Given that China doesn't allow everyday citizens unlimited access to the internet, we can assume the only ones allowed out are bad actors like badbot, so blocking China entirely would be a net benefit for the entire world. We'd have to get the VPN operators to cooperate, which is near impossible since they'd sell their own mothers for a quick buck.

Not 50 yet, although at one time I had a FOUR digit UID, but that login was tied to a university email I no longer have.

My next door neighbor for some period of time was a dancer. I got to know her and people she worked with and I've had a revolving door of current and former dancers in my life. Some of them have been fuckups, but mostly I've come to know these women as just normal folks who have a slightly more miserable job than most other service workers.

I don't know if anyone remembers this, but having a Facebook account was a requirement for Tinder users for the first several years of operation.

Most of my real life friends are strippers. Even when they're honestly just trying to meet somebody, their accounts get banned constantly just from doing normal Tinder stuff. Even for the most blessed with attractiveness, Tinder is a goddamn hole of suck.

A zillion years ago, I had a contract position at Disney. But I was a temp worker, so they didn't give me a desk. Or a phone. Or a PC to use. Or any official way to check my e-mail. But somehow they DID give me Forest Admin credentials for their ENTIRE Active Directory.

I was there for six months and when the full time replacement admin finally showed up, they had armed guards escort me out. My replacement let me know after the fact that someone done fucked up setting up my user account. I could've fucked the entire company, so I the order was given that I be treated as hostile until I left the premises. Why they didn't just, I don't know, select and delete the group memberships my account wasn't supposed have, I do not know.

Last year some IT worker at Disney got in a lot of legal trouble by using his still-active credentials to make tiny changes to the printed menus used on Disney Cruise ships. He apparently thought investigations into how that happened would eventually lead to getting his job back, but honestly ruining a print run or three of menus is probably about the most malicious thing I would've guessed WOULDN'T get LEOs to your door. It's just nice to know Disney's IT hasn't gotten any better since I worked there.

I do volunteer "IT Stuff" for a community center near my home. This includes helping high school age kids through CompTIA A+ certification. There's even a grant to pay for exams for a few kids every year, which is honestly a big deal since the exams themselves are very expensive. I also do a Help Clinic a couple times a month that is primarily geared toward cleaning off malware, doing data transfers and counseling people interested in buying something new.

HP has absolutely staggering mindshare in relation to anything involving printers. It's selling $150+ single tank inkjets RIGHT NOW, as if that is a good idea and a quality product from some actually reputable manufacturer. There are a very small number of low-cost HP color laser printers that are actually kind of a good deal as used/refurb products, but I beg and plead that people consider the humble Brother monochrome laser models for their home printing needs. Almost no one listens, even though an equal number of people will concede that any positive experience they've had with an HP printer was either 30 years ago or involved the dishwasher sized printers they have in their office.

I actually had a lot of respect for him. He was from probably the last gasp of computer magazines as useful sources of timely information. I am sorry to hear that he has passed. I hope that he did not suffer.

Fuck cancer.

In the mid 90s, I was dealing with process control systems that ran on NT/Alpha and PPC because x86 systems weren't thought to be able to handle the IO loads. We also offered the same product on Solaris.

I will say that it was cool to see an Alpha chew on an x86 binary for a minute and then watch as FX32 kicked in and whatever-it-was would run faster on the workstation than the best PC in the building. It wasn't really surprising, except that in a lot of cases the PHBs would look at the DEC systems and say something like "I thought you said those things can't run Excel."

On the other hand, our system worked so much better on UltraSparcs than it did NT4 that it was actually funny that we gave customers the option to use anything else.

One of the frustrating things about Premier for me is the wide variance in sentiment about how well it works as an application. Both my partner and I do a certain amount of video editing. Her job means that she's basically married to the rest of Adobe Creative Suite, but she also says Premier specifically behaves poorly on the mix of Apple and Windows computers she uses.

Other video editing pros I've checked with say they can leave it running for weeks on Walmart-grade trash PCs and never see a hiccup.

That can't be the same software.

DaVinci Resolve is free and cross-platform. You can spend $350 on a paid license. They send you a really nifty desktop editing device if you do that, but it's a big-boy editor that can do big-boy work.

In my experience, the only thing Premier is good at is crashing.

Wireless networks aren't solely for internet data transfers. My partner is always bitching about how long Time Capsule needs to run on her Macbook and how long it takes to move finalized video projects off it, but she also refuses to plug the goddamned thing in with a cable even though she hasn't unplugged the fucking thing from AC in like two and a half years and there's an $200 SFP+ to Thunderbolt adapter literally inches away from the wall wart.

I might be a little salty about it.

It's called Hyper-V and it's been included as part of desktop and Server Windows since the days of Vista / Server 2008. If you have a Pro or Enterprise SKU of desktop Windows, it's a standard OS component.

I'm not going to use the FSF solution because it turns out that there are many alternatives. Even when I was talking about Linux on IRC in 1994, I was specifically using either Yggsdrasil or Slackware at the time rather than Debian.

Regarding Microsoft, there's lots and lots of industry-specific applications that run on Windows and nothing else. The system I'm looking at this morning runs on a Paradox DB and looks like it uses Delphi libraries. The vendor says it needs to live on Windows Server 2016. Since that's what someone is paying me to keep running, that's what it's running. I'm guessing that the four or five developers who made that application aren't going to make a Linux version any time soon given that they haven't even certified compatibility for their software on any newer Windows version in the last eight years. As a pragmatic matter, Windows exists and people need it to work. Their money spends as well as anyone else's.

I operate a MSP for small businesses. I started on ESXi and moved to a combination of Windows Server datacenter (Windows Server instances running on DC edition are automatically licensed, and I'd be spending that money anyway) and XCP-ng for my hypervisors. I have no major complaints about either product. I think you'll hear about Proxmox a lot in this thread as well, but it's a nonstarter for me because some people claiming to work for the FSF were condescending dickholes to me on IRC in 1994 and it'll be a cold day in hell before I use anything that's derived from Debian. I don't have anything bad to say about Proxmox itself. I'm just never going to try it.

At the point when I can run clustered nodes and easily transfer guests between them, when I have easy access to handle backups and out of band management, I'm pretty happy. It's ever pretty straightforward to give a VM direct access to a PCIe device or raw drive on both platforms.

I'm only dealing with ~20U of hardware and a total of a few hundred CPU cores for everything I'm doing, which is pretty small scale, but what I'm doing works in theory and in practice so I'm putting in a good word.