I was talking about secure boot. If the computer only runs Windows, enterprise doesn’t care. If the computer only runs Windows S, it’s an absolute nonstarter in enterprise tons of apps aren’t on the app store. But Windows S is never targeted to enterprise, only low end home users.

Anything can support secure boot, the question is, are the keys included in the BIOS so it can run that particular OS without loading extra keys?

I’ve also not personally encountered a computer where secure boot couldn’t be disabled or the list of keys modified, but I’ve definitely heard about them existing.

It’s been attempted in two ways.
First is secure boot. There were a handful of computers sold that did not allow disabling of secure boot, or changing the loaded keys. So it was basically essentially a Windows only computer.
More recently is there was Microsoft Windows S. This was a cheap version of Windows Home that ran on low end computers and was locked to only allow installing apps from the Microsoft store. It was possible to unlock it but as I recall it required an additional fee.

Enterprises almost all run Windows anyway so they DGAF.

All jokes aside, things like this are why China is beating us. I am absolutely not a fan of the Chinese government, but the simple fact is they get shit done.

The elder looked at the interviewer like he was a slow child. “They will get wives from other tribes.”

I believe Darwin might have had something to say about this attitude…

I think a lot of it was frog and hot plate situation. If they had done all this stuff all at once people would have dumped them immediately, but they did it slowly always seeming reasonable and considered at each step.

And a lot of people still adopt their product because for better or worse, it is the best known and relatively easy to use.

I don’t use Plex. I have never used Plex. But based on the one time I tried, this doesn’t surprise me even a little bit.

Years ago I installed it on my NAS, it was a one click download package. I installed it and hit the button to set it up. And then it prompted me to make a cloud account.

Why do I need a cloud account? I am logging into my local server and I am not sharing anything with anybody nor am I subscribing to any cloud services. I have no need of a cloud account. But, the way they built the thing, you need a cloud account to log into your local system.

I did not create a cloud account. I uninstalled it. I concluded that a company that claims to care about user privacy, but requires cloud integration in an area that absolutely does not require cloud anything, does not actually give a shit about privacy. I Googled and found that the requirement for a cloud account was, at the time, a fairly new thing. Lots of people didn’t like it. I concluded that this company was beginning to enshittify, although this was years ago and none of us had heard that word yet. But either way, it was obvious that the company was moving in a not customer-friendly direction and I did not want to be along for the ride.

My choice has been proven right several times over the years since. And yes, every time they remove a feature, or make some other customer unfriendly decision, I retell this story.

The moral here is that a company either cares about its customers or it doesn’t, and it’s usually pretty easy to tell which one fairly quickly. When one bad decision is made, and not corrected, others will follow.

Synology is the latest example of that. For anyone not paying attention, they have recently announced that their 2025 series units will only work with Synology branded hard drives, which are of course more expensive than standard Seagate or Western Digital drives (which work just fine). But if you look, the bread crumbs are there and form a trail. Over the last few years they have removed features, for example the device is no longer can decode h.265 surveillance video, and the units will no longer display SMART data for ‘unsupported’ drives. I say no longer because they used to, but an update changed that so they no longer do.

Bottom line though is don’t do business with companies that don’t respect you.

This is the answer. Leave a hair dryer blowing at the thing for 5 or 10 minutes. It will heat the bowl, and also heat the air inside, which will expand.

Yeah exactly. I tried to set it up once, installed it on a NAS box, and it starts talking about me making a cloud account. Why do I need a cloud account to log into my own hardware on my own network?

I do not want the cloud
I do not need the cloud
I will say it very loud
No cloud, no cloud, no cloud.

But apparently it’s set up so the only way to log into your own locally hosted software on your own locally hosted hardware is with an external cloud account.

To that I said no thank you and uninstalled it.

Oh of course. For them and their OEM partners too. Nobody else benefits from throwing 2-5 generations of perfectly functional hardware in the fucking trash.

That all said though, Microsoft has been one of the biggest pushes behind replacing passwords with more secure authentication. And TPM does play a role in that. Certainly not the driving factor for throwing away millions of perfectly good computers though.

I really wish there was something regulatory that could be done about this. There are millions of perfectly good fully working computers that are going to go in the fucking trash because of this. I understand the desire for a TPM on every machine. It makes sense in a way. But the pure environmental impact is just indefensible. All of those computers had a significant environmental footprint to build them and ship them and again to dispose of them plus building and shipping their replacements.
If Microsoft had such a hard-on for TPM, they should have worked with computer manufacturers to make some sort of retrofit system or way of easily determining if a TPM can be added to an existing computer

That would require genuine intelligence. We only have artificial intelligence, both in the machines and the empty suits who market them.

For the last year or two AI has been the buzzword of the day. Anyone not investing in AI is considered dinosauric. Just like cloud was 5 to 10 years ago.

Only the cycle has happened a little more quickly this time. AI was supposed to produce immediate revolution, and we are seeing the immediate results are… Just okay.

Google spends billions building an AI that takes 10x more power per query than a standard search, only so it can tell people to superglue their pizza together and jump off the Golden Gate Bridge when they are depressed.

Copilot 365 costs about as much as an E3 license, so turning it on basically doubles your monthly spend with Microsoft. I don’t see it doubling anybody’s productivity.

AI is like cloud. There are some places where it makes sense, where it can be helpful, where it can save time or help do difficult jobs. That is not everywhere doing everything for everybody, and I think perhaps some of the world is starting to realize that.

I’ll bet they are great live. I actually have only heard one song of theirs, which I found by accident years ago when trying to find something else. Everlasting Light, played live. One of very few songs that completely makes it obvious how much mp3 compression sucks, and even if you download the FLAC (sadly not high res) you can still hear everything wrong with your speakers and if you listen to it on good headphones then you can hear the deficiencies of the mic they used to record it.

Truly a huge amount of audio information in that track. I love it!

That’s assuming raw PCM data, no compression (lossy or lossless) whatsoever.

LDAC can do lossless redbook audio (16 bit 44.1 KHz) at 990kbps. All other modes are lossy.
It’s probably doing something much like FLAC- lossy encoder + residual corrections to ensure you get the original waveform back out, but with less bandwidth than raw PCM.

I’m in the same boat. Keep getting android popups like IMPORTANT ACCOUNT NOTIFICATION YOU HAVE TO ADD YOUR BIRTHDAY no I don’t fuck you swipe away.

Not sure about better but I can add a step. Fire up Microsoft word, then write a macro which outputs a shortcut that launches Internet explorer with a URL that loads and local HTML page which after 1 second redirects to a .exe. then click open instead of save as. That only works with really old school internet explorer of course not the modern edge version.

Bow tie for sure. I suggest raise the hat a little bit so you can see the eyes a bit better.

The beauty of self hosting is most of it doesn’t actually require that much compute power. Thus, it’s a perfect use for hardware that is otherwise considered absolutely shit. That hardware would otherwise go in the trash. But use it to self host, and in most cases it’s idle most of the time so it doesn’t use much power anyway.

And yet you all are still using SMS two factor authentication. Why does my Xbox video game account have better security than my money?

I would return that UPS and for about the same price or not too much more you could get a cyberpower unit that puts out a real sine wave. Obviously your server does not like Riello’s fake sine wave, so why not feed it the good stuff rather than trying to force it to eat garbage?