Nonsense! One of our computers at work running an essential in-house software is somewhere around that age. Windows 2000 is a perfectly fine operating system!
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It was the last Windows I enjoyed usingā¦
I found the CD drive and ripped everything. Now I need to sort out copying other stuff over from my external drive.
Need to be selective as a) thereās not enough space on my laptop, b) thereās probably some absolute rubbish in my collection.
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Twitch. I had the reverse problem a while ago. My employer produces software whose testing is quite computationally intensive. Producing it for Android was a problem: conventional Android phones could not run their fastest cores for long enough without the battery draining and the device crashing.
I found some devices intended for development work. Theyāre made by Qualcomm, and sold through electronics distributors, who behave very differently from computer distributors. One UK-based distributor quoted fifty (50) weeks delivery. We eventually managed to buy them from a Canadian distributor, although they were very inefficient.
But the Android pre-installed on them had a fatal defect, in that it only let us use a quarter of the storage, which was Not Enough. There was an updated Android with an installer on the distributorās website, and that was easy to download. But the installer, written by the distributorās technical staff, didnāt work, and the support people claimed it worked for them, and were of no more help.
I never did find out why the installer for Windows didnāt work. After a day of banging my head against the Linux installer, I tried it in a root shell, and it worked perfectly. There was no documentation of the need for root, no warnings, nothing. I concluded the technical staff must do all their work as root.
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Iāve had worryingly similar experiences with adb - infinite hangs run as a user, works instantly as root. If you donāt have the permissions, you tell me.
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Thank you for that information @yashima !
Iāve added this to my laptop configuration scriptā¦
# Disable GenerativeAI and other undesirables in Firefox.
if [ ! -f /etc/firefox/policies/policies.json ]; then
sudo mkdir -p /etc/firefox/policies
sudo chown root:root /etc/firefox/policies
sudo chmod 755 /etc/firefox/policies
printf %s\\n '{}' | sudo tee /etc/firefox/policies/policies.json >/dev/null
sudo chmod 644 /etc/firefox/policies/policies.json
fi
if [ ! -f /etc/firefox/policies/policies.json.original ]; then
sudo cp /etc/firefox/policies/policies.json \
/etc/firefox/policies/policies.json.original
fi
# Merge the settings from:
# https://github.com/corbindavenport/just-the-browser/blob/main/firefox/policies.json
# See also:
# https://github.com/corbindavenport/just-the-browser/tree/main/firefox
# https://justthebrowser.com/
sudo cp /etc/firefox/policies/policies.json \
/etc/firefox/policies/policies.json.backup \
&& jq </etc/firefox/policies/policies.json.backup \
'.policies.DisableFirefoxStudies |= true
| .policies.DisableTelemetry |= true
| .policies.DontCheckDefaultBrowser |= true
| .policies.FirefoxHome.SponsoredStories |= false
| .policies.FirefoxHome.SponsoredTopSites |= false
| .policies.FirefoxHome.Stories |= false
| .policies.GenerativeAI.Enabled |= false
| .policies.SearchEngines.Remove |= "Perplexity"' \
| sudo tee /etc/firefox/policies/policies.json >/dev/null
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Me again.
Today, again via my partner diligently reading heise, I found out that the launcher I had been using on android to replace the stock launcher of my phone has after acquisition by a new owner turned into a privacy nightmare. I should have seen it coming, having read some news about it beforeā¦ so Nova launcher was abruptly removed from my phone today. After many many yearsā¦
Now I got kind of used to some of its featuresā¦ but the only thing I really miss is the customizable search barā¦ because the default search widget is dumb. Does anyone else have a good replacement? Preferably open source? I am so sick of being tracked ā¦
I tried the open source KISS launcher but I am not sure I can get used to that much simplicity. I have a ton of apps on my phone that I regularly launch via simple press on the app icon on my home screen and there is not a lot of space for that kind of stuff with the KISS launcher.
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My main browser on Android is duckduckgo browser (com.duckduckgo.mobile.android). It does their ai thing by default, but you can turn it off and it sticks. And it offers a 5Ć1 search bar widget.
Itās not really a browser, more a set of sensible defaults applied to the built in browser, but I have found it good. Also comes with an app firewall.
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duckduckgo is my main browser on android where i keep tabs for forums open. i generally like their search well enough and have been using it for years. but it does not autoremove tabs i opened from searches like firefox klar does or the startpage browser and with nova launcher i had the duckduckgo search configured to use my default browser which is firefox klar (normal android firefox has too much baggage). with the default stock search box i am lucky i can use a search engine other than google at all (their own documentation states this only works in Europe)
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A consequence of Last game you bought? - #5977 by Phil is that I installed an app on my phone (via Aurora Store), and had some realisations.
- This app needs internet access (which I knew in advance).
- When I installed it there was no talk of internet access.
- When I ask my phone which permissions it uses, the only thing it lists is permission to use the camera (enabled) and access to storage (disabled).
- When I tested the app, it talked to the server without asking me for any access.
All of which led me to learn that unrestricted network usage is not considered to be a special permission by Android. It turns out that thereās a menu option tucked away in the App Permissions UI to actually show you the permissions that an app is using. But you canāt disable anything that wasnāt in the initial list.
I meanā¦ what?!
I can comprehend internet access being allowed by default because so many apps are going to want that, but how is internet access not a permission you can switch off?!
Anyhow, I found https://netguard.me/ which is a firewall written by the author of https://email.faircode.eu/ (which is the email client I have on my phone), so Iāve installed that (via F-Droid), told it to block networking by default, and then whitelisted the small handful of apps I have that should ever require network access (and mostly using the setting which says that they can do it only when the screen is on).
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You are using an operating system made by an advertising company. Anything that conflicts with the goal of selling you to as many advertisers as possible is not acceptable.
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That they never figured out another business model is the tragedy of todayās internet. Or maybe it is that they didnt see this Orwellian dystopia comingā¦ because at the time they might have considered it going against their values and truly tried something else. Because it is the company that said they didnāt want to be evil. Or maybe the cake was always a lie.
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I always thought it telling that the mottto was ādonāt be evilā, instead of ādonāt do evil ā. There is a non-subtle difference between the two. Even before google dropped the slogan, it was very clear they were doing lots of evil things. Now they are full on evil, which includes making their user facing products worse, going to great effort to destroy privacy and choice because it interferes with their core values of āfuck you, hereās some advertising.ā
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FWIW the specific phrase I recall them using is āDo no evil.ā
(I may be wrong, though. I can see both that and āDonāt be evilā mentioned in articles, so I figure some of us just reworded it in our heads.)
1 Like
Oh, darn it, itās no longer obvious from just looking at that issue why Iād posted it.
It looks like the status/need-triage label was removed | Hacker News has an item, but in short someone raised an issue and tagged it as status/need-triage and a bot then removed the label and replied with āHi <name of person>, thank you for your interest in helping triage issues! The status/need-triage label is reserved for project maintainers to apply. This helps us ensure that an issue is ready and properly vetted for community contributionā¦ā
Another bot (or maybe the same one) then decided that the issue required triage and added the status/need-triage, and at this point it went into a loop of removing the label (with the message āHi <name of bot>, thank you for your interest in helping triage issues! The status/need-triage label is reserved for project maintainers to apply. This helps us ensure that an issue is ready and properly vetted for community contributionā¦ā) ā and then adding it back again.
At the point I saw it the loop had been killed, but not before ping-ponging the status with the same stock reply several thousand times.
The last post in the issue that I saw was from a human, and read:
āHi, this is status/need-triage; have there been any messages for me?ā
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I also heard a neat trick where if the tests are failing your changes, you can always turn off those tests and all the reds will disappear!
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Making someone wear the āI broke the buildā hat always seemed like bullying, butā¦
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The MS docs definitely had a proper Git Flow diagram at some point.
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