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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 31st, 2023

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  • With our HP laptops they would work perfectly so long as you only ever used them with one brand of dock. If you mixed dock brands without doing a full restart (like say having one brand at home, suspending, and then using another brand’s dock at the office) Wi-Fi, suspend, and several other features would no longer work or work intermittently. We had HP and Targus working on it, even their engineers were puzzled.

    Problem was non-existent on Linux…


  • The difference is that if an upgrade breaks a Linux install (which is much rarer in my experience) I can often simply change the setting, revert the update, use a different distro/version, or even undo the change myself. Hell if it’s was kernel deep, nothing stops you from recompiling yourself, if the problem warrants it.

    We can more easily run special Linux versions in a virtual machine without having to do a bunch of registry/gp magic and hope it sticks because Microsoft likes to force updates through your settings anyway.

    There are more options for dealing with problems and they suck less.



  • We are doing a review of all of our software to prep for Windows 11 right now. It’s not going nearly as well as you think because not all software is consumer-grade.

    Not too long ago a bunch of our scientific devices got knocked out by Microsoft fixing an old serial bug. Turns out all the software to run these was built to workaround the bug and quite a few of these items are long since unsupported (or the vendor is gone). Some of these are tens of thousands of dollars, we can’t just replace these on a whim.







  • AtkinsRéalis (known as SNC-Lavalin at the time) is a Canadian construction company that was at the centre of a huge scandal in Canada. They were caught bribing the son of Libian dictator Gaddafi to get a contract to build a prison, allegedly for political prisoners.

    While the Justice Minister was having this company prosecuted, the Prime Minister (Justin Trudeau) demanded that she give AtkinsRéalis a slap on the wrist and a deferred prosecution agreement. When she refused, she was driven from her position.

    Canada’s government has a history of propping up bad actors like this, and goes out of their way to support several oligopolies that run significant chunks of the Canadian market. Bell/Rogers/Telus own most of Canada’s mobile and internet offerings, Loblaws/Sobeys/Metro own most of Canada’s grocery stores, much of Canada’s produce and meat are controlled by cartels, etc… The maple syrup cartel is very powerful and wealthy and yes you’re reading that right, there is a maple syrup cartel and even a maple syrup black market.

    One special mention goes out to the Canadian Real Estate industry, which is full of actual crooks all over the place and just disgusting. Did you know in Canada it is legal for a real estate agent to represent both sides of a purchase? Agents also will refuse to work with any of the bargain agencies that charge less than the standard 2.5% commission, basically locking them out of the industry. This crap is part of why housing prices have bubbled so hard, and together with price fixing by landlords they have managed to keep Canadian housing prices at levels so stupid homelessness has increased several times over.

    Canadian people are often too fixated on not being seen to be a problem, what some call “politeness”, to the point they won’t even stand up for themselves. That unwillingness to protest or try to change things has allowed this to happen for a very long time. Because of this awful “politeness” many Canadians are even cheering on new laws limiting union action.

    tl;dr Canada is a banana republic and Canadians are cucked







  • I’ve seen it a lot (I do PC builds/repairs as a side gig). I just assume it will cause me grief from the start and keep both USB2 and USB3 sticks handy.

    To be fair I’ve had the issue with Unraid too, but only on one brand’s B450 motherboards in my testing. I didn’t have a whole bunch to try of course but MSI and Asus was fine, Gigabyte not. X570 didn’t have this problem in my experience.