of that is a myriad of metadata and hyperlinked info and resources that all work together to make Google Maps an all-encompassing tool for which "maps" is only a part of.
It really doesn't matter if for a tiny section of the USA, Apple Maps tracks the curve of a driveway around a house with pixel-perfect accuracy. That's not relevant nor does it somehow make Apple Maps more useful. It's still a stinking pile of shit and I'm glad it's limited only to the over-priced status-symbol trash that comes out of Apple's factories.
It always frustrated me how "cool" it became to dig on Google+. Journalists, podcasts, etc... it seemed once it caught on that "we all hate Google+ now" it seemed everyone was falling over themselves to make fun of Google+, but without any real substantial reason other than it was the popular thing to do.
The truth is, there was a LOT about Google+ that was better than Facebook. The Circles thing was extremely smart and useful. Nevermind that the average user is too fucking stupid and/or lazy to bother to learn or make use of it... that doesn't make the feature any less good. It's a failing of the userbase, not the service.
Honestly one of the real things that killed Google+ early on was the lack of any sort of events feature. This is BIG on Facebook, and in fact many users maintain a FB profile for no other reason than to be notified and invited to events. These people don't post nor read posts. For whatever reason, Google refused to add events into Google+ and this was a huge reason why people who dipped their toes into it early on became disenchanted and never came back. It couldn't replace FB if it lacked a major feature of FB that they cared about.
Even to this day though Google+ has had the advantage of being a community with far less BS, trolling and spam than Facebook. The signal-to-noise ratio for the Google+ communities I participate in is exponentially better than anything on Facebook. This will be a great loss.
Yet another worthless phone lacking an SD card slot.
Not only does a MicroSD slot provide the ability to add additional storage later in life without buying a new phone, but it provides a mean to back one's phone up in the event of a hardware failure (has happened to me twice). Don't give me that "just use the cloud" bullshit... if you don't know by now why that's not a reasonable solution, you don't even belong on Slashdot.
Honestly. Listen, I know they're being trashed right now but it wasn't them... it was outsourcing 2 layers removed. It's unfortunate that they're young to take the sword for this.
I've been building PCs for over 25 years. I used to love Asus but recently switched to ASRock (Rack) and SuperMicro. Both provided excellent personalized support when I needed it. In fact it was just earlier this week that I emailed SM with a tech question and they responded relatively immediately with a detailed and enthusiastic answer. Not even an initial robo email with a ticket # and false promise to respond in "24-48 hours". It was only 3h.
I hope they get through this. I'm not even sure my board would be targeted... It's a full ATX style, while it seems the targeted boards are blades used in HD racks.
it's pretty hard to buy a computer with it pre-installed and supported.
I know, so incredibly hard. It's unfortunate that Dell is such a tiny company that no one has heard of.
Dell will happily sell you a Latitude laptop with Ubuntu installed, and it knocks like $100 off the cost. The Precision workstations are available with Red Hat. All you have to do is ask. And the Latitudes (and Precision Mobile) laptops are the only ones you should be looking at from them anyway... the Inspirons are junk, and avoid the Latitude 3000 series as that's basically just an Inspiron now too.
I love my Switch, and you not only CAN play single-player games, but there is no shortage of amazing single-player experiences out there. These are pretty much the only sorts of games I play and enjoy. If you are assuming all console gaming now is online multi-player, you're sorely mistaken and grossly out of touch of the reality of the game market.
One of the main reasons I'll be buying the online service is for the save game backups, honestly. However, I'm furious about the fact that the feature is left out of some games because the games have some online aspects. Splatoon 2 was originally on my "maybe" list but is now firmly banished because of no backup. I'm worried that Animal Crossing (which I genuinely love) will get the same treatment.
Now can the tech world stop being hypocrites and come down on Google next for the shit they're pulling with Chrome?
Drive-by trojan installs inside of unrelated software. Endless nagging to change the default browser, leveraging their market share of online services (search, email, etc) to do so. Proprietary web markup resulting in "This page requires Google Chrome" crap that Microsoft got their ass reamed out about during the original browser wars.
People have short attention spans. Google is pulling all the same shit Microsoft got held to the fire over but for some reason everyone is willing to give Google a free pass. What the fuck? Browser monoculture is NOT ok... all the same reasons apply even when it's Chrome and not IE.
Chrome is a fucking arrogant RAM and resource hog and you're better off using Firefox anyway. Is Firefox perfect? Of course not, they have lots of room for improvement. But compared to the clusterfuck that Chrome has become, it's the lesser of 3 evils by a mile.
Seriously. That was my first thought: as these roads get plowed, you're making piles of microplastics that are washing directly into wildlife and the food stream.
Slashdot Mirror
Now Youtube TV costs more than when I first started paying for satellite. I canned Dish last year because the price had creeped to to over twice what it was when I started, and I was getting fewer, worse channels for the cost.
As long as it continues to let me download FirefoxSetup.exe, we're good.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/...
Just use an empty Visa/MC gift card that still had an unexpired date. I'm always getting them from rebates and crap, so I always keep the numbers from an unexpired one handy just for stuff like this.
This article warrants reposting here:
https://www.theverge.com/2018/...
The feature is notably missing from the S10e, the only one of the three of them that is a reasonable size. Even my S7 is a bit too big, making one-handed use awkward and difficult. The S10e is larger still, but the other two are just ridiculous.
I really wish Samsung wasn't participating in this infuriation game of seeing who can make the largest phone. They're either marketing to people 6'10" with hands the size of my feet, or morons who like looking like fools holding tablets to their heads to talk. I'm neither a giant nor a douchebag, so I'm left with sub-par, handicapped phones to choose from.
there are still reasons to buy a $3k laptop
Not really.
I recently had one of our users ask for a Macbook that, with the specs they were requesting, was over $3000.
I then quoted her a Dell Precision Mobile that had better specs, including a more-powerful video card. It also had room for additional hard-drives (or replacement of the existing standard M.2 NVMe drive), removable/expandable RAM, a higher-resolution 4K display ("Retina" isn't 4K) and all the ports she'd need so no dongle-hell. Oh, and she could get an OEM docking station for $140.
She could spend more, get an even MORE powerful CPU, more RAM, more SSD, whatever, and STILL be well below the ridiculous $3K luxury cost of the over-priced and under-powered MacBook.
The demanding apps she uses are available on Windows, and would run better on the more-powerful hardware. The only reason for over-spending +$2K for the MacBook would be a stubborn refusal to learn the radically different process how to move the mouse and click on the Adobe Premiere icon in Windows vs. on a Mac.
I'm hardly a Windows fanboy (I use Linux), but pragmatically the Dells are far superior options. Mac computers are over-priced status-symbol luxury items that have no place in a business or enterprise. They don't play well with corporate networks, they are virtually unserviceable, totally non-upgradeable now, have built-in 2-3 year obsolescence due to the glued-in batteries, and on the whole are a stupid waste of money. It never ceases to amaze me how many mindless Apple zealots will stubbornly defend the abhorrent company who continuously screws them over more and more with each generation, and can't make a quality product without serious manufacturing flaws to save their life (there's the anti-reflective coating issue on the displays, the recent SSD recall on 13" Macbook Pros, the only computer ever to have a systemic HDD cable failure, the GPU failures in pretty much every generation of their products going back years, SMD chips not being properly soldered to the motherboard requiring a rubber shim so the case presses them against the motherboard harder, the failing keyboard that we're getting flooded with, and so on).
How about they give back SMS permissions to the Hangouts app, so that it can register as the default SMS app and those of us who use our Google Voice # as our primary SMS can have the seamless integration back? As it is now, I can't click on a phone # from a contact to launch sending a text... or any other app that shows phone numbers. Instead, I have to go into Hangouts first then initiate the text from there.
I know it's be really complicated for Google to work with the company that makes Hangouts, but I'm sure some sort of channel of communication could be opened so that proper interoperability could be restored like it used to.
...that broke the camel's back? FINALLY? PLEASE?????
Can the idiotic pro-systemd folks finally admit they were wrong, abandon the whole misguided concept, and start the process of moving back to unix philosophies and architecture? The world dropped xfree86 fast as a hat, pretty much spun on a dime and moved to X.org.... let that happen w/ systemd as well.
Or, better yet, just shift support en masse behind FreeBSD and get the hardware and desktop environment and app support back up there like it used to be. Honestly, that'd be the better path and the end result so much better.
Probably too much to hope for...
Fantastic. I've even gotten deliveries on Sundays without asking. UPS is best, USPS second, FedEx third... but generally I have no issues getting the stuff I order on time. Maybe twice a year or so there's some inexplicable scenic-route that a package takes.
Not often I get to see Vermont in the news. Yay. I'm a multi-generational native (yes, my family makes maple syrup).
In the hopes of dispelling some myths and inaccurate stereotypes, I'm happy to answer questions. I happen to live in a tiny ( under 4000) rural town, and on top of that, on the outskirts of it. Despite that I have 50/25 Mbit DSL. If I lived in the center of town I'd have the option for 100Mbit, 500Mbit, or even 1GBit FttH. So being rural doesn't necessarily mean junk internet... although it can, so check before you move.
In under an hour I can be in Vermont's largest "city" (Burlington). If I need a proper city experience, in just about 2.5 hours I can be in Montreal which honestly I enjoy a lot more than our next-closest big city, Boston. The border isn't an issue, since living near the border makes it easy to get a NEXUS card, which is basically fast-lane across the border for $50/5y and includes PSA pre-check at airports and Global Entry.
Yes, we have farms and cows and cheese and maple syrup and all that. We also have kick-ass skiing and lots of other great outdoor activities. Oh, and if you're not used to it: NO BILLBOARDS. It can be quite the pleasant shock for those new to the area... and jarring for us natives when we travel outside of the state.
The communities can be quite tight which is a nice thing... you really get to know the people in your area, and feel less anonymous than living in a city. People are quite generous and helpful with all sorts of things. Towns love to put on gatherings and events that bring everyone out for some reason or another. There's amazing food, and the proliferation of farms provides no shortage of fresh, high-quality produce and meat if you like to cook (or even if you don't, the better restaurants will use the local farms. Some BnB's even have their own gardens). People really care about the environment here... organic farming, trees, conservation, recycling, renewable energy, etc. Heck, even my house produces more solar power than I consume. You can find many die-hards who are truly "off the grid", self-sufficient and doing the whole homesteading thing. There's even a yearly festival/event/gathering called Solar Fest (not just about solar) if you're really into that.
Older crowd can be a bit conservative (not all, plenty of ex-hippies and all that... we're the source of Ben & Jerry's, Bernie Sanders, Bill McKibben, et al) but the younger generations lean strongly liberal. We currently have a republican governor but oh well... our Lieutenant Governor is progressive/democrat so he keeps him in line.
Home prices are all over the place, depending on where you live. You can get a sub-$100K home all the way up to multi-million dollar mansions (I know of a $10M one specifically). Places like Shelburne, Charlotte, and a few others with properties on Lake Champlain are popular with rich active/retired doctors, lawyers, and 2nd vacation homes for crazy rich people elsewhere.
So yes, worth considering. Questions? Ask and I can try to help.
FreeBSD has so many technical advantages over Linux. It's unfortunate that stupid things held it back in the day and caused Linux to be the one most-commonly adopted.
From the unified kernel and userland environment, to the fantastic ports system, to the documentation, to the ridiculous stability, to the performance, to ZFS, to the LACK OF SYSTEMD... I use it anytime I can. Unfortunately its lack of popularity hold back using it as a desktop (it can be done, but it's gotten to the point that so many things have become dependent on Linux-isms and Linux has gone so off the rails with things that it's too much effort for dev teams to make alternate proper unix versions that'd run on FreeBSD and such. So you have issues with drivers for peripherals, video cards. Popular desktop environments won't compile (the only Gnome that works is an old version). No Dropbox, etc. For years though I ran FreeBSD as my primary desktop on my home computer.
You used to see FreeBSD rule the top uptime lists, and tons of web hosting providers used it. But then when things like cPanel stopped making FreeBSD versions, that dwindled away. Now if you want FreeBSD on a webhost you're going to have to fully manage it from the ground up, and use something like Digital Ocean.
I still use FreeBSD at home in the form of FreeNAS and pfSense. And if I have cause to build a unix server for any reason which I'd be managing from a terminal, I absolutely choose FreeBSD.
Bingo.
I know lots of my clients are sub-10Mbit, with many sub-5Mbit. 3MBit is common. Attempts at streaming are quite painful for them. At least one person I know is 1Mbit DSL.
These are places Comcast will never run cable, nor is it worth the telecom to invest in the infrastructure to improve DSL beyond the token amount it is today.
Without satellite, they're basically done with TV since the mountains around here make OTA basically impossible unless you're in the "city" (I use that term loosely for what constitutes a "city" here), or feel like erecting an antenna tower a few hundred feet high in your backyard.
Like pfSense?
https://www.pfsense.org/
I wouldn't say it's "bulkier"... you can run it on pretty tiny hardware, like I do (mine is a tiny Jetway box, smaller than most peoples' routers, chassis is metal and functions as the heatsink). Definitely "more complex to administer" but it's right up my alley.
Well, the other difference is that the only credit score they track is about, well, credit -- your ability to borrow money and otherwise incur future debts. And it's not some judgment on your overall fitness for society, it's just a judgment on how likely you are to pay what you owe.
Except that that's increasingly not true. We're now seeing one's credit score being used as criteria for determining what auto insurance rate you get, your ability to get housing, and (ironically) as part of the application review process when you try to get a job.
The negative feedback loop that that last one causes is particularly bad.
...is because the library is fickle, and shrinking. I'm not interested in throwing money down the trash for a "library" where the stuff I love today could be gone next month. And studies have shown that the library is getting smaller and smaller, which more leaving the library than is being added back to it. Sorry, screw you Netflx and all the other streamers... I'll stick with owning my own streaming library via my Plex server and my owned legit 1000 or so discs.
Why is this news? We've known this for years:
https://www.greenbot.com/artic...
What next? We need Google to announce that water is wet so that people can finally go jump in a lake?
Thing is, what Apple is getting OCD about here is only a subset of what makes Google Maps superior.
The detail of Google Maps is more than sufficient for me to determine where I am and route me from A to B. However, on top of that is a myriad of metadata and hyperlinked info and resources that all work together to make Google Maps an all-encompassing tool for which "maps" is only a part of.
It really doesn't matter if for a tiny section of the USA, Apple Maps tracks the curve of a driveway around a house with pixel-perfect accuracy. That's not relevant nor does it somehow make Apple Maps more useful. It's still a stinking pile of shit and I'm glad it's limited only to the over-priced status-symbol trash that comes out of Apple's factories.
It always frustrated me how "cool" it became to dig on Google+. Journalists, podcasts, etc... it seemed once it caught on that "we all hate Google+ now" it seemed everyone was falling over themselves to make fun of Google+, but without any real substantial reason other than it was the popular thing to do.
The truth is, there was a LOT about Google+ that was better than Facebook. The Circles thing was extremely smart and useful. Nevermind that the average user is too fucking stupid and/or lazy to bother to learn or make use of it... that doesn't make the feature any less good. It's a failing of the userbase, not the service.
Honestly one of the real things that killed Google+ early on was the lack of any sort of events feature. This is BIG on Facebook, and in fact many users maintain a FB profile for no other reason than to be notified and invited to events. These people don't post nor read posts. For whatever reason, Google refused to add events into Google+ and this was a huge reason why people who dipped their toes into it early on became disenchanted and never came back. It couldn't replace FB if it lacked a major feature of FB that they cared about.
Even to this day though Google+ has had the advantage of being a community with far less BS, trolling and spam than Facebook. The signal-to-noise ratio for the Google+ communities I participate in is exponentially better than anything on Facebook. This will be a great loss.
Yet another worthless phone lacking an SD card slot.
Not only does a MicroSD slot provide the ability to add additional storage later in life without buying a new phone, but it provides a mean to back one's phone up in the event of a hardware failure (has happened to me twice). Don't give me that "just use the cloud" bullshit... if you don't know by now why that's not a reasonable solution, you don't even belong on Slashdot.
Honestly. Listen, I know they're being trashed right now but it wasn't them... it was outsourcing 2 layers removed. It's unfortunate that they're young to take the sword for this.
I've been building PCs for over 25 years. I used to love Asus but recently switched to ASRock (Rack) and SuperMicro. Both provided excellent personalized support when I needed it. In fact it was just earlier this week that I emailed SM with a tech question and they responded relatively immediately with a detailed and enthusiastic answer. Not even an initial robo email with a ticket # and false promise to respond in "24-48 hours". It was only 3h.
I hope they get through this. I'm not even sure my board would be targeted... It's a full ATX style, while it seems the targeted boards are blades used in HD racks.
it's pretty hard to buy a computer with it pre-installed and supported.
I know, so incredibly hard. It's unfortunate that Dell is such a tiny company that no one has heard of.
Dell will happily sell you a Latitude laptop with Ubuntu installed, and it knocks like $100 off the cost. The Precision workstations are available with Red Hat. All you have to do is ask. And the Latitudes (and Precision Mobile) laptops are the only ones you should be looking at from them anyway... the Inspirons are junk, and avoid the Latitude 3000 series as that's basically just an Inspiron now too.
I love my Switch, and you not only CAN play single-player games, but there is no shortage of amazing single-player experiences out there. These are pretty much the only sorts of games I play and enjoy. If you are assuming all console gaming now is online multi-player, you're sorely mistaken and grossly out of touch of the reality of the game market.
One of the main reasons I'll be buying the online service is for the save game backups, honestly. However, I'm furious about the fact that the feature is left out of some games because the games have some online aspects. Splatoon 2 was originally on my "maybe" list but is now firmly banished because of no backup. I'm worried that Animal Crossing (which I genuinely love) will get the same treatment.
Now can the tech world stop being hypocrites and come down on Google next for the shit they're pulling with Chrome?
Drive-by trojan installs inside of unrelated software. Endless nagging to change the default browser, leveraging their market share of online services (search, email, etc) to do so. Proprietary web markup resulting in "This page requires Google Chrome" crap that Microsoft got their ass reamed out about during the original browser wars.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/...
People have short attention spans. Google is pulling all the same shit Microsoft got held to the fire over but for some reason everyone is willing to give Google a free pass. What the fuck? Browser monoculture is NOT ok... all the same reasons apply even when it's Chrome and not IE.
Chrome is a fucking arrogant RAM and resource hog and you're better off using Firefox anyway. Is Firefox perfect? Of course not, they have lots of room for improvement. But compared to the clusterfuck that Chrome has become, it's the lesser of 3 evils by a mile.
Seriously. That was my first thought: as these roads get plowed, you're making piles of microplastics that are washing directly into wildlife and the food stream.