I moved from Windows to MacOS years ago (Windows Vista encouraged that!).

MacOS is easy to use, but there is a learning curve -- that is a cost. Macs tend to be more expensive than commodity hardware -- you can no longer run MacOS on commodity hardware (Apple made sure of that LOL). There is then the cost of support; Apple does have Enterprise plans and device management, but I am not familiar with the details (it is a cost).

MacOS has grown into a major OS, but Apple does apply its own rules--at times, they do f*ck things up -- for example, settings and preferences that get trashed after an update (ansible and config management might address some of that). That is a cost. Apple has taken the position of where they believe they know what's best for you, and some settings will continue to reflect that. That is a cost (perhaps more of nerves).

If you find a problem with the update/upgrade or some other matter, Apple Discussions is filled with Apple Apologists who will attack you. Or, Apple will delete your post if they find it too critical ("unhelpful") -- there are other venues, but it's a cost. I have had mixed results with Apple Support directly.

The software ecosystem for MacOS has grown significantly (good); there is also open source (also a cost, security/support/liability). Apple has their App Store, other vendors do their own thing.

There are other costs with any hardware platform (antivirus, security policies, updates/licenses), anti-theft/insurance, that need to be considered.

25,000 student is no small project and you have to factor in the time that such a migration would take, considering the above "costs" but also the unknown.

Microsoft has positioned itself well for the corporate environment, especially with Active Directory. The recent direction that they've taken is unfortunate, through poor management and sh*tty leadership, I wonder what their future will look like if something doesn't radically change.

I am hopeful that the Linux ecosystem will continue to improve.

I understand the advertisement industry had been engaging in this, to help identify your typing cadence, mouse move, etc. This is something I read a long time ago, so the technique is not new; and I can only imagine what else they can infer from this data.

In its early days, social media was a fun, amusing pastime. Today, it's the source of political and social manipulation -- perception management -- by both people, corporation and state-sponsored interests. And let's not forget the anguished advertising industry, that works very diligently to mine, distract, track and monetize nearly everything they can.

It's not fun anymore. At times, it has become outright immature and banal. Look at products like TikTok, Facebook and what they were *really* designed for.

I'm old enough to remember where compute resources were useful, they helped get things done -- as they got more powerful, the impact on society became more negative. Is it human nature or corporate interests? I think it's both, but one clearly understands and manipulates the other (corporate), and so it goes.

Having said that, there are positive uses, such as sharing information -- as much as people use terms "sheeple" and other terms, which are often true, I believe the public (those of us that think for ourselves) are much smarter, more well-informed, even closer, because of these tools -- but hopefully those of us also know how to moderate our consumption of it.

Remembering that the ultimate social benefit is, when possible, in person.

I'm being partly flippant, but wouldn't it be nice to have ZFS on MacOS.

Isn't there a requirement in most municipalities that any excess energy you create must be "sold" back to the power grid? The way I understand that "arrangement" works is you sell the excess power to the grid at "wholesale" pricing, but they simply resell that same power back to you, retail. I don't see any net benefit in that, as I would just assume store power in an array of batteries for my own benefit.

I wonder a potential way around that is to have completely separate wiring for the solar power, but that could get costly.

Anyone know more about this.

This is nothing but an effort by the lenders to ensure repayment/income to their portfolios -- does absolutely nothing for those out there struggling. The student loan "system" is a corrupt series of companies, regulations and laws that no other agency would get away with. The entire system needs to be deleted.

I understand that most of what is released is from lower classification surveillance systems; not National systems, which carry higher classification. That being true, is very telling. Otherwise, we have Senators coming forward, making statements about the "truth" being terrifying, indigestible, that it would frighten, along with knowledge (and potential interaction with) of interdimensional travel of beings. Yet, we get the grainy videos, hoping that will placate the public -- an old tactic that simply isn't going to work. IMHO

Scammers will have a field day with this sloppy move.

I had to laugh at this, as that ship has sailed. There is no way they will put that genie back in the bottle; furthermore, we've had AI application in classified environments for a long time. I feel like this is just another move to establish control. Remember back when Microsoft, OpenAI, et al, moved to create some oversight mechanism for AI? That kind of power over society is unacceptable. But here we go...

I have differing opinions about DST, and I appreciate some of the comments by those that differ.

IMHO, the fact that this contentious issue pisses everyone off so much (GRIN), I think is sufficient reason to standardize time.

What the US does (ie: on the east coast) impacts global interests (who also have do deal with our time changes). I feel like the base reasons for seasonal time change have long since become moot.

Ubuntu can shut down the service itself, but I'd like to see them post the code open-source.

This is some yearly ritual that usually goes nowhere. I am all for getting rid of DST -- just keep one time, whichever it is, done. We will all adjust and the net impact of normalization will be positive.

Just let it die, the world has moved on.

I remember unboxing this AT&T 3B1 with utter excitement. It ran UNIX, real AT&T UNIX (which we later learned was riddled with bugs lol). I could compile GCC overnight LOL. There were times I had no f'ing idea what I was doing, but I kept learning. I had the modem and the voice card, which gave me tons of hours of exploring/learning, dial-up BBS via ProComm. I connected a DEC VT330 to this and logged in -- total excitment (LOL!). Hey, it was my geeky time.

I agree with other sentiment here, the product was poorly planned. The AT&T UNIX PC was expensive, off-the-shelf software was nearly non-existent. Open source was in its infancy. UNIX (and all variants like Xenix) were "exclusive" -- marketed and priced as such. SCO milked everyone for a long as they could, then fell into disaster. AT&T didn't put the real work into the larger ecosystem for this, but they had higher-end 3B servers which did a little better. For what it was and what it accomplished in the UI I think was pretty decent.

At the time, though, there really wasn't much useful need or context for UNIX on the desktop at home. Very few people understood it, we had IBM PCs and Commodore 64s and the Apple Mac, the Amiga... along with the huge software bases.

The world moved on.

FYI There is an emulator in open source called FreeBee on Github that will run the AT&T 3B1 (3.51) OS, for those who are interested: github.com/philpem/freebee

Star Trek was designed to endure. From the beginning, it was inclusive — not as a marketing strategy, but because that was the whole point of Roddenberry's future. Multiple races, interspecies politics, a Russian on the bridge during the Cold War, a Black woman as a senior officer in 1966. That wasn't "woke," it was the premise. So when people blame inclusivity for Trek's decline, I feel they're misdiagnosing the problem entirely.

What actually killed it is a lack of vision, poor writing, and management that treated the franchise like IP to be mined rather than a universe to be respected.

I'll admit — Academy grew on me. The characters developed, the acting was good, and when it hit the warfare arcs it found some real weight. But it needed more time to breathe, and it never fully escaped the teen drama gravity well that nobody asked for. I wanted to love it, because I love Star Trek and I'll always give it a chance. But wanting to love something and it earning that love are two different things. That's the frustrating part — you could see what it could have been if they'd trusted the material and given it room to develop.

The timeline fragmentation hasn't helped either. I know there are fans who embrace all the timelines, and more power to them — but for me, it's fractured any sense of a coherent universe. Kelvin timeline, Discovery's jump to the 32nd century, prequels contradicting established canon — at some point you can't even tell what's connected to what anymore. The TOSTNGDS9Voyager era had a coherent forward trajectory. You knew where you stood. That matters, because investment in a fictional universe requires continuity to mean something.

For those of us old enough to remember, there was a stretch after TOS ended and before TMP where there was no active Trek at all. It survived. It came back. But it came back because people with genuine passion and understanding picked it up. That's what it needs again — not more content, but better stewardship.

I honestly don't know what Gene Roddenberry would say about any of this. But I suspect he'd recognize the difference between a show that has something to say and one that's just wearing the uniform.