TheRealDunkirk

22 dni temudiscuss

You're trying to follow an out-of-date map. Our technology-infused growth of the past 50 years has produced more widespread mental illness and psycopathy than someone in the 80's could have even imagined. At this point in our societal evolution, you cannot assume that HUMANS THEMSELVES are either normal or natural.

TheRealDunkirk

2 miesiące temudiscuss

Does your place review every line of every update patch note? Do you think you would catch this implication?

TheRealDunkirk

2 miesiące temudiscuss

> the larger economy hasn't failed

It's only a matter of time until Social Security starts to fail, right after we've paid all the boomers their full benefits (and just in time for me to be eligible), and then they'll have to implement "austerity measures." After that, groceries, gas, housing, health "care," and higher education will have fully broken the middle class (it's already broken me, and I have a good job and a paid-off house), and the economy (sans imaginary AI investment bullshit) will be exposed as failing. AI (such as it is) will hammer entry level jobs, and tax revenues will be impacted by this. At the same time, we're going to have to start some sort of menial UBI, but with what money, I have no idea. Service on the national debt just surpassed military spending last year. When the shit hits the fan in another 10 years, the country will have to either go to war to reset the accounting ledgers, or actually put themselves on a budget. Which do you think will happen?

Given the numbers and rates we can see at present, all economic activity right now is a process of moving deck chairs on the Titanic. Sure, it hasn't failed, but it is an absolute certainly that it WILL. It's just a question of WHEN, and it's relatively soon. We have no adults in Washington. It's clear they're ALL just trying "get theirs" before it all comes crashing down.

TheRealDunkirk

2 miesiące temudiscuss

Companies are already following a bunch of standards like SOX, SOC2, HIPAA, etc., and documenting their adherence to checking all of the boxes, but incidents still happen every week.

TheRealDunkirk

4 miesiące temudiscuss

When a megacorp funds a network of non-profits to lobby a bunch of politicians, draft legislation, and tell them to take it to committee, that can happen without much visibility, especially when it's been orchestrated at the state level, as this has. Where does any of this show up until there's a vote called on it? There's no open debate. No working "across the aisle" to address concerns. There's nothing left of the legislative process that started this country, or, indeed, any Western representative democracy. So someone has to be watching, see something on an agenda that raises the hairs on their necks, figure out what it is, and if there's a story there, and they're not going to get any help from anyone because everyone involved knows how the public is going to feel about it. And then, as the article indicates, even a place like Reddit is going to astroturf the effort to get the story out. (Which I've been trying to point out for YEARS, but which -- surprise, surprise! -- gets supressed.)

TheRealDunkirk

4 miesiące temudiscuss

You literally blamed these moves on US religious prudishness, and then said that they were only about surveillance. Which is it? Just kidding. We all know it's nothing more than surveillance and control, and you just have an anti-religious axe to grind.

If the US actually gave a flying FUCK about "protecting the children," the current administration would be making good on Trump's promise to release the Epstein files -- as now ordered by a federal law passed by a overwhelming majority of both houses of Congress -- and prosecuting everyone involved.

We see what's really going on. We can't do anything about it, apparently, but we see.

TheRealDunkirk

4 miesiące temudiscuss

I'm sorry, but what!? Right back atcha. If you'd have bothered to have looked at the chart in link I posted, you'd have seen that market share of "consumer compute" for Windows was 26% as of 10 years ago. You're going to have to do a lot better anecdata to find a 44% resurgence over the last 10 years, especially given the dismal things that have happened to it as a platform over that time.

TheRealDunkirk

4 miesiące temudiscuss

I've said this for years. The amount of money Microsoft makes from the OS apart from corporations is a rounding error. What little they do make is from preinstalled systems, and, honestly, when was the last time you knew someone that went out and bought a Windows-based computer for anything other than gaming? I don't need a quote from someone high up in the company to know they couldn't care less how upset people are by the decisions they make about it.

Literally every corporation and government in the world is slavishly devoted to running all of their end-user computers on it, because Microsoft will let them do unspeakable things to the OS, in the name of security, that wind up having next-to-nothing to do with actually making their data more secure, and only serve to infuriate and spy on the users. My company runs THREE different "end point" security packages on my machine. There are at least 35 scripts that run at all hours of the day to make sure I'm not doing anything I shouldn't. It takes 20 minutes to be usable after a boot up. And the VPN drops several times a day, even though my internet is rock solid. It's an entire, vibrant ecosystem of outsourced, bone-headed, second-and-third-party decision making so that no one in the company or the department or the management or the supply chain has any accountability in case something goes wrong. THAT'S what Microsoft is selling, and IT HAS NO COMPETITION IN THIS CAPACITY.

For years, I've begged people on every social network I've been on, including this one, to find a source of operating system market share that has corporate purchases broken out from personal purchases. This is the closest thing I can find. It shows abysmal numbers for Microsoft, and it's at least a decade out of date. I expect that Microsoft -- who obviously underwrote the entire IT press during the 90's and 00's -- has done quite a lot of work and paid quite a lot of money to make sure that nothing definitive in this regard ever sees the light of day. They have gotten to where they are making sure that Gartner never did anything resembling this.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/143277-microsofts-shar...

TheRealDunkirk

11 miesięcy temudiscuss

At some point, doesn't humankind rise up and demand that our governments stop... you know... actually fucking us like this? After all the trust-busting at the turn of the century, we're right back in another golden age of robber barons, almost as if we learned nothing about this as a civilization. Being paid in company scrip that can only be used in the company's store with products from their global monolith doesn't sound far-fetched at this point. We seem to be heading straight for the cyberpunk version of our inevitable dystopian future.

TheRealDunkirk

11 miesięcy temudiscuss

Just more proof that the merger/acquisition should never have been allowed in the first place.

TheRealDunkirk

w zeszłym rokudiscuss

TheRealDunkirk

3 lata temudiscuss

So many people so concerned about CO2 emissions from computing devices... all the way down to Microsoft setting the default timeout for Bluetooth on Windows 11 to ONE MINUTE. It took me 2 weeks of hair pulling and updating everything before I realized why my mouse and keyboard would stop working, because it NEVER occurred to me in my WILDEST dreams that an OS developer would be given the insane task of creating a timeout like this, and writing a UI to control it. Then I realized that some middle manager in the guts of Microsoft probably got a bonus by being able to tell his management that "Microsoft" was now saving a collective million pennies a year of energy costs by crippling this basic feature. Well done, guys.

Where's the outrage from the colossal carbon footprint of the overarching, advertising-based economy? Does anyone have any idea what the electrical costs or carbon footprint per dollar of ad revenue is? It surely must be one of the lowest returns per environmental impact in the entire spectrum of capitalism. Sure, complain about cryptocurrency "setting the earth on fire," but Google gets a free pass for much the same thing to make their trillions?

TheRealDunkirk

3 lata temudiscuss

It is a fundamental truism of American "capitalism" that, if there is a law for something, it was written to protect established "capital" from competition. There are no free markets in the US.

TheRealDunkirk

5 lat temudiscuss

Like where it was going; left after the third random, unrelated political comment.

TheRealDunkirk

5 lat temudiscuss

> the prior gold standard, Apple Airport devices

It would seem the market is RIPE for them to come back into the wifi market with a mesh product.

TheRealDunkirk

8 lat temudiscuss

I just started a new job at a MASSIVE international conglomerate. I was literally told that an intranet site I needed to use would only work in IE, and that it specifically would fail to render fields if I used Chrome. It's a little disingenuous to hear these kinds of complaints coming from the company which distorted the browser market so badly that the world is still paying for it 20 years later.

TheRealDunkirk

9 lat temudiscuss

I think the grandparent author is simply not possessed by the same personality traits that generally define the type of person who gets a lot of value out of HN. I tend towards OCD, which caused getting off Facebook to take about 8 tries. It wasn't until I found a "last straw" that I finally managed it permanently, and that was the runup to the recent US election. I simply did not want to find myself at odds, politically, with a certain couple of family members, and feel like I could not say anything in response to their posts without damaging a relationship I otherwise highly value. With my all-or-nothing personality and approach to things, "the only winning move is... not to play."

TheRealDunkirk

9 lat temudiscuss

To be fair, if you've ever used paid support from Microsoft, you'd have gotten equal treatment. The couple times I had to call them back in the early 00's, I got super-technical, friendly people who got to the root of the problem right away.

One even taught me to catch a Windows error via remote debugging on a different machine. I leveled up because of a support call.

TheRealDunkirk

9 lat temudiscuss

<cough>Bullshit</cough> If you were a Linux user in the mid-90's, then about the only place to get "help" was #linux on EFnet. Collectively, I don't think I've suffered more abuse on the internet than in that forum. And, yes, I'm still bitter. It was NOT a noob-friendly place. The best place -- ever -- to get Linux help was, and will always have been, the Gentoo forums, but that didn't take off till the early 2000's.

TheRealDunkirk

9 lat temudiscuss

I went to vote for this, just for the fun of it, but got asked to login. Then it asked me to setup my username, and then complained that my 3 usual variants were already taken. I guess I have another account that's already sitting on that username. But who knows? Microsoft's multi-user login support is a disaster.

One of my accounts is corporate, and my browsers -- ALL of them on ALL OS's -- are constantly confused. Sometimes when I need to switch, it looks like my browser flips through about 4 or 5 pages, and then makes me manually refresh to get a prompt. How can this be so bad, at this point? Google had multi-user support sorted years ago, including business account logins. I guess it's a problem due to a difference between AD-backed corporate accounts and (I assume) non-AD accounts?

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