In Maine having Platner flame out in such spectacular fashion did not help Democrats at all. That said, with a split of 48% to 45%, that leaves 7% either undecided or listing a different candidate. Couple that with a stated error of +/-3.7%, and the poll is putting Jackson with anywhere between 59% and 44% of the vote, if it were held today. The polling average has been pretty stable. And SSRS's poll isn't telling any different of a story. So, maybe this will be the year we are finally rid of Collins's "oh I'm concerned, but not concerned enough to actually vote against Trump".
Michigan is similar. SSRS lists the race as 47% to 44%. This leaves a 9 point gap in Undecided/Other. And a stated error at 4.1%. That's a lot of room for these numbers to swing. Though the polling average has moved a lot more in the past few months. It probably doesn't help that the Democratic Primary took a bit to wrap up. But, a slight lead in a heavily Democratic national environment, with enough undecided voters left to shift the race, isn't the worst place to be.
As excited as I am for this, it'll be a while before I can get back to Valheim. My wife and I finished our last run, defeating The Emerald Flame in Ashlands, a couple months back and we're not ready to deal with the Mistlands and Ashlands again quite yet. We also just enjoy the early game enough that we'd usually rather re-roll to experience the new content than continue an old world.
I'm also going to be curious to see what, if any changes and tweaks happen to the game with it officially released. In our last playthrough, the Mistlands still suffered from issues dealing with enemies which were slightly off-plane. A situation you cannot avoid in Mistalnds. Also, the particle effects and screen shake for magic were way over-done. Casters basically blind everyone else, but the magic is so incredibly invaluable that someone needs to do it, especially in Ashlands. I don't know how you're supposed to deal with the forts without it. Between spawn rates turned up to "yes" and melee weapons which have all the stopping power of a limp dick, the only reliable solution we found was yeeting a couple trolls into the fort with a batch of vines setup to hold the breach.
I'm also curious about support for mods. It makes sense that they didn't want to put time into support during early access, but that's now over. We basically don't play without the Mass Farming mod and the Better Wisps mod. The former is just a tedium reduction mod and the later strikes a nice balance (for us) between keeping the mists and actually being able to find anything in the mists. The hunt for black cores is tedious enough without being able to see any further than my own feet.
somebody posted on Facebook about a specific injustice they heard about and declared they will unfriend anybody who doesn’t care enough to post about it.
Sounds like they are doing you a favor. The world can be a pretty horrible place, and horrible things are happening all the time. You could spend all of your time posting about all of them online and accomplish exactly fuck all. You'd do far more by focusing on the things around you which you can actually affect. Your local community almost certainly has problems which you could help with. Even if it's just showing up at a food bank and helping to serve food to the unhoused. There are concrete things you could be doing to make the world a little less terrible for the people around you.
Posting on FaceBook et. al. is just slacktavism at its worst. You me or anyone else posting something on social media does nothing to change the facts on the ground. Assuming you're in a modern democracy, you do have some power with your vote and the ability to organize and be involved in collective action (e.g. political groups). But, even there the things you post on your personal accounts isn't going to actually do anything.
So ya, I'd tell the person to fuck off with their virtual signaling, slacktavist bullshit. If they really cared that much, they would get off FaceBook and put their time into actual community service and political action. But, they are too lazy to do the hard work, and instead just want to feel good about themselves with their smug, online pronouncements with no substance behind them.
Also, get yourself off FaceBook, the site is nothing but a cesspit of advertisements and assholes shitting all over everything. Case and point, your rant.
Ya, it was fairly big news a couple months ago. MS was apparently dicking around the researcher (NightmareEclipse) who uncovered it and he went nuclear and dropped that one along with a few others in rapid succession.
This is the company which is ultimately behind the buy-out. I won't pass judgment on them yet, but I no one throws around large sacks of money if they don't expect a return on that investment. I also don't blame the SteamDB owner, they did a great thing and made it free. And them having a large sack of money land in their lap is a fitting reward. But, I'm also assuming that enshitification will eventually ensue.
For those estimated to be over-18, the Settlement guarantees no direct benefit to you: no privacy protections, no greater user controls for your own accounts, no dent in Meta’s surveillance capitalism.
This is a big one and of course governments are ignoring it. Because violating privacy is the point of these age gates.
It's the equivalent of chimpanzees and humans. Just because we are a species which uses advanced tools and language doesn't mean that other related species all died out. We're Just very distantly related cousins.
Buy a bit of paracord, make a simple net, toss as appropriate.
Paintball markers are also cheap, reasonably accurate and don't involve yeeting a bullet on a ballistic arc.
This does make me wonder what the legality would be around 3d printing a cover for a Flock camera, maybe even line it with felt/cloth to prevent scratches, and slipping it over a camera?
Color me underwhelmed. It looks like a pretty run of the mill, third person action game with the "Dungeons and Dragons" name tacked on to try and drum up purchases. The dark magic wielding swords-woman is a great starting point, but I wasn't sure where the combat ended and quick time events started. The entire "fight" with the gazer looked like a scripted QTE sequence. The fight with the undead ogre and associated attackers (ghouls, maybe?) looked better. Though the end of that fight seemed to go back to QTE for the "finish him" sequence. Hopefully, I'm wrong and this turns out to be another great D&D game. But, it's mostly just making me think about breaking out Baldur's Gate 3 again.
I've been on several sides of this. As a sysadmin supporting a Windows dominated environment integrating Linux, as a user who wants to use Linux in a Windows dominated environment and in security trying to secure an environment with both Windows and Linux. In short, it depends on the use case, environment and the users' tolerance for problems.
The first question which will come up is, "why?". If you don't have a good business use case, you should expect to be basically told to go get fucked. I realize that this seems like IT sticking their head in the sand, and it kinda is. But, also realize that you are asking them to take on extra work for nothing more than your own self edification. I have yet to meet an IT department which is so overflowing with time and resources that they want to take on new work which isn't required. Even with the most basic use cases for Linux, IT is going to need to have resources dedicated to support, maintenance and oversight. Things like asset management, patching and license management don't go away on Linux systems. Sure, the OS may not have a license to worry about (unless it's RHEL or Ubuntu Pro), but there may be other software installed which is licenses and that license may be a different SKU on Linux. Then there are issues with ensuring IdM works on that flavor of Linux and supporting it when it breaks.
Along side that "why" question, be ready to answer the "why not" questions. Why not a Windows based alternative? Why not Cygwin/WSL? Why not a Linux based server that you SSH into from your main Windows desktop? Especially with a lot of workloads moving to the cloud, I've seen the mainframe model start to return, just with Linux instead of Unix/AIX this time. This sort of thing centralizes a lot of the IT headaches into a single host (or handful) which can much more easily be centrally managed. And that's a theme to keep in mind, IT departments love centralized management. This is one of those places where Linux kinda lags Windows. Centralized management does work on Linux. It's one of the reasons RHEL is all over the place, Satellite is like crack for IT departments dealing with Linux. But, a lot of centralized management looks like a folder full of Ansible scripts. With proper code management, it can work quite well. Keep in mind that many folks in IT are not coders and for a handful of Linux systems, dedicated resources which can handle that may not be in the budget (in the end, everything is about money).
Ok, so you have your "why" and are ready for "why not". Let's talk about the security stack. No, just because it's Linux doesn't mean you can ignore security. I've personally worked cases where Linux boxes got popped. And from the user side, things like ClickFix attacks are starting to crop up targeting Linux desktops. So, does your company's software stack support Linux? This has, thankfully, started to be more common. Go back a decade and the answer was almost certainly, "no". Partly because Linux wasn't that common and partly because idiots believed Linux was fully secure by design. Anyone who believes that today shouldn't be allowed to work on anything more advanced than an Etch-a-Sketch. With the dominance of Linux in the cloud, attackers are targeting Linux and your system will need to be ready for it. If your company's security stack doesn't support Linux, and/or your security department doesn't have the expertise to monitor and respond to issues on Linux systems, you might find them resistant. Thankfully, that whole "Linux dominating the cloud" thing has started pushing security teams towards supporting Linux. And more advanced security teams often utilize Linux themselves in some capacity. So, that could ease your path a bit.
The final bit might be your tolerance for pain. If you're out there on the bleeding edge, trying to be the first Linux system in an all Windows environment, expect things to break. No matter how well planned the rollout, the fact that the IT department hasn't done this before means that they are going to miss stuff. It happens. If your system becomes a common source of trouble tickets, IT leadership may try to pull the plug. If you turn out to be a high maintenance user, you might find IT slow to respond and unwilling or unable to help with things aren't working quite right. Some level of self-help and patience with a help desk which doesn't have Linux expertise are going to be necessary. You really don't want to become the phone number which pops up on the Help Desk queue and all the analysts scramble to avoid taking the call.
To conclude this long ramble. Linux systems in a Windows dominated environment is getting easier. That "the cloud" basically runs on Linux has gone a long way into getting Linux integrated into Windows environments. Microsoft has been forced to make their tools actually work with Linux, rather than the abomination which was setting up POSIX uids in a Windows 2000/2003 Active Directory domain. But, a lot of IT departments will still want to treat Linux as a server OS and not a desktop OS. MS Office, Teams and the rest of their communications and collaboration software still treats Linux as a pariah. Integrating and supporting Linux alternatives means budget and resources which aren't dedicated to the core business. And that's really what IT is going to care about.
Along side what you mention, I work for a company with a lot of engineers from multiple disciplines. Linux is everywhere in our environment and has been growing. Most of our engineers either have a Linux laptop, use Linux virtual machines or submit jobs through Linux backed software stacks. Our products have tools built on Linux to the point that we used to maintain our own Linux distribution to make having all those tools on a system easy, though we've just moved to having scripts to install and setup everything. Almost all of those engineers also have a Windows laptop as their daily driver. The few who don't have Macs.
I don't doubt that organizations can move to all non-Windows, but the Windows Ecosystem of Exchange, Office and Active Directory/Entra is very hard to replace. Yes, you can absolutely cobble together alternatives. But, you then have a special snowflake of an IT infrastructure. Maintenance may be eased by the use of tools like Ansible, but even that will likely result in organization specific playbooks and scripts. But centralized management of a Linux environment isn't quite as standardized yet and so requires more planning and effort. And then there is the challenge of security.
Folks like to tout the inherent better security of Linux. As someone who works in Cybersecurity daily, I fully agree with that assessment. However, "better" isn't "perfect". You still need vulnerability management, monitoring and response tools. And this is an area where Linux lags behind Windows, mostly because of the effort put into it. Something as basic as Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) on Linux is still a foreign concept to a lot of folks. And yes, it's absolutely necessary. I've personally worked cases involving compromise of Linux systems and Linux specific malware. And more than just XMRig clone #5374. It may be harder to move from user to root on Linux than moving to local admin on Windows (unless some jack-off decided that Linux doesn't need updates and DirtyCow still worked); but, there is still a lot of damage which can be done without root.
Overall, I'd say that the Linux ecosystem is evolving. It's already embedded in a lot of environments of all sizes, but it's usually a smaller part of a much larger Windows network. Hopefully, if enough large organizations start pushing away from Windows and towards Linux, there will be more investment and standardization. And, we've already seen some of that. Red Hat is a common distro of choice for large organizations because of that higher level of centralized control and standardization. Of course, a lot of the tools engineers want to use aren't on Red Hat, specifically because of that centralization (read: everything AI). So, it will be interesting to see where we land.
I can already see the malicious compliance gears in motion:
"Yes, sir!"
The Naval CNO creates a project, codename "Ouroboros". With the stated goal of replacing EMALS with steam. The project is assigned to whichever Colonel is on the shit list who is tasked with the feasibility study and creating the RFI.
3 years later
The whole thing is shit-canned by the next President.
Several of my co-workers got upgraded laptops recently. Teams (yup, Microslop's own product) has been an absolute disaster on those systems. Cameras not working. Sound or Mic cutting out. Even chat just fucks off from time to time.
I get that software is complex and hard. Operating systems even more so. But, if you're charging hundreds of dollars for a product, you ought to have done some QA.
In Maine having Platner flame out in such spectacular fashion did not help Democrats at all. That said, with a split of 48% to 45%, that leaves 7% either undecided or listing a different candidate. Couple that with a stated error of +/-3.7%, and the poll is putting Jackson with anywhere between 59% and 44% of the vote, if it were held today. The polling average has been pretty stable. And SSRS's poll isn't telling any different of a story. So, maybe this will be the year we are finally rid of Collins's "oh I'm concerned, but not concerned enough to actually vote against Trump".
Michigan is similar. SSRS lists the race as 47% to 44%. This leaves a 9 point gap in Undecided/Other. And a stated error at 4.1%. That's a lot of room for these numbers to swing. Though the polling average has moved a lot more in the past few months. It probably doesn't help that the Democratic Primary took a bit to wrap up. But, a slight lead in a heavily Democratic national environment, with enough undecided voters left to shift the race, isn't the worst place to be.
As excited as I am for this, it'll be a while before I can get back to Valheim. My wife and I finished our last run, defeating The Emerald Flame in Ashlands, a couple months back and we're not ready to deal with the Mistlands and Ashlands again quite yet. We also just enjoy the early game enough that we'd usually rather re-roll to experience the new content than continue an old world.
I'm also going to be curious to see what, if any changes and tweaks happen to the game with it officially released. In our last playthrough, the Mistlands still suffered from issues dealing with enemies which were slightly off-plane. A situation you cannot avoid in Mistalnds. Also, the particle effects and screen shake for magic were way over-done. Casters basically blind everyone else, but the magic is so incredibly invaluable that someone needs to do it, especially in Ashlands. I don't know how you're supposed to deal with the forts without it. Between spawn rates turned up to "yes" and melee weapons which have all the stopping power of a limp dick, the only reliable solution we found was yeeting a couple trolls into the fort with a batch of vines setup to hold the breach.
I'm also curious about support for mods. It makes sense that they didn't want to put time into support during early access, but that's now over. We basically don't play without the Mass Farming mod and the Better Wisps mod. The former is just a tedium reduction mod and the later strikes a nice balance (for us) between keeping the mists and actually being able to find anything in the mists. The hunt for black cores is tedious enough without being able to see any further than my own feet.
Sounds like they are doing you a favor. The world can be a pretty horrible place, and horrible things are happening all the time. You could spend all of your time posting about all of them online and accomplish exactly fuck all. You'd do far more by focusing on the things around you which you can actually affect. Your local community almost certainly has problems which you could help with. Even if it's just showing up at a food bank and helping to serve food to the unhoused. There are concrete things you could be doing to make the world a little less terrible for the people around you.
Posting on FaceBook et. al. is just slacktavism at its worst. You me or anyone else posting something on social media does nothing to change the facts on the ground. Assuming you're in a modern democracy, you do have some power with your vote and the ability to organize and be involved in collective action (e.g. political groups). But, even there the things you post on your personal accounts isn't going to actually do anything.
So ya, I'd tell the person to fuck off with their virtual signaling, slacktavist bullshit. If they really cared that much, they would get off FaceBook and put their time into actual community service and political action. But, they are too lazy to do the hard work, and instead just want to feel good about themselves with their smug, online pronouncements with no substance behind them.
Also, get yourself off FaceBook, the site is nothing but a cesspit of advertisements and assholes shitting all over everything. Case and point, your rant.
Ya, it was fairly big news a couple months ago. MS was apparently dicking around the researcher (NightmareEclipse) who uncovered it and he went nuclear and dropped that one along with a few others in rapid succession.
The YellowKey Vulnerability was an engineered backdoor for the CIA/FBI/NSA.
If everyone is guilty of something, it makes yanking them off the street easier to justify to a news media asleep at the switch.
"A big reveal"
Do you guys not have phones?
This is the company which is ultimately behind the buy-out. I won't pass judgment on them yet, but I no one throws around large sacks of money if they don't expect a return on that investment. I also don't blame the SteamDB owner, they did a great thing and made it free. And them having a large sack of money land in their lap is a fitting reward. But, I'm also assuming that enshitification will eventually ensue.
This is a big one and of course governments are ignoring it. Because violating privacy is the point of these age gates.
Yes! I can finally hear the sound of a floppy disk trying desperately to read a failed disk again.
It's the equivalent of chimpanzees and humans. Just because we are a species which uses advanced tools and language doesn't mean that other related species all died out. We're Just very distantly related cousins.
Buy a bit of paracord, make a simple net, toss as appropriate.
Paintball markers are also cheap, reasonably accurate and don't involve yeeting a bullet on a ballistic arc.
This does make me wonder what the legality would be around 3d printing a cover for a Flock camera, maybe even line it with felt/cloth to prevent scratches, and slipping it over a camera?
I guess the Trump Administration wanted to deliver classified documents in person this time.
Color me underwhelmed. It looks like a pretty run of the mill, third person action game with the "Dungeons and Dragons" name tacked on to try and drum up purchases. The dark magic wielding swords-woman is a great starting point, but I wasn't sure where the combat ended and quick time events started. The entire "fight" with the gazer looked like a scripted QTE sequence. The fight with the undead ogre and associated attackers (ghouls, maybe?) looked better. Though the end of that fight seemed to go back to QTE for the "finish him" sequence. Hopefully, I'm wrong and this turns out to be another great D&D game. But, it's mostly just making me think about breaking out Baldur's Gate 3 again.
I've been on several sides of this. As a sysadmin supporting a Windows dominated environment integrating Linux, as a user who wants to use Linux in a Windows dominated environment and in security trying to secure an environment with both Windows and Linux. In short, it depends on the use case, environment and the users' tolerance for problems.
The first question which will come up is, "why?". If you don't have a good business use case, you should expect to be basically told to go get fucked. I realize that this seems like IT sticking their head in the sand, and it kinda is. But, also realize that you are asking them to take on extra work for nothing more than your own self edification. I have yet to meet an IT department which is so overflowing with time and resources that they want to take on new work which isn't required. Even with the most basic use cases for Linux, IT is going to need to have resources dedicated to support, maintenance and oversight. Things like asset management, patching and license management don't go away on Linux systems. Sure, the OS may not have a license to worry about (unless it's RHEL or Ubuntu Pro), but there may be other software installed which is licenses and that license may be a different SKU on Linux. Then there are issues with ensuring IdM works on that flavor of Linux and supporting it when it breaks.
Along side that "why" question, be ready to answer the "why not" questions. Why not a Windows based alternative? Why not Cygwin/WSL? Why not a Linux based server that you SSH into from your main Windows desktop? Especially with a lot of workloads moving to the cloud, I've seen the mainframe model start to return, just with Linux instead of Unix/AIX this time. This sort of thing centralizes a lot of the IT headaches into a single host (or handful) which can much more easily be centrally managed. And that's a theme to keep in mind, IT departments love centralized management. This is one of those places where Linux kinda lags Windows. Centralized management does work on Linux. It's one of the reasons RHEL is all over the place, Satellite is like crack for IT departments dealing with Linux. But, a lot of centralized management looks like a folder full of Ansible scripts. With proper code management, it can work quite well. Keep in mind that many folks in IT are not coders and for a handful of Linux systems, dedicated resources which can handle that may not be in the budget (in the end, everything is about money).
Ok, so you have your "why" and are ready for "why not". Let's talk about the security stack. No, just because it's Linux doesn't mean you can ignore security. I've personally worked cases where Linux boxes got popped. And from the user side, things like ClickFix attacks are starting to crop up targeting Linux desktops. So, does your company's software stack support Linux? This has, thankfully, started to be more common. Go back a decade and the answer was almost certainly, "no". Partly because Linux wasn't that common and partly because idiots believed Linux was fully secure by design. Anyone who believes that today shouldn't be allowed to work on anything more advanced than an Etch-a-Sketch. With the dominance of Linux in the cloud, attackers are targeting Linux and your system will need to be ready for it. If your company's security stack doesn't support Linux, and/or your security department doesn't have the expertise to monitor and respond to issues on Linux systems, you might find them resistant. Thankfully, that whole "Linux dominating the cloud" thing has started pushing security teams towards supporting Linux. And more advanced security teams often utilize Linux themselves in some capacity. So, that could ease your path a bit.
The final bit might be your tolerance for pain. If you're out there on the bleeding edge, trying to be the first Linux system in an all Windows environment, expect things to break. No matter how well planned the rollout, the fact that the IT department hasn't done this before means that they are going to miss stuff. It happens. If your system becomes a common source of trouble tickets, IT leadership may try to pull the plug. If you turn out to be a high maintenance user, you might find IT slow to respond and unwilling or unable to help with things aren't working quite right. Some level of self-help and patience with a help desk which doesn't have Linux expertise are going to be necessary. You really don't want to become the phone number which pops up on the Help Desk queue and all the analysts scramble to avoid taking the call.
To conclude this long ramble. Linux systems in a Windows dominated environment is getting easier. That "the cloud" basically runs on Linux has gone a long way into getting Linux integrated into Windows environments. Microsoft has been forced to make their tools actually work with Linux, rather than the abomination which was setting up POSIX uids in a Windows 2000/2003 Active Directory domain. But, a lot of IT departments will still want to treat Linux as a server OS and not a desktop OS. MS Office, Teams and the rest of their communications and collaboration software still treats Linux as a pariah. Integrating and supporting Linux alternatives means budget and resources which aren't dedicated to the core business. And that's really what IT is going to care about.
Along side what you mention, I work for a company with a lot of engineers from multiple disciplines. Linux is everywhere in our environment and has been growing. Most of our engineers either have a Linux laptop, use Linux virtual machines or submit jobs through Linux backed software stacks. Our products have tools built on Linux to the point that we used to maintain our own Linux distribution to make having all those tools on a system easy, though we've just moved to having scripts to install and setup everything. Almost all of those engineers also have a Windows laptop as their daily driver. The few who don't have Macs.
I don't doubt that organizations can move to all non-Windows, but the Windows Ecosystem of Exchange, Office and Active Directory/Entra is very hard to replace. Yes, you can absolutely cobble together alternatives. But, you then have a special snowflake of an IT infrastructure. Maintenance may be eased by the use of tools like Ansible, but even that will likely result in organization specific playbooks and scripts. But centralized management of a Linux environment isn't quite as standardized yet and so requires more planning and effort. And then there is the challenge of security.
Folks like to tout the inherent better security of Linux. As someone who works in Cybersecurity daily, I fully agree with that assessment. However, "better" isn't "perfect". You still need vulnerability management, monitoring and response tools. And this is an area where Linux lags behind Windows, mostly because of the effort put into it. Something as basic as Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) on Linux is still a foreign concept to a lot of folks. And yes, it's absolutely necessary. I've personally worked cases involving compromise of Linux systems and Linux specific malware. And more than just XMRig clone #5374. It may be harder to move from user to root on Linux than moving to local admin on Windows (unless some jack-off decided that Linux doesn't need updates and DirtyCow still worked); but, there is still a lot of damage which can be done without root.
Overall, I'd say that the Linux ecosystem is evolving. It's already embedded in a lot of environments of all sizes, but it's usually a smaller part of a much larger Windows network. Hopefully, if enough large organizations start pushing away from Windows and towards Linux, there will be more investment and standardization. And, we've already seen some of that. Red Hat is a common distro of choice for large organizations because of that higher level of centralized control and standardization. Of course, a lot of the tools engineers want to use aren't on Red Hat, specifically because of that centralization (read: everything AI). So, it will be interesting to see where we land.
I can already see the malicious compliance gears in motion:
"Yes, sir!"
The Naval CNO creates a project, codename "Ouroboros". With the stated goal of replacing EMALS with steam. The project is assigned to whichever Colonel is on the shit list who is tasked with the feasibility study and creating the RFI.
3 years later
The whole thing is shit-canned by the next President.
Several of my co-workers got upgraded laptops recently. Teams (yup, Microslop's own product) has been an absolute disaster on those systems. Cameras not working. Sound or Mic cutting out. Even chat just fucks off from time to time.
I get that software is complex and hard. Operating systems even more so. But, if you're charging hundreds of dollars for a product, you ought to have done some QA.
I daily drive Windows 11 for work. I'm so glad I upgraded by personal system to Linux.