As someone who used to be conservative (I considered myself an "independent conservative" back then), I became apolitical (mostly due to dealing with severe health issues), up until 2020 when I started getting back into politics, Trump scared me. I was nervous in 2016, I warned my family about him but they wouldn't listen to me, they would say "Well we'll look into that" but they never did. 2021 and the insurrection were the nail in the coffin for me, family members have supported him completely without budging on any issue. I've been shocked at the reelection, I've practically endlessly watched Trump speak and he seems to be completely incapable of telling the truth, or even doing/saying the right thing. I have family members who are sold on him, they lap it up.

I had a discussion with them about the insurrection after it happened, and one of them said that it was actually Antifa posing as Trump supporters to make Republicans look bad, to make it look like Trump wanted to overturn the election but in reality it was Democrats wearing Maga hats trying to take over the world (!), yet the more I asked, they kept doing mental gymnastics to justify it, or to pass the blame onto the other side. An example is that they said there would be hyperinflation under Biden, and also that Biden is a communist who wants to be a dictator, and has establishment figures pulling the strings to control him. One line that struck me, was when they said "What about the Murder of Ashlee Babbit?', it was the way it was said and the wording that sounded way too cult-like to me, as if they were being programmed to have very specific and automatic responses. They expressed things that showed that they believed that the whole world basically revolved around republicans and democrats, how George Soros was trying to dominate everything and destroy the world, etc. You've heard it all, they've been mentally programmed to not only regurgitate it, but believe it wholeheartedly.

This election terrified me, but I'm interested (in not really a good way) to see what happens.

It is, back in the 90's there were a lot of competing architectures, some very good, but that all basically died out at the hands of Intel and market consolidation around x86; I've seen lots of good technology just die off. If MIPS had taken off, Windows might've been primarily for that platform due to the fact that Microsoft developed a lot of NT on the Jazz architecture (custom-built MIPS systems with ARC firmware), some of that can still be seen in SGI systems (which use ARCS firmware, a modified ARC, and MIPS cpus). I've noticed there's a lot more competition nowadays with CPUs than there were even 10 years ago, mostly due to how ARM is basically showing how bad x86 really is. Windows (NT) also used to be available for the Alpha architecture, but support for that was pulled before Windows 2000 went RTM, there was even a binary translator available for NT4/Alpha similar to Apple's Rosetta called FX!32.

As the main developer of a relatively large 3D simulator project in C++ (in development for over 20 years), I've encountered some users who have Windows ARM systems that they wanted it to run on. Since I already had Mac universal binaries for it, porting to ARM/Windows and providing builds for it wasn't hard at all, I basically did it in case the industry moves in that direction. Builds are done on a VM on a Mac system. I don't like Windows anymore (I think it's a huge mess, it's very bloated and slow compared to competing platforms, WIndows 11 seems to be more about ads and marketing of Microsoft stuff), but in situations like this you need to use it and build for it, since most users use it. X86 translation appears to work pretty well in it, but I always want the sim binaries to be architecture-native. I mainly now develop the C++ code on a MacBook Pro with an ARM CPU, was previously mainly using Debian Linux for development, but the Mac system is extremely fast and has relatively low power usage, I've badly wanted to leave the x86 architecture since I've considered it to be a legacy one for a long time now (I used to use SPARC and MIPS systems quite a bit, a long time ago). I'd probably prefer RISC-V if it was gaining a lot of traction in modern systems, since I'd rather have an open architecture.

My simulator is at https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skyscrapersim.net%2F if you're interested.

I used to be a serious Winamp user in the late 90's/early 2000's. In the mid-to-late 2000's I started using the Winamp clone Audacious since it ran on Linux. I now use it on both Linux and Mac (I think I used to run it on Solaris/sparc too back in the day), for most of my music listening, and have barely used Winamp for over a decade, mostly because I abandoned Windows. I think things would be a lot better if development was poured into something like Audacious instead of trying to revive a proprietary app from the dead (with severely restrictive and questionable source code). I downloaded their git repo when it was online too.

I use manual rsync at home, but on my AWS server I use Rsnapshot which is a wrapper around rsync that mostly manages incremental backups. For my mom I set her up with Duplicati which uploads to AWS S3.

It caused 2 updates, in which one update caused the self destruction. The windows updates don't display files as it's deleting them, what happened is that the icons on the desktop disappeared, and then I opened up the My Computer for drive C, and saw that the disk usage had dropped by almost 100gb or close to it. When I looked around the hard drive, most everything was gone permanently. I wanted to like Windows 10, and wanted to like Microsoft again, but after this, I simply can't. I'm pretty surprised that you'd just blindly bash me over my comment.

I normally run Debian Linux on my Xeon desktop, but recently rebooted into Windows to keep it up to date. I did the "security update" everyone is talking about on here, and it eventually wiped most of the C drive (I actually watched it deleting everything, and it literally wiped out probably close to 100gb of data) plus it even damaged the operating system, so upon reboot, the OS wouldn't boot anymore due to missing DLL's. Luckily I had a backup (from ntfsclone) and restored from Linux, but I don't really want to touch the Win10 installation anymore, and now believe that Microsoft has horrible quality control.

The last 3 releases (3.14, 3.15 and 3.16) have all been named Shuffling Zombie Juror (with 3.13 being "One Giant Leap for Frogkind"), so I'm guessing Linus gave up on the nonsense release names or something. I was looking forward to new ones, but there haven't been any in a while.

I work for an ISP and we were running FreeBSD on our critical (and extremely active) recursive DNS servers and also route master machines (edge-level BGP/OSPF management routers, which are at the level right below the Cisco peer routers - those machines run Quagga). The first issues we started having had to do with random system lockups on the primary recursive DNS server (it appeared like the OS would stop the interrupt controller - pressing the power button on the machine would briefly reactivate the interrupts for about a second probably due to it trying to initiate a sleep mode). This happened on FreeBSD 7.1 and above. I went around in the FreeBSD mailing lists and saw a large discussion about it on there, with some die-hard FreeBSD fans fuming at the kernel devs since this kind of issue went completely unnoticed (was fixed in 8.0). Then I assumed that 8.0 would be fine, but we were building new route master machines with 8.0, and Quagga was having massive issues with the kernel (I tried building the latest Quagga code which didn't solve the issue) - so we had the choice of either dropping back to 7.0 for those machines or just jumping ship to Linux (Debian specifically, which is what most of our machines run anyway). We went with Linux (still have a few FreeBSD machines though), and all our problems disappeared. The machines in question were IBM x335 and x336 1U rackmount machines.

FreeBSD used to be the standard for high-performance networking systems, but they really need to get their act together and actually field-test things before deploying production code. The code isn't simply being used on some random person's toy box, it's being used in datacenters on critical infrastructure. Situations like this will make people immediately jump ship.

-eventhorizon

Those "other crazies" you're referring to are part of the psychotic LaRouche PAC, which is actually a leftist organization: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:A_touch_of_teh_crazee.jpg

"(LPAC)— Advocates for a single-payer health care system are on an organizing drive across the country to try to get single-payer into the debate on health care reform. The LaRouche movement supports single-payer, but nothing will happen on it until the Obama Administration's Nazi health care policy is defeated and the HMOs are defeated." (http://www.larouchepac.com/node/10437)

-eventhorizon

And it provides an incentive for massive corporations (and of course the federal government) to amass even more money and poser, by profiting off of everyone else. Take everyone's favorite guy Ken Lay of Enron for example, who was a huge proponent of carbon offsets - here's a tidbit of related stuff:

"There’s big money to be made in the carbon business. Enron and Lehman Brothers are two examples. Ken Lay became a celebrated corporate executive praised for his ‘21st century’ business visions. But Enron’s internal memos, leaked to reporters during its bankruptcy scandal, revealed other motivations. Christine MacDonald in her book, Green, Inc., notes that Lay had two meetings with President Bill Clinton and Vice-President Al Gore on a treaty capping carbon emissions. An internal Enron memo predicted this would ‘do more to promote Enron’s business than almost any other regulatory initiative outside of restructuring the energy and natural gas industries in Europe and the United States.’ MacDonald adds, “Enron also had plans for using its support among environmentalists, who cooed over Lay.”"

http://www.carbonoffsetsdaily.com/global/the-rich-and-famous-and-carbon-offsets-3926.htm

-eventhorizon

Nice flamebait - it's great seeing your ignorant leftist hatred showing itself for what it really is, and truly shows what kind of a person you are. As an independent conservative myself, you have absolutely no clue what you're talking about, and you're just babbling from a demented stereotypical leftist viewpoint on what conservatives are. Just mocking and slandering others without even slightly trying to understand them is only going to cause problems for yourself in the long run.