The batteries ran out on my tire pressure sensors years ago. I have to check the pressure manually, as nature intended.

I can't speak to Indian programmers, but their IT techs are trash. Our company (an MSP) hired a few on the promise that they would do the low impact support requests. Automated stuff that rolled in and was easy to fix. Failed backups, missed Windows Updates, that kind of stuff. Our company used them for about 2 years. Between glowing reviews from management (after they had been given a free trip to India to 'check in'), 'wonderful metrics', and the cost of four of their techs being less than one local, it looked like it was a great deal.

We even tried using them for customer facing requests. They worked at different hours but that was great for things like offline servers in the middle of the night. That didn't last long. Between the language barrier and their inability to actually fix simple issues in a timely manner we put them back on automated stuff. On multiple occasions taking 2+ hours to log into an iDRAC and power up a server that the UPS gracefully powered down due to a power outage, for example. Or being completely unable to help clints with printer issues. That was the first sign that maybe they weren't actually very good at their jobs. We then had a client need a file restored from a backup. As it was customer facing, it went to an in-house tech. Uh oh, the backups on their server haven't been running in a couple of months. What gives? Sure enough, every day we got a ticket about the backup failing overnight. In the wee hours every morning one of the Indian techs would assign themselves to the ticket, report that they had started a new backup job, and then closed the ticket without confirming the new backup actually finished. The customer was not happy about not having a backup in place that they were paying us for every month. This was passed along to the head of the service department and he did some digging.

Every backup that was failing was 'fixed' by creating a new backup job and closing the ticket. As you can imagine, this didn't fix the issue very often. This was not how they were taught to fix the tickets but, when asked, it turns out that their management had told them not to fix it our way because it took too long. Fix it the 'standard way' and close the ticket. The same tech would work the same failed backup for the same client for weeks at a time and wouldn't bother telling us or trying anything different. Failing Windows updates on servers? Same deal. Run the update task again and close the ticket. Low space on the server? Run Disk Cleanup, close the ticket. The best part of those is they would start up Disk Cleanup and then log out, which does nothing. Because the tickets were being closed every day before the main office started work our reporting system didn't catch that they weren't actually being fixed. It ran at 7 AM right before management showed up. No open tickets, no bad reports. The opened ticket to closed ticket ratio looked fantastic, so everyone got a pat on the back.

Why were they being pushed by their management to close tickets so fast? Because they were double dipping. We were 'assigned' 4 techs but they weren't exclusive to us. If there were no open tickets they were expected to work on stuff for others. We discovered this when we would try to call a tech with no open tickets and not be able to reach them. Management was less than pleased when this came out because the techs were paid by the hour, not the ticket closed. Who was the management that pushed for hiring these clowns? A former accountant that was made the CTO. The same guy that 'upped our metric game' and was so happy they bought out numbers down by hiring them. That's right, a guy with less technology experience than an entry level tech was the CTO of the company. He was a former client that was 'promoted to manager' after our last real CTO left a (IE he bought a share of the company and wanted the job). What's the lesson here? When the accountants start running the show, get another job.

In the end, we lost a few clients to their shenanigans, damaged our reputations with a few more, screwed up two years worth of metrics so they had to be discarded (only management cried about that one), made a bunch of work for our techs to clean up, and didn't actually make our business any better.

it almost always is because it is a lie. The worlds of business and finance are littered with this. Insane numbers, giant profits, huge growth. They couldn't figure out how Worldcom was doing it? Really? The leaders of some of the largest telecommunications companies in the world seriously didn't ask themselves "Wait, is it all bullshit?" Every single time stuff like this happens and it all comes crashing down. History is littered with bubbles, panics, and companies that cratered spectacularly and every time these 'captains of industry and finance' forget the lessons of history and think it is never going to come down. The dot com bubble was the prelude to the Great Recession. What is the popping of the AI bubble going to be the prelude to?

Oh, and for those that need it:

Open the Google app on your phone
Tap your profile picture
Tap Settings
Tap the search bar and type "Discover" without quotes
Tap the slider to disable it.

YMMV depending on what version of Android you have, what vendor made your phone, how old it is, the phases of the moon, and if the 49ers make it to the post season.

You mean that annoying thing I disable and every phone I find it on? The thing that every single person I have disabled it for has thanked me? The thing that everyone already hates? Oh no, its getting worse? Boohoo. How about instead of porting a 'no duh' article about how garbage it is you mention how to disable it instead? You know, like actually be helpful about the problem. 'Cause if everyone turns it off, maybe Google will fix it. I mean, that is a long shot, but at least if it is disabled it won't actually be a problem anymore.

Can't wait to never hear about this again.

Oh no! You mean the company that charges 200% markup on cheap Chinese garbage is being charged a markup? How terrible that someone applied their own business model against them! Seriously though, half of the crap they sell can be had from your preferred Chinese online vendor for less than half what they charge for the exact same product. I was pricing out analog joysticks (not thumbsticks) for a project and found they were selling a $20 model that was literally the same as ones I could pick up on eBay for $9. I even bought one from both places to confirm. Same box and everything. As I dug deeper I found this was true of most of their generic Chinese products. They are a scam and I hope this puts them out of business.

Not that I agree with 99% of what Trump does but even a broken clock is right twice a day. When it comes to China and their own economic terrorism we probably aren't doing enough to wean ourselves off of their cheap trash products.

If you do a fresh install of Windows 11 it doesn't do the CPU check. I just did this with an older Surface tablet. Make a bootable USB drive with Rufus and you can do a 'from scratch' install of Windows 11 without a problem. Suck, I know, but its better than tossing the equipment.

I mean, yeah, its almost certainly garbage but if it works (and is cheap enough) I can totally see the retro computer and console scene putting these in consoles to boost the performance and run more modern games. Things like Fuji.net, GameDrive, etc. already add extra chips to these old systems to add features.

We handle small and moderate sized businesses. Generally, their previous IT companies promised them reduced costs, increased reliability, scalability, and ease of maintenance. What they got was a slight decrease in maintenance costs and a big increase of subscription costs. Scalability didn't really come into it as none of them were growing fast enough to warrant it. They migrated their file and print to the cloud so people could access it from the office or home. Now they have no access at all when the internet is down and poor access when it was slow.

We got an angry call from a company that wanted us to clean up the mess their previous IT company left. The lights were on, customers were coming in, but they couldn't work because a data center three states away was inaccessible due to a storm and their previous IT basically said there was nothing they could do. They didn't spring for the redundant hosting package so there's only one copy, which is now inaccessible, so sorry. We sold them a server. By the time it was ready, their datacenter was back online and we moved the data back.

We also cleaned up a company they that their previous IT told them they were too small for a server. 20 PCs, twice as many tablets, lets get rid of AD and move them to Office 365/SharePoint! No Azure though, it costs too much. Wait, how do we setup individual profiles across all the machines without AD? How do we deploy printers without GPOs? How do changing things like screen lockouts, sleep settings, Windows Updates? Well, they connected to each machine remotely and used scripts or did everything manually. After their first contract was up the previous IT crunched the numbers and found they were spending way too many man hours supporting this serverless setup and raised their prices, which wiped out all the savings the client had from getting rid of the server and then some. So, they came to us. We got them working right with their current setup, because the previous IT people were incompetent, and they are in line to get a server when their budget comes in this year.

Are their uses cases for it? Absolutely. None of our client's have onsite Exchange/email anymore. Email is a perfect thing to move to the cloud. Quite a few examples of Line of Business Software have done the same. That really does make maintenance easy for us. Oh, somethings not working? We'll call the vendor for you. Yup, they said its fucked and they are working on it. These vendors move their software to the cloud. We didn't sell it to them so its not our problem, but we still look helpful. I wonder how many companies selling their 'cloud' programs are going to move back to locally installed/hosted setups though? Every client we've had that moved to QuickBooks Online has regretted it. We have a few clients that need 3-4 of these different cloud programs to all be working for them to do their jobs and it seems they can't go a month without some outage somewhere causing them headaches. If they'd all been in house it wouldn't be an issue.

I live in California. Most of my friends and family live or have lived in California. Several have moved out in the last 5 years, all for the same reason: It is really expensive here. Not politics, not immigration, just plain old money.

There is a housing shortage that has been ongoing for years, inflation has kicked the crap out of peoples wages, and boomers are retiring and transitioning to fixed incomes. Some people are cashing out their incredibly valuable homes and moving to cheaper states (often times selling to corporations that turn their homes into rentals at inflated prices, which is a whole nother problem). PG&E also managed to burn down a couple of my friends homes. They had to move out of state simply because there was nothing available for them to buy or even rent. That is what you get when an infrastructure provider cheaps out on maintenance in the lowest income area: they burn down all the affordable housing.

Many people still *work* in California though. Remote work has changed the calculus on homeownership for some of my friends. They moved out of state, kept their jobs, and can now afford to buy instead of rent even though they were almost 'low income' here. Oddly, I have seen more than a few move a second time. I had family retire and move to Texas only to move to Oregon after a few years. They couldn't take the bipolar weather. Summers where its 100 percent humidity and 90 degrees at 2 AM, winters where the roads all freeze, storms that come out of nowhere, rattle your house for an hour, and then its sunny and bright an hour after that. I also had friends that moved to Nebraska. They didn't last 2 years before they moved to Colorado to escape the boredom. They are avid outdoors people. Why they thought eastern Nebraska would be a good idea I don't know. A lot of the old folks I know have moved. Some even moved to Mexico for cheaper medical care. Mostly its the same story: costs. Healthcare is expensive, housing is expensive, gasoline is expensive. It all adds up.

I tell you what though, the infrastructure is hugely different in California. I've heard all the complaints of living in flyover states. Terrible roads, no sidewalks/bike lanes, non-existent building codes, non-existent city services, crazy neighbors, you name it. Friends in Tennessee said there was no water, sewer, natural gas or even garbage pickup in the town they moved to (20 minutes form Nashville). Everyone was on septic tanks and wells. As you can imagine, that sometimes caused problems. A few times a month they would load up their truck and drive their garbage into the city for disposal. Some of their neighbors would just burn it in their back yards. Technically illegal but not enforced. Lovely. A family member that was a retired contractor spent over a year trying to find a home in his price range that wasn't, in own words "a deathtrap waiting to catch fire", in the Texas community he wanted to move too.

>A hard disk drive might last five years. A tape, well, if you're brave, it might last ten years.

Seeing as I have a ton of 5¼ floppies that are in the 40 year old range and some tapes that are even older, well, I don't know what this guy is on but its the good stuff. Heck, I have some bootleg Apple ][ games that I know for a fact are copies of copies of copies and they still work. When i finally ditched VHS 15 years ago I had several tapes from the early 80s that were fine too.

At work I have a number of client's still using machines with magnetic hard drives that are in the 10 years old range. These are machines that see daily use and have power on times in the tens of thousands of hours. I'm sure the users of these machines would love for them to die due to their sluggishness. I know we want them gone because they are a bear to work on. But you tell some managers to replace something that isn't explicitly broken and they start clutching their pearls.

Besides, they are writable media. This guy is talking about unwriteable media. It isn't a fair comparison.

...I just think of the headache it is going to cause me when some local manager picks up a half dozen of them and asks me to support them. Like that time I had to tell a manager that had just purchased a dozen Windows on Arm tablets without consulting us that they wouldn't run our anti-virus or remote assistance software and were therefor unsupportable. Or the time a manager bought a dozen laptops that ran Windows in S mode from the factory. They couldn't figure out how to turn it off, even after I talked them through it over the phone and sent them two different videos detailing it. They had to ship them to us for me to push that button, load our software on them, and then ship them back (we normally do it remotely). Or the time a manager purchased almost 40 'refurbished' PCs because they were only $450 each. What a steal, right?! They were all 8-11 years old. They did meet our system requirements. He had us on that. They all had Intel i5 CPUs, at least 8 GB of RAM (mismatched manufactures, sizes, and speeds), and SSDs (that had no branding on them at all and no SMART reporting, so our monitoring software kept generating weird tickets for them). Oh, expect that we explicitly forbid purchasing used equipment. Half of them had developed some kind of serious fault within 6 months. Yet, anytime something like this happens I look like the bad guy.

before casting aspersions on others. For a branch of government where each member gets paid well over $150k a year while also working way, way less that the average American they sure have opinions about where people choose to do that work from.

I live in a small city. Our bus system is under funded to begin with. They don't have the money for the already needed upgrades let alone to cover the lost fare revenue. The population of our city has increased by 20% since they last added bus routes. There are huge sections of the city that have no real coverage at all.

While it is generally reliable it only runs buses once an hour and is by no means fast. They use a hub and spoke layout to their routes. Every bus starts at a transit center down town, drives out away from the city center, loops around, and comes back. So, if you want to get to any part of town that isn't on the same route you have to transfer at the transit center. You can drive completely across my town in 15-20 minutes from any direction but you are going to spend at last an hour if you use the transit system.

My daily commute takes 20 minutes total by car (10 minutes each way). It would be close to an hour and a half by bus and I would have a lot of down time, as the nearest bus would drop me off about 30 minutes before my work opens and would pick up me about 20 minutes after it closes. No thanks.

That said, my city has been investing a lot in bike paths and pedestrian infrastructure. As a driver it is nice, as I don't have those little wheeled turds in our lanes as much anymore. Intersections with modern pedestrian crossing are also nice. Less jaywalking or old lights that didn't have pedestrian signals. Every year we had major accidents caused by people making right turns on greens lights and not seeing the walker stepping off the curb. Totally the drivers fault, but not much consolation to the people hurt and killed. Their long term plan, which they say will be finished by 2027, would having me being able to bike to work in about 25 minutes. 15 if I sprung for a fancy electric bike and did the max bike path speed the whole way. It requires a very expensive bridge to get over a highway though, so who knows if they will have the money to build that.