wink

Funny. I have about 187 posts titled 'The Stack' on my blog, but also none on 2013-08-13, so I'm not the training set it seems :P

A friend who doesn't live close had one season of a series I wanted to watch and I could stream it from his Plex. I'm not saying this could not have been solved in another easy way, but it worked without friction because he had Plex anyway.

I'm kinda over downloading gigabytes of files and then deleting them after watching. And I'm not doing this regularly so I've not investigated. All I'm saying is that it solved a problem nicely.

I dunno. I've worked with linux routers for years and I've had a lot less problems than with mikrotik.

I still like them but it's usually not the networking knowledge that trips people up.

There are dozens of us who went through the ordeal to use MIDI controllers for stuff because you just want to touch a button and not alt-tab 4 times. cf. https://f5n.org/blog/2026/hardware-mute-button/ (part 2 is not published yet where I replace the Korg software with my own app using a Rust midi driver)

But yes, mine was 55 EUR, is universally usable, and it was a fun project. There is a reason I didn't buy a stream deck and there's also a reason I did not buy a 3d printer, design a PCB and do it from scratch.

The problem is just if you don't want to replace stuff that is not broken.

My BT in-ears charge with Micro USB, my 2 bike lights do, my flashlight does. The only downside of my Suunto watch is the proprietary charger cable (USB A on the other end)

And yeah, adapters exist of course, but still.

Yeah. HDMI sometimes shows the same signs of whatever is happening as DP.

I still miss the old binary (works/doesn't work) nature of D-SUB and DVI. No autonegotiations or any "need to reset the power on the monitor"...

I didn't lose it per se but it was kind of an ordeal to migrate it from Mojang to MS back then and I had to actually involve support, but in the end it worked.

Have not logged in for years so maybe I have lost it meanwhile ;)

True, I had forgotten about UO, but for the sake of the argument I don't think it really matters. I don't have numbers ready, I had always seen EQ as the bigger mainstream success, could be wrong. Also was a bit before my time, I didn't pay sub fees for my games until 2004/05ish.

Edit: I didn't actually want to say that EQ invented it, but I had phrased that badly.

Not the person you replied to but they mentioned DACH + customers.

As someone from Bavaria... I have several stories of coworkers who speak and understand decent German but put them on a phone or a in a room with people who speak in a thick German dialect and they will understand 10%. Functionally useless.

See, you went the extra mile.

Like the person you replied to (I assume), I clicked on the home page, pondered why one would not describe the app's purpose on the home page, failed to scroll horizontally with a mouse and closed the page before noticing the about section.

They didn't even lose me with the original link I couldn't make sense of.

I'm not in the US but it's been years since I had a coworker with more than 2 kids (or they're so many departments apart I simply don't know). None of my closer friends has more than one kid (ok, that might be a bit of an exception). None of the families in my huge apartment building has more than 2 kids. I'm actually hard pressed right now to name 5 people I know who have 3 or more kids or 2 siblings (and the kids/siblings being younger than 30). (and I am including all my US acquantainces (sorry, no real friends over there for me))

I just don't understood what this has to do with "online".

You have your timeline slightly wrong because GW1 (if we take dev time into account) basically launched at the same time as WoW - and WoW wasn't the first subscription MMO. I suppose if this was a major reason, EverQuest would be the one to inspire it.

I think we're in the minority here. Or at least we absolutely were in the minority until 2020 when everyone started working from home, many kept it that way, and a somewhat dedicated (even if temporary) spot had to be found.

But I know so many people (who don't work from home) who put their laptop on their living room or kitchen table, or the couch.

People who game on PC are probably also an outlier, but many of those again use it mostly for gaming and not as their main machine.

It's really weird how smoke breaks are still more accepted than coffee breaks in some companies.

And for all the terrible chemicals they blast in the air, I don't remember ever having enjoyable small talk with strangers except when accompanying people to a smoke break, be it outside the office or a bar.

Which law though?

Which country/state/region? Does it even apply? We're talking about an open source project that is not being sold, with contributors from all over the world.

Very common is the case of some person who sometimes uses linux on their machine telling a system administrator who has thousands of machines under his responsibility what's what.

I'm not sure that's a good argument because it goes both ways.

Sure, times have moved on but having dozens or hundreds of machines is now nothing compared to thousands, but at some point it was - and people have experienced it then.

And even without the number, I'm not really sure it's a good thing to count professional users (who often have access to support and resources) more than hobby users.

It traded one set of problems for another set of problems.

The people who are happy now don't complain (or are too new to init systems) and the people you hear are the ones who now have more problems than before. I suppose the majority either shouldn't comment because they never used anything before it to some degree, or they're just more, or they're really happier, good for them.

I count myself as part of the latter group (nothing was broken, now I have some problems) but it's not catastrophic. I'm not arguing systemd is worse, I'm just saying I've repeatedly have problems I didn't have for the first 15 years of using Linux.

I'm wondering what the problems can be because I've not experienced that (or heard it first hand).

Last I checked you can be a 1man GmbH and it's not even that rare. I would say it is actually the "default" company type, by volume (not the 1man, but of all companies - although maybe "single person company" are more frequent, but that's not typically what people would imagine as a company).

I am on the other hand constantly surprised how many AG (Aktiengesellschaft) there are in Switzerland which only employ < 10 people.

Ok, so first of all, the UG was only introduced in 2008 - which even for some of us middle-aged people is more "it's relatively new" than "GmbH has existed decades before I was born".

Second, not that I claim to be any representative, but this "UG is weird, unknown, not serious"... I have personally not heard that for about 10 years, so yeah, absolutely true when it was new.

Third, it's still relatively rare I'd say. You stumble over one every couple of months or years, in my experience mostly online shops without their own manufacturing (but maybe that is where I am looking) - if you just look at what tradespeople have on their vans: Nope, never. Always GmbH or GbR/single person.

But I have no insight into procurement departments.

Mini USB was clunky, but how was it flawed? Unless you count data transfer rates as physical. Never seen one break.

Clueless people in the correct position for whom only Windows is THE secure OS.

In theory.

I did that for someone (after jumping through QUITE some hoops) and apparently the next days some popup made the person click the upgrade button anyway.

So yeah, probably just dark pattern + non-technical user but still.

That's the wrong way to look at it. They are pricing their product at whatever çost and people pay them that it works. Most people contact support if it doesn't work. Does not matter if it's 10 bucks or 1000.

Nope, not common, except for prepaid mobile plans which are kinda ubiquitous.

I have never had to prepay anything for Hetzner, not 20y ago for servers and not for the last 5-7 years for Cloud VPS. Maybe for recent-ish signups?

Some hosters support prepaying (for example INWX where I have my domains) but I am reasonably sure you could also do other forms of payment

You are underestimating how countries and towns can drag their feet. I live in Germany, in an apartment, in a large city. There's hardly any public charging infra in a 1km radius (if I discount the supermarket parking lot with ~3 chargers), maybe still zero and not hardly any.

Yes, some of my friends who live in a house with a garage are very happy with their EVs, I'm still calling it absolutely ridiculous without spending extra time driving somewhere, then charging, then driving back (or a folding bike maybe).

How good they are literally does not matter at all if I can't fill it up.

Unfortunately San Pellegrino is owned by Nestle, but yes, while usually not buying any bottled water (just using our excellent tap water), it's also my favourite.

I think they don't make sense if you don't care about the screen size - but nothing in that size really existed around 2010 iirc.

iPad? OK, if you don't want a laptop and can live with it. Android tablets? worse.

11" - 13" can already be too large, maybe not for you.

Chromebooks - would be the 1:1 replacement if they weren't usually 12" or more

The price. Sure, inflation and all but I paid 300 for my eeePC, new.

I bought an old Intel 12" Macbook off of my employer for that reason. 10 bucks, 9y old, still good enough for anything where an Android phone sucks (people who like using phones may disagree, it's ok).

This looks cool but I care a lot more for even 100 bucks than 10 :P

I've been using Linux for about 27 years now and yet there are still some things I begrudgingly use Windows for (can also rephrase: one machine that does certain things).

I own more (and have them running right now) machines with linux than anything else and yet I'm not saying people can just switch. The problem is usually not "can do at all costs" but "can do with a reasonable addition of extra steps/relearning/tool does not exist/etc". There's some nuance and when I have some spare time I will (again) try to switch that one machine, but "it just works" maybe can also mean you're not using it for a diverse enough set of things.

In my case the reasons are actually quite boring: some hardware I couldn't get running and some (maybe minor) things that drive me nuts. The hardware is kind of a deal breaker atm. And yes, some people do a lot more weird things at home, my work machines were running Linux for 90% of the time since 2010ish.