If governments across the world gave a quarter of what they give to Microsoft to open source projects that compete, not only would they get to stop paying Microsoft all that money, they’d have a better product to boot. Add to that the side benefit to people and companies using it, and it’s pretty obvious why Microsoft will do everything in its power (except make a better product for a better price) to prevent that.
Oh, it’s worse than I even made it sound. Their sponsored video recommendations would often recommend me a show on a service I don’t subscribe to, even though the show was available on services I do subscribe to, and Google would recommend videos from the one I do subscribe to as not an ad, so they know I could get it for free, but still tried to sell it to me.
It’s sad, because Android TV was a very solid experience for years, and it slowly enshitified to being a pain in the ass to use, just like Roku. I feel the same about a lot of streaming services though. They started removing downvoting videos, made it so you couldn’t hide certain content, started changing the recommendation to recommend what they wanted me to watch instead of what I might want to watch. Half of them force sports in my face too, with no option to hide sports content. Hell, even if you had a sport you loved, that doesn’t mean you love whatever sport that streaming service has, yet it gets top billing on my screen for some reason.
Arg, I’ve been forced to a new solution.
Looks much improved from the last time I looked at Plasma Bigscreen. Probably going to struggle to get any Streaming services support, but it might make a great base for something like Bazite to not be locked to Steam Big Picture mode for TVs.
Google has Google TV. It’s rancid with ads too. Basically the top half of the home screen is ad space, with more sponsored content recommendations below. There for a while it was running fried chicken video ads on that top half. That’s when I decided to replace my ChromeCast with Google TV with an Nvidia Shield that has all the Google crap gutted out of it. Not exactly perfect, but so much better.
Unfortunately, digital rights restrictions prevent an open source option from taking off. None of the streaming services want to allow their content onto a platform they can’t easily manipulate.
You know what made a good Linux Tablet? The Microsoft Surface Gos. I got a few second hand from work and they were nice at the time. A little light on RAM by modern standards, but size and shape was good, and Linux ran remarkably well on them.
Most states already have yearly vehicle inspections. It wouldn’t be hard to include mileage metering in that. It wouldn’t surprise me if it already does. I have to get my car inspected before I pay my vehicle tax anyways, so it isn’t a complicated addition.
Yeah, I got the “This isn’t free anymore” email a few years ago about my GSuite account. I switched to Proton, then they followed up with the “Well, if you aren’t using it for business you can keep it”. Too late Google. I’m happy with the move. Thankfully my primary Google account on my phone wasn’t that GSuite account, so I didn’t have to worry about Play Store or YouTube.
I also switched from Google Photos to Immich because Google was deciding I was using too much space and wanted me to pay a subscription, despite them offering the same amount of free space for over a decade as storage prices have plummeted. I guess the value of mining my data has bottomed out and now they want my cash and data. Well, now they get neither.
Giving everyone an office is too costly.
I’ve got an idea, since cubicle went so well, lets shorten the walls to half walls.
Since half wall cubicles went so well, lets take the walls down complete.
Since the fully open design worked so well, lets squish all the desks together as closely as possible.
Since bench desking worked so well, lets take away personal desks all together and go to a hot desking system.
Since hot desking went so well, lets replace the desks with side tables, and benches with empty cat littler buckets.
Excerpt from “Leadership’s Guide to Call Centers”
Outgoing traffic would be a random port. Incoming would be blocked by default on all routers. Chances are, if the intel lights out management stuff was phoning home, it would do it on port 443 like the majority of data these days. The ports mentioned above are for unsolicited incoming packets, and that would be blocked at the route level for anything outside your local network.
The grocery store I worked for, over 20 years ago, did something similar, with similar results. All it did was incentivize locking and unlocking the register as optimally as possible. They also tracked how often and when in the transaction you scanned the customer’s loyalty card. It was to the point that basically cashiers who wanted to optimize their numbers wouldn’t unlock the register until the customer had their loyalty card in hand.
This is the same grocery store chain that almost failed completely due to a impossible sales requirements in their meat department leading to redating meat and bleaching chicken to increase its shelf life. The company claims they never asked any of their meat departments to do anything like that, they just set impossible standards and held people accountable unless they were able to find a way to cheat.
As long as those foreign agents aren’t from Israel or rich.