Switching to Linux, saying goodbye to Apple and Microsoft

I once worked for a supplier to Brother. Tip: If in this position do not screw up.
Their basic printers did indeed tend to be extremely solid; resolution not the best but they just ploughed on. Like HP used to do.As a consultant I once went into a company where a department had been issued with a medium sized cluster of modern HPs and the department head had taken them over for her exclusive use - “in case she needed to print something in a hurry”. Not quite in the Carly Fiorina private jet scale of entitlement but our report was not complimentary. The rest of the staff had to use a bank of old LJ4s. They were so old the cases were a deep brown, they were hot, they were churning out paper all day long and still going.

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Whats your score on the heinlein human test?

Ah, the past.
At one company I worked for, part of the industrial IT department liked cold cathode displays. I was known to prefer CRTs. One day one of the cc displays had its raster generator fail whereupon the beam burned a vertical line down the centre of the display until the glass cracked. I was promptly summoned by the supervisor to inspect the damage and asked “Do you think they’re supposed to do that?”
Knowing what CRTs are capable of, I immediately started a campaign to adopt HP 35-segment LED displays, which were lovely, expensive but totally reliable.

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In debian, Hulu works (in iceweasle) if you install the package libhal1-flash available at: https://www.deb-multimedia.org/ Adding this package & repository should work for ubuntu as well.
The problem is that adobe stopped updating flash for linux back when many distributions were using hal (hardware abstraction layer). Now it is gone.

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That was a feature not a problem.
Now if only they had stopped updating flash for everything at about the same time…

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That was my first one and the same year I started using linux! I dual booted though as it was my parent’s machine. (Linux was installed on a parallel port Zip drive with LILO and kernel on a floppy.)
I still maintain a windows partition, although I use it infrequently.

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I’m not really enamored with this transitionary period where simultaneously

  1. things like flash and java applets are deprecated and being removed from browsers and
  2. some people still expect you to have access to them.
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[quote=“dave_b, post:164, topic:71542, full:true”]Whats your score on the heinlein human test?
[/quote]

I have no way to know if my skills at fake invasions are at all transferable to real life. Do you have a spare army, and someplace that needs invading? If you’d want me to invade Israel or Saudi Arabia then I’ll need a BIG army, and most likely an air force and a navy, too.

Yeah, I know, you asked @enso, not me. But just on the off chance you have a world-class military organization I could borrow for six months or so…

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As long as you promise you aren’t taking it to Oregon…

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And yet you don’t like the other companies for doing essentially the same thing?

So… a perfect score, then?

Eventually those people will die and will be replaced by technologically competent humans. It’s already happening.

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I suspect a few actual world-class soldiers would demonstrate the powerlessness of individually armed citizens against a modern army in very few seconds. In fact, one drone pilot - a woman for maximum Schadenfreude - would take out the lot of them from a comfy chair while finishing her coffee.

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Do you know how to drive a steam train?

I remember having this discussion with my grandfather, a railway engineer. He hated steam engines with a passion; dirty, unreliable, dangerous. I said, wouldn’t it be difficult to teach drivers how to maintain Diesels? To which he replied that one of the key reasons for changing to Diesel and electric power would be that drivers would just drive trains “and not miss signals through smoke or dealing with a broken gauge”, and that maintenance would be done by specialist technicians in clean, well-equipped workshops. He was right…same with cars.

Windows and OS X are still at the steam train era, where users have to do some maintenance. That is a failure of design.

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Really? You don’t work in tech support do you? Most of the kids seem to pick the stuff up because they are sponges for knowledge and don’t have the same learning curve us grumpy oldsters do. Also I see just as many idiot users among the kids as I do among the adults.

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I here theres a large one avaliable in oregan. For a real test you could try two fronts washington and california.

Low-ish?

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Welcome to your botnet.

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As imagemacros go, that’s a work of art.

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