Story is not sexy enough to be noticed :-(

My last active Windows Installation is my Gaming PC. Once Windows 10 goes, I will switch to SteamOS. I took one look at the roadkill that the cat dragged in (aka Win 11) and decided, I will never use that. Microsoft has made so many customer hostile decisions. Worst is that they try to ram AI down everyones throat.

This is just anecdotal evidence:

I am working in sales, so my metrics are very clear: how many Euros do I pull in.

When I went to a 4-day-week three years ago, all my numbers went up and stayed there since.

I took a 20% hit on my base salary, but the higher commission compensated it.

I am suffering from osteoarthritis. I would rather need an appliance that enables me to walk more than a mile without pain. 5000$ would be small change compared to what I would pay for that.

My last Windows is my Gaming PC. Wanted to try Gaming on Linux anyway, so this is the necessary motivation.

8 * 8 TB HD
4 * 2 TB SSD
64GB RAM

The EU didn't demand that Microsoft grants 3rd Party Software Kernel privileges.

What the EU demanded, that all solutions must have the same access to work with the system as Microsoft does.

So the reason for 3rd party SW having kernel access is because Microsoft is using a shitty security architecture for it's own software.

Apple recognised this problem and went through years of pain and complaints to get security software to use an API and do things in userland territory.

Just checked:

Our first web server came up in 1994 using Cern HTTPD.

We developed that year a concept of mirrored web sites to keep non-local traffic low: the Bundesdatenautobahn. It was the first attempt of a CDN that didn't take of.

We also built a web shop that sold books online in 1994. Strangely we are no billionaires today.

What do I remember?

Client was Mosaic Browser running on Solaris 2 on a Sparc Station. The Mosaic Browser showed the web to be vastly superior to Gopher.

I also remember that running a web server was really complicated in the time before the Apache HTTP server was born.

We started as an ISP in 1992. I am unsure when exactly our own web server came up. But it must have been in 1994 or shortly after.

As mentioned, during Covid-19 there were a lot of regulations in place that allowed companies to continue existing even if they would have had to file for bankruptcy under the usual rules.

That way we built up a backlog of zombie companies. Most of the uptick results from cleaning up the backlog.

If you look for overall payment discipline, that is at an OK level (same as pre-pandemic or better). So this is not worrying.

Between the approaching climate disaster (which will hit us most likely very hard) and the rise of the right wing parties (which want to slaughter the EU goose that lays the golden economic eggs), I don't have CPU cycles to spare for that worry.
 

It has been at a similar level in 2018. The lowest price was in mid 2020 at height of the first Covid wave....

The irony is that today the gas prises have reached it's lowest level since summer 2021. It is down more than 90% from the peak in 2022.

The reason is personal: I dislike movie theaters.

Seats, service, sound, screen and all the other features are subpar compared to my home setup.

But the worst of movie theaters is "other people". Usually it takes just two teenagers to make even the worst villain of any movie look like a sane and nice person.

The last time I went to a movie theater was five years ago and the "the last time" was that even in a more abstract sense.

Can't wait for that thing to die so that I get my movies streamed earlie.

I liked the series overall and I am gonna watch the following seasons. What did I like:

• Visually stunning
• Middleearth feeling
• Presentation of Sauron
• How the tied in Galadriel with her future decisions in LotR

What did I dislike:

• Narrative structure (trying to create mysteries)
• Optics sometimes drowning the story

What criticism do I often hear and disagree with:

• Not following the lore: Tolkien explicitly left gaps in his lore for others to fill out. And he designated his stories as "legends" that were told and retold by people that adapted and changed them. So for him there is no definitive version. He used this to explain his own inconsistencies he was painfully aware of.
• Dark skinned elves: When I read Tolkiens works, I never assumed there were none. If you set your mind to it, you can read Tolkiens works in a way that it suggests that good/bad has to do with the skin colour. I didn't understand him that way and I support the showrunners of making sure their work can be misinterpreted that way.
• Action Galadriel: Shew is not how I imagined her, but the same can be said for Frodo in LotR. But similar as with Elijah Wood I can accept that version as just a different interpretation.

That guy is a party hack (nephew of an important Christian Democrat official) and was already called âoeCyberclownâ by a significant part of the German IT security specialist at the time of his installation.