"Even my old mom has used it for over 15 years."

ok now that might be harder to do with someone who doesnt have a linux expert on speeddial. And i dont want to be that linux expert for my family and friends (sorry, not sorry).

When win7 lost support, i tried linux on the desktop yet again as i have since 1997. mint in this case. It has the same problems of needing updates, where people force in "design changes" a long with security changes. It has a lifecycle, and you will be told to upgrade to a newer release at some point. During those upgrades, things may go wrong, same as windows. Except i can tell my parents to call any independent computer store and have them deal with it. Not have to call in the elusive linux expert at hundreds of dollars an hour. they can use general forums and self solve, not have to deal with niche forums, and snarky attitudes from linux tryhards.

for me personally, i could have stuck with mint. i had to leave it due to bugs in games, and the lag of proton support to address those bugs. But having some small issue and being pretty much on your own to solve it does grate at the nerves. I just want my computer to work when i get home. I fix computers all day... and in the corporate world, its all windows. Because windows experts are easier to hire (plentiful) and cheaper to pay. The same applies to home support, resources on the internet to solve things, etc.

some real funny ones with 10 views. happens sometimes when you are searching for something randomly, and you hit some crazy video that only has like 20 views. but this makes it easy!

makes you wonder what happened to the dad yelling at his kid. Are they still friends? is the dad dead?

pretty fun.

They cannot possibly unload them as people would notice immediately i believe. In that situation, it is far better to have two accounts, or 10 or 100. each with an amount in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. just convert pieces of that when you need some cash.

So he had the first coins. Saw the price going up and purchased a few thousand over different wallets while they were still 19 cents or whatever. Just spends those off one account at a time. Never needs to touch the main account because no one can spend billions of dollars with no accountability of where that money came from.

And practically, no one actually needs billions of dollars. a few million tax free over 10 years would be plenty for almost everyone.

Your ideas intrigue me, and i would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

"are now rolling out kiosks that can take cash and accept change."

LOL... the 1990s called, it wants it antiquated methods of payment back!

its 2024... who the fuck carries cash? even farmers markets and side of the road country bumpkin stalls take cards these days....

in 20 years, if society doesn't collapse, there will be while-u-wait diamond machines in every mall in the land. You'll be able to get diamonds engraved with your sweethearts name and maybe even a microscopic picture of them. Of course it will be as popular as photo booths in malls are today. A novelty. And just like aluminium before the industrial age, older people will tell the youths that diamonds were rare when they were a kid and no one will care.
  People will want functional jewlery in the future, diamond keys encoded with data. The encryption key to your house, or a lifetime of pictures and videos. Your grandmothers engagement ring will be worthless to them, just like napoleons cutlery.

" Canada now has 3 fairly left wing parties,"

LOL... this person is clearly not canadian if he thinks that the liberals are a "left wing" party, or even have many left leaning views. They are currently propping up landlords, corporate interests and big business. They bought and run an oil pipeline. They are bringing in tons of low skill foreign workers with the only reason being to depress wages for citizens and help business friends make more dividends. They said recently that their primary concern is to keep home prices high so boomers don't lose all their savings. They sell weapons to isreal. They are currently busting up the train strikes and legislating union workers back to work. Do these sound like "left wing" polices to you? Perhaps you have been fooled by their token support of social justice issues, but that is just window dressing. Liberals are firmly big business, status quo and always have been.

The only reason that trudeaux does anything "left wing" is because jagmeet forces his hand. And the greens? they are mostly unelectable conspiracy nuts, same as ppc. Their policies are just as wrong headed as the other fringe parties.

Canada has mostly right wing parties. They just aren't as stupid over the top right wing as cons and dems in america. Electing the NDP is the only way forward, unless someone comes up with a "housing first" party.... NDP has been the only ones who ever push for solutions for the non rich, regular working people. (i didnt mention the BLOC, but they are pretty left leaning as well usually). And don't get me started on all the conservative provincial governments who do most of the fuckups that the federal government gets blamed for...

Canada, politically, is and always has been somewhat conservative. We took all that land from the natives after all. Canada is built on exploitation by giant monopolistic corporations, both of the people and our natural resources. This continues to this day, with of course, the help of the current liberal government.

The gen3 T14s seem to have a really high failure rate. Its generally the motherboard (as per what the depot replaces). I support about 600 of them and rma at least three a week with the same exact problem. Does not post just suddenly. Sometimes the user just goes out to lunch and comes back. I dont believe they are breaking them through misuse as it happens so much for us. They did not fix it with the gen4 either as i am pretty sure that they also come in like that. I mean its a laptop, so they get tossed around a bit.... But i am not super impressed. Most that do fail, fail in the first few months of use.

The gen1/2 had problems with the power button literally detaching and not being able to power on. They did seem to fix that though. Sometimes they also had motherboard failures.

They are nice devices though and everyone does like them. Just make sure you get premiere support so you dont really have to jump through any hoops when calling in the rma, and good warranty terms. And have some kind of file backup for the user (eg onedrive).

I dont think i have had one keyboard failure yet on them, nor trackpad nor battery. One or two screens. 99% of the rma's are for not posting. I find that sad.

I have been looking for a simple phone that has no data and has an 8+ day standby battery life, like i had before they switched off the networks that they used.

None of those old phones work. They either connect and are horrible quality due to intentional degradation or simply have nothing to connect to anymore.

So please do tell eton, where you are getting a simple phone phone that supports 4-5g. There is the CAT phone, that has poor reviews, a bunch of flip phones that run android (so battery life is still only a few days), a few phones that are gigantic for old people, and expensive designer phones that are sold out. But it seems pretty hard to find an affordable feature phone, with a simple '00s OS on it . Just give me a candybar motorola that supports all the new networks and that can fall out of a two story window and not even drop the call.

So then they ditch the tool and you get it back eventually from the ditch.

Or they tinfoil plate their thiefing sacks

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i hate automated attendants...

I only just upgraded from windows 7 for fucks sake! This OS better give me at least 15 more years.

If it wasnt for stupid steam I would still be on it. Only reason i had to turf a perfectly good install in the first place. Linux is too much work on a gaming PC. tried it over and over and its just different enough to be frustrating and wasting my time with bullshit. try and get any modern distro to auto login and escalate without a password for instance. And since like osx, you have to escalate for every fucking thing... its little things like that, a bunch of them.

Man you talk a lot for someone whoes user ID indicates they were not even born when i was rolling out my first servers....

VMware has 45% of the market. Not a monopoly by any definition.

This is a poor argument. Anyone with any experience in the industry would know that vmware is the defacto standard since the early aughts. Hyper-V came along later, and is all based on unstable windows. The only thing it has going for it is that its free. So what is the other 55%? QMEU/KVM? get real... vmware is the standard period, and should be considered a monopoly for the purposes of these conversations, as the parent and many other comments keep trying to tell you. They might as well be a monopoly for the power they have in companies, the mindshare in technical people and their installed base.

Its like arguing that windows isnt a monopoly because linux, OSX and chromeOS exist.... Its may be "factual" but its wrong on the ground, on the streets, where most of us work. If i need to hire someone, its easy to find an affordable vmware person. Many people have that experience. Hiring a linux KVM person is going to ask for a major premium in salary, so doesn't work at all.

Your arguments up and down this thread miss the forest for the trees. VMware is the virtualization system that most people use. Getting "locked into" vmware is as unavoidable as getting "locked into" windows. It just is. So spare me your semantic games mr "i am so smart". The combined knowledge of the people you are replying to dwarfs yours in this space clearly. Reminds me of that moped jesus guy who had to put his idiotic two cents on everything in old slashdot times....

Pretty much my favourite author. The localizers, the baubles, the spider people, the pocket pal... So many great concepts and ideas came out of that man. He was as great as authur C clark in my opinion. Every single one of his books is great and full of novel ideas and concepts. The whole idea of how he organized the universe into zones was just amazing to wrap your head around and solved so many conceptual problems regarding the age of the universe and why it appears to empty to us.

I was actually just recommending him last week. 79, he had a good run i guess. Seems like he died in la jola on the ocean, I hope when i die i am close to the ocean as well. Will smoke one out for him tonight for sure! RIP friend, ill keep on recommending you every chance i get.