My newest computer is 5 years old. I see no reason to upgrade anything.

I use my 11 year old laptop with Linux mint on it as well. I maxed out the RAM on it and swapped in a Sata SSD, it boots in under 40 seconds and does everything I need it to do. It’s one of those cheap underpowered Celeron processors as well.

My son fell into a bad group of mostly straight A kids in middle school.

They collected a large collection of webpage based games. They started out attempting to host them on the schools network through shared docs etc. The IT guys wised up to them and shut it down.

Then they turned into 14 year olds and took it up a notch.

Got together and paid for a hosting location overseas. Built a video hosting webpage with thousands of pirated educational videos. Made a secondary menu without any links on the homepage. They have to type in the index page in the URL. All of the games pages show up as educational videos in the history.

Most of the teachers in the school are using the free educational videos so the webpage is on the trusted site on the school districts content filter.

The IT teacher at highschool figured it out. Instead of ratting them out and banning the webpage. He started working on getting them scholarships to colleges. Now most of the ringleaders have full ride scholarships.

My son was invited in because he is extremely good at games (unusually fast reaction times). He holds the high score on most of the games. I don’t play against the little shit. It’s pointless to try to beat him.

The place was a toxic cesspool at the time. An investment group had purchased 7 different companies and forced merged them in the space of 3 years and went on a massive hiring spree. The company I started with was 350 people. The company I left was over 4,000 people

It was an illegal layoff that I could taken them to court over. However the in-house lawyer knew what was going on and made them give me one hell of a severance package to stop me from suing them. I basically got everything I reasonably would have gotten if I sued.

That ended up being the most profitable year of my life.

My boss ended up CEO for a few years. It didn’t go well. They have 1/2 the number of employees now and 50% less market share.

I am on my 3rd layoff in 10 years.

First one I had all sort of dirt on my boss who was kissing ass to climb the corporate ladder. I was a massive liability as I knew what a waste of space he was. They laid me off with some really week excuses and a years wage/benefits to keep me quiet.

Second one we got a new CEO who decided to make massive changes to the company “to make it more profitable”. It hasn’t shown a profit since and the layoffs are a yearly tradition now.

The last one was this past fall. Smaller company over-invested when times where good. Then the market turned around and they are in trouble. One of those small “family” businesses, me and 20 others got kicked out of the family.

So as of now I have my own business. I am on track to make 100% more than I ever have before working for someone else.

Just for shits and giggles I also have an interview tomorrow for a C-suite position in a tropical country. It’s too fucking cold here.

This is not that new.

Android auto would allow apps to play ads when the car was in park.

After using the ad support version of Pandora for most of a decade, when the full screen video ad popped up on my 2016 work truck, it was immediately and permanently uninstalled. I used 128gb microSD in my phone instead.

I’ve never used a streaming service for music again.

56-year-old Artur Pryakhin – an ex-police colonel now working for an anti-monopoly agency – died after plummeting from a fifth-floor window…

Looks like his replacement would accept smaller bribes.

I once had to sit down with a suppliers accountant because the billion dollar company I worked for couldn’t figure out why the PO and the invoices on about 50 orders were slightly off.

Reason: The supplier and billion dollar companies systems used different units of measure. So the conversion created a rounding error as the billion dollar company only went out 4 decimal places This led the the invoices being between $0.01-$0.05 off. All told the difference was $0.01.

It took us 2 hours and I had to buy the suppliers accountant lunch to get it sorted out.

If I recall correctly they linked a bunch of powermacs together with FireWire.

Them “Just order on the Kiosk”

You mean the thing that takes 20x longer to order and tosses all sorts of bullshit ads at me?

Me “No.”

My wife has a chronic illness with expensive drugs.

Healthcare is around 35% of our families gross income when you include in the cost my employer pays, what I pay, plus deductable and copays.

I avoid going to the Dr as much as possible because I have a separate deductible. If I went for everything I should it would be closer to 40% of our gross income.

Not quite, in my experience on really cold days my heat pump struggles to keep up. This is expecially true when the outside unit is frosting up. The unit has to reverse and pump heat out of the house.

That’s one of the reasons i run my wood pellet stove on those days. The secondary source of heat takes the load off the heat pump.

I have to use an iPad for work. I was also forced to use one of their phones as a while back. I have unhappily used the iOS system for about 7 years now.

A few additional things:

I have attempted to use multitasking on it. Every update changed it’s behavior and they are all unintuitive. I gave up and use my phone for the second task.

The settings menu can burn in hell. It’s an absolute hot mess that’s worse than anything else I have seen.

I use a Bluetooth keyboard at times. In order to use it I have to leave an annoying floating “accessibility” circle on the screen when it’s not connected. In order to turn it off, it’s buried somewhere in the hellish settings menu.

Apps crash about 2x more often on it than on any other system I have used. Especially after an update before the inevitable small fix comes out a few weeks later.

The updates go through an endless cycle of adding bugs then killing bugs then adding new bugs. One of my favorites bug was when I had the phone years ago. They somehow broke the search functions in contacts and took them 4 months to fix it. My company had loaded 3,000 corporate contacts Into the phone… Fun times.

Then there are all the hidden gestures that are completely illogical. I turn gestures off on my android phone for a reason.

That makes more sense. I was wondering why you didn’t connect via ATL to CDG and take the train to lyon. It was always faster for me when I did that trip 5 or 6 times per year. However I was traveling with just a carryon by myself.

I drive 3/4 or one ton trucks for work. They suck to drive. You feel every bump, they sway on corners or with wind, and parking is a nightmare. I have no idea why somebody would drive them around for vanity.

I piss off my teenage son all the time using the outlander sport I bought for him. For driving around town it’s awesome.