

And you can say no if you want to!
And you can say no if you want to!
I recently swapped my Dad’s Windows computer with my old machine, which I installed Linux on ahead of time.
I told him it was a faster machine - which it was just slightly in the hardware sense, a very minor upgrade. A half-truth to encourage the transition.
But of course, it’s running Linux, not Windows.
Next day he phones me up really happy that it’s “so much faster than the old machine!”
And it really is a lot faster, but it’s not the hardware. It’s just not getting bogged down with all the crap Windows constantly does in the background.
Either way, mission accomplished.
Microsoft would absolutely love it if people had zero computer literacy and had to ask an AI for help to perform even the most rudimentary of tasks.
Because then the AI becomes indispensable.
I agree that it’s a huge fuck up, my comment wasn’t in defence of the post office, just a related story :)
Whenever I have delivered code for a client it has always been in a way where the client has complete ownership of the code and can maintain it themselves later (or ask a different company that isn’t us to come do it) because that’s the only sustainable approach, and all companies should absolutely demand that all work done for them is done this way.
I did consultancy work as part of renewing and replacing ancient software systems for an insurance company, and it’s amazing how little people actually know about how their own business processes are actually supposed to work.
Orgs are in the position where everyone who built a system is gone, and all the current people who work there defer to the system for how the processes work, without actually properly understanding the rules. And so the system itself becomes the arbiter of correctness.
This is obviously horrible because it ends up where nobody dares to touch the current system in case they break it in some way nobody understands.
We ended up speaking to people across the whole business to painstakingly work out what the rules really were, putting together a new system and effectively “dual running” that side-by-side with the old system, so we could compare outputs and make sure they were the same. In some case they were different, and in some of those cases it was actually because the old system was actually wrong, but nobody noticed!
It’s a mess.
In 2025, things staying the same as they are rather than getting worse counts as a ‘big win’ :|
I remember reading a story a while back about someone who owned a legit CS version with a proper serial and activation.
They had to change computer, and in doing so had to reactivate Photoshop, but it wasn’t working. They contacted Adobe support and explained the situation but support basically told him nope, not a chance, we aren’t helping you. You need to subscribe to new Photoshop.
So Adobe accepted that yes, he bought a perpetual licence for Photoshop and that yes, the reason it isn’t working is the online activation, but they still refused to help.
Scumbags.
It’s common, and especially so on devices that don’t have batteries which are intended to be user-removable - which is pretty much all new phones.
Unlike laptops, many phones simply won’t turn on without a battery connected.
As a citizen of a former EU country (UK, of course) I think that too.
I’m still salty about Brexit.
Totally. I feel like winning Best Director is your one-time free pass to get a risky project greenlit that normally you could never.
And if those movies don’t smash the box office then maybe, in part, it’s because the director quietly never intended them to be the kind of movies that would.
Fair :)
Oh no!
Anyway…
10 years isn’t the worst run, but it still proves the point that anything which needs an app or connected web service to function will inevitably become e-waste, and maybe sooner than you’d like.
Earlier today, I was looking at reviews of portable Bluetooth speakers. One had a bullet point “No equalizer app, with only basic EQ functions available on the speaker itself.”
The review intended that to be a negative, but I was like “Hell yeah that’s what I want!”
Functionality in pure hardware means it will keep on working as long as the hardware works. It means that I myself get to be the one who decides when I need an upgrade, not when the company forces my hand.
Every single tech purchasing decision I make these days, having freedom from apps, cloud, or any other ticking time bomb is top of my feature list.
There’s a time for everything, is my personal take. Sometimes I want a film that will be original and challenge me, but I don’t want that every day.
Sometimes it’s relaxing to know there won’t be any big surprises.
You see Statham on the poster, you know exactly what you are getting.
Personally, I don’t feel that analogy is a fair comparison.
Begging a dev for new features for free would definitely be entitlement, because it’s demanding more, but what OP is upset about is reduction in the service they already had.
I don’t think any free tier user of any service could have any right to be upset if new features were added only for paying customers, but changing the free tier level is different.
In my opinion, even if you aren’t paying for it, the free tier is a service level like any other. People make decisions about whether or not to use a service based on if the free tier covers their needs or not. Companies will absolutely try to upsell you to a higher tier and that’s cool, that’s business after all, but they shouldn’t mess around with what they already offered you.
When companies offer a really great free tier but then suddenly reduce what is on it, then in my opinion that’s a baiting strategy. They used a compelling offering to intentionally draw in a huge userbase (from which they benefit) and build up the popularity and market share of the service, and then chopped it to force users - who at this point may be embedded and find it difficult to switch - to pay.
So yeah, it doesn’t matter in my opinion that the tier is free. It’s still a change in what you were promised after the fact, and that’s not cool regardless of whether there is money involved or not.
For sure right!
What really changed though wasn’t the size of the computer, but how the computer produced value.
Initially, a lot of what people wanted computers for was to get their “document stuff” done, and that was what took up all the room, because of the printer, and scanner, and paper, and filing drawers, and so-on. And soooo many CDs for software you needed to get that all done.
Back when I was a kid, my babysitter used our Windows 95 machine to write up and print off a cover letter for job applications, and it was 9 year old me who taught her how to do it, lol. And that was the value.
I bet even when your friend set up their shiny new all-in-one, they still had the old computer and all its attached devices hiding away shamefully in the ‘office’ there somewhere…
So it wasn’t really miniaturisation that killed the computer room as much as it was every aspect of life going online. No physical disks anymore because software comes over the Internet. No need to print because 99% of our life and business can be done online. So all the things that filled up the computer room just ceased to be needed, and so did the room that held them.
There was a brief and remarkable period in history from the mid 90s to the late 2000s where homes all across the land had a room that was referred to as “The Computer Room”
Not “The Office” no; for this room was not so pedestrian. It was a room whose entire function was to house the great monolith of The Computer.
A corner desk in veneered pine-effect plywood, atop which sat the great beige tower and CRT. A printer and a scanner straddling the desk like sentinels. Racks of CD holders built right into the fake pine, and a lidded box for floppy disks in a smoky translucent plastic, that for some reason came with lock and key as if the disks were precious jewels.
These days we have no need for such things, and the home office is once again simply an office. But for a while we had The Computer Room, and some part of me misses you.
Wireguard doesn’t necessarily need to have those limitations, but it will depend in part how your VPN profile is set up.
If you configured your wireguard profile to always route all traffic over the VPN then yeah, you won’t be able to access local networks. And maybe that’s what you want, in which case fine :)
But you can also set the profile to only route traffic that is destined for an address on the target network (I.e your home network) and the rest will route as normal.
This second type of routing only works properly however when there are no address conflicts between the network you are on (i.e. someone else’s WiFi) and your home network.
For this reason if you want to do this it’s best to avoid on your own home network the common ranges almost everyone uses as default, i.e. 192.168.0.* and 10.0.0.*
I reconfigured my home network to 192.168.22.* for that reason. Now I never hit conflicts and VPN can stay on all the time but only traversed when needed :)