His whining at the beginning certainly had me wondering too.

And then there are the comments -- "There just haters there mad cause they can't afford one them self's..." Like really, did you even make it beyond third grade? And this is the kind of person who is sticking up for Cybertruck owners? Maybe there are a number of reasons why we point and laugh...

At least the Delorian had character. You can't say that about this abomination.

Don't forget that Musk is also the one who intentionally blocked paid service from Ukraine during a critical moment in the early days of Russia's current genocide, because Musk sucks up to Putin. Dude needs to answer for his actions.

I'm afraid there's nothing new about this, it has been going on for a long time. What I do believe is happening is now that every idiot with a cell phone can jump of sites like lemmy or reddit, we are simply seeing a lot more examples of the problem. Pretty much like when camcorders became affordable to the general public, we suddenly saw all kinds of police brutality videos and some people thought this must be a recent trend when in fact it had been occurring all along.

Don't forget that Amazon also routinely charges shipping costs that sellers have already rolled into their pricing. The first time Amazon moved away from the $25 free-shipping mark, I started looking elsewhere and found the same sellers at their own websites or on ebay, with zero shipping charges (I was looking for hard drives at the time). When I reached out to ask the sellers about it, they said they had no idea Amazon was up-charging their orders but they had no say in the final pricing.

Now that Amazon has once more abandoned the $25 free shipping I have stopped using them entirely (again). I'll read the site for product reviews, then go find the same seller on ebay and get it for an honest price and free shipping.

And before anyone starts the discussion all over again... That's 70,000 customers who have reported outages on a single site, and is by no means indicative of the total number of customers who are actually without service.

And yet with closed-source software you have no choice but to trust it blindly. At least open source software has people looking at the code.

Aww the poor Russian bots think they can hide content by down voting it like they do on reddit? Won't anyone think of Putin's sad hurt feelings? ... Oh wait, that's right, we DO think of him -- every time we point and laugh.

We don't know right from wrong because we don't fear retribution from an almighty.

“heavy-handed regulation will not just hobble network investment and innovation, it will also seriously jeopardize our nation’s collective efforts to build and sustain reliable broadband in rural and unserved communities”

They said exactly the same thing when the first net neutrality laws were getting put in place, then after the laws went into effect the companies went on to invest record amounts in innovation and infrastructure. Funny how their words are completely meaningless.

All it takes is one big company like Amazon changing their services to IPv6-only and most of the world would be converted over in a month or two... but now I guess we know the reason WHY Amazon doesn't push such a policy.

You've got it backwards. A firewall blocks everything, then you open up the ports you want to use. A standard config would allow everything going out, and block everything coming in (unless you initiated that connection, then it is allowed).

So the question you should be asking, is what services do you think you're going to be running on your desktop that you plan to allow anyone on the internet to get to?

Where I work at they decided the "office" people need to keep a presence just in case some random person walks in off the street and wants to ask questions. I'm the IT guy, I have no intention of talking to anyone I don't support, I have no knowledge to answer any questions about our business that I could offer, and my office isn't even near the front desk where I could hear anyone come in anyway ... but yeah it totally makes sense that I should have to drive in a couple days a week to a place where they make me pay for parking, just to sit at my desk all day and answer emails.

Of course there's two reasons why I haven't made a stink about their idiocy. First is that in doing my job, it really is helpful to others if they know they can meet me in person at certain times to fix issues that can't easily be solved over email. The second is that I can see my retirement on the horizon (about ten years away), and in the last ten years the place I work has made a huge contribution to my 401A, so much that it has already passed everything I've put away from previous jobs. If I can hunker down for another decade, I won't even need social security to retire comfortably, and that's a really good thing since Trump and other Republicans have already stated they are trying to eliminate it so they can justify collecting fewer taxes from the rich. I may be one of the last generations that can afford to retire and I'm not taking that lightly.

It sounds like maybe you're looking for a primer on how networking works across the internet? If so, here's a few concepts to get you started (yeah unfortunately this huge post is JUST an overview), and note that every one of these services can also be self-hosted if you really want to learn the nuts & bolts...

DNS is the backbone of everything, it is the service that converts names like "lemmy.world" into an actual IP address. Think of it like the phone book of the internet, so like if you wanted to call your favorite pizza place you would find their name, and that would give you their phone number. Normally any domain that you try to reach has a fixed (or static) IP address which never (or rarely) changes, and when you register your domain you will point it to a DNS server that you have given authoritative access to provide the IP where your server can be found.

But what if you're running a small setup at home and you don't actually have a static IP for your server? Then you look to DDNS (Dynamic DNS) and point your domain's DNS to them. There are several free ones available online you can use. The idea is you run a script on your server that they provide, and every time your IP from your ISP changes, the script notifies the DDNS service, they update their local DNS records so the next person looking for your domain receives the updated IP. There can be a little delay (up to a few minutes but usually only seconds) in finding the new address when your IP changes, but otherwise it will work very smoothly.

You mentioned DHCP, so here's a quick summary of that. Basically you are going to have a small network at your home. Think of your internet router as the front-end, and everything behind it like you computers or mobile devices are going to be on their own little private network. You will typically find they all get an IP address starting with 192.168.* which is one or the reserved spaces which cannot be reached from the internet except by the rules your router allows. This is where DHCP comes in... when you connect a device it sends out a broadcast asking for a local network IP address that it is allowed to use. The DHCP server keeps track of the addresses already in use, and tells your device one that is free. It will also provide a few other local details, like what DNS server to use (so if you run your own you can tell the DHCP service to use your local server instead of talking to your ISP). So like the phone book analogy, your DHCP service tells all of your local devices what phone number they are allowed to use. other Now to put all of this together, you probably have a router from your ISP. That router has been pre-programmed with the DHCP service and what DNS servers to use (which your ISP runs). The router also acts like the phone company switchboard... if it sees traffic between your local devices like a computer trying to reach your web server, it routes those calls accordingly. If you are trying to get to google then the route sends your call to the ISP, whose routers then send your connection to other routers, until it finally reaches google's servers. Basically each router becomes a stepping stone between your IP address and someone else's IP address, bringing traffic in both directions.

OK so now you want to run a web server for your domain. This means that besides getting the DNS routing in place, you also need to tell your router that incoming web traffic needs to be directed to your web server. Now you need to learn port numbers. Web pages traffic on port 80, and SSL pages use port 443. Every type of service has its own port number, so DNS is port 53, ftp is port 21, and so on. Your router will have a feature called port-forwarding. This is used when you always want to send a specific port to a specific device, so you tell it that any incoming traffic on port 80 needs to be sent to the IP address of your web server (don't worry, this won't interfere with your own attempts to reach outside websites, it only affects connections that are trying to reach you).

Now if you've followed along you might have realized that even on your local network, DHCP means that your server's own IP address can change, so how can you port-forward port 80 traffic to your web server all the time? Well you need to set a local static IP on your server. How that is done will be specific to each linux distribution but you can easily find that info online. However you need to know what addresses are safe to use. Log in to your router, and find the DHCP settings. In there you will also see a usable range (such as 192.168.0.100 to 192.168.0.199). You are limited to only changing the last number in that set, and the router itself probably uses something like 192.168.0.1. Each part of an address is a number between 0-255 (but 0 and 255 are reserved, so except in special cases you only want to use the numbers 1-254), so with my example of the address range being used by DHCP, this means that you would be free to use any address ending in 200-254. You could set the static IP of your web server to 192.168.0.200, and then point the port-forwarding to that address.

Now remember, your local IP address (the 192.168 numbers) are not the same as your external internet address. If you pay your provider for a static internet address, then your router would be programmed with that number, but your web server would still have its local address. Otherwise if you're using DDNS then you would tell that service the outside IP address that your router was given by your ISP (who coincidentally is running a DHCP that gave your router that address).

Let me see if I can diagram this... OK so imagine your router has the internet address of 1.2.3.4, your web server has the local address of 192.168.0.200, and someone from the internet who has address 100.1.1.1 is trying to reach you. The path would be something like this:

100.1.1.1 -> (more routers along the way) -> your ISP -> 1.2.3.4 (router) -> 192.168.0.200 (server)

They send a request to get a web page from your server, and your server send the page back along the same path.

Yes there's a lot to it, but if you break it down one step at a time you can think of each step as an individual router that looks to see if the traffic going to something on the outside or going to something on the inside. Which direction do I need to send this along? And eventually the traffic gets to a local network that says "hey I recognize this address and it needs to go over to this device here." And the key to all of this routing is DNS which provides hints on where to forward the information to the next router in the path. I can break things down further for you if something isn't clear but hopefully that gives you a broad overview on how things move around on the internet.

Unfortunately there's a lot of products that most people don't even know exist. Hell I keep finding new tools and wondering why I've been doing things the hard way for so long.

OTOH, fuck all the advertisers who use shady tactics to make sales, and especially fuck all the people who pray on the naivety of others to steal their money. I was just showing a customer an email I got the other day stating her domain hosting was past due and required immediate payment, and she asked how I knew it was a scam. Uh, hello, because ---I--- am hosting your domain and website (and this is exactly why I share this kind of stuff with people, to make them think before they blindly write a check).

"We managed to not kill the first subject, but we're hopeful to succeed in the future"...

Just an FYI, I had that happen to my driving glasses a couple years back. My optometrist said that's because you cannot leave glasses in a hot car as the heat destroys the coating... OK thanks for telling me AFTER the fact, where do you THINK I am keeping a pair of glasses that you designed specifically for my driving vision? And by the way, I've been wearing glasses for over 35 years and always had the anti-glare coating for night driving, what did you change that is suddenly making them self-destruct when they are stored where I need them???

Yeah they had no answers for me. But OP, if you left your glasses in your car, that's probably what happened to the coating.

Asked by a mother to recover family photos from her deceased son's laptop. Fortunately I noticed and removed the porn folders before passing over the USB stick.

The one thing I absolutely hate doing is getting inside my mom's computer. She's a heavy chain smoker and everything is covered in yellow tar.

I've also read about the John Deere issue as a leading instigator of right-to-repair laws. They weren't able to provide authorized local repair techs when a tractor breaks down, so farmers were stuck waiting 1-2 weeks for someone to show up while crops were rotting in the fields (think of how fast your fresh fruit rots in your kitchen and then imagine dozens of fields of that crop going to waste). And the biggest insult was when the repair tech drove into town for a $5 part that the farmer had already identified but couldn't replace because of manufacturer lockouts.

Gee are you implying that storing passwords in plaintext is a bad thing? /s

Worst thing in the office place was when some idiot left their window open in the middle of Winter, temps fell below 0F with high winds, and froze the 2" sprinkler pipes running over their office. Flooded most of the 2nd floor then started running through and raining out onto the 1st floor (and then into the basement). And it happened during covid lock-downs so it was fortunate anyone was even in the building to report it.

My own personal oopsie was checking network cabling in a small room, bent over to check things low and then wandered out to check elsewhere... Then noticed there was a LOT of commotion on the sales floor. Turns out I hit the power switch on one of the phone cabinets with my ass and shut down half the phone lines.

This always cracks me up. He's mad about big tech censoring political information, but wants HIS political information censored. Probably not even bright enough to realize how pathetic he sounds.

You might want to re-read that... This is saying they signed up for a 1-month free trial in 2019. It sounds like they haven't even had a subscription for the last 5 years but the lawyers are still trying to argue that it applies.

Screwing over a large number of people to benefit a small number of people. Religion and corporations immediately come to mind.

Even if this isn't true, it's a brilliant piece of propaganda.

Don't forget Microsoft's whole "we're gonna pretend like we're integrating everything just so you can never find anything"... I work from home half the week but don't want to receive phone calls after-hours (because of course we had to fucking get rid of real phones and change to Teams). Oh they claim there's lots of scheduling options, but when you dig into it you find out you can't actually schedule anything in Teams, you have to go into Outlook. I'm on Linux, Outlook isn't an option even if I wanted to touch that steaming pile. So I go to the web version of Outlook only to find that no, despite their assurances, you cannot actually schedule your office hours to send phone calls straight to voicemail. That feature might come "soon" but considering half the time our staff launches Teams they get a blank page on private chats and have to keep restarting until they show up, I have a serious lack of faith that Microsoft could code up something useful for office hours.

tl;dr: Using "integration" as a buzzword to put options in unrelated and unused products, only to discover those features don't even work.

Since it hasn't been mentioned yet... Yes a failing drive will significantly slow down a computer. Drives are built to be fault-tolerant, so if it reads a block of data and that doesn't match the block's checksum, the drive will attempt to re-read the same data until it gets what it believes is correct data, or until it gives up and sends a failure to the computer.

So now imagine your drive is in a state where nearly every block is having trouble being read, so it re-reads each block several times, adding a significant amount of time to every operation. A scan of the drive may indicate everything is working correctly if the drive does eventually return valid information, but the drive itself is having to work very hard to get this data.

One thing you might try to check for internal errors is running a read/write test of the drive, and recording the speed these operations were performed at. If that number is close to the parameters of the drive (you can check with the manufacturer or online reviews to find real-world drive speeds) then the drive is probably ok. However if the test is running a lot slower than the expected speeds, it's a good bet that your drive is failing and you will want to back up the data as soon as possible.

When you do this long enough, not having to work for a few days is all the reward you need to make Friday exciting.

In 2016 a lot of folks were saying we should let Trump win and burn it all to the ground. Everyone always underestimates the stupidity of the masses, and the cult mentality of following someone who is taking away everything you have so they can get richer, so now we have someone who was absolutely the worst candidate with no ability to represent anything but his own desires, and all these people think he's their new god.

Does anyone remember all the Republicans crying about how Obama was going to declare himself "dictator for life" so he didn't have to leave the Whitehouse? Isn't it interesting how every time they raise a ruckus about the other party doing something, it turns out to be just a cover for things their own party is already doing, or in this case was about to do?

Any judge who makes a ruling based on their personal beliefs rather than on factual evidence is not truly acting as a judge, but rather as a petulant child determined to force everyone else to do things their way. Allowing even a single ruling of law to be based on personal beliefs, whether religious or otherwise, reduces the entire court system to nothing more than a mockery of legal justice.

security firm McAfee

Now there's an oxymoron. Let me know when they can write a virus scanner that works.

To answer your first question, ALL of the mirrors are safe. The idea with mirrors is that you choose one that is geographically close to your location (same country, maybe the same region or state) to help reduce lag in downloading the files. Any selection is valid, all of the mirrors will have the same content, but for your location some mirrors may simply be faster or slower than others.

One other thing you might run in to is different types of installers. Some may be a very minimal install which only give you a command line, while others will provide a fully configured desktop. You might also see an option for a "Live" version -- that is something you put on a bootable memory stick and you can test out a working version of the operating system without actually changing anything on your computer, but all of your settings will go away when you reboot.

I haven't used Mint so I can't provide specific info, however some things that are common to ANY linux desktop -- You probably want to start with printer drivers (install CUPS) and some office software (install LibreOffice). For internet access, Firefox and Thunderbird are good choices. LicreOffice, Firefox, and Thunderbird can all also be used on Windows if you want to check them out ahead of time. There are many lists online that can point you to equivalent software, so like if you use Lightroom on windows, you might try Darkroom on linux. basically you just need to make a list of what Windows software you use and then install a similar package in linux.

Yes you will need some time to learn the new operating system and all the new software, very little will be 100% exactly the same, but they are "close enough". You figured out how to use all these things once before, so you can do it again, and it will definitely be worth the effort.

So they're going to provide a list of the pirate's identities along with complete records of what filenames were downloaded, what percentage was completed, and proof that the labels actually own the contents of what was in those files (regardless of the actual filenames)... right? No? Yeah I didn't think so. How are the courts still entertaining these broad lawsuits that never seem to prove any wrongdoing? Oh this person torrented some perfectly legal files so you want the ISP to cut them off because "they might have downloaded a movie we didn't notice"?

It's almost as if Ukraine can actually hit a target -- something Russia has never been able to do. 😃

I remember reading about Page's situation before seeing the 'coming out' episode in Umbrella Academy. I was really happy to see how they handled it in the show, including what seemed to echo some of his own issues with people who had trouble accepting him. Hollywood seems to have taken on the "token gay person" in nearly every show, but very few actually take the time to explain any of the problems faced in the daily lives of those who transition.

I think my biggest tip is to manage your expectations. What you are attempting is not the same as simply moving to a new version of Windows -- literally everything will be different. You've spent a lifetime learning how to perform all these tasks until they became second-nature, but now you plan to move to a whole new system. Thing will be in different places, the way you tweak settings or access content will be different, and it's going to be very frustrating because hey, this task should be easy. Don't expect to cram all those years of experience into re-learning a new system in a few weeks.

The good news is that there's a huge support community, and just about anything you want to do has already been asked and can be found through a quick search. Stick with it, and you'll discover that linux actually gives you quite a lot more control over what you can do with your hardware (not to mention nearly all the software is free). It won't be long before you're asking how you ever survived without many of these tools.

Ever since sites started doing this, StackExchange has been the one constant thorn in my side. "We'll only ask you once" and yet that popup has appeared every single time I have visited the site, and I'm there quite frequently for programming questions. Other sites like StackOverflow were able to store a cookie containing my selected preferences, but SE seems to ignore my selection and I finally gave up even trying to click on the banner years ago.

Funny thing is, I checked them again after reading this article, and suddenly there is no cookie banner on the page. Hopefully they finally got it fixed and this isn't just some temporary fluke.

That's rich coming from the guy whose entire platform is one big political bias against free speech. Seems like Musk's whole outlook is "I'm going to move people to a colder planet where nothing grows and we can't even breathe, so why should I worry about trashing this one?"

Also, when is his daddy going to teach him how to shave?

The only policy Republicans have is to directly hurt as many people as possible. The only people who vote for Republican policies are those who want to harm others in an attempt to make themselves feel better about their own shitty lives.

I still don't know why anyone USES linkedin. It was a shit company built by hacking Windows and sending out emails in other people's names to try to build their user base. The fact that Microsoft actually bought the company that hacked their operating system just shows how little moral value is present in any of this.