That’s who you are to all the people who aren’t your boss but think they can tell you what to do anyway.

They have the ability to turn off the web access now. My company recently did just that - if I try to access office.com on a personal device, my log in is blocked. Works fine on a company controlled device.

I’m not sure how they tell the difference since it’s through the browser. But my guess would be something to do with the lack of all their security software they load onto company controlled computers that have hooks into everything.

I would also never let corporate IT manage a device, e. g. a laptop connected to my private network at home.

That’s pretty standard for working from home. I’m expected to use the company provided, managed laptop with my internet connection.

I figured so long as I made sure of things like there weren’t any open file shares and things like routers and IP cameras were password protected there wasn’t a whole they could see.

If I was really paranoid I could set up a VLAN or something.

The reason we have timezones is because of the railroads. Before the railroads came in, every town would have its own time, typically set so noon is the time when the sun is highest in the sky. This really wasn’t a problem, as back then it didn’t really matter that the time was different in every little burg.

Then the railroads came in. They needed things running on a coordinated time table out of necessity, and having every town with its own time was unworkable. I’m sure the railroads would have loved running everything off of the same clock everywhere because that would be simple. But people were too used to noon being the middle of the day, so instead we got the compromise of having timezones so that the railroads can still run on a coordinated time table, but also so that noon is still approximately the middle of the day as people were used to.

So the solution is just go back to the 1800’s and convince the railroads that timezones are actually silly and that they really should run everything based upon UTC. And if people want rail service to their town, they can just deal with not having 12PM being when the sun is highest in the sky.

When I beat Subnautica, there were long periods of me just wandering around gawking at the scenery until I stumbled upon what I needed to do next. To me, that wasn’t a bad thing either. I wish there was some way to selectively wipe from my memory everything I remember about the game so I’d get to play through rediscovering everything again.

The games that are going to be the hardest to preserve may end up being many of the mobile games that are popular now.

These games are usually installed through an app store, so if the app store pulls it, that could be it for new installations of the game unless the game can be extracted off an existing device. And even if you manage to extract the game off of a device, in order to get it onto another mobile device will likely require some way to side load it.

Many of these games also depend on a server so once the server is turned off that’s another way the game to die.

The mobile devices these games run on aren’t built for the long term either. They are essentially disposable devices meant to last a few years and then be tossed. They aren’t built to be serviced or repaired. Eventually the batteries will die, and while you can replace the battery, there’s no standardization of battery packs and eventually replacement batteries won’t be available either.

Even if you can get an old mobile device going, there’s no guarantee that you’ll actually be able to do anything with it, because the device itself may depend on some remote server just to function that could someday be shut off. There’s already old phones today that if you factory reset them, it effectively bricks them since they need to contact some activation server as part of the initial setup process and that server is long gone.

Of course, many people may ask - who cares? Perhaps so, but I’d bet a lot of people said the same thing about the old Atari and Nintendo and Sega and MS-DOS games that were popular years ago and are still popular today.

It’s kind of interesting that pretty much all the games I played as a kid are still accessible to me today - in many cases the original game is still playable on the original, still functional, hardware. But a lot of kids today growing up today playing mobile games on a phone or a tablet, when they are my age, could very well have no way to ever experience those games again that they grew up with as kids.

Well, that’s a misleading title. All the countries in their list have some debt, just less than most.

All countries carry some debt, because they need to show a history of reliably making payments on that debt in case they need to borrow money in the future for whatever reason. Not all countries, however, run massive deficits every year.

The thing is, it forced the people making games to release them as a finished, working product, with the bugs (mostly) stamped out.

Today it’s just push something out the door now, and we’ll patch it soak them for even more money with DLC later.

I suppose the real question then is… do you go to Starbucks?

Donald trumP?

Well, if you’re sticking with Windows, you really have no choice. The sun is rapidly setting on using Windows 7 as a “daily driver” - a lot of new software doesn’t support it and the older versions that work on Windows 7 are getting less and less viable. Windows 8 is in the same boat as Windows 7. Windows 10 goes out of support next year, but you’ve probably got to 2028 or maybe 2029 before you really have to move.

I ended up riding Windows 7 pretty much to the bitter end. Steam dropping Windows 7 support last December was it for the last Windows box. Everything now is running Linux.

I consider Windows 7 the last good version, but I still consider Windows 2000 to be when Microsoft was at the top of their game.

I did switch over to yt-dlp some time later as development seems to have slowed on Pytube and yt-dlp seems to be where all the activity is.

That reminds me back when some time ago, I was tired of dealing with sketchy, and often broken, websites and programs for downloading videos from Youtube. I figured these sorts of programs must be doing something along the lines of downloading the Youtube page, parsing through the massive pile of HTML and Javascript to find the stream, and then saving that to a video file. That seemed like something I could do myself with Python, so I set out to see if I could figure out how to do it.

A few minutes and a couple of web searches later, I discovered that someone else had figured that all out already and I just needed to do “pip install pytube”.

I did the opposite. After one of the big updates, Windows 10 decided it was no longer going to work with the Vista-era drivers for an old Core 2 Duo laptop. To be fair to Microsoft, was I pretty impressed when I initially installed Windows 10 and it accepted those ancient drivers without any complaints on a laptop that was 10 years old at that time.

So I instead installed Manjaro and everything worked just fine.

We really need an alternative to CUPS. Unfortunately, that will probably just be systemd swallowing up printing too.

There’s always the centrally managed corporate Windows desktops. My workplace is better about this now, but previously they’d just push down updates and with some of them you’d have little other choice but to let it proceed no matter how inconvenient the timing.