ReactOS is cloning NT, so the 2000 part of that is correct.

95/98/98se/ME are completely different beasts, even if they happen to share the same GUI.

The implication seems like, “we all talk to each other and if you lie to me you lose all of your accounts”.

Well uh, yes, in some cases, that’s exactly the correct interpretation.

A lot of tracker admins DO talk to each other, because this is a fairly small world, and yeah, nobody wants a shithead around so they’ll definitely let other people know who their shitheads are so they can be handled before they become a problem.

Nothing inherently wrong with that, imo.

Ah HP printer drivers, my favorite form of self-inflicted malware.

My favorite HP sucks story happened many a year ago. The boss’s shitty HP multi-function POS died, and we got him a nice Brother instead, and then went to uninstall the drivers.

Somehow, and the reason for this is totally unknown to anyone other than HP engineers, the driver ‘uninstaller’ decided that today’s hilarity would be that it was going to uninstall… everything.

After about 15 minutes of the drive churning away I got concerned, rebooted it, and found that nearly 75% of everything on it had been deleted by the uninstaller.

No fucking idea, but that was a fun thing to explain and then fix.

Yeah, for sure. SCSI died when SAS emerged, and that’s been basically 20 years now.

Any SCSI stuff left laying around is going to be literally a decade+ old and yeah, unless you have a VERY specific need that requires it (which really is just trying to get another few years out of already installed gear), it’s effectively dead and shouldn’t be bought for anything other than paperweights or for a coffee table.

nothing of value will be lost

I’d argue the opposite: there’s actually a lot of stuff out there that’s actually interesting: old-school lets-players who’d have done actual informative playthroughs of games. It’s kind of a dying art, but it’s also exactly the kind of content that’s going to get purged by this kind of action.

It’s interesting to spend, say, 10 hours watching some guy play Sierra games and actually talk through shit about the game and whatnot, and it’d be a shame to have that vanish.

But not entirely unexpected since that’s not profitable content in the way that the current morons babbling about bullshit reaction videos, totally-not-camgirls totally not showing their tits, and whatever other brainrot nonsense most of twitch is. (Also alt-right propaganda, but eh.)

MSA30

Unless my memory fails, that’s billion year old SCSI drives.

Do not buy billion year old SCSI drives, enclosures for SCSI drives, or uh, well, anything like that.

It’s going to use an enormous amount of power, perform slower than a single modern drive, and be prone to failure because well, it’s a billion years old.

That’s not something you want.

For bandwidth intensive stuff I like wholesale internet’s stuff.

The hardware is very uh, old, but the network quality is great since they run an ix. And it’s unmetered too so it’s probably sufficient.

Oh good, just what I always wanted: some techbros able to SSH into my bed and tell how horrible my sleep is.

Do love the exposed AWS creds though. That’s some premium high-quality software engineering.

Universiality, basically: almost everyone, everywhere has an email account, or can find one for free. As well as every OS and every device has a giant pile of mail clients for you to chose from.

And I mean, email is a simple tech stack and well understood and reliable: I host an internal mail server for notifications and updates and shit, and it’s rapid, fast, and works perfectly.

It’s only when you suddenly need to email someone OTHER than your local shit that it turns to complete shit.

No no, you don’t understand!

He’s one of the good billionaires!

(/s for some of you, and for others perhaps you should reconsider why you feel the need to defend a billionaire, regardless of your opinion on video game platforms)

Now now, they’re not just inconsiderate assholes and leeches.

They’re inconsiderate nazi oligarch assholes and leeches.

I’d say combining these necessary data points is probably enough to identify me

The EFF has had a couple of websites that would profile you on exactly this data, so you’re completely correct in that even the basic normal required metadata is more than enough to identify you pretty well.

coveryourtracks.eff.org is where it’s living now, and a quick glance shows that just using browser capabilities and such is absolutely enough to identify me.

Even following ‘beginner’ tutorials is hit or miss

It’s gotten worse than it even used to be, because more than half the “tutorials” I’ve run across are clearly AI written and basically flat out wrong.

Of course, they’re ALSO the “answers” that get pushed by Bing/Google so even if you run into someone who is willing to follow documentation, they’re going to get served worthless slop.

One thing I will give arch is that if there’s a wiki entry for something, it’s at least written by a human and is actually accurate which is more than I’ve found ANYWHERE else.

There’s no such thing as too much seeding.

Well, maybe the 85tb of Ubuntu 24.04 I’ve done is too much, but I mean, whatever.

(I’ve got basically everything I’ve downloaded in the last 7 years seeding, some 6000 torrents. qBittorrent isn’t the most happy with this, but it’s still working, if using a shit-ton of RAM at this point.)

And more fun, lots of laptops have really goofy routing. I’ve got one where the DP alt mode on the USB-C ports are on the dGPU, but the HDMI ports are on the iGPU. And the internal panel is on the iGPU unless you switch it to be on the dGPU because yay mux.

Why? I don’t know. Too much meth while laying the board out or something I guess.

10940X

“They say”, but they’re right. Ryzen chips do have worse idle power usage, but you’re talking about 10w or so, at most.

And uh, if you were looking at an X-series CPU, I can’t see how that 10w is a dealbreaker, because you were already looking at a shockingly inefficient chip.

Everything is temporary, except for that 25 year old system that’s keeping everything running and can’t be replaced because nobody knows how or why it works just that if you touch it everything falls over.

Debian stable is great: it’s, well, stable. It’s well supported, has an extremely long support window, and the distro has a pretty stellar track record of not doing anything stupid.

It’s very much in the install-once-and-forget-it category, just gotta do updates.

I run everything in containers for management (but I’m also running something like 90 containers, so a little more complex than your setup) and am firmly of the opinion that, unless you have a compelling reason to NOT run something in a container, just use the containerized version.

I really, really wanted one as a kid, but they were quite expensive. Like, actual-real-computer expensive, if I recall correctly.

The good news is the tech pretty much ended up in the S60 Nokia phones, of which I had uh, a lot. And some of them even had normal keypads, and not one from whatever meth-induced fever dream some guy in Finland had.

I still have one!

It’s broken because it was designed by crazy people.

(The battery is required, the battery failed in such a way that it leaked and ate everything on the battery charger/temperature board, so uh, I have to find a replacement controller board and then put a new battery on it and I have to admit I just haven’t been motivated enough to try to find a non-destroyed board from a tiny production run that’s like 30 years old now.)