The older I get and the longer I work in IT, the more I believe that software activation is to be avoided at all costs, especially time-limited software activation.

I've got a Framework laptop on pre-order because I'm pretty certain I really don't want Windows. I have only one Windows machine at home, on Windows 10, and I'm really not convinced that it offers me anything at all that I want. Much of my early use of that device was getting AROUND shite that I don't want, and fudging things to make them work. Windows 11 needs that x 100, from my experiences with it.

And now they have the 10 ESU stuff, which is just unnecessary, especially after they promised "no more new versions of Windows".

So I think I'm done. Again. Having previously used Slackware as my primary desktop for 10 years.

I audited the software on my primary machine and I don't think there's a single thing on there's that proprietary, needs "activation" (I "activated" my software when I clicked the download button, giving it executable permissions or via the use of credit card to purchase it in the first place, thanks) or that can't work on Linux.

I'm at that point again where I need to computer do work for me, not run off and do whatever the hell it likes. Between activation, AI, mandatory cloud accounts, "search everything" rather than just organise stuff, etc. I think I'm done again.

I have 20 years until retirement. I reckon that's a viable proposition to reach there without having to have a single Windows machine at home again.

He says, typing from a Samsung DeX session on an Android phone.

Myself and another IT manager friend were looking at the same time for new NAS units.

We both looked at Synology. I rejected them based immediately on the first article I saw about them restricting what drives you can use. It's none of your business, Synology, just use what's presented to you and get out of the way. I ended up buying QNAP (for work) and Asustor (myself).

My friend, though, was in a procurement nightmare and the people above them hadn't done their homework and they ended up with a Synology unit and a bunch of IronWolf drives. And only when it filtered back down to my friend did they realise that it just wasn't going to work.

Cue one month of more of arguments and having spent a small fortune to then have to back the Synology and buy something else. And now Synology changes its policy? Yeah, it's too late. You already burned that bridge and cost people money (now admittedly, through their own poor research and not keeping up with industry news, but why should that be necessary?).

My friend and I were basically sworn off Synology at that point. I'd dodged that particular bullet, but he was caught right in the middle of it DESPITE hearing this about Synology and trying to warn people.

Sorry, but your profiteering indicates your STATE OF MIND, and how you view customers. Whether you "fix" it or not, that state of mind persists. This is what people don't get. You've now tainted yourself because you clearly don't care about what your customers wanted, and only realised after people swore off buying them or by literally backing units that - as far as they were concerned - weren't fit for purpose.

You need to do an awful lot more to fix that problem - by showing customers that your state of mind has changed, not just your knee-jerk reaction to getting a bunch of returned kit and lost sales. We need to know you're not just going to try something else entirely to try to recoup that loss.

It's to do with reducing wastage as much as reducing profits.

I have a bunch of chargers that came with phones - and I don't use any of them, because all my house sockets have USB-C, I have a ton of USB-C cables, my car has multiple USB-C adaptors or sockets already, etc. etc. Another brick of copper to convert to USB-C is really unnecessary.

Hell, my bathroom scales are USB-C, my kitchen scales are USB-C, etc. etc. etc.

But I have a box of "old" chargers that have never been touched because they came with the device and they're worthless to me. Even if I gave them away at a flea market or similar, nobody would take them.

The most expensive phone I've ever bought was ~$500... and I have owned about 5 phones in my life. Not one of them did I use the "official" charger for for any significant length of time (e.g. to charge them up initially, maybe, but beyond that I had battery packs, charging sockets, docking stations, car adaptors, etc.).

A USB-C cable is pennies. A USB-C charger is, what a couple of $ if you want one. Any store would start bundling them together now if you asked for one. But for the millions of people who already have a drawer full of useless or surplus wall-bricks, or who mostly charge their phone in the car, etc. they aren't bundling another $5-10 of plastic and copper with every phone they sell.

That's right.

I put a pre-order down on a Framework laptop so I don't have to use Windows 11.

It's been mangled by culture.

Once upon a time, it was unambiguously a pretty debilitating mental state. If you had that diagnosis, everyone could see issues and it wasn't at all something that anyone would aspire to.

Then Asperger's came along and thus began the 'diagnosis as an excuse for selfish behavior'. The general impression was "a smart person who has a tendency to be a jerk", which sounded totally awesome to a lot of people. They didn't need to try not to be a jerk, they had a pass in the diagnosis. People *wanted* this diagnosis.

Then, at least in part, some felt that Asperger's had become a very coveted 'diagnosis', and self-diagnosis was popular. They said 'oh, you know what, maybe if we group it with general autism, maybe people would be more reluctant to want that association, and it can go to being an aid for those that needed it.

But no, bereft of their diagnosis, they would instead do the same with autism, really diluting it and making a lot of people end up not taking autism seriously.

Nowadays, Gen Z highly values 'neurodivergent' as a badge of honor, that anyone cool *must* be neurodivergent.

So we end up with everyone saying they have a diagnosis, that they are neurodivergent, and they absolutely are not anything so pedestrian as 'normal'. Meanwhile those that really need it are generally taken less seriously because it's been diluted so much.

No different to "batteries not included".

If the world has standardised on chargers - finally! - after so long, then maybe we should just embrace that.

It was always Apple dragging their feet, and now all the Apple users have USB-C too (thanks, Europe!), there's no bad thing in everyone used a bunch of standardised chargers and having to build devices compliant with a wide range of chargers that everyone already has.

Well, if it's anything like the two shows I saw being shown in America based on Scrabble and Trivial Pursuit....

They were so awful I honestly continued to watch them only to see just how more contrived they could possibly be.

I mean... you'd think there'd actually be gameplay elements in two of the world's most popular board games to make a show that actually feels like they're playing it, right?

Looks like the displays have something like a 128x78 'pixel' active LED display as a backlight, and then put an LCD on top of it.

So if a tiny region of the display is just dim reds, then it can get a backlight that is doing just that and the LCD doesn't have to block as much other stuff.

No, this is still backlit LCDs.

The LEDs are still 'just' a backlight, but now a colored backlight. You basically have an OLED-like characteristic of emissive lighting at some resolution. The problem is the resolution of these LEDs would be something like a 128x78 display. Impossibly low even by old fashioned 'SD' standards.

So you have a 128x78 active LED display, and then an LCD panel on top to give it resolution. So you get to pick a good tiny local backlight color and minimize how much extraneous unwanted color that tiny dimming zone needs to filter out.

Then these sharks won't be able to make the campaign contributions necessary to get complying elected officials re-elected.

Can't have that.

Spank people who can't pay their bills for whatever reason? Childcare, healthcare costs, inflexible employment traps, maybe we change more for those. Usurious alimony? Car financing deals from the seventh level of hell? Hey-- don't touch that stuff!

Alter bankruptcy laws to make them easier? NO WAY!

What we need are more student loans at the drop of a hat, for any degree, no matter how unsalable, how inane, how self-indulgent. /eye-roll

But less convenient than version numbers, particularly since Ubuntu uses very predictable versioning.

So I know that even numbered years are LTS and the version number is YY.MM, and the month is always April for LTS and October is the other possibility.

So with that all in mind, one says "ok, I know I need to add stuff for Ubuntu 24.04 to this configuration". Except some configurations don't do version number and take the codename. So now I've got to remember 'noble'. Canonical themselves in their web site sort of de-emphasizes the codename. The 'tag' results for the blog all fixate on the version number. The download page doesn't mention the codename. The release cycle page does, and the *original* blog announcement mentions it, but not the subsequent ISO refresh release announcements.

I'd say the likely scenario is that the person actually buys stuff but doesn't consider the stuff an 'investment'. I bought a house to live in, not to turn it around for a profit.

To the extent people are 'investors' in things like 401k, they may not be 'active' investors and would just as much prefer something like a massive expansion of social security instead of letting investment companies play with their money. Or to the extent they do want to 'invest', they actually want to contribute to the potential success of things they intrinsically want to succeed, rather than chasing the best percentage return without regard for anything intrinsic to the people using the money invested.

The sentiment I think is plain enough, that they don't like the thought of handing their money over to a group of folks that will mostly enrich themselves above all else while their money is used for who knows what without regard for his deeper consideration of what is going on.

Agreed. This is a race to the bottom. No one should depend on AI, because AI then undoes AI mistakes undoes AI mistakes because there is no harmonization among approaches. This will not end well.

Presuming it can ultimately 'work as advertised' the key word might be 'more', but lower paying programming jobs.

If it makes it more accessible with less experience and interest required, the labor pool expands and suddenly developers are cheap enough to afford for that software someone wants but isn't worth it today.

All that said, I'm a bit more skeptical that it 'works as advertised', or that it will anytime soon, but instead it can expand productivity of already strong programmers and do next to nothing for those without the skills. It screws up constantly and even as I try to lean into it and try asking it to fix its own mistakes, it's really terrible at it. It generally creates code that is really hard to maintain and further is the worst at trying to modify code that is hard to maintain.

Now I do know of some dysfunctional development teams that employ dozens of interns and give them just shit tasks that are ripe for LLM fodder. Those teams may find it hard to justify the same volume of junior devs when the LLM can just take care of those shit tasks with no more supervision than the junior devs but with a much quicker responsiveness.

If you're used to finding inaccuracy and accepting that, then you'll do fine, and have no regrets. For the other eight billion of us, we find this both immoral, and still another example of the immunity from liability by the bad advice from AI, itself an oxymoron.

This is the same logic leap that makes people believe that driverless cars are ready to put on the highways.

These are big lies, foisted by trillions of dollars in bad investments, trying to bring halo to trusting people who believe the big lies. Small successes fool people into unearned trust. Marketing is powerful because people are believers. Sadly, only skeptics are rewarded these days.