What a great read! I have been playing with DLNA equipment lately and have found that, while extremely niche, is still alive and quite flexible for the few of us who like to curate local copies of our own music.
I do sometimes pirate music, but I have found that buying used CDs at thrift-shops and at Discogs is cheap (and much more fun!) and lets me rip to FLAC with my own preferences.
Jami has improved alot the last few years, and now I do also use it for my business SIP account. I will test out the new conferencing features with family soon, Zoom and Skype has never worked well for us.
Microsoft really screwed up not taking advantage of its Skype acquisition and furthering the technology that Skype had a large and early lead at. In my opinion, MS Teams is in many ways comparably worse, not that Skype was ever a technological darling. Regardless, on my Mac laptop, Teams is incredibly slow, difficult to use, and has all sorts of challenges with screen share. Might be my setup, but I simply don't have those issues with other conferencing apps.
Teams is a usability disaster. I have to restart it a couple of times a day because it will not show the people list when i press the chat button. Aparently i shall not use a laptop screen to access Teams.
Well I use it daily and I can't even scroll up through chat history without it getting totally janky. The search basically doesn't work, I routinely have to restart it and often text shortcuts (like Ctrl+A to select all) just stop working completely.
It's not stable at all. Audio calls are generally okay, but often screen sharing just doesn't seem to come through either.
Yes, very productive. My favourite is when i'm in a meeting and somebody is sharing his screen. MS thought is a good idea to throw a toolbar at the top of the screen and some meeting participants icons (big) on the right. This eats around 33% of screen space (i'm being generous here). To be able to see something i need to go in the menu and select full screen. This will make some space on top. Now i need also to go in the menu and select focus and now i have an image which is approx 85% of the screen. The issue is that sometimes the lower part of this image is cropped with no possibility to scroll (scrollbars are so last centuury). Of course i can scale the image till it fits the screen (ehich will scale also the programm) but then it is not readable anymore.
I guess some things are just hard.
I’m convinced that a lot of the problems with Teams is your installation and the servers behind the system.
Teams was widely used at Whole Foods when I was there (I left in August of 2021), and that’s not a small company. And it worked very well. Better than any other chat/video conferencing solution I had seen to that date.
Now that I’m working at AWS, I’ve used Slack more extensively, and I’m still not convinced that it’s a better chat client. Maybe. Maybe not.
Internally, Amazon and AWS primarily use Chime for videoconferencing, and it’s getting better. I think Teams is still a lot better in that role, but Chime is catching up.
I have hated on Microsoft since at least 1984, if not before. And I dearly loved the early days of Skype. But even I must grudgingly admit that Teams is not a horribly bad solution in these spaces. Less bad than most others I’ve seen.
Disclaimer: I speak only for myself and my own personal experiences, not for my employer or any previous employer.
Have they fixed the problem where if you have only a few participants, and one is on a connection that is I a separate region from the others, that participant will show the symptoms of the queue they are on being stuffed instead of flushed, and e.g have audio and video freezes that never catch up, and not be able to see screen shares even when video is off?
This was an issue for much of last year. In larger calls this didn't happen, but it made teams a painful waste of time and energy for actual team communication, rather than big announcements. Hangouts/meet and zoom both work fine in the situations I'm thinking of.
Special interest groups (like MADD) is almost extremist in their single-mindedness, pursuing utopic ideas without any regard for existing laws concerning privacy and personal freedoms.
Here in Norway, we have had the same problem with the anti-drug lobby, where police, schools and other government agencies have gotten away with obvious injustices for decades, in the name of the utopia that is a "drug free society". Only now is people and the press waking up to the fact that so much of what has been going on in the service of "the greater good", actually has been illegal and caused a lot of harm and suffering.
It’s really unfortunate because MADD has otherwise produced good-for-the-country-and-its-citizens results, but then they go and do shit like this and make it so so hard to support them.
Are you sure about that? When I was a child I was prescribed Adderall for ADHD and I have been on the medication ever since. When I was 25 years old I was picking up my nephew from my sisters house and bringing him to my parents house. I had my prescription sitting in the cup holder. I drove through a DWI checkpoint and long story short I was charged with a felony DWAI for driving under the influence of Adderall.
There was no accusation that I was abusing the prescription. There was no accusation that I was no legally allowed to have the prescription. The simple fact that I was driving on Adderall, the state claimed, was impaired driving. It became felonious because my young nephew was in the car.
I lawyered up and spent 30k fighting the case but the DAs office had a “no plea” policy whereby they refuse to plea bargain any DWIs. So my only option was take it to trial ( and if you lose, spent 5 years in state prison ) or plea guilty to a felony and do probation.
Everything I just wrote to you is 100% true and stated exactly how it happened. Does that seem fair to you?
The MADD lobby has gone way too far to criminalize non criminal behavior. Thankfully employers have empathized with me and not rescinded any job offers due to the conviction, but it’s a hard pill to swallow. When I went to court I was seeing burglars, robbers, etc have their charges dropped to misdemeanors but that wasn’t an option for me. Additionally, the laws are written such that DWI cannot be sealed or expunged. I’m so bitter that I can’t even empathize with those mothers anymore. There have been times where I’m so upset about the situation and feel so wronged by the process that I actually am happy that they lost a child… as terrible as it is to say, but I have to be honest. I’m glad they’re hurting because I’m hurt
If more people who got wronged like you did bought bulldozers fewer people would get wronged like you did. When there is no repercussions to the system (other than positive ones where you input money) the system has no reason to stop.
Once these organizations achieve "good enough to satisfy the overwhelming majority of regular people" results regular people have no reason to care further and the interest groups become staffed by extremists and promote extremism because those are the only people with desire to push further and the only people throwing money at the organization.
The example with Bill Gates at the bottom is wild! The "teardrop" under one of his eyes makes it slightly gangster, and the smooth face and awkward smile reminds me of a much younger Bill. Fascinating.
Flarum is a built on PHP / Laravel and is easy to host even on shared hosting providers. It looks and behaves much like Discourse, but less resource intensive in my experience.
Mastodon was hard to "sell" to my peers when I tried to explain how it works. Recently I changed my approach by not explaining all the great technical features related to federation, and instead focused on the fact that it is ad-free, do not use an algorithm (feed is chronological) and is community run. Mastodon is what Twitter once was, before it got ruined by ads and algorithms.
A friend who is an artist was frustrated with the experience on Instagram, and finally signed up on an art-related community in the fediverse, and found it to be a breath of fresh air, with more meaningfull interactions, not just likes.
I have started installing Fedora on computers I set up for my family, and it has been great! Everything works out of the box and every app is avaliable in the app store thanks to Flatpaks. Skype is just a click away, which used to require adding extra repos from Microsoft.
My father, who barely knows how to operate a computer, has been using it for years without the need for support. No forced updates/reboots. I only run a system upgrade every year or so, which also is a one button operation whitout any problems. It is a super stable experience for him as a user and me as an admin.
I tried PopOS for my SO, but it was to nerdy and the GNOME experience was to tweaked. I then went for Fedora and she likes it much better, comming from mac-land.
> My father, who barely knows how to operate a computer, has been using it for years without the need for support.
How's this working with regard to discoverability? Asking out of general curiosity; I haven't supported anybody else with a Linux desktop in years, and I'm fine with Gnome for my own workflow and habits, but I've always wondered if the lack of always-visible app launchers or an obvious menu in stock Gnome wouldn't be an issue for those who don't already know what and where to look.
> No forced updates/reboots. I only run a system upgrade every year or so, which also is a one button operation whitout any problems.
If these are the only updates run on that computer, wouldn't that leave e.g. browsers unpatched for quite long periods of time?
> How's this working with regard to discoverability?
He quickly learned to use the super key or the upper left corner to go to the overview. He mainly uses the browser and the email app anyway so he does not multitask that much.
> If these are the only updates run on that computer, wouldn't that leave e.g. browsers unpatched for quite long periods of time?
Fedora has an option to auto-update apps on reboot (not sure if it is default or not). He does not reboot often, but it happens often enough that it stays reasonably up to date. The updates are seamless and not forced, so he never experience any interuptions.
I have little experience with OpenBSD, but this webzine reveals a playful community that have piqued my interest. A great way to mark important releases :)
I do sometimes pirate music, but I have found that buying used CDs at thrift-shops and at Discogs is cheap (and much more fun!) and lets me rip to FLAC with my own preferences.