I think the doomerism was all to get that moat. There’s no vendor lockin either, even if you’re using the API. You can switch between providers really easily.

Probably 10 years ago I encountered a pump on a job. It was huge. 2-3 stories tall. Probably cost millions.

There was a computer plugged into, an old beige tower case and a CRT monitor with RS232 serial cable between it and the pump.

This was the control system, it was connected to the network (airgapped LAN fortunately).

Was running NT4!

I have no idea why it was set up this way, PLCs were definitely the standard at the time and there were older PLCs than that on the site. No one who worked there was around when it was installed, it was just the way it was.

Thanks. I didn’t know that had a name.

I hate wasting resources. The service i work on processes millions of transactions a month on a $14 AWS instance with spare capacity. Did I need to do that? No. But wherever we have performance issues I like to fix it before scaling the instance up. It was on the $7 instance for a while but 1GB memory wasn’t quite cutting it.

It can’t spread across networks because it doesn’t run locally. The “agent” is running in their data centre the entire time. It should be very easy to stop it

Saw this coming when Microsoft admitted to have bought up loads of hardware they couldn’t actually use yet. I’m convinced the data centre build out is to hoard all the computing capacity so we are forced to use their cloud services because our own hardware isn’t capable.

If this keeps up in a couple generations every personal computing device will essentially be a thin client with everything running remotely for a subscription.

I’ve been explicitly told not to use any open source for a project. I don’t even know what language I’d write it in. We ended up not even quoting for it in the end.

Yeah this only makes sense if the builds start diverging from the open source code, extra features that are closed source.

Hertzner storage box. I think it’s €13/month for 5tb. Just storage with ssh interface. I use restic but most backup systems should work with it.

New outlook is awful. When I first got forced to switch it didn’t show you tooltip with where a link was actually going before clicking on it - you know, the thing literally every mandatory phishing training has told you to do!

They have actually fixed that now but it was ages without it.

My current pet peeve is it doesn’t tell me about new emails in shared mailboxes. We have a shared support mailbox and I have to remember to go and check it manually. It doesn’t even update the unread email count until you open the inbox.

Sometimes if I hit the voice typing on my phone, which I’m pretty sure is whisper, and then don’t say anything, it just comes out with nonsense.

Just did this and also got…

Thanks for watching!

We use AL2023 as well. Didn’t know that about 2027. Guess learning SELinux is in my future

Back during covid we sent my wife’s grandparents a smart phone so they could video call. They only had a dumb brick phone.

I forget what model but it was one specifically aimed at easy of use for seniors. We had it delivered so I could set it up. Then delivered it to them ready to go.

It was impossible. Even just answering a call being touch and hold the green circle then slide it 2cm in any direction and release took nearly an hour.

My wife does social care now and a client yesterday had managed to enable audio description on his firestick. This is what i was explaining. Hold back and menu on the remote to turn it on/off. He’d probably done it by accident and now his TV is explaining everything on screen after every button press and he has no clue where to even begin to turn it off. It’s utterly incomprehensible. I’m sure they thought it was a good idea to have a way to turn it on that doesn’t need you to see the screen.

Yesterday describing how to do a thing to my wife over the phone “The menu button” “There is no menu button” “It’s a hamburger icon” “What?” “3 lines” “How is that a menu?”

I’ve been on the site since 2008 i think. Used to use it loads. Posted questions and answers. The question i actually got an answer to was 2018. Since then it would just get nothing. Sometimes a mod might tweak it a bit in a pointless way but just no answers. Gave up in the end.