Again, it’s “Don’t quote the troll”. Some of us learned this in Usenet in the 1990s.

Saying “This is bullshit” or “You’re weird” without engaging with their ideas stops the contagion from spreading.

It is, though. Studies in disinformation have proven this. This is why right-wing bullshitters are so eager to engage in debate: just getting the chance to show up and be refuted in a legitmate setting, like a major newspaper, gives them an audience for the ideas and credibility, that their position is one worthy of refute.

This is how we got the alt-right in 2015: by taking neo-Nazis seriously.

This is what the media doesn’t understand, and why fact-checkers are getting–correctly–rolled on social media. Every time you bring up one of these lies, even to fact check it–especially to fact-check it–you give it credibility.

This is why the Harris/Walz campaign’s tactic of ridicule is working so well. Instead of saying “No, you’re wrong about XXX because YYYY and ZZZZ”, they’re saying “What is wrong with you? You’re weird.” The latter doesn’t give the lie any oxygen.

“Liberal” doesn’t mean what many people think it means.

It doesn’t mean “leftist” or “progressive” or “humane”. There might be some overlap, but these are not the same things, despite conservatives trying to define them as such.

Yes it is.

You might not wish it to be, but fact-checking absolutely does amplify fake news, especially if you give details.

A simple “this story is bullshit” is all that’s needed

And now you, the mainstream media, are amplifying it and giving it oxygen.

It’s like y’all never learned the old Usenet adage: “don’t feed (quote) the trolls”.

Yeah, XP was pretty good.

I was a young sysadmin during this era, I don’t know if I agree with this sentiment. It got tolerable by the time of the last service pack, but it was a security nightmare otherwise and didn’t offer much over Win2k.

That said, I’m not a Windows fan in general, but I’d class the following as the “good” ones:

• NT 3.5 (user-mode GDI FTW!)
• Phone 7.0 (this was probably what I’d call the Practically Perfect version of Windows. WP7 is just so good)
• NT 3.1 gets an honourable mention
• 8 (after WP7, this is the first version of Windows that was pretty much stable on day one. Say what you will about the UI, the core was the best Microsoft has ever one; ditto fir Server 2012)
• 10 (8 but with refinement; I’m cautious putting it here because you can see the genesis of the decisions that gave us 11)
• Vista (a lot of what people like about 7 really came from Vista, like the WDDM driver model and the improved security infrastructure; Vista, like NT, came out before hardware was commonly available that could run it)

Anchoring the bottom

• 98 & ME (IE integrated everywhere and the security nightmare it begat deserves a special place in hell)
• 1.0 (you had to be there, but this thing made Atari TOS look sophisticated)
• 95 pre-OSR2 (VxDs, DLLs and a login screen you could bypass with an escape key!)
• NT4 (it wasn’t bad, per se, but I still resent how unstable it was versus 3.5)
• CE and pre-5.0 Mobile (hey, guess what, replacing your battery wipes your device because we didn’t implement persistent storage!)
• 11 (10 without most of the redeeming features, plus an Android launcher for a Start menu. Now with extra spyware!)

A lot of people really like 7 and 2000, but I tend to think of those as polish releases of Vista and NT4. They’re Microsoft eventually fixing their mistakes, after having everyone drag on them for years.

ARM doesn’t specify a standard firmware interface like x86 PCs do.

I mean, they could, but ARM comes from a different era, where interoperability isn’t a requirement and devices are disposable instead of upgradeable.

There no incentive, no IBM PC to be compatible with, not even an Apple, Macintosh, Conmodore Amiga or Atari ST to make peripherals for. ARM devices, even the rPi, are one-and-done.

macOS seems to handle this pretty well, honestly. About the only issue I have is XQuartz and even it’s pretty good.

What’s the issue you’re seeing?

“There but for the grace of god go thee.”

Or, to be less poetic, “don’t get cocky”.

Hacks can happen to anyone. Better lessons to learn is “don’t enable or install what you don’t need” and “keep machines you don’t trust off your local network”

Because Google was so focused and strategic before the pandemic rollseyes.

The issue is Google’s broken governance and incentive system, which gives product owners and executives incentives for new products and actively disincentivizes maintaining and improving existing products…and that was a thing from well before the pandemic hit.

It’s why Google launched three pay systems and had five messaging systems at the same time.

And, finally, this is all because of the strategy set by senior leaders.

• OpenLook
• OpenMotif
• OpenTransport on MacOS
• SCO OpenServer
• HP OpenMail
• HP OpenView

You couldn’t throw a ball without hitting something branded as “Open” in that era.

Does this represent a taxable benefit for Trump’s campaign?

Stable means different things in different contexts.

Debian being stable is like RHEL being stable. You’re not jury talking about “doesn’t crash”, you’re talking about APIS, behaviours, features and such being assured not to change.

That’s not necessarily a good thing for a general purpose desktop, but for an enterprise workstation or server, yes.

So it’s not so much that Debian would replace Fedora, it’s the Debian would replace RHEL or CentOS. For a Fedora equivalent, there’s Ubuntu and the like.

Debian Stable.

It’s always the answer to "what distro do I want to use when I care about stability and support-ability.

You have have my LaserJet 5 when you can pry it from my cold, dead hands.

Do they?

Because their actions imply otherwise.

Coincidentally, that’s what using it is like, too. :)

When you say that the keyboard works: do the brightnesss, mute and volume controls do what they’re supposed to do?

HP laptops–at least business-grade ones–are notorious for sending nonstandard scan codes and requiring custom drivers.

Pirate an old, pre-CC version.

That’s what I do. Admittedly it’s Photoshop 3.0 on a Mac Quadra.

There’s one notice, and it’s in the System Settings app. And it’s a little red dot beside the iCloud section. That’s not really the same league as what Microsoft is doing, or Even Google’s nag to use Chrome across all their Web properties.

You’re right about the first-party apps that you can’t remove, but it’s also not the same as, eg, Edge where those apps are used constantly and your preferences are reset on every update.

On my Mac I set my browser to Firefox in 2018. It’s never reverted to Safari, not once, where Windows really wants me to use Edge and goes so far as to not just reset it periodically, but also direct start menu searches and in-app web links to an ms-edge: url instead of using the http handler.

Apple has problems, but this isn’t one of them.