wizardbeard

wizardbeard , 4 months ago

Stagnating? A lot of people would argue that it's gotten considerably worse than it used to be.

wizardbeard , 4 months ago

And all of these are easily disabled with GPO, registry edits, and other basic system administration means.

wizardbeard , 4 months ago

Web search can be disabled with a few registry keys.

wizardbeard , 4 months ago

What? I was expecting registry edits from your description. Actually hidden shit. Those examples are all right where you should expect those settings to be.

That really isn't that many settings, and while it would be nice to have a collected "ads" settings page, those are all located sanely. You just need to pay a modicum of attention to where the ads are on your system, then go to the associated settings page.

Do people in general just not ever go through the settings when they first get something new? I feel like that's the equivalent of buying some flat packed Ikea furniture and complaining about how shit it is after you throw away the instructions and can't figure out how it needs to be put together.

wizardbeard , 4 months ago

I understand the resistance to change, and the pain in the ass of moving to a new OS, but moving 10 to 11 isn't that huge of a leap. Especially if you know what you're doing configuration wise.

Having used both, I maintain that learning a Linux distro is, in the best case, an equivalent amount of work to configuring Windows 11.

wizardbeard , 4 months ago

Just like return to office, relocations, and the overwhelming majority of performance metrics.

Cheap excuses for shit managers that can't or won't handle their employees (and firing of them) properly.

wizardbeard , 4 months ago

Fug. Got any articles/videos on that? Was considering them due to convenience.

I'm dumb, it's literally the fucking article linked.

wizardbeard , 5 months ago

Fair, but this is talking about where the company is incorporated, which isn't the same as where they're physically operating from.

wizardbeard , 5 months ago

Personally, I think that's oversimplification to the level of absurdity, for both AI and humans.

That description can easily be applied to insects and animals as well.

wizardbeard , 5 months ago

I'm a systems engineer who spends most of my time coding, and I have a quest 2. Unless apple has somehow fixed the big issue of VR headsets having no peripheral vision (you have to move your head to see things not in the cone in front of you, can't just shift your eyes) and relatively shit resolution, using a VR headset as a large screen/screens for text content would still be headache inducing.

The amount you'd have to zoom the text in order to be readable for long periods of time would make it unreasonable to try and code in.

I would love for VR to actually work as the movie idea of an infinite desktop, but in my experience it really falls short in that use case. I'll admit, a quest 2 is a real budget headset, so maybe higher end ones work better for it, but the one high end headset I've used had the same limitations.

wizardbeard , 5 months ago

I mean, that's not revolutionary. That's just basic VR headset functionality. Plus, it's not nearly as useful as it's cracked up to be.

wizardbeard , 5 months ago

Lol, right?

The sheer ego to tell your customers to reserve judgement on a massive, company changing event for over a fucking decade! Delusional.

Especially when they've been completely beat out in their market niche for ages and are now only holding on due to brand recognition. It's easy to have grass roots community support when you were the only product in your niche, but they've been coasting on that for ages with no real work to truly stay relevant.

wizardbeard , 5 months ago

Were you on a Windows Pro license and did you tried using group policy settings?

I keep hearing people being frustrated that low level solutions don't work, but I've not heard of anyone having these issues who has used the official tools Microsoft provides for Windows sysadmins (and power users) to actually manage this sort of thing.

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I get that logically, it shouldn't matter whether you put a sign up telling Edge to fuck off when you've bulldozed it down six times, but Windows sees that it's gone and your settings (by default with no group policy config) indicate it shouldn't be gone, so it "helpfully" rebuilds it.

Power users are not their market for normal home licenses. Those are for the people who don't know the difference between Edge and Chrome and need protection from making dumb mistakes like deleting Edge and ending up without any web browser. Unfortunately, those are the grand majority of computer users, and it makes good business sense to take advantage of "just helping" to provide a locked down ecosystem and push your software on power users who don't know the management options available.

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Windows doesn't do a good job advertising these features, and has made them harder to find by getting rid of a lot of their old non-cloud sysadmin training courses, because it doesn't help them make money. But by no means are these options non-existent.

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They offer a Windows version for power users. It's the Pro license, and it doesn't cost significantly more if you're buying a cheap "OEM" key.

If you want to make Windows work for you, look at the tools they have for on premises (non-cloud) Windows system administration in small companies.

KMS (key media server) is one way to manage Windows license keys for multiple machines in a domain. KMSpico emulates that setup on a single machine (no server needed), allowing safe spoofing of whatever level Windows license you want, using the same systems and technique meant for actual sysadmins. Last I knew, that was the safest way to spoof a license if you don't have the ~$15 for one.

Group policy is one of a few ways to push consistent Windows configuration and settings to multiple machines in a domain. It is also an option for managing settings on individual Pro licensed Windows machines. Most of the time when you find weird registry key changes online to enable/disable Windows features, those are part of what Group Policy changes when you use it to disable a feature the proper way. Windows respects group policy options through updates, and releases update to group policy templates as needed. They don't want to fuck with their big business clients that can actually hurt their bottom line, so they keep those working.

wizardbeard , 5 months ago

Alternatively, buy or 🏴‍☠️KMSpico🏴‍☠️ yourself a pro license, and use group policy so it's one and done. Microsoft has built in tools for almost all of this that don't get rolled over by updates.

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Getting tired of people claiming that it's impossible to decrap Windows.

Obtuse? Sure! Features that shouldn't be hidden behind an upgraded license? Hell fucking yes!

Impossible? Fuck no, hell no.

Learning basic Windows admin stuff, especially just the debloating/configuration things, is comparable in difficulty to switching to Linux.

Don't get me wrong, I love Linux and less reliance on Microsoft is awesome, but 90% of complaints about Windows come from people who don't know how to configure it, how to use the tools Microsoft offers to decrap it, and how to make it work for them. They'll hit similar problems with most Linux distros as soon as you go deeper than basic "office suite and web browser" usage.

wizardbeard , 5 months ago

Google's monopolistic and often asinine implementation of web standards that haven't been fully set in stone by the proper internet oversight groups yet, I'd guess?

wizardbeard , 5 months ago

If no one is actually auditing that code, or somehow confirming that the binaries shipped by your package manager match what the code compiles to, then you're still playing a trust game.

Trusting in open source software devs rather than a capitalist corporation definitely makes sense, but it isn't some panacea for "safe, nonspying software".

Also, dependencies on linux absolutely include programs I don't want. They just tend to be less obtrusive terminal programs and libraries rather than full blown UI based shit. Less visible, but far easier to sneak under the radar.

wizardbeard , 5 months ago

As I recall, that tends to be Doctorow's shtick.

wizardbeard , 5 months ago

🎵It's the circle of homegrown-coded-solutions, and it moves us all🎵