If you have the money and want simplicity, reliability, and interoperability, go for a Mac. Just clench your sphincter and maximize the RAM; min. 32Gb ought to be minimally appropriate for a 7-8yr lifespan of basic duties. And FFS, go for what your current data uses up ×2.5 or 1Tb, whichever is larger (vital performance reasons in that). Don’t get the smallest storage unless third-party upgrade options exist like for the Mac Mini M4. And remember: all RAM and a lot of storage is integrated these days, which is why you should always max it out; there is no upgrade path except wholesale replacement of the machine. CPU is largely immaterial unless you are doing truly heavy lifting like video editing or AI, so that can often be the lowest choice.

If you want freedom and truly unconstrained system, some form of Linux/BSD on a Framework system is the way to go. Or if a desktop, hand-assemble it yourself.

If you are going to stick with Windows, go for a business-class Dell. Trust me, it’ll be almost as $$$$ painful as a Mac, but these little f**kers are built to last. At least you can upgrade the RAM and on-board storage, although I honestly recommend not going under 32Gb for anything other than basic tasks. It’ll be a lot more zippy with 32Gb even if you spend the first week tearing all the AI and built-in spyware out of Windows.

You are correct, however they were malicious in nature and loaded on every boot from the UEFI/BIOS. They required Windows and auto-terminated the install if they already existed.

Goldfish memories by most muggles and normies.

Plus the latest shiny and feature FOMO.

And then you have procurement who are told to get the most at the least cost, allowing state-owned companies to undercut most competition. Without clearly-specified guidelines that exclude dangerous tech, most rank-and-file salarymen will be told by Dilbert bosses to order the hardware or look for a different job.

Yes, but if you are running Windows on them, do they still inject Chinese state-sponsored malware into Windows on every boot from UEFI/BIOS storage?

They were caught doing this on several occasions, to the point where Lenovo products are forbidden across significant swaths of the U.S. government and military.

And even if the Core Storage held everything straight out of the gate, you could do initial storage configured via RAID-10 using only 28× 30Tb drives.

In Canadian Pesos, that’s $34,000 before taxes for those drives. If the operating costs were in USD, that’s only 5 months of operating costs. Get a pair of used 4U 16-bay server boxes, and almost anything built within the last decade will work well as a SAN/NAS, especially if you use a specialized FOSS NAS OS.

A good strategy for migrating to BitTorrent would be to migrate the high value content first, so that bugs and failures ooze out of the woodwork as rapidly as possible. This would also allow you to build the NAS/SAN data storage boxes over time, one at a time, instead of all at once. And you can start with repurposed desktops as the seedbox itself and upgrade to more RAM once the BitTorrent client grows beyond the box’s initial resources. This stepwise growth would also give you the opportunity to work out any kinks and gotchas that you failed to anticipate.

For example, the BitTorrent client you choose to run on the seedbox itself will be a critical importance. I have found, through my own use of multiple clients, that by far the most aggressive BitTorrent client I have ever come across has been BiglyBT. I am able to achieve a ratio in weeks and sometimes even days the most other clients require years or even decades to achieve. For something seeding out, there is literally nothing better.

As an example: when MyAnonamouse banned BiglyBT, I tried an experiment, downloading the same movie file with several different torrent clients. After a full year of seeding, the runner-up was qBittorrent, with a ratio of 0.2. BiglyBT? A ratio of 870.

Same file, same super-seeding, but a massive difference between BiglyBT and pretty much anything else out there.

It’s a shame that so many closed trackers ban BiglyBT. It is absolutely an overall benefit to the ecosystem.

…What is Myrient?

googles name

390Tb of history

…Oh. Oh, no. This loss would be painful.

I mean, not a gamer, but daaaaaamn.

A structured BitTorrent system could keep most high-demand files offline after initial seeding, especially if seeding rules like the ones MyAnonamouse uses were implemented. And the low-demand ones could remain online via a seedbox from anywhere, even from the operator’s basement.

Honestly, while I don’t have funds to take over normal operations or even provide seedbox space, I can see many paths out of this problem.

ANYTHING cloud-connected - your doorbell, your security system, even all f**king post-2006 vehicles, regardless of manufacturer - are suspect.

And are highly likely to be actually spying on you.

I’ve been working with computers since 1982, on the Internet since 1988, on the Web since 1992, and in the IT industry since 1997. The proportion of average people who don’t realize how much of their stuff is exposing them, and by how much, is frankly astounding. It’s almost 100% of normies who are woefully ignorant. Even IT people who have no clue is in the majority.

And the security on this stuff that tracks you tends to be - except in rare circumstances - absolute dogshite. Sometimes it comes without any security at all, such as all devices sold having admin creds baked in, or all remote-access credentials being identical and non-user-editable.

This is why almost all of my stuff is hardlined, I have no IoT devices at all, and the wifi for my family’s devices is physically separate from everything else.

Don’t get me wrong, as IT for almost three decades I love all the new shinies. But I’m not blind, and I’m not stupid.

Would love to know when the iOS app is coming out.

Businesses want AI because it solves what they perceive as a problem: how to obtain labour without having to pay said labour.

Remember: AI is meant for wealth to access labour without cost, not for labour to access wealth. It’s a golden gate meant to permanently separate the wealthy from what used to be the working class.

I like RustDesk. If you’re worried about connectivity, you can even run your own relay server.

You stopped a bit short on your delete spree I guess.

No, that was just the first two steps. Just on the “rip shit out” category, I typically churn through at least three separate tools, usually in this order:

• Win10Privacy
• Win11Debloat
• Winslop

I mean, sure, Windows can take as little as a half hour to “install”. But on a personal rig (which also includes my own workflow software and personal data shoehorned back into place), I take another 24-48 hours to gleefully beat it into submission and install secondary programs that bypass the warts it has acquired over the years.

And as a benchmark, XP needed only about 6-8hrs of extra work to reach the same threshold of data migration, workflow software, and improved usability (I was an NT fanboy, IMO the primary improvement of XP over 2000 was the start menu).

If we add up the AI push, the spyware/telemetry explosion, the recent attempts to force the use of a Microsoft Account as the default login, and the massive bloating and instability of Windows in general, it’s slowly becoming time for even non-technical, everyday users to move to Linux.

I just rebuilt my Win 11 Pro Workstation setup (yes, it is the version for stupidly high core and thread counts), and one of the first things I did was to violently eviscerate anything AI in the system. Right after gleefully ripping out all the telemetry and spyware.

And this is why I would never own a vehicle made after 2006.

Dammit. I’ve had an LG plasma for the last 15, and it looks like I’ll have to get that Sony well before I’m ready for it.

The objective is not to win. Winning against America’s imperial might is impossible.

The objective is to make them bleed as much as possible. To make victory as phyrric and as painful for them as possible. And when going up against the most expensive war plane in human history, this means choosing the aircraft that can get as technologically close as possible with as many units as possible on a per-dollar-spent basis.

We can make them bleed much more with 420 fully-functional Gripens than we can with 88 partially-functional F-35s that can be remotely shut down against our will.

We can already figure much of that out from the technological specifications of the F-35. Simply looking at the capabilities can give us strong clues on how to neuter or at least limit the inherent F-35 advantages from a tech standpoint.

The rest of that comes down to how the pilot behaves, and what tactics they have been trained in. And this is where differences in training, corps attitudes, and even pilot personalities can dramatically affect performance.

And while I fully agree with you in regards to pilot training, our problem is that a Canadian fighter pilot is likely to behave (tactic chain, decision trees, emotional responses, etc.) considerably differently than an American fighter pilot. As such, while we need to train our pilots in Gripen jets against F-35 jets in combat-like scenarios, we need to do so against American pilots, not Canadian ones.

And that’s the tough part - how do we get the American administration to willingly play along with activities that are obviously meant to train our pilots to fight theirs, and gain a consistent toehold against pilots in F-35s even if it means losing a few Gripens for every one of their F-35s. It needs to be done with a great deal of subtlety and subterfuge.

Canada needs to put the Gripen factory on an accelerated track, cancel the entire F-35 order, and move ahead with an immediate purchase of min. 50 Gripens using the F-35 funds to cover the gap and train up pilots until Gripens start rolling out of the factory.

Canada’s complete F-35 promise will cost the country $28,000,000,000 ($28B) with billions more needed to bring them up to full operational efficiency, and yet the Gripen costs only $65,000,000 ($65M) per aircraft, allowing us to buy 430 fully-functional Gripen jets instead of 88 partially functional F-35 jets.

Remember: tech superiority does not win battles. Sheer numbers do. WWII demonstrated this overwhelmingly on many different fronts, with many different technologies.

As just one example, the Germans had Tiger tanks that could face off against 6-8 Shermans at a time and win with barely a scratch on their hull, but when 10, 20, or even more came roaring over the hilltop for every Tiger that was fielded, their tech superiority ended being absolutely useless. They got overrun and overwhelmed with sheer numbers.

The F35 can be rendered equally as useless with enough Gripens in the air.

And the Gripens don’t come with a remote kill switch like the F-35 does.

Why… why would hard drives be going up in price?? AI does not use spinning platters of rust, like, at all.

For many places, it’s operational inertia. If you’ve had a hosting account at the same place since 1998, you’re bound to still have username/password access to services like FTP even though other (and better) options exist.

And then there is the issue of sole control. Many greybeards like myself still run traditional username/password auth on services because,

1. We have whitelisted our IP address, and if dynamic, keep that whitelist updated
2. That outside of said whitelisting, the service is a quasi-honeypot meant to protect the machine as a whole. Any connection made from outside the address space of my ISP, by anyone else, is by default considered malicious, and is banned instantly as a precaution. They don’t even get the opportunity to attempt a login; merely connecting to said service is sufficient evidence of hostile intent.

So while my setup is not ideal, it is ideal for myself. if I had anyone else as co-admin, or even clients, things would get stupidly complicated very quickly. But since it’s just me…

…The fuck?

Is Tim Sweeney legitimately outing himself as a pedophile? Does the Parasite Class really feel so comfortable and immune from consequences that they can openly advocate for pedophilia?