And a formatting-stripping tool

I thought that maybe the guy that plays Ronald had died and they were just auditioning for a new makeup-clad clown.

It seems to me that its the profits that cause the crisis

Kraken konfirmed?

Can I assume by that comment that you’re also a self-made millionaire?

No? Oh, why are you so lazy? After all, it just requires hard work. There are over a thousand self-made millionaires in my small town alone. The media call us a “statistical anomaly” but they just don’t see how easy it is if you just put down your 9-5 and get to work.

/s

Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely believe that hard work can get you there but it is very, very uncommon. I work bloody hard, have a good paying job, no debt and investments but will only have enough for an ok retirement.

Friends with their own business who are more driven, work even harder and longer than I do and are absolutely better off, but they’ll never earn the level of money like this article suggests.

My issue is with the disingenuousness of the article. This sort of success requires a huge amount of work, a once in the lifetime (for most people) idea or market to kickstart and even then often still requires a bucket of 7-leaf clover levels of luck. But it’s sold by the media as others have detailed “if you just work harder…”

Good on you! I’ve found the best thing to do with upset babies is try to engage with the kid - ask the parents first(!) but babies are fascinated by new people in a way that parents can’t fulfill.

Story time: I had a crying 6mth old next to me earlier this year so I pulled out the safety sheet (asked the mum if I can show him this), channeled my inner Wiggles and kick-started it with a big, excited interruption to his crying: “wow, look at the plane!” The unexpected, strange interaction short circuits their focus on being upset and he just stopped and started at me like “wtf is this dude on?”. Once I had his attention I started pointing and describing all the pictures, then gave him the page. This turned into a 10min game of point at the picture, say the word or a story then hand it back. My names and descriptions for the people on the page got more crazy each time - after all, his were nonsensical too! I even got a few giggles as I kept it animated with hand gestures and big smiles. That turned into pointing out the windows or different things in the cabin.

The kid eventually got bored of the games after about 15-20 mins but had already forgotten he was upset and then peacefully interacted with his mum again for the rest of the flight. I got back to my book while he had the sky mag to read along like me and would still point out different pictures to me or check my book, puzzled why they were no pictures!

I even scored a tiny-dude high five as they were leaving which everyone knows are the best high fives.

Best flight I’ve had all year!

Being bad or evil is literally bad for your health.

The better you act, the better your health - great teeth, good muscle, low fat, high fitness, good looks, and longevity (to a point), no addiction or mental health issues, selfless with no crazy ego. Ie Mother Teresa looks like a supermodel!

Health can fluctuate based on behavior but it always drops 3x faster than it improves. So if you fuck around on your wife, your teeth go bad, or you start balding etc. cheat on your taxes, or lie maliciously (excl. good lies like Santa) you start to get fat n ugly.

If you’re a miserable prick who fires staff, scams people, bribes, hires children for sweatshops or harms people just to increase profit or boost share price you get cancer. But if you help those people then you may be cured provided you handle it really well and undo all the damage.

You attack someone, pedal harmful drugs or hoard unnecessary wealth, you go blind/deaf until you earn it back, more than once and it becomes permanent, each time after that you lose a limb for good.

You intentionally harm or kill someone via murder, drink driving, rape etc then it’s game over via a slow, long, painful debilitating disease that’s contagious to anyone you like or care about, ensuring you die alone.

To help identify the good/bad, your gut instincts are 10,000x more powerful and obvious to warn you of the dangers or benefits of each choice.

Serious Sam - almost any version!

Boy

Once we’re warriors

Excellent movies - but terrible reality of what is like living poor in New Zealand in the 1980’s and 1990’s

Phase one: force everyone’s data into their OneDrive account. OneDrive now at capacity, you must upgrade to ensure all your data is backed up and retained.

Phase two: MS secretly (or not so secretly) use all this data to train copilot.

Human generated content to feed into ai systems is the new good rush

I used to get these regularly on my fingers and heel of my palm for years.

Once I changed soap and shampoo away from my wife’s fancy stuff to normal, basic stuff, it’s all come right.

Quite a few products allow for this home use. Aids with training, familiarisation and locking users into their ecosystem. I’ve been able to do this a few times to help learn complex programs.

Completely legit with Adobe as far as I’m aware - since there is only the one licence available via online check-in so can’t be used on more than one at a time.

Autodesk is similar - used to have an allowance for a training/home use licence (may have been extra), even the common Office 365 corp licence allows for up to 5 installations and doesn’t really care where you install it.

Corp data on a home device or using your own gear for WFH is another story though.

Got a well specced 4th Gen i7 that does everything I need so unless it blows up, I won’t be upgrading. Started working on the plan this week. Been using Mint on my secondary (non essential laptop) but never had the stones to take the plunge on my main rig.

Watching MS stepping into the enshittification trend and AI with Win11 means this is the last straw, particularly now I don’t need to rely on keeping up with windows for work. Currently bashing on Linux Mint DE in a VM to test what I need and have working to be happy:

Outlook/Office - Thunderbird is good but it’s been a while since I’ve used Libre Office but didn’t have much luck with it in the past - trashing the formatting when bouncing between LO & MSO. Hoping the more recent versions are better else office web will have to do for those documents that don’t play nice.

Steam - make sure I can get it going, several key games. This is the least of my worries after seeing what others have said. NVIDIA graphics may be a bit more painful.

RDP - I still have another headless win10 media box. VNC as backup. This box will be the next on the chopping block if all goes well.

Backup - this is the big one. Currently use Backblaze for unlimited backup and love the set & forget nature. No native Linux client so would require moving to their B2 platform with a third party interface - do-able, just need to get off my butt to work it out :p

File structure - always struggled with this in my playing with Linux, need to become more comfortable with where files live and general directory structure.

Will slowly pick those off over the next couple of weeks and then I should be good to go.

That is literally what the first Xbox was. It’s internals was a custom mboard running a Celeron 700 and 3.5" HDD (can’t remember what the graphics was based on, maybe a GeForce MX?) with a customised Win2k OS.

All approx. It’s early and I can’t be bothered confirming those specs are 100% accurate :p

Quite a few things - mostly used it for capturing images, loading drivers and updates into images but can also be used to pull apps out of the image too.

For a live windows install there are PowerShell commands to do this

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufacture/desktop/add-or-remove-packages-offline-using-dism?view=windows-11

I’m not sure about this one - it’s definately not my experience but yours could be very different.

The system definitely reports data back to MS but I’ve never seen a box have issues because we denied it the ability to dial home or update. Unless the PC is online and the user is actively trying to prevent the updates installing? I’ve seen users pull the plug on a PC that started/midway though updates hoping to stop them and it would often make a mess of things.

We had a small handful of XP then Win7 boxes that were completely off the grid/standalone as SCADA access points/controllers? for several years without issues.

Likewise, we had one box where the vendor did not allow any updates despite it being networked and online. They had disabled win updates completely without our input. It ran just fine for a few years until it was picked up in a security audit. We didn’t understand why updates were disabled at that time so we switched them back on and updated. The PC ran just fine until it’s eventual retirement.

That’s right! I remember those signed drivers where also why early XP (pre SP2) had a bad rep. Not as bad as ME but users were swearing on the graves of dead relatives they would never give up W98 or W2k. Without new or signed drivers, a lot of hardware struggled but by the time SP2 rolled out, hardware vendors had mostly caught up and the OS had matured.

Vista had similar issues (so, so many issues with Vista) with it’s security changes which made life difficult for badly written/insecure software (wanting admin rights to run or write access to system folders/reg keys). Those changes in Vista paved the way for Win7 to be so much better at launch since most software had caught up by then.

I think the issue with disabling components is 90% how users remove them. Pulling them out via “official” methods hasn’t ever caused me issues - DISM is really handy - particularly for permanently removing the default apps. Those deeply connected functions can be a pain!

My dumb arse used to do this to win 98/me when I was a student. “Optimising” everything and deleting anything I would never use, trying to squeeze every mb out of my limited 2gb disk space but the damn thing was so unreliable I was constantly reinstalling windows.

After one reload, I finished late at night and just left it alone, forgetting to perform all my “power user customisation” until I remembered a week later when it suddenly dawned on me that it was running fast AND stable - I hadn’t had a single crash that week. As a final test, I applied all my “optimisations” again and “oh, look! It’s crashing constantly again”. I was a slow learner and turns out I don’t know better than the people that built the system!

I always think of this when I see threads about win7 - 11 being unstable, because it just isn’t. As you dig through the thread, the op reveals more - they’ve chopped out all sorts of system components with registry hacks and third party tools or blocked updates and then bitch about windows being garbage - don’t get me wrong, they simultaneously make it better and worse with every release so I sympathize why people try chopping out edge, copilot etc - but just don’t.

Disabling services and uninstalling functions the non-hacky way ‘should’ be fine (and likely reversable) but if someone wants to bare-bone their OS or be data gathering-free, they’d be better off learning Linux.