Read a memoir by a KGB agent who arrested a man in Moscow who was passing info to the CIA. Had been doing so for years. The CIA had the typical western attitude towards money so they kept giving him stacks of rubles. Thinking they were being generous. The man (a professor, I think) had nothing to spend it on so he stacked cash up in a closet. Had around 1 million stored when he was caught. He probably would have been better off just burning it as the money was used as evidence in his trial.
Had a chance to ask a Russian / Soviet historian how one could spend a million rubles in the late 70s, early 80s. He just shrugged and laughed about it. Almost no way to spend that much. Nothing cost very much and there wasn't much of it.
I did something that was almost the same. Used to work for an educational software company that almost solely sold to schools, universities, and government institutions. Sometimes to corporate learning centers. Every sale was on a per-seat basis.
Every single customer we had wanted to be legal. Didn't want to exceed their seats or do anything which would violate their sales agreement. In the case of our government clients, such violations could lead them into legal penalties from their employer.
Despite having an unusually honest customer base, the company insisted on horridly strict and intrusive DRM. Even to the point of using dongles for a time. It frequently broke. Sometimes we had to send techs out to the schools to fix it.
I ended up just ripping all of that out and replacing it with a simple DLL on the Windows client. It talked to an tiny app server side. Used a barely encrypted tiny database which held the two numbers: seats in use & total seats available. If for some reason the DLL couldn't make contact with the server, it would just launch the software anyways. No one would be locked out due to the DRM failing or because the creaky school networks were on the blink again.
This system could have been cracked in five seconds by just about anyone. But it didn't matter since we knew everyone involved was trying to be honest.
Saved a massive amount of time and money. Support calls dropped enormously. Customers were much happier. It's probably my weakest technical accomplishment but it's still one of my proudest accomplishments.
Reddit is a bunch of bar districts in a large city. You can find any sort of bar you want. Some of the bars you'll love. Some of them you'll hate. Some of them will make you say "what the hell is any of this?"
It's an almost infinite variety. Fractal even with how many subreddits are the results of splits from an older subreddit.
You can find any sort of bar you want, but all of them are owned by the same shady company which waters down the drinks, are involved in secret backroom deals which sometimes results in things like selling your personal info or in bars being closed without notice. They also refuse to give the bouncers the training and resources they need which leaves many bars full of jerks who shouldn't have made it inside in the first place, while in other bars you can find yourself thrown out for no reason at all.
It's kind of like an American grocery store where you have shelf after shelf filled with different brand names and products in all kinds of colors and flavors, but they're all owned by one of three corporations so it really doesn't matter which product you buy, you're still supporting the same assholes who will gladly poison you if it'll increase their profits by a fraction of a cent, so naturally most of your choice comes down to the flavor of the poison.
Kobo is the sort of device which would make HN happy. The software is much more open and permissive than Kindle. Integrates with Calibre more tightly. Has a fairly rich ecosystem of tweaks and addons which don't require a jailbreak. Wish it didn't have secure boot but am otherwise pretty happy with it.
Kobo feels like something I actually own. More so than Kindle or even my iDevices. That's a little unusual these days from a mainstream product and that will make its users enthusiastic.
I've had both. Kobo is fine hardware-wise. And light years better on software than Kindle. One huge example: I have 1000+ books in Calibre. Took the time to tag them all into their respective categories. Kobo recognizes those tags and my book collection is sorted. With Kindle, I'd have to sort by hand on device. It ignores Calibre tags.
For this feature alone, I'd never go back to Kindle. Sure, I might be able to replicate it with jailbreaking + KOReader. But the Kobo worked this way out of the box.
Buy DRM free when you can. Not only is this convenient for you but will hopefully help nudge the market. When you can't, buy the book from one of the easily cracked sources (Kobo, Google, Adobe DRM).
Or you can save yourself the bother of removing DRM by buying the book from wherever and then downloading a copy from Anna's.
Would checking the Apple gift card balance first be a useful precaution? Would it have saved Paris all this hassle?
Seems like this might be a necessary step if checking the balance would reveal there's something wrong with the card. Would be frustrating to see the $500 card is worthless but better than risking the bureaucratic hell.
I had this exact thought. Unfortunately I can't find a way to check the balance of an Apple gift card without signing in to an Apple ID⁽¹⁾. So maybe you need a throwaway Apple ID...
Scammers will sniff card info before activation, and poll the balance check site to see when the card is activated. They will then use the card to get merchandise which they ship to another market and sell for ~50-60% of retail value.
Like solar power, money laundering is inefficient, but it's valuable when the source material is zero-cost.
>I think the only way desktop Linux will ever approach something an "ordinary" computer user could use is if a corporation puts significant money behind the development effort.
I think you're correct, but I also think this has already happened. Valve has put large amounts of money and development time into Linux. With a huge success. Gaming on Linux is very close to being as easy as it is on Windows. That removes a barrier for many home users.
I do wish there was more commercial software. Getting Photoshop ported over would be the last hurdle for me personally. Everything else I can do through Steam, various open source programs like Calibre, Electron apps, and Web.
> Valve has put large amounts of money and development time into Linux
I was gaming on linux when DXVK was just a library override in WINE before Proton or the Steam Deck existed. It's been fantastic to see how things have changed since then and I count this as a successful example of what's possible with desktop Linux.
If there was a commercial path to fund general purpose desktop computing on Linux, I'm certain that it is techinically feasible to achieve.
I think Valve have been very careful with where they put their efforts (hardware and software), their scope isn't that broad so much as it needs to have a direct link to steam. It's similar to why I don't think we'll have SteamOS released by Valve for generic hardware in the foreseeable future, because they're concentrating on their specific usage on the Deck.
Going broad means they need to support a whole lot more, and they probably can't tell users "go google it" in a similar fashion to how MS can't shrug off windows problems entirely when they happen for their users. The geeks are perfectly content with using a range of existing distros and there's little gain in adding one more, besides those that want the Valve/Steam brand umbrella to cover even more of PC gaming like they own the platform.
The reading experience is fine on Kindle. Or at least it was the last time I used it. My main problem is how they've locked down the DRM. I was on Kindle for a very long time and didn't mind the DRM because it was easily breakable. Amazon was also helpful about helping you download the book file directly. The locks they had in place were essentially bathroom door locks. And they seemed chill about it.
That's all changed now. I'd love to know why it's changed. My first thought was publisher pressure. But Kobo hasn't implemented harsh measures. Just Amazon has.
At any rate, I'm now using Kobo for my reading. Easy to break DRM. And they don't assume the same level of control over Kobo ereaders the way Amazon does with Kindle. I have over a thousand ebooks. I'm able to tag books in Calibre, and those tags automatically show up as Collections on the Kobo. It's a simple thing, but Amazon never gave me such flexibility. Makes a huge difference for me.
It's also possible to alter Kobo's UI/UX with various plugins without the need to jailbreak. Kobo (the company) is perfectly happy to let you do whatever you want with your own device. That's such a breath of fresh air compared to how Kindle is locked down.
It's not the size of a backpack but my wife did home hemo dialysis with a machine that had a handle and was portable. We even took it on trips a few times. I forget the weight, but, from memory, was around 10 pounds / 4.5 kg I think. Wife has had a transplant so my home hemo experience is from a few years ago. It may have changed since then.
The machine's portability wasn't the only factor. Needed a clean space to set up. There was a second machine hooked up to the house water lines. It would be used to create dialysate which was pumped into the dialysis machine. You could travel without the water pump, but to replace it, you needed these massive disposable bags of dialysate. Each bag was heavier than the machine itself and they were essential.
I guess with car trips, you could take the pump too to generate dialysate on site but it wasn't designed for portability as much as the main dialysis machine was. Was heavier. We kept it on rollers.
There were other supplies needed too. Saline bags. The dialysis machine had one-time use cartridges that were quite convenient but took up a fair bit of space. All added up to considerable bulk.
We only used the machine at distant locations when we knew we were going to be there for a week or more. One factor that made things a little easier was the the dialysis company was willing to deliver supplies to wherever we were, as long as it was within the US. We didn't have to take weeks worth of supplies. But we did have to take enough supplies to get through the first few days before delivery.
Vacations were rare but doable if we were going by car or if there was a dialysis center at the location. I guess we could have flown with the machine but we didn't trust airline baggage handlers enough to risk it.
Had a chance to ask a Russian / Soviet historian how one could spend a million rubles in the late 70s, early 80s. He just shrugged and laughed about it. Almost no way to spend that much. Nothing cost very much and there wasn't much of it.
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