I wasn’t very old then but the main thing was RAM. Fuckers in Microsoft sales/marketing made 1 GB the minimum requirement for OEMs to install Vista.

So guess what? Every OEM installed Vista with 1 GB of RAM and a 5200 RPM hard drive (the “standard” config for XP which is what most of those SKUs were meant to target). That hard drive would inevitably spend its short life thrashing because if you opened IE it would immediately start swapping. Even worse with OEM bloat, but even a clean Vista install would swap real bad under light web browsing.

It was utterly unusable. Like, everything would be unbearably slow and all you could do was (slowly) open task manager and say “yep, literally nothing running, all nonessential programs killed, only got two tabs open, still swapping like it’s the sex party of the century”.

“Fixing” those hellspawns by adding a spare DDR2 stick is a big part of how I learned to fix computer hardware. All ya had to do was chuck 30 € of RAM in there and suddenly Vista went from actually unusable to buttery smooth.

By the time the OEMs wised up to Microsoft’s bullshit, Seven was around the corner so everyone thought Seven “fixed” the performance issues. It didn’t, it’s just that 2 GB of RAM had become the bare minimum standard by then.

EDIT: Just installed a Vista VM because I ain’t got nothing better to do at 2 am apparently. Not connected to the internet, didn’t install a thing, got all of 12 processes listed by task manager, and it already uses 500 MB of RAM. Aero didn’t even enable as I didn’t configure graphics acceleration.

The studios! Think of the studios! Their execs couldn’t live off merch sales and shitty reboots anymore! They might even have to - gasp - develop original IP if they want to milk an exclusive license. Some other execs would make money off some of last century’s licenses! The horror! The tragedy!

That can’t be. Clearly the best thing about Indiana Jones and Jurrasic Park is the death grip the studios have on those IPs. Ever since Steamboat Willie fell into the public domain I’ve been unable to enjoy the Disney Classics. All joy has been snuffed out from my life.

Bro I wouldn’t trust most companies not to store their only copy of super_duper_important_financial_data_2024.xlsx on an old AliExpress thumb drive attached to the CFO’s laptop in a coffee shop while he’s taking a shit.

If your company has an actual DRP for if your datacenter catches fire or your cloud provider disappears, you are already doing better than 98 % of your competitors, and these aren’t far-fetched disaster scenarios. Maintaining an entire separate pen-and-paper shadow process, training people for it? That’s orders of magnitude more expensive than the simplest of DRPs most companies already don’t have.

Friendly wave to all the companies currently paying millions a year extra to Broadcom/VMWare because their tools and processes are too rigid to use with literally any other hypervisor when realistically all their needs could be covered by the free tier of ProxMox and/or OpenStack.

We’re like 1960s tobacco industry at best. I don’t see the subsidies on red meat going away in the next 10 years, and probably not the next 20 if I’m honest, short of a catastrophic food crisis that would cause us to re-evaluate the number of human calories produced per hectare of agricultural land.

I’d like to be wrong, and change does come in waves so maybe 10 years from now I’ll change my mind. Maybe. But right now the idea of not subsidizing red meat production is fringe even within the left of the left – and the left hasn’t exactly been making electoral strides in most countries recently.

Vegan ≠ Vegetarian.

Veganism starts and ends with “no animal exploitation”. And due to some weird ingroup/outgroup dynamics Extremely Online Vegans will get batshit insane radical with it and refuse to feed meat to their cats or insist that eating honey is fundamentally unethical.

I eat very little meat, mostly for environmental and partly for ethical reasons, but bringing up the environmentalist side of vegetarianism to defend veganism (a radical dogma based on a specific ethical stance) is missing the mark entirely.

With all that said, everyone should eat less meat, and way less red meat.

The lack of even the most basic understanding of parliamentary politics flying around in this thread is appalling, but certainly illustrates the reason why there are so many wild takes flying around on Lemmy.

To summarize:

• The right got a 2/3rds majority in parliament. The united left had the most votes of any individual group, but that’s only around 1/3 total.
• The reason the left proclaimed they “won” is they came “first” and thought the center-right party would ally with them rather than the “hard right” (welp)
• That, in isolation (!), isn’t antidemoratic. A majority of French representatives (presumably) approve of the government. Simple maths. A government can only govern with the approval of parliament, it literally can’t work otherwise.
• However the French voting system very strongly relies on strategic voting, and the far-right came very close to having a parliamentary majority. Therefore the center-right party only got the seats they did because everybody left of the far-right made electoral agreements to pull out their candidates so only the candidate with the most chances to win against the far right would be running. This heavily benefited the center-right party who then allied with the hard right, which is being perceived as treason (for lots of reasons that I’m not going to get into). Strategic voting is a democratic failures and leads to suboptimal choices for representatives (thought that is still miles better than whatever the fuck the CCP is doing, since apparently that needs saying on here). Furthermore this whole shift to the right certainly isn’t going to help with the socio-economic issues and is going to end up benefiting the far-right.

The fact that they polled customers afterwards points to this being a simple corporate fuckup. This kind of thing regularly happens as well where I live despite noncompetes basically not being enforceable.

Acquiring companies is easy, but it extremely rarely goes well. The incentives and skills required to buy something and give a sales pitch to a private equity firm simply do not overlap with the incentives and skills required to vertically integrate that thing without completely destroying it.

In many ways these corporate ghouls are like serial hobbyists. Buying all kinds of expensive toys and tools they don’t understand then breaking them and/or giving up.

Congrats. So you think that since you can do it (as a clearly very tech-literate person) the government shouldn’t do anything? Do you think it’s because they all researched the issues with these companies and decided to actively support them, or is it because their apathy should be considered an encouragement to continue?

You are so haughty you’ve circled back around to being libertarian. This is genuinely a terrible but unfortunately common take that is honestly entirely indistinguishable from the kind of shit you’d hear coming from a FAANG lobby group.

Why would you think only valid military targets were next to these?

That’s… not a war crime is. I don’t want to be the guy who justifies the death of civilians, because each one is a tragedy, but unfortunately in war there is such a thing as greater evils.

Why are you still believing the IDFs first reports when the vast majority of the time they’re lying?

Now that’s fair. And of course we can as well point out that their whole war is self-inflicted to start with so there’s not much legitimacy to any of their acts of war, even the less illegal ones.

I’m as critical of Israel as any reasonable person but that’s like the one thing they did recently that was actually a (at least somewhat) targeted attack against their enemies.

Calling that a war crime unnecessarily and dangerously dilutes the term. Leveling cities and starving the fleeing population is a war crime and a crime against humanity. Intentionally shooting civilians, children, aid workers, and journalists is a war crime. How about we focus on those, it’s not like there’s a shortage of israeli war crimes to report on.

EDIT: Apparently Lebanon reports 2800 injured and 12 dead from these attacks… How many fucking explosive pagers were involved? I doubt a significant percentage of those were Hezbollah, which would make that a war crime. The callous inefficiency of IDF operations will never cease to amaze me.

Then you’re knowingly engaging in the consumption of abusive products? Do you not see how you have literally no leverage whatsoever as a consumer?

Do you not consume a single Google/Meta/Microsoft product or do you not care about their abhorrent business practices?

You are conflating Consumers with Citizens, a classic pitfall of modern neoliberal democracies.

Just because people willingly Consume a Product does not mean they think The Product is good or even that it should exist at all. Neoliberalism is unable to acknowledge that, because Everything is a Market and the Market is Infallible.

In reality, the game theory is such that individuals may not have the means to get out of the local minimum they found themselves stuck in. Prisoner’s dilemma and all that. That’s what representative democracy is supposed to solve, when it isn’t captured by ideology and corporate interests.

I would argue that Valorant or CS are terrible games for casual enjoyment anyways. The skill floor is already pretty damn high for a shooter.

In the FPS genre I’ve found Battlebit has faithfully replicated the feel of BF3/BF4 for those of us who just want to run towards the objective and shoot, and it had old school community servers.

The competitive scene happened. Can’t have meaningful competitive matchmaking against the same 100 players. People don’t just want to frag noobs, they want to grind the ladder to be able to say “I’m GE and you’re Gold, therefore I know for a fact I’m better than you”.

This is a global phenomenon. Even goddamn chess has this, first thing players ask each other nowadays is “what’s your chess.com ELO”.

I’m not a competitive player myself but I get why people rush after ELO progression. And it’s not much of a stretch to say CS, Valo, and especially chess wouldn’t have seen such widespread success without competitive ELO-based matchmaking.

France’s historic language policy is certainly highly problematic yes. Although the point is not genocide but class warfare and/or colonialism, not that it’s much of an improvement.

And now do Belgium. French is the language of the elites (the monarchy and, historically, the aristocracy and bourgeoisie) but also a minority regional language. Is Flanders banning French on public signage a form of oppression? I personally think it’s stupid Flemish nationalism but I wouldn’t call it oppression.

So how about we stop making blanket statements. Moscow’s erasure of Belarusian identity is at least oppressive and imperialistic and follows a long history of oppression. IDK if that qualifies as genocide (IMHO that undermines the gravity of something like the Holodomor), but something not strictly being genocide doesn’t make it unimportant.

Yeah as I expected you’re projecting right wing talking points on what I said and answering those instead of anything I -at the very least- meant.

I just do not think that, in a frictionless vacuum, one can completely dismiss the idea that there can be some, however microscopic and inconsequential downsides to immigration (through no individual fault in the vast majority of the population).

Do consider that at the very least if Europe hypothetically did away with border checks entirely and strived for massive immigration, the ensuing brain drain would wreak havoc on the Global South (even worse than right now, kinda like happened within the EU with the former eastern block). Regardless of the exact mechanism, mass migration has long-lasting sociocultural impacts and to say these are only positive is pure globalist ideology.

You gloss over the part where even with the best intentions imaginable European immigration would have killed 90 % of American Natives with their new pathogens. No matter which way you slice it that is a scenario where European culture becomes the dominant culture, though it would certainly be nice not to have overt genocide and oppression sprinkled on top.

(Of course that’s not the case right now and the great replacement theory is a fascist invention, if that needs saying)

Also be careful not to infantilise immigrants. There is a marginal but highly visible issue happening for example where Saudi Arabia is funding Wahhabit (i.e. highly orthodox) mosques and imams in Europe that when combined with depressed socioeconomic opportunities fuels religious antagonism/radicalism particularly amongst particularly vulnerable teenage second generation immigrants. Is it an existential threat to European hegemony or something Europe is incapable of absorbing? Certainly not. Doesn’t mean it’s an issue we have to refuse to acknowledge in the name of our own leftist orthodoxy.

I wonder how many terrorist (and “terrorist”) plots that were foiled were from compromised telegram messages. How many Ukrainian airstrikes were called from similar sources. My gut says a whole lot more than people think. Since nothing is encrypted, one backdoor is all the NSA needs to read everyone’s group messages. Like the much lamer version of Crypto AG, because in this case it’s an open secret.

Socialists have been the go-to vote of the proletariat in Europe since the early 1900s, and most of these parties were in power at some point or another since 2000.

However these parties have fallen off a cliff in popularity, and the reason why will depend heavily on who you ask but it boils down to “workers don’t feel represented by socialists”.

• The socio-economic landscape moved on since 1917, but the left-end of socialists did not. Orthodox Marxism says tertiary sector workers are basically part of the bourgeoisie (I’ve had Extremely Online Marxists explain that one to me with a straight face, so as an IT worker I’m afraid to say I am not allowed to partake in any True Socialism because I do not sell my Labor).
• Conversely the “center-left” socialists are hardcore neoliberals (who just happen to think that some social programs serve the neoliberal agenda) and their policies have therefore failed to meaningfully curb the degradation of public services and standards of living.
• The Left™ got stuck in the trap of being pigeonholed as “pro-immigration” during what most people felt like was immigration crisis. Doesn’t matter how you feel about it, this culture war bullshit has profoundly hurt their polling scores and benefited bigots.
• Parties with an internally democratic governance have been dreadfully slow to react to changes in the political landscape in the past 25 years. Retirees are voting in the primaries whereas extremist parties are led by autocrats who fully understand how to capitalize on online media attention (hence the better polling numbers of the far-right with thr youth).

Fighting fascists with “but socialists good for proletariat” is worse-than-useless. Voters know what socialists stand for, and that’s kind of the problem because they feel it hasn’t helped. People don’t have hope in traditional European socialist policies, and only vote red out of tradition or as a barrage vote against the far-right.