Another reason to not tie all that together into one account. Ie, first off, don't use the cloud. OneDrive is still optional and worthy of a global boycott (I'm shouting at the clouds here and they ignore my shaking fist :-). Don't purchase shit from a Microsoft Account, don't use the Microsoft Store, that should be a no-brainer! Use a separate account for each and every computer (a no brainer), and device (also no brainer but harder for some to understand). The snag are the people who insist on sharing all their files with all their devices, maybe they feel like they have to take the job work and do it on their home devices as well while sitting on the toilet?

Basic security would imply not to use a single point-of-failure password for *everything*. If it's a bad idea to use the same password for the bank that you use for online shopping, then it is also a bad idea to use your microsoft account for anything other than logging into one single computer.

Google also sells expensive phones. It's just not their core business.

But that doesn't change the fact that Apple chose to stay and help the CCP oppress the P of the PRC, and Google didn't.

Your argument basically boils down to Apple's business model being more dependent on more corrupt regimes. That is not an endorsement.

I've got Windows 11 and I don't have a Microsoft Account. I think newer W11 users will be required to get an account though, but maybe there's still a way around it. It's a really bad idea though. Microsoft is trying to copy Apple, but not even Apple requires an Apple account on Macs.

Possible use the account only temporarily, make a local account be admin, then swap over.

Nobody cares if the games run natively. What they care about is whether they work correctly.

I agree that the compatibility is not perfect, and it is slightly irritating to have to try both PlayOnLinux and Lutris to find out where some games will run. But there are compensations for some users.

Specifically, many older games will run on Linux that won't run on Windows at all, even with patches.

If you only play new games, and you do nothing E else with your computer but that and possibly running some other software that only runs well on Windows like current Adobe stuff, then you will be best off on Windows. Everyone else is better off on Linux, unless they want to play games that require Kernel DRM.

Most modern games which don't require that run very well on Linux. And nobody cares if they need proton. It's not like it's hard to install.

The schtick is to abandon federal government altogether and devolve into confederate like states. Refusing to fund federal departments is to make those departments ineffective and thus be easier to get rid of when the public sees them as pointless.

You root the machine, usually.

Not difficult for most PC OSes.

Welcome to corporatism, where they're the same picture.

For a long time, Taiwan was also an authoritarian state, ruled by martial law, with intellectuals imprisoned. The harsher periods were relatively short but it remained authoritarians for several decades. It wasn't democracy that causes Taiwan to flourish as it was more productive than China even before the authoritarian period ended.

The difference here is that Taiwan had the support of the richer West, and thus had profitable trade avenues even while having a heavy handed ruler. Other countries that were authoritarian but also anti-communist were treated as friends by the West. Definitely the CIA helped keep dictators in power for cold war reasons. Meanwhile China mostly just had trade with the Soviets which was not an economically robust system either.

Marxism isn't really Socialism except in the strictest sense. Socialism can easily coexist with Democracy. Marxism rejects democracy, and attempts to forcibly create a class-less society with seizure of private property. But properly Venezuela isn't really Marxist, though it has leaders with those tendencies.

Without some sort of heavy handed government, you can't force a company to give their money away to workers without them expecting the workers to do the work efficiently and cost effectively. You can't force companies to be charities. The most you can really do without going full on short-term doomed dictatorship is demand that they treat the workers well, follow rules, etc.

Even in the Soviet Socialist Republics (if that's not socialist then nothing is), companies were to an extent still profit driven. A low profit company meant it was not helping the broader economy, and the bosses of that company would be subject to dangerous scrutiny.

I think many Google employees, especially those who've never worked anywhere else, treat Google like it as a university. And in the early days Google to promote this style of view. The main google buildings are clustered together and the employees treat the entire area as their own, including all the public streets which are NOT google property, which is why you see them not paying attention to stop signs or stop lights (drive extra slow if you're a visitor). They used to allow stude.. employees to work on their own projects. People bring their dogs into work. There are special after-hours clubs, themed cafes in the buildings, tubs full of breakfast cereal, goofy nap time pods, etc. It feels like a college!

Except that it's not a college, it's not a research institute, and the employees are not paying customers like students are. I think this catches some workers by surprise, especially when they get a bad grade... performance review. Then they canceled that "do your own project some of the time" and this discouraged a lot of workers. Now Google is paying big attention to the bottom line, the profits aren't just rolling in automatically, and the "resources" need to earn their keep.

For iPerf - the common use case is not to measure the network performance on the host machine itself, but to measure network performance on the network. Ie, you're a router tester and want to measure throughput. In those cases you want a host machine that is not going to inadvertently affect your tests because it's a slower machine or, in this case, if the porting to the host machine is inefficient.

Microsoft is not saying "don't test us because we'll end up looking bad". They're saying that a non-Windows test application running on Windows is going to give you unexpected results. *Especially* if the non-Windows application is sitting on top of Cygwin. Cygwin is great, but it's sloooow, and mostly obsolete given WSL2. So run the iPerf3 on a linux box directly, Unsure why it isn't just using WSL though.

> LA has: 5 Billion dollars missing in various "help the homeless" scan non profits.

Much of that is due to the ongoing power-struggle of local govt's versus county and state gov't (C/S). Local gov'ts don't like C/S telling them how to run things, making it hard to regulate monitor funds given to them to solve problems.

Local gov't is conservative mainstay, but when it backfires, they blame liberalism.

Back in the day there was this monstrosity known as "Windows 95." Microsoft was advertising the hell out of it. The PC manufacturers were advertising the hell out of it and their PCs. Internet in dorms was becoming a big thing. There were ads all over TV telling luddite parents that their kids had to have a Windows 95 PC to go off to college or they would FAIL!

Well, predictably, people did this in droves. They then went to their dorms (or did it at home) and hooked their non-firewalled Windows 95 machines up to the Internet with full file and print sharing turned on. It used to be a sport to go surfing through SMB shares on these college networks. You'd find peoples' email, their entire documents folder, and yes, porn they shot of their girlfriends and God knows what else. One time I knew that this dude had a hidden camera in his dorm and his girlfriend wasn't aware of it. So in the interest of being anti-revenge, I went into his email, found her email address, and forged an email from him to her with a link to it. I'm sure that went over well.

There were also so many bugs in the Windows TCP/IP stack, such as it was. Winsock was still even a thing. Then there was Winnuke, where you could send a malformed TCP/IP packet to an IP address and blue screen someone's computer. Anybody who had any clue blocked it in short order, but you always had the script kiddies and trolls and otherwise annoying shits who would pop into IRC or something else and it was necessary to just eliminate them in short order. Most of them never figured it out. ("Uh, every time I say something stupid my computer crashes. What a coincidence!")

This was before Napster and all the rest. In fact, originally it was kind of the original peer-to-peer file sharing. I used to have a huge library of MP3s and stuff from back in the day but that was lost long ago in a HDD crash. Not that I really miss any of it.