cley_faye

Locked-in platform closing the door. How surprising.

Accepting DRM in the first place is the problem. Hard to avoid, but still. I just got a boox; great value, can't use adobe DRM. Didn't have any problem there. Of course, money is going everywhere except big "publishers", but that's hardly an issue; they choose their business model, I choose my customer model.

Plot twist, he does get exemption to dig it up, causing mass damage all around. He finds it. The board is completely busted, but it seems the platters are fine, so he pays some very expensive data recovery team to access the data. They manage to do it! Now he got all the files from the drive, in a safe place. He just have to find where the wallet is stored. Easy enough, he lucked out using a common software for it, so it's well documented, and he retrieve the files. It costs an inordinate amount of money to get the rights to the landfill, to "convince" local authorities to allow the digging, to actually do the digging, to put the drive in a recoverable state, but finally, his wallet is in his hands! He inputs his password… which doesn't work.

That would be hilarious.

(note: this is a fantasy scenario. I never bothered actually reading these articles, as it sounds like a stupid story, so there may be approximations there)

And it works with the same license key too.

Back when winrar existed and 7-zip didn't?

Opensource software is free most of the time. It doesn't prevent people from paying for it, too.

WinRAR does a job, you need it, you can pay for it, you pay for it. Not everything is about racking the maximum amount of money while avoiding every single expense, no matter how petty. These days there's certainly competition, but you should remember that it's been around for a long time.

For a good while, the UI in 7-Zip was so atrocious merely extracting an existing archive was not obvious. It definitely improved over that.

I'd argue that even today, WinRAR UI is more intuitive than 7-Zip, but it is largely irrelevant since both have decent integration with windows file explorer anyway, which was also something 7-Zip lacked for a while.

Last time I had to wear glasses was during the heavy phase of covid, and wearing masks caused a LOT of fogging up. I'm sure that exact same reason made a lot of people aware of proper glass treatment.

Glasses are mildly inconvenient when it's cold, somewhat inconvenient when you have to wear headgear that don't take it into account, and very inconvenient when you have to move your head a lot or look down a lot. Anyway, I took the laser instead of the plastic bit that costs a lot and gets lost easily.

…and I keep wearing glasses anyway because the sun is still a thing that exists outside, anyway.

You can't really disable it anyway.

Hardening is mostly prevent root login from outside in case every other layer of authentication and access control broke, do not allow regular user to su/sudo into it for free, and have a tight grip on anything that's executable and have a setuid bit set. I did not install a system from scratch in a long time but I believe this would be the default on most things that are not geared toward end-user devices, too.

The microsoft forums are the one place that could be fully automatized. You post a problem about anything, really anything. Can't change wallpaper? Can't login? Screen flashing? Files disappearing? Constant loud pitched noise? It's all the same. The answer, whatever your issue, is sfc /scannow, "Restoration point" and "Reinstall".

And arguably, that last step will most likely make the issue go away, at the price of not having a fucking clue as to what was wrong, losing a lot of time afterward, and having a fair chance of re-doing the same things, causing the issue to show up again. Great stuff.

And since they made so much while people are effectively using adblocker, there's no need to fight them back, right?

Right?

Stick with something popular. People like to argue about distros, but beyond their package manager and some settings, it's the same thing under the hood (not saying these difference are nothing, but still). For a beginner, or really for anyone just looking to use their system instead of tinkering with it endlessly, a popular, well supported distribution will do the job.

Ubuntu fits that bill, although they made some very weird decisions recently, so I'd suggest starting with Mint if you're new to this. Most everything should work out of the box if you have common hardware, and there's a decent community around in case something goes wrong.

I'd also advise jumping to anything too new, flashy, or promising stuff that should really, really not be distribution dependant. My position on things is that if there's a common tool that's available everywhere to do something, and some distributions decides to make "their own" which does the same thing but is very specific, that's just wasting time. Hence the disdain for raw ubuntu, among other.