The academic side is less bananas I will give you that. And your comment about 80m is spot on. The problem we have here in the UK, is that it's pretty easy to get a 2m HT and a license to use it. Huge swathes of amateurs never progress past that or take a technical interest at all. I've lived in 3 separate areas where the local 2m nets are full of people with very defective personalities. The sort you'd find in a flat-roofed pub. And they're the guys who actually go to the clubs and the hamfests here.
It's pretty not exciting here as far as emergencies go. So our emcom network (Raynet) are limited to dressing up like police offers as far as they can legally do it and managing the car park at public events. The real emergency services here are very well equipped to handle this themselves with cross service commercial radios. And there's very few places you can't get a 4G signal now, even in the middle of bloody nowhere.
I did enjoy working CW QRP and chasing miles-per-watt to some degree. It was also difficult to be an asshole on CW so people didn't bother. SSB / FM is just urgh.
Having met a lot of people I think the license gives some kind officialdom and status which they are otherwise lacking and desire. This is an attribute demanded by a large number of people with defective personalities.
Granted a chunk of people go in for the technical interest (I did ultimately) but the other folk rub off on a lot of them and it normalises into the amorphous bubble of defective personalities.
No one does this or cares. They care about delivery and keeping ROI high and costs down, not demanding platforms.
I wouldn't draw any assumption that higher quality software is portable. I've seen monocultural genius (Keysight Genesys) and cross platform garbage (libreoffice) for example.
Fintech here. Also large. We have no Macs. We will probably never have any. We have a lot of software which will most likely never work on them. None of our clients have them as well.
Also another company we are related to tried a roll out and found they couldn't get Apple to deliver anything other than crap off the shelf configs in any quantity. Dell could. So the trial was ended.
Windows doesn't matter to Microsoft now. The big sellers are Azure and Office 365 and they work on Macs.
As for market share in the US, I very much doubt it's that high really. There are huge unimaginable swathes of windows boxes which won't show up in GlobalStats at all. I know a company with 50,000 desktops that can only visit a web site on an internal network for example. Those sorts of installations are everywhere.
The ratio of cranks and weirdos to normal people is 9:1 with ham radio. It’s usually the other way round with other hobbies.
The thing that gets me with ham radio is some see it as a social responsibility even here in the UK where its totally unnecessary from an emergency comms perspective.
Yep. I’m in the middle of switching from macOS back to windows because I need to do things I can’t do on macOS. I’ve had to build out a locked down windows 10 LTSC build to get anywhere near a sensible outcome for me.
I think we should start a revolt in the IT sector against this shit really. I’d start one but I don’t know where to begin.
I had ham radio passed down to me. This turned out, ironically considering it’s a communications hobby, to be isolating and a rather nasty bubble. Sort of like an aether 4chan full of bigots, racists and status chasing money spenders. Explained my father entirely.
There are some niches in it which are still manageable (QRP, SOTA) but I don’t want to become associated with the rest of them.
YMMV but I would encourage people to find their own interests and try and look for more progressive ones without a perpetually ageing demographic.
I found photography, hiking, travelling to be a better social outcome.
Completely agree with this. Having ported a lot of old non async c# to async, even mixing the notions for a moment is a disaster. This was a world of pain in the late .net classic lifecycle (4.5-4.8) where Microsoft kept fucking it up as well as us.
I had a fairly extensive personal web site for a number of years used as a professional profile. Unfortunately someone I met on a dating app turned out to be a bit of a psychopath and I had to pretty much cut her off. She managed to find the web site on the public Internet and get in contact with me directly and caused me a lot of problems leading to me having to dispose of the web site, the domain, my phone number and update lots of professional contacts.
I prefer a lot of anonymity now. I don't have any social media profiles or public facing stuff. And you know what? It has done no harm whatsoever to my professional life or connections. All that stuff that sucks you in is 100% optional.
I’m convinced the only thing Wi-Fi doesn’t fuck out on at the moment is windows. Had problems with Linux, macs and android for the last few years. Just works on windows!
Fair but I wanted to be a fighter pilot because the money was better than driving a bus. So I learned c#. The company I worked for, a software dev house, said that they were VB only be they wouldn’t bring in c#. They died within 6 months of me and everyone else leaving.
C# and .Net was a gold rush. VB was only valuable where the primary business function was not software delivery.
That’s pretty funny. I just bought a pixel 6a with the intent of replacing my iPhone. About an hour of “how the hell do people put up with this shit” and it’s going. Then I wake up to this.