It’s not the competitive pricing that is the issue, it the forced upgrade cycle and invasive user policies.

(Except for system admin costs and Mail/File Hosting) a Linux-based solution is literally Free. I would assume that Mail and File hosting for Governmental Entities should be hosted in-house anyway.

TIL. I will do it the correct way from now on.

The best solution is DuckDuckGo. You can use DDG as your primary search engine and when it (or Bing, which is its backend) fails to find what you want, you can add “g!” to your search to look it up in Google.

What DDG needs to do is modify the G! switch to include “&udm=14”.

Back in the old days, we had mini-USB-B , USB-A, USB-3.0 A, USB-B, USB-3.0-B, micro-USB3.0, and a dozen other semi-proprietary mini-USB-B form factors.

Before that we had all the D-Sub variants like DB-25 and DE-9 for both Serial and Parallel data transfer, DB13W3 and DE-15 for Video signal and dozens of other variants for all sorts of proprietary data formats

I was referring to the EU laws that are making USB-C charging mandatory.

The solution is a legislated minimum standard or quality.

I’m surprised that the original legislation did not provide this guarantee.

The problem is that there is no certification of new good cables. There is no guarantee that the replacement cable may be just as defective as the one you are recycling.

One good thing about the MFA program was the proprietary chip guaranteed a minimum standard of quality. Unfortunately it also resulted in a minimum cost.

#NotTheOnion Microsoft will make millions of computers obsolete and will generate thousands of tonnes of eWaste on International eWaste Day.

“Windows 10 security updates end on 14 October 2025, KDE’s 29th birthday and also, ironically, International E-Waste Day [1] (you cannot make these things up!)”

One of the KPIs for IBM engineers used to be kLOCs or “1000 lines of code”. This encouraged the engineers to write more complicated, obfuscated, inefficient code.

If you cleaned up your code to be more efficient, you were penalised.

While this doesn’t make sense to developers and users, it does make sense to hardware sales staff. The crappier a program runs on the existing hardware, the more incentivised customers are to buy new hardware.

My argument is that by adding technologies branded as “AI” to software platforms that inefficiently consume system resources, software developers don’t actually add anything to the platform. It is just a way for manufacturers to create more eWaste through forced obsolescence.

It just goes to show that the current LLM/AI hype only exists to sell new hardware.

The manufacturers want to keep us in the RatRace, which is why they keep pushing out inefficient features that nobody wants.

Before anyone gets on their soapbox about GNU/Linux, the big distros are just as bloated as Windows and MacOS!

They have “simplified” their installers for novices to the point where everything, including the kitchen sink is installed.

This headline should be “most computer users see little or no value in LLM and other technologies that are being branded as “AI” and never will”

The problem is that they are not actively asking permission.

They are technically legally asking permission through the EULA, but nobody reads these.

Apple do this differently, they require the user to opt in for each of their services, and except for a pitiful amount of storage, the user has to pay for a useful amount of storage. This makes the user the customer, instead of the product. They could make it easier to roll-your-own “cloud” storage by NAS, but I assume that it isn’t worth their effort.

This is one of the things I love about the Lemmy community. No one wants to argue, every one can be passionate about their opinions, but still respect other people’s passion.

I used Linux back in the 90s as my primary OS. They were simpler times. Since then I have used BeOS, various versions of Windows and (primarily) MacOS.

I am seriously thinking of going over to Linux as my primary OS because of all the TechBro “AI” bullshit that Microsoft, Adobe, Apple and Google are trying to ram down our throats.

The bottom has dropped out of the OEM software licence market. Microsoft have to find a different way of making money. Their loss-leading hardware sales have not borne fruit so they are getting desperate.

All they have left is services, which means that the only way the can actually make money is selling out their customers private information.

There is a difference between destroying looms, corrupting LLMs by feeding bad data and causing an uprising like the Butlerian Jihad of Dune or the Second Renaissance of The Matrix.

There are legitimate uses for vehicle telemetry being stored by the vehicle and uploaded to the manufacturer.

Identifying unexpected behaviour under certain driving conditions and being able to contact emergency services in an accident are two important examples. Remote diagnosis in the case of a breakdown is another.

None of these uses include selling the data to third parties or using the data to create a profile of the vehicle owner.

They all do. Google search is one big primitive Digital Assistant. Apple’s Siri is less functional than its predecessor Voice Control. Amazon’s product recommendation algorithm and Alexa are also successful digital assistants.

Meanwhile the YouTube algorithm, Netflix, and Metas recommendations are notoriously frustrating, pumping out irrelevant recommendations and obfuscating constant that you actually want to consume.

Microsoft haven’t had any effective Digital Assistants to date and must they feel like they are being left behind. Their attempts to emulate successful product from other companies are either unnoticeably irrelevant or laughably bad. Even the terrible content recommendations of Netflix and YouTube keep people hooked.

https://mastodon.social/@sdw/112203918268779518

Actually Indians.

Step one: start Chroming. Eventually you get so high (kill enough brain cells) that you chrome with blue paint instead. That is called Edging.