Chahk @ chahk @beehaw.org

Posts

7

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400

Joined

2 yr. ago

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3121736/microsoft-sues-repeat-software-pirate-who-owes-company-12m-from-prior-case.html

Literally first hit on google (after the NYT links).

Do musicians not buy the music that they want to listen to? Should they be allowed to torrent any MP3 they want just because they say it's for their instrument learning?

I mean I'd be all for it, but that's not what these very same corporations (including Microsoft when it comes to software) wanted back during Napster times. Now they want a separate set of rules just for themselves. No! They get to follow the same laws they force down our throats.

It's a glorified autocomplete.

Agreed on both counts.. Except Microsoft sings a different tune when their software is being "stolen" in the exact same way. They want to have it both ways - calling us pirates when we copy their software, but it's "without merit" when they do it. Fuck'em! Let them play by the same rules they want everyone else to play.

I've learned the hard way to never use a new Google product, no matter how good they make it look.

When they killed Google Reader it was rough, and I only recently started getting back into rss feeds after setting up a self-hosted FreshRSS instance. After spending over a year convincing most of my extended family members to switch to Allo from their default SMS app for texting, it was a real gut punch when Google rugpulled it within several months of them really getting into it. They tried really hard to get me off Hangouts into Duo for calling, but I resisted all the way until they killed Hangouts too. Play Music was an excellent streaming service with a good library and I was happy subscriber. They also spoiled me with the "Free Song of the Day/Week" promos. The YouTube Music app to this day doesn't have half the features Play Music app used to have. The Stadia fiasco wasn't too bad because I got full refunds for all the controllers and games I bought on it.

It's no longer a mystery which services they want to ditch. Basically anything that doesn't make them a ton of money directly with paid subscriptions will be on the chopping block sooner or later. Even the ad-supported stuff is there only to annoy us into the paid tiers. I weep for the time they will eventually kill off Google Voice for good, or enshittify the free tiers of things like Photos, Gmail, Android, Classroom, Calendar, etc.

For me personally though, the biggest punch in the gut was when they killed Cloud Print in the middle of the fucking pandemic lockdowns, when my kids who were both doing school remotely needed to print a metric shit-ton of stuff. Worst of all, there was no warning about this, just a blurb on the cloud print site that nobody ever visited after the initial printer setup.

This latest "fuck you" was the last straw for me to begin degoogling my life. They made the web hosting decision easy for me when they sold Google Domains to Squarespace. My photos are now backed up to a self-hosted Synology Moments instead of Google Photos. I threw away the OnHub and replaced it with TP-Link Omada access points with a self-hosted Omada Software Controller. When they killed both Duo and Hangouts, I finally set up a self-hosted Jitsi server for video calling. I'm slowly replacing the digital content that I've bought over the years on their various services (e.g. Play Books, Play Music) with "archived" (wink-wink) DRM-free versions that I self-host (Readarr/AudioAnchor, Navidrome/DSub). The only three of their services that I can't seem to kick are Gmail, YouTube, and Android. Email will happen eventually, for my phone GrapheneOS sounds better and better every day, but nothing can beat the content library they've built up on YT.

But then why is it pronounced "eye dee" as if each letter stood for a separate word, and not "eyed" as if it was a short hand, like every other abbreviation?

My introduction to the world of computers was back in the late 80s when my stepdad brought home a Pravetz 8D. It was an 8-bit Oric clone made in Bulgaria. It hooked up to our TV and we had a cassette deck to load/save data. I was 13 or 14 at the time living in Ukraine. Playing games and learning BASIC on it got me interested in coding and started me on the path to a now 30+ year career in IT. Technically it wasn't mine though.

After we emigrated to the USA in the early 90s I went to college to continue studying programming. With my very first paycheck from a part-time job I bought my very own first PC. It was a 486DX2-66 with a ginormous 40 megabyte hard drive.

I'm with Norm on this: "ID" is stupid. "I" stands for "i" and "D" stands for "dentification".

I read Asimov's Foundation series of books when I was 14 or so, and it made me a lifelong science fiction fan.

Most of the time I use assistant to either perform home automation tasks, or look stuff up online. The first one already works fine, and for the second one I won't trust a glorified autocomplete.

I'd recommend release order because there are callbacks and crossovers, cameos, etc. that tie these shows together. You could watch the in any order, but you'd get more enjoyment out of picking up all the references and easter eggs. So, TOS -> (maybe TAS) -> movies 1 through 6 -> TNG -> movie 7 -> DS9 -> VOY -> movies 8 through 10 -> ENT. Then modern stuff like DSC, SNW, PIC, Prodigy, and LD.

That said, there's no need to watch every single episode of every show. Back on Reddit there were guides of "essential" episodes for each season of every series. Here's one for TNG. I'm sure you could find this for other shows too.

Seriously. People don't realize how well Intel QuickSync transcodes (non-4k) stuff. My Plex/Jellyfin server is on a 6th gen Celeron with 12GB DDR3, and it can transcode 10+ streams simultaneously. Cost me under $150 USD.

detonate

The term is "R.U.D." - Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly.

It was towed outside the environment.

Agreed! That quote shifts the blame onto parents, and completely ignores a decade's worth of evidence that today's social media platforms were designed to be as addictive as possible. On purpose. For better "engagement metrics" so that they can get kids' eyeballs on more ads.

I know if I was the seller I would appreciate the gesture, even if I didn't need the data.

Firefox on Android works great too. I'm slowly degoogling my life, and this was by far the easiest step.

Hey! I resemble that comment!

As much as I hate awfully broad patents, if the shoe was on the other foot, Apple would unleash its army of lawyers to block the other company's sales.

Haha! Look at those dumb "professional" photographers spending $15k USD on a single 600mm lens that only gives them like 15x zoom. My $1000 phone with 200x zoom will surely beat the crap outta those!

/S