linuxhansl

That happened to us, and what followed was a 8 week nightmare.

1. My son's school MS account took over his private account, only because he linked the two accounts.

2. Suddenly my son's Windows said it was un-authorized.

3. We called Microsoft, they could not fix it.

4. We called the manufacturer of the machine (they shipped Windows as OEM). They could not fix it.

5. Called MS again. They gave us a new activation code. Did not fix it.

6. Called MS again, this time they said to reinstall Windows (This is not a joke).

7. Upon re-installing, Windows would not activate. No error message, no nothing it would just hang in the activation loop.

8. Called MS. They had no clue. Claimed H/W issues.

9. Called manufacturer again. Also claimed H/W issues. I said that I can access the internet from the machine while it was hanging in activation, so network was not the problem.

10. Manufacturer sent someone out (I had bought warranty). He switched the SSD with a new version of Windows... The did exactly what I did. Same problem, would not activate.

11. Some back and forth with MS and the manufacturer involving many reboot and (I kid you not) turning off all wireless routers... MS still would not activate. Manufacturer (and MS) did not believe me. So they sent someone again. Did the same thing, again. Did not work.

12. Manufacturer said I needed to send in the machine. So I did. I included a note about what the problem and to please not just re-install Windows, because the activation was the problem.

13. Got the machine back... They had just re-installed Windows. Would not activate.

14. Started to get upset. After some pressing manufacturer agreed to send a new machine.

15. First they sent someone out again. Did the same thing again. Forced me, again, to turn all wireless routers off, so that (he claimed) Windows would activate without network. Again... Did not work. Activation just hung.

16. Eight weeks into this we ended up getting a new machine (yes, not kidding) from the manufacturer and now the same version of Windows (from the same memory stick) on the same hardware, same drivers, all the same, would happily register.

I cannot even begin to express how annoying and useless this was. And MS and manufacturer were helpless and useless.

Personally I have stopped use Windows over 2 decades ago - only using Linux, but my son wanted a gaming machine, and so I relented. :)

Gattaca is hands down my favorite movie of all time.

From a dystopian future, where a determination ("not saving anything for the way back") can still make a difference against all odds. A love story, a friendship, and finally an unexpected act of goodwill and an ending that is both relieving and sad.

And all this on top of the great acting and cinematography!

Am I the only one who does not like episodes and prefers movies?

One the one hand there is time for development that a movie would not have, on the other hand it often feels drawn out.

KDE is great. I've been using the Fedora KDE spin for years now. Just works.

Everything just seems to make sense, and I have not experiences the crashes or wake-up failures the author describes. Probably Fedora pre-vets which packages and version work well together.

The last day of the year would not be complete without watching this! Together with "Ein Herz und eine Seele: Silvesterpunch". :)

That does not absolve them from abiding to applicable law.

Whatever the backstory of this particular incident is... It's clear that Stripe, Paypal, et al need to be regulated like a bank. Period.

If it looks like duck...

Seems like the implants (hardware design and any software) need to be the equivalent of open source (in the GNU sense).

Failing that, hardware designs, and the software - along with all necessary instructions - at least have to be put in escrow in the event that the company goes under. That would not immediately help, but at least there would be a fighting chance... As in this case to still be able to have someone fix/use the software to calibrate the implant.

This should be standard regulation for approving such implants.

And this can and should be paired with the other suggestions here such as mandatory insurance, etc.

Edited for clarity

Oh come on. This was about Wikipedia allegedly sensoring stuff, and us entering some kind of dystopia of uninformed people.

We'll follow the scientific method; and that is how we learn and continue to explore and learn more.

Do really not a see a difference between that and convenient political alternate facts?

And the grey sky? Seriously? You're looking at clouds, not the sky. Whatever, why am I even responding...

As things stand Wikipedia is pretty good. Non-contentious topics are free to edit by everyone, contentious/political/hotbutton/etc topics have restricted editorship.

I do not sense any specific bias. As usual, "freedom of speech" does not imply a right to be listened to.

Also, I do not buy this dystopia claim. In 99.99% of all topics we know exactly what is true and what is not. The sky is blue, clouds are condensed water, the earth is a sphere, there is racism, there is poverty, wealth is unevenly distributed over the planet, hygiene helps prevent sickness, vaccinations have prevented a lot of suffering, social security is expensive, etc, etc.

The facts are easy. We used to argue about consequences stemming from these facts and what do to about it. These days we tend to confuse our disagreements with "alternate facts".

It's really not that hard to stay informed.

Definition of woke: alert to injustice in society, especially racism

Somehow, some folks are now saying this is bad.

I'm sure Musk is going to be left with an extremely motivated workforce.

Seriously, people should just work whatever hours they want now (or don't want), look for other jobs, until they get caught.

It's always the same with the bean counters, you can measure cost, salaries, etc, but you can't really measure happiness and motivation (well perhaps with surveys). In the end you are perhaps left with lower cost, fewer people, but these people are not motivated to to anything or do anything well.

I wanted to believe that Elon had a plan. I now believe he has not the faintest idea about how to run a software company.

And maybe that's a US problem... I see the same with construction and service workers, nobody has pride in their work left, just doing the minimum, hoping to get away with it... because their leaders are telling them that cost is all that matters.

My experience is exactly the opposite. If that make me a "Linux apologist" I don't really care.

Install TLP, uninstall thermald, and make sure turbo mode is off (it's on by default in Linux - probably applies to Intel only).

Under light load the system is using 6-8w (about 9-10h of usage on the 80WH battery), under 4w when completely idle. This is latest Fedora on a ThinkPad X1 Extreme with KDE. I want to see that with Windows.

You have to invest a bit more time with Linux (for example the fingerprint reader on my Laptop prevented the CPU from going into lower power modes), and that part is unfortunate.

On the other hand I never experience things randomly not working like it was with Windows.

Your mileage may vary.

Digital books are a scam. I never bought (and will never buy) one.

Every hoop is taken to make them like real books whether it makes sense or not, except for the time when you actually want to lend or give them to someone else. Then it gets complicated, depends on the vendor, or is simply impossible.

I have no need for that.

Imagine 200 years in the future, all license servers are disabled and we cannot read our own (digital) books anymore.

Step 1: Buy company, load it with debt in the process.

Step 2: Claim company is not profitable (partially due to the interest payments you yourself loaded onto it)

Step 3: Lay off 1/2 the staff.

Step 4: Try to get some of these people back, because you need some projects done (that actually happened)

Step 5: Enforce unpopular and useless work rules.

Step 6: Profit... Maybe?

I want to believe that he knows what he is doing, but it certainly does not look that way!

As I said before. There was a world before Twitter and there will be a life after Twitter. I deactivated my account (and Facebook et al) over a year ago. Not only have I not missed it, I feel lighter without it.

I still find/follow things I like - just not on Twitter (or Facebook and whatnot).

Aside:

Social media that trigger our reward response (followers, likes, etc) will inherently never really work. People will post things that get the most followers or likes, not what matters. The more radical, the more likes or followers, the better. Not everybody of course, but enough to make these system in total a detriment to society.

Reminds me of he typical corporate take-over locusts.

1. Take over. 2. Layoffs. 3. Profits go up short term. 4. Then you notice all of the folks missing. Productivity drops. 5. Revenue drops, followed by dropping profits. 6. Folks move on to the next take over.

Difference, crucially, here is that Musk actually owns the shop, so we'll see if it is different with Twitter.

I think we live in a dangerous time. We have always disagreed on things and discussed and occasionally fought over them. This is healthy and needed (except any violence).

It is important to realize that even as we disagreed, we still used to agree on basic facts and then fought over what best to do next.

That is what is different now! We now live in a culture where any discussion can simply be ended with "Your facts are wrong", or "I have alternative facts". A reasonable discourse is not possible this way.

It takes just one "side" to take such a stance for society to fall into camps. I think that is what we see happening.

Firing 25% of the workforce "for cause" looks like a very hard sell to me, and would open up Twitter for a barrage of lawsuits - and rightly so.

Even laying off 25% of the workers would be hard to justify at this point. I'm certainly curious where this all is going.

Heresy: Why do we need a replacement for Twitter?

There was a world and a life before Twitter, and there is one without Twitter as well.

I deleted my Twitter account about a year ago and have not missed anything. People and topics I am interested in I can updated on by many different means.

Controversial pages on Wikipedia (contemporary politics, etc) are typically hard to edit. Others are easy to edit. Vandalism is rare and temporary, and nobody is going fight earnestly over topics such as how a light bulb or an electric engine works, or when a certain building was build or most historical events, etc.

Wikipedia does not absolve you from checking references or the credibility of the text, but it does a damn good job collecting and pre-checking a lot of the content. You still need to be able to recognize hot-button topics and take those with a grain of salt. And as I said usually those pages cannot be edited by everyone.

The school does not seem to understand how Wikipedia works. At all.

+1

Running Linux on laptops since the late 90's. In the beginning I had to tinker a lot, compile custom kernels, etc.

Now - for the past 10 years or so - it (especially Redhat's Fedora) just works without doing anything, even with the newest laptops.

Wayland is not quite there, yet (IMHO), so I'm still running X11 (thankfully Fedora let's me do that).

If I cannot cancel my subscription after a reasonable effort, I instruct my credit card company/bank to stop making the payments. Period.

This is cool!

At the same time, not being part of the Apple ecosystem, should I be worried about the closed nature of this. I have been using Linux for over two decades now, and Intel seems to be falling behind.

(I do realize Linux runs on the M1. But it's a mostly hobby projects, the GPU is not well supported, and the M1/M2 will never(?) be available with open H/W.)

Heroku never made any money before the acquisition.

Don't get me wrong, Heroku is (was?) great, but in the end at some point you have to stop losing money.

In every western country - except the US and England - the loser pays for the cost of the trial (all parties' lawyer fees + the court).

Just this reduces frivolous lawsuits. If you have a good case, sure, go ahead. If your case is weak, you run a real risk paying not only for your lawyers but the other side as well.

(Note that there are disadvantages to loser-pays as well. Image you legitimately want to sue corporation X because they did something atrocious. Big corporation X can now run up lawyer cost that you have to pay if you lose.)

Edit: Sorry I was wrong about England (which leaves the US only). Edit 2: In the US you can file for your lawyer fees to be returned, but that in itself is risk (I have some lawyer friends)

In all the testing I have been doing across a variety of use cases, from BigData, to databases, to games, I have not come across a scenario where Zstd is doing worse than Zstd.

Compression time CPU is lower for equivalent ratios. Maximum compression is better. Decompression CPU is much lower (i.e. faster), and that is independent of the level used at compression time.

Hmmm. I have learned to not trust HP any further than I can throw one of their laser printers - which is not very far!

We know a lot of past humans, in part because we can still read old books.

Image a future when all one can find are digital artifacts and all license servers have been disabled. No e-books, movies, etc, will aid our future selves to decipher what was going on.

(Well, maybe they'll find some TikTok clips.)

BART...

As I always say: One of the richest parts of the richest state of the richest nation on this planet and we have ... BART. How is this possible?