It’s a term invented by Last.fm that didn’t really catch on more generally because it’s too silly even for the Internet.

It would be a single point of failure for many apps in case the curators of F-Droid were dishonest or hacked. They could insert bad things into lots of packages without having to change the public source code. But it also becomes the only point where malware or backdoors could be inserted that way, instead of having to trust every single developer to build honestly off the source code, which we’d have to do if they just stuck prebuilt binaries up there. I don’t know how rational I’m being, but it makes me trust F-Droid apps more that they build each one themselves.

Many of our home customers’ feedback indicated a preference for the certainty provided by an annual plan. The annual plan offers assurance that you always have access to the latest version with innovations such as improvements we’ve made in compression speeds and algorithms. It also ensures you have access to critical updates and are protected against new threats and risks.

I think they made that up. I highly doubt their customers expressed any such preference.

$20 per month would be enough to discourage me. It’s another relatively costly computer-related subscription and I already feel like I’m losing a battle to keep those minimal. There would have to be some very clear benefits for that price.

They’re looking for something open-source. Draw.io’s readme says:

License

The source code authored by us in this repo is licensed under a modified Apache v2 license. This project is not an open source project as a result.

I haven’t been through the license to see what its restrictions are, but there must be a reason they give this warning.

Not as annoying as all these people being sent over from number 302.

So what’s the benefit of this over the regular Lemmy web front-end? Just things like friendlier-looking buttons?

Maybe they should, and also care about the many people still using these processors that are not very old.

I think this is why the “my code documents itself” attitude appeals, even though it’s almost never enough. Most developers just can’t write, nor do they want to.

I guess letters are a distraction.

Google takeout is there so they are technically compliant with rules that say you must be able to download your personal data, but they make it so inconvenient to use that practically it’s almost impossible to download it. Google photos isn’t a backup service so much as a way for Google to hold your photos hostage until you start paying for higher amounts of storage. And by the time you need that storage, Google takeout download has become impractical.

Is btrfs RAID stable yet? This article is three years old, so maybe things have improved, but it contains some pretty strong warnings about the dangers of btrfs RAID:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/09/examining-btrfs-linuxs-perpetually-half-finished-filesystem/

To summarize, the article argues that btrfs is great for single-disk usage but its RAID implementations are idiosyncratic and unreliable.

(I use btrfs daily on several single-disk computers and it has been great, but I have never tried its RAID.)

The corporate branding, the new “AI-powered developer platform” slogan, makes it clear that what I think of as “GitHub”—the traditional website, what are to me the core features—simply isn’t Microsoft’s priority at this point in time.

Microsoft software is all like this: the features users want and would find most useful are never a priority, nor are the bugs that annoy existing users. The priority is whatever some unholy alliance of management and marketing have pulled out of their corporate bottoms as the focus of this month’s promotion. It doesn’t seem even to be about what would drive sales, since customers like things that work. It’s some logic that only makes sense to the businesspeople who speak that absolutely vapid buzzword slurry that gushes from Satya Nadella’s mouth. I don’t get it, but it’s very consistent with Microsoft.

Am I likely to be annoyed about where the fiber comes into the house?

That one depends on the company installing it. When I got it installed they asked me exactly where I wanted the fiber to terminate and ran it through the house to an outlet under my desk. So let them know and they might put it where you need it.

As for the router, I recommend buying a mini PC with at least 2 Ethernet ports and 4GB of RAM and running OPNsense. It’s great and will give you all the control you need. Or you can repurpose any old PC you have lying around and just add some Ethernet ports on a PCIE card.

There’s more information about the components of this system here:

https://docs.pears.com

There really isn’t much to this Holesail project - it’s a little convenience wrapper around Hyper DHT and that’s a part of this Pear project it seems. That site has a list of the various components and links to each one’s GitHub.

Pear looks like an interesting project but I haven’t looked through the details of how it works.

Great that they’re using the GPLv3 license too.

Once the company goes out of business (or they focus on a different business) they tell you to get your tires or they will be discarded if you don’t. So you have to get them from them and you stop paying for the storage.

That’s where there’s no analogy for media purchased through streaming services. When streaming services withdraw content, the analogy would be the tire shop sending you an email saying “Just so you know, we’re burning your tires next week. No, you can’t come and get them.”

If the backup HDD was the only copy, it was an archive and not a backup, and you also need backups of the archive.

The only difference between Steam and the streaming companies is that Steam seems to have managed to create a lasting profitable business. If this changed and Steam faced more challenges, they’d put the screws on the users just like the TV and music services do.

It was a huge fluke of luck that the XZ backdoor didn’t go in any actual Linux distribution releases.

It did get into a few, just not the ones corporations are likely to be using.