A few years back, I finally got so fed up with the care and feeding of Windows that I bought a PS4 Pro, and gave my gaming rig to my son. For me, it's been a great move. (I've since put an SSD in it, but that didn't speed things up as much as I would have liked.) I love the simplicity of a console, the exclusives on Sony (Horizon Zero Dawn has become an all-time favorite), and NO CHEATERS ON BATTLEFIELD. I'll be buying a PS5 on launch day, with the biggest hard drive, and as much stuff as I can't get with it, no questions asked, and no matter how much it costs.

Seems like an opportunity for your Pi-Hole to block this sort of thing from leaving your network. Does anyone know if it does, or could?

All of this is swell if you handling classified state secrets. My company's departmental PowerPoint presentations on how little IT got done on the project this week aren't worth this sort of hassle.

There's NOTHING at my company I think is worth this hassle.

There's probably NOTHING at 90% of the companies using the recommendations in TFA that are worth the extra hassle.

But SOMETHING has to justify the IT budget, and make users feel like SOMETHING is being done. And that's why our computers keep getting more and more of a hassle to use, in the defense of literally nothing of value. And while they work on this crap, the projects we NEED them to do slip further and further behind.

My company makes developers use a separate account for privileged operations. So I wind up entering a second set of credentials several DOZEN times a day. I literally just spent an hour and a half fighting this to try Elasticsearch. Ultimately, there was so much confusion caused between installing under the privileged account, and running it under the normal account, that I finally just uninstalled it, downloaded the zip, and ran in by hand in a command window. (Thank goodness the Elastic guys offer this sort of option. I imagine that situations like mine are not uncommon, and the reason for it.)

I was exhausted from the exercise, and browsed Slashdot with the hanging thought... How could this situation be any worse? And Slashdot provided. Thank you.

For the love of God, please don't tell anyone in my #CorporateIT about this.

And it's telling, that this is the best alternative.

I read an article awhile back (which I can't find now) that talked about the deep and extensive work it's taking to allow us to finally (finally!) have a real terminal on Windows. It's not surprising that they've taken this long to do so, and tied it in with a new WSL. It's a LOT of work, which will impact a LOT of existing code.

As someone working for a company which is talking very heavily about digitally securing the code in our products, I fall on the other side of this conversation. I think we should make it EASY to hack our stuff. There are legitimate reasons to do so, but it CAN possibly be dangerous. The law should protect us from whatever people do to themselves in the process.

You should allowed to do whatever you want with stuff you "bought and paid for." But if you "break" it, you void the warranty, and you get to "keep both halves." Seems like a terribly simple and clear tradeoff to me. This is all the right-to-repair legislation should say. Owners of things should get to do whatever they want to them, free of legal repercussions, but then the company that made the product should be free of any legal obligations as well.

I thought I deleted it my account 2 years ago. Like, I specifically went through a process, according to some web site, that was supposed to delete it -- not just deactivate it. I recently found that I needed to recreate an account. Lo and behold, I couldn't use my same email address. I reset my password. Everything was still there.

We all understand that they never delete anything from their side, but, at this point, I'm not even sure they have removed the stuff you think you've deleted from your timeline for anyone else.

Better for whom? Engineers? Scientists? Developers? No, no, and no. It's good for the *company*, and only then for managers and secretaries who do nothing more than email, presentations, and spreadsheets. For everyone else, the restrictions a large corporation puts on the standard disk image are counter-productive. In my company, we all just shake our heads and waste time with it, knowing there's nothing to be done about it.

I'd argue that the only thing that's REALLY holding back a corporate move to Linux is PowerPoint and Excel, specifically. And THAT'S why Microsoft won't make them for Linux, no matter how much they say they "love" it.

This is clearly a corporate thing. What are employees going to use to access these virtual desktops? A PC? You're sure not going to use a smart phone!

And to do what? Run Excel? Who's going to be happy with a remote display to run Excel?

I'm really missing the value proposition here.

> Emails demanding deletion of the memo contained "pixel trackers" that notified human resource managers when their messages had been read, recipients determined.

How's it feel to have the shoe on the other foot?

I wonder how much of this is driven by a lack of vision, and simple inertia. I've used Rails as my main tool for 10-11 years, since the 2.x days. In the company I work for now, the one app I had written has been mothballed, and I was told I could no longer use it.* My choices were either .NET or Java, and that's simply because we had been an "IBM/Oracle shop" for 25 years, until we became a "Microsoft shop" since transitioning to O365. Because what I'm integrating with is all Java, I chose Java, but these days, to even try to compete against modern stacks, that implies Spring, and either Angular or React.

My theory is that old, manufacturing-based companies are just locked into a mindset of "this is what we do," and that comes from an answer from 20-30 years ago. They don't care to optimize for IT tools, because it's not their expertise, and they're throwing money down the drain because the C-levels just play the game of hiring consultants to implement whatever Microsoft pays to put in the trade magazines. So we get H1-B's with, and outsource for, that skillset. And then the consulting industry educates and trains for this skillset, and it becomes a self-perpetuating legacy situation, a little like Cobol and mainframes. We just can't get away from it, because it's too hard to switch everything to something else.

* The person responsible for the decision told me, "You're the only person in the company who knows it." I asked, "Rails is the most productive thing I've seen in 15 years; why wouldn't we hire for that?" I didn't get a response.

I've come to the conclusion that I hate using Java for web apps.