• 0 Posts
  • 54 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: November 12th, 2023

help-circle

  • $300 for the most important piece of software on the hardware that you interact with every day, sometimes all day, for years? That’s a steal.

    And again, as an OS, Windows just works and Linux doesn’t. Even if you wanted to set things manually in the registry to disable the bad consumer “features”, you’d still spend less time than configuring a standard Linux install and it would be more stable.

    It’s like Apple fan bois nowadays. Ridiculous.


  • Or… Read what I said. Spend the $300 on the enterprise license. No ads. No forced notifications. A single computer with multiple users at one time in a home environment is not a use case that would get any thought. Those that want it, can do it. And it’s easy, and free. Hyper-V is free and the licenses for the virtual machines are free too because the container host is windows. Lock an instance per output and voila. Recall won’t be coming to enterprise or server and if it does, it will be disablable. Just like forced updates are disabled in enterprise. Forced reboots disabled. Etc.

    If you want that experience you buy that experience.



  • Yes exactly. I love Linux. I build embedded systems devices with it. I run it on some of my rack appliances. But I’m also not a blind fan boi.

    Windows made leaps and bounds into stability with XP. And since then it’s been a slow cog into being an excellent enterprise grade OS even with users bashing it all sorts of ways.

    Most (all) of the complaints except price focus on money grabs and features for the docile masses. Forced updates, reboots, integrations, etc. My 80 year old relatives can use it and you know what it works great when they type into the “computer question box”. Click start menu and type. It brings up their files, folders, apps, answers to web questions, etc. That makes sense to someone who doesn’t understand a computer. It’s not pandering to the IT folk, it’s pandering to Karen.

    If you’re IT folk, you can just spend a little more money on the proper license and all that goes away. Or you spend some time hacking the registry and get it for free usually.

    The only BSODs I have had in the last decade are graphics driver related usually when pushing beta drivers hard. My Linux OS’s have had way more stability issues with less interaction.



  • No. It really isn’t.

    Windows with the proper license and configuration is more stable, more productive, and that configuration takes less than an hour once for the life of the machine.

    In 2024 if you’re still bashing Windows for BSODs, stability, updates, etc, you’re doing it wrong. You can bash all day long for privacy violations and corporate greed but both of those are fixed with the proper version like Windows Enterprise. Costs more, but you are less of the product.








  • The US has the same rules, and are a driving force for this. They will enforce the rules the same as they do now for 10k payments. If you want clean money in a bank or if you want to travel with the money, or if you’re just randomly stopped and have the money on you, you will be forced to prove its provenance or it will be seized.

    This is already how it works in the EU, UK, Canada, and of course the USA.

    The cash itself isn’t the problem, it’s getting that cash into a “clean” system where it can be used to buy anything that isn’t cash. And with everything being non-cash on purpose because of these Nazi laws, you essentially have worthless paper you can’t do anything with.


  • You cannot stop the collection. It ALWAYS collects. It may not transmit, even if connected. For example the black box in many cars is really an assortment of ECUs that contain fine grained historical data. It does eventually roll over and get replaced but the data is there.

    For example there are public cases you can find where the police, not even needing a warrant, were allowed to dump this data off of a rental vehicle that a suspect, not convicted just suspected, was thought to have been in. Of course the copaganda story showed that they the used this data which was mostly location by gps and speed by the wheel sensors and gps to get a track of everywhere that vehicle had been in the last 6 months. Every person who rented it and drove it somewhere had their privacy violated. But I guess that’s normal now.

    The infotainment systems are the biggest jerks for data storage as they’re just mini generic computers today with lots of storage.

    To stop wireless transmission you can remove the sim card from the modem. Many vehicles won’t work or even start if the modem is disconnected (unplugged or unfused). A Nissan for example will drain its 12v battery overnight trying to find the modem if it is unplugged. But if the sim is bad or disabled, it will try and fail to communicate, then retry later which won’t kill the battery.

    You lose a lot of convenience and the data is still there. So the answer is basically you can’t drive a new vehicle without it violating your privacy with collection. You can only make the wireless transmission more private or disabled. I suppose you could buy a scanner yourself and before you leave the vehicle, factory wipe all ECUs. But even then you’ll need to enable them for emissions testing and such if that’s in your area.


  • Always UPS everything. But also always have a simple backdoor. I generally have 1 little desktop like a NUC running some basic Win10 OS and an install of remote software like TeamViewer. It is connected to my hardware router right after the ISP router and a backup connection. Used to be LTE everywhere, now I’m half and half on Starlink. It is then also connected to the router ports needed for management but inactive.

    If I have to, remote into the NUC over Starlink. I can then reboot my main ISP box. I can eventually get into my router and enable those ports which are pre-plugged in. From there I can then access all the stack management and all the IPMI ports like iLo. It’s a virtual interface through a virtual interface. It is slow, and painful. But it works.

    And it works 99.99% of the time. But even then, I’ve had to do a call of shame and walk one of my friends through which button to press as I’m on the other side of the world. In my case it was also power related but the UPS I had decided to overheat. In reality over the summer, the temps were high. But also it is a super awesome double conversion UPS. The line voltage into the UPS was dropped to below standards from the utility because their grid was overworked with everyone’s AC’s. So the UPS saw this as a line failure, kicked in the double conversion and ran happily. But it did not count as a power failure, so none of my services scaled back. Essentially it was delivering 3KW of juice from the wall through a double conversion making the whole thing super hot. Eventually it shut down for safety automatically, just pulled the plug. My NUC is on a separate little backup along with the modems and an auto transfer switch which did its thing. But there was no way to press the reset button on the UPS for a critical safety shutdown like that. It had to be in person.



  • Their hardware is just poor. They can charge whatever they like, I’m fortunate enough to not look at prices for that type of kit. Objectively, their hardware sucks compared to many other brands, especially at the same price point.

    Their OS sucks for 90% of my use cases. If your “work” involves you just using a browser then yes you can use a big phone to get your work done. Slap an arm in a big case with a keyboard as a “pc” or a big screened arm for a tablet, or a small screen for a phone. But if you do anything where you use a computer, you need an x86 architecture and you need certain hardware capabilities. Over the time, they have all been lacking in performance even at the highest tier, and the price has been high end. Overall makes zero sense. The locked down *nix systems hide everything useful to make it pretty. Isn’t compatible with real software. And isn’t backwards compatible. I can install windows and my software from the mid 90s or 2000s or today and it just f’cking works. That’s why Windows is king. Bloated absolutely. But it just works.

    That doesn’t make me hate the company. That just makes me sad for the uninformed people that get fooled into spending their hard earned money on sub optimal pieces of kit.

    What makes me hate them is this game of “we just invented this new feature from 10 years ago!” and then all their fan bois go apeshit over it like they just stepped into the future. And they’re too stupid to know they’re being lied to and manipulated for profits. But they are also vocal and arrogant about their stupidity and ignorance, so I don’t like them either.

    My phone has more RAM, more storage, better screen, better camera, faster charging by an order of magnitude (120W wired, 50W wireless…), more radio transceivers for global connectivity, better battery life, and honestly looks better. There is not a single thing I prefer about an iPhone and there is not a single qualitative metric an iPhone beats my phone on.

    My laptop has more RAM, more storage, better screen, better camera, faster and more charging, more ports, upgradability, and is a BEAST that will eat even mid range desktop computers. There is no equivalent Apple product. Not even close. And when you factor in the best and beefiest new macs can’t even run my software, it’s not even an option. Now my battery life sucks and it looks like a zombie movie prop, but it is actually functional. I can run a simulation or a LLM/ML algo that stresses the CPU at 100%, the Quadro RTX5000 at 100%, and gobbles up 120GB of system RAM plus the 16GB of VRAM writing TBs of data to the 5 internal M2 drives. And I can do so indefinitely with the temps peaking to 100C and limiting to about 300W of power draw. It blasts air out of 3 sides that I could probably cook an egg in. But it doesn’t thermal limit after 5 mins of web browsing like the Macbooks or the Airs. It’s a beast that is made to beast and it does. Apple can’t even compete in the class.

    For a tablet, I don’t have a need. My phone gives me a giant screen and my tiny auxiliary laptop does everything I need. My aux laptop is beefier than most, but it would be slower than a top of the line mac doing basic tablet things of web browsing. If I did need a tablet I’d just get a Xiaomi Pad. But in general I feel that the entire tablet market is a solution looking for a problem that only exists because Apple and fan bois are idiots again. I’ve been taking notes on TabletPCs for 20 years now. Seriously, Windows XP had a tablet mode. As did every one after. My laptops have touch input. My laptops in university the screen swiveled and then laid flat on the keyboard with a stylus to write on the screen. All of those fancy new Apple pen features? I had them in 2005. Pressure sensitive, gyro enabled for brush strokes/widths. Eraser on the other end. It was capacitive and needed a proprietary pen which was evil to say then. Now that’s Apple motto and they stole the idea and people are believing it’s new.

    If they release a good product, I’ll try it. I’m not brand loyal. If they keep releasing shit, I’m going to keep calling them out.


  • Lol that piece paper is not a god. It’s useless jibberish written by traitors starting a now failed nation.

    You have no rights in the USA. Everything you’re granted as a right, you are also denied as a right by other laws. It’s the playbook of a tyrannical society. Name ANY law that you have a right to, and then look up to find another law taking that exact right away from you.

    Just like a tyrannical society, you’re guaranteed nothing. But you can fly under the radar if you agree with the political powers that be. Which is no different than any country at any point in history.