
To channel yet another commentard . . .
Winning so hard!
2258 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Oct 2015
Google has moved to an 8-year support cycle for their Pixel series (up from 3), so kudos to them. My last Synology router continued to get updates for several years, until it overheated and died (in fairness to the router, the reason it overheated was that it had become a favorite resting spot for the cat). Both brands get my sustainability seal of approval.
On the flip side, Dell used to make durable laptops with swappable batteries. I finally retired a gen 2 i5 Inspiron which I'd been using as a lightweight server (running Linux, natch) because a friend gifted me a beast of a machine as a replacement. My more recent Dell laptops (work-issued) have all sucked. My current Precision manages to be not all that fast, despite nominally being a "workstation" grade laptop, yet the battery life is well south of 2 hours under sustained use, and the battery is sealed in, so I can't swap it on demand. The Latitude that I traded for it was of shoddy construction and had a terrible screen, as well as a sealed-in battery. What happened, Dell?
And don't even get me started on Bluetooth earbuds . . .
"owning a penis"
Is it detachable?
In any case, I find that owning a penis can be too much responsibility, risk, and expense, so I prefer to rent or lease instead. And definitely never buy new; those things lose an incredible amount of value once you drive them off the lot.
Also, they're a bitch to insure.
Whenever there's an article on DEI (or, in many cases, pretty much anything) someone is required to thunder a comment about "WOKE NONSENSE!”, so I figured it may as well be me this time. (The ALL CAPS is, of course, mandatory.)
Since this comment board is text-only, you'll just have to imagine my portly, bewhiskered jowls quivering in outrage at the very thought.
In defense of the cloud, it has enabled some very powerful capabilities which would be much more difficult to implement without it. I got an IM in Teams from a teammate in India requesting a file, which popped up on my phone. From my phone, I was able to locate the file in OneDrive and send it to him via Teams. I'm not saying you couldn't implement something similar with on-prem technology, but the cloud does make it simpler for the customer, freeing them from having to administer the complicated back-end infrastructure. For smaller organizations, cloud technologies can enable capabilities that they simply wouldn't have otherwise.
It obviously has its downsides as well, such as operational cost and being at the mercy of the vendor's changes, so it's not all bread and roses, to be sure.
"Sometimes the Old Farts really do know best."
That's true when it comes to things that are tried and tested, but it's utterly worthless when trying to do something innovative. To quote Arthur C. Clarke: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
In any case, even if you're right, why get enraged? What harm is being threatened by someone else's experiments? Isn't experimentation a cornerstone of learning?
"The changes Gobo makes enrage Unix traditionalists"
Imagine being so attached to a traditional way of implementing an operating system that someone else experimenting with alternatives enrages you. It's ironic that there's a faction of so-called technologists who are so hidebound, close-minded, and conservative that they can't bear the thought of someone else doing a different thing.
It sounds like there's increased disk usage but that it decreases complexity, since every installed program presumably includes everything it needs to run rather than depending on a patchwork of dependencies. As you say, that means disk usage could get quite high, but storage is at much less of a premium than it once was, and I can envision having a filesystem with built-in deduplication to help manage overall capacity and/or enhancing the versioning capability so that only changes to a given program get deployed.
Infosec guru Brian Krebs, who is no relation to Chris, reports getting hundreds of angry, hateful emails directed his way due to mistaken identity. He said he can only imagine what Chris is getting. Brian has also been reporting on the many security failures of the Trump administration, yielding the inevitable complaints about being "political." He has correctly pointed out the overlap between national security and politics in response.
In any case, Brian's experience really highlights that there's a vocal contingent of Trump's followers who are just like him: mean, spiteful, and mind-numbingly stupid.
An underappreciated quality of Microsoft marketing is the continuous flow of superficial and essentially irrelevant changes which allows them to stay front and center in the tech press. This sort of anodyne change allows Microsoft to receive free publicity without needing to engage in an expensive marketing campaign. My hat is reluctantly off to them for employing this strategy.