Problem is that if you’re looking for FOSS software outside of the absolute most mainstream use cases, that type of software is the only available option. GIMP and Inkscape have been mentioned but throw FreeCAD into the ring as well. Shotcut and Kdenlive are passable, but don’t quite measure up to the commercial alternatives.

My particular hobby horse is CFD code. OpenFOAM is fantastic from a technical standpoint, but until recently, to actually use it you either had to buy a commercial front-end, or literally write C++ header files to set up your cases. There’s a heroic Korean developer who’s put together a basic but very functional front-end GUI in the last year to change that, but it only covers relatively straightforward cases at the moment.

My first attempt to switch to Linux for my primary desktop was in 2007, and ended when my attempt to run WoW via WINE mostly worked, but had a weird an completely unfixable audio delay.

Proton (and Valve’s efforts on SteamOS and the Steam Deck more generally) have been an absolute godsend for Linux as a usable daily-driver.

I’m Commander Shepard, and this is my favorite issue of Fornax on the Citadel!

Hard to say. Real estate has been weird in China for years since it’s one of the few investment vehicles available to the masses. A collapse domestically could even push those with the ability to do so to move more of their money into overseas real estate, which could have the opposite effect. Regardless, it’s a bad sign for the Chinese economy generally, especially given that Evergrande is only the first of what’s likely to be a wave of real estate industry bankruptcies.

The server I set up for my friends is named “Portable Creatures: Exhalation of the Wilderness” for a reason.

USB-A is only rated for 1,500 mating cycles, whereas USB-C is supposed to last for 10,000… Though in reality the ports on my phones seem to start getting too loose to hold the jack in at around 1,000 cycles. Still, it’s not a totally unreasonable standard, and any device that hasn’t been designed to be thrown away should have ports broken out onto replaceable subassemblies – as is the case with many business-class laptops, for instance – so replacing a failed USB-PD port shouldn’t be too much trouble.

I installed KDE Neon on Friday evening and things were going great, everything was testing well, and Saturday game night with the gang went flawlessly, but this morning the VMWare Horizon Linux client spontaneously decided that it didn’t want to accept mouse input anymore, so after ten minutes of troubleshooting I gave up and booted back into Windows so that I can be productive today.

A battle lost, but the war is not over yet.

Worth noting that Outlook the Office suite component, and Outlook, the freebie mail client that comes with Windows, are not the same thing. They’re just named the same because yadda yadda executives yadda yadda name recognition yadda yadda brand synergy.

Unless your employer is one of the very few that doesn’t provide Office to its users, this isn’t about the version you are required to use.

"We’re not colluding with our competitors to fix prices on rental units, we all use a third party service to collude for us" is such a bullshit legal excuse that I’m shocked they even floated it.

My 750sf circa-1960 starter home in a turn-of-century streetcar suburb sits on a 7,500sf lot, and that’s relatively small for the area. You’d have to be talking about urban rowhouses as seen in East Coast cities to approach anything like a 2500sf lot size for a single family home.

You can divide 2400 square feet into an acre 18 times, but yeah… like, in most metros, even the kind of small detached single-family home you’d find in a inner-ring suburb is going to sit on a 5,000-8,000 square foot lot. Typical suburban lot sizes are more like a 1/4 acre.

This isn’t to say that a McMansion on a quarter acre of land is a good thing, but just as a point of reference, if you’re imagining a neighborhood of 15 to 20 homes and somebody tells you “that’s about an acre” you’re going to be off by an order of magnitude.

I landed my last two jobs (and in that timeframe another four offers and probably a dozen recruitment pitches I seriously entertained to some degree or other) via LinkedIn, either via contact with colleagues or messages from recruiters. Granted that I’m in a niche specialty of a relatively small profession, but for me LinkedIn has been the most reliable source of job offers for at least a decade. Many of the “better” options really only serve fields like the tech industry, or are so dominated by listings for tech jobs that have appropriated my industry’s professional titles that it’s impossible to sort any signal from the noise.

I don’t know about manufacturing environments but I deal with laboratories a lot, and I’m a bit baffled at how quickly lab operators have jumped on battery-operated wifi sensors for lab monitoring systems. I have like three room sensors attached to my EcoBee thermostat at home and I can barely be assed to change the batteries in those things, I cannot imagine dealing with batteries and connectivity troubleshooting for a building full of sensors whose reliable operation is often critical for regulatory compliance. Seems like the perfect application for PoE systems, to me

There have been studies (this one, for example) that suggest the total radioactivity-related health impacts from coal power exceed that of nuclear power by an order of magnitude. That’s not all pollution-related deaths for coal – just those associated with radon exposure inside of mines, and radioactive materials embedded in coal going out into the environment. For all the fear-mongering about nuclear, it’s hard to find a less dangerous source of base load generation using present-day technologies. Maybe once grid-scale batteries are available at scale, they could replace nuke plants, but that’s a solution ten years too late for an environmental problem we have to fix right now.

Farmers are quick to jump on an opportunity to refine their current processes in ways that reduce their inputs and increase their yields, especially when it only costs them a few grand in capital investment (drones for surveying and spot treatment) or is hilariously over-subsidized by the government (bioethanol). Wholesale change from the literal ground up, not so much, and perhaps understandably so – farmers have massive, often generational investment in infrastructure and equipment for farming in specific ways and with specific crops, operate on narrow margins, and don’t have much available liquidity to change things up on a whim. For that reason, major innovations in agriculture don’t usually come from farmers; instead they usually come from university research.

The last set of NAS drives I bought for my home server were ~$120 for 8TB, and while random access may not quite measure up, I’d put them up against your $50 Inland white-label drive for sustained R/W any day of the week, especially once the SSD’s write cache is saturated. That’s not even comparing like-for-like – consumer hard drives using SMR are quite a bit cheaper than the NAS drives I bought, and enterprise-grade Flash storage costs 2-4 times as much as low-end consumer flash.

There’s absolutely still a case to be made for mechanical drives in near-line storage, and that’s not likely to change for quite a few years yet.

On the other hand, Fraunhofer is obnoxious enough about licensing and enforcement that companies like Google invested similar money and effort into developing open-source codecs just to avoid dealing with them.

Public universities in the United States haven’t been able to subsist primarily on public funds since at least the Great Recession, and in many cases long before that. To the extent that they are able to, they’ve tried to bridge the gap between state funds and budgetary needs by attracting more and higher paying students, but that has lead in turn to a startlingly-expensive arms race between institutions trying to build the cushiest student amenities and hiring vast administrative bureaucracies professing their expertise at wooing and retaining high value (read: out-of-state and international) students… all of which comes at a cost to the student body, in the form of crushing student debt, which paradoxically depresses enrollment – for many institutions, tuition has soared past the pain point for new high school graduates and their families.

Enter the wealthy donor. Likely they’re a successful alumnus or local businessperson, who has more money than they can reasonably spend on their own. They want a legacy now – to have their name live on for decades or centuries after they’re gone. One easy way to do that is to get their name plastered onto the side of a landmark building at their favorite university, so they approach the administration with an offer of some millions of dollars, on the condition that it be used to build a new facility for their college or program of choice, and that it be named after them. This gets the school out of a bind, since they have massive backlogs of deferred maintenance they can’t afford to tackle, and a fresh new building for one program means they can play musical chairs with the others until they’ve vacated their most decrepit building and can just tear it down rather than deal with its problems.

However, as you’ve guessed, this gives donors incredible power over the universities. I know of one donor who enabled his pet dean to act like a spoiled child and run roughshod over the procurement process, kitting his new building out with useless bells and whistles that took budget away from things that could have actually helped students. In another case, a department chair’s actual job became to dote upon an elderly widow of a real estate baron, in order to keep the donations flowing to the department’s endowment. Not to mention the distorting effects that what donors choose to give money to have on both the programs that get attention, and the priorities of universities. There was a real glut of new business schools for a while, as an example, and all of them were really excited about the novel ways their MBAs could financialize things that didn’t need to be financialized. The late Charlie Munger infamously had UCSB over a barrel with his offer to fix their student housing situation, but only if he was allowed to make the design into a dystopian hell cube.. Not to mention all the donors who will only give money for sports facilities, nevermind what the academic needs are.

In short, the lack of sufficient state funds for the last 15-20 years has drastically worsened higher education in the US for everyone, and opened the door for millionaires and billionaires to exert undue influence on public institutions.

Before Win95/NT, Windows was basically just a skin on top of DOS, and DOS had never been designed with multitasking in mind. That meant that (with some exceptions, like 8-bit DOS programs running in virtual 8086 mode on a 386) for multiple programs to play nice with each other within the GUI, they had to “cooperatively multitask,” that is, they had to be programmed to share a common memory address space, and to yield back control of the processor to Windows periodically, so that the other open programs could get some execution cycles in before they had to yield in turn. As you can imagine, this didn’t work particularly well in practice, with software commonly forgetting to yield back to the task scheduler and pooping all over shared memory on a regular basis. Windows 95 was a quantum leap forward, with preemptive multitasking and independent address space for each running process.

It’s Russia, shady AF companies are the only kind they have. If you’re not owned by the Russian Mafia and/or a sociopathic silovik, it’s only a matter of time until you’re sold out or the victim of a hostile takeover.