And then interrupting that hold music at seemingly random intervals to tell you that they care about you
I recently encountered one that paused the hold music for around two seconds before the “your call is important to us” message. I hated it because every time it happened, I thought that someone was answering the call!
Huh I didn’t realise that. I’m Australian but have been living in the USA for around 11 years.
Australia’s consumer laws are far stricter than the USA. In Australia, the store is responsible for fitness and quality of a product, based not just on its advertising but also what sales reps in the store say to you.
Obviously you can’t return something nor ask for a repair/replacement if you’re using it for something other than its intended purpose (like using a chainsaw on bricks or whatever), but otherwise, the law is in your favour as a consumer.
Stores must also accept warranty returns and not say that you need to go to the manufacturer. It’s not legal to say “no refunds”.
Products must last at least as long as a reasonable consumer thinks they should last. For example, a fridge would have to be repaired or replaced under warranty if it stops working after 4 years, even if the warranty is only 1 year, as most people would reasonably expect a fridge to last more than 4 years.
It means some stuff costs more, but it’s absolutely worth it for the protection you get.
Changing your own lightbulb was illegal in Victoria Australia until 1998.
Australia is pretty strict about electrical stuff, and only qualified electricians can perform electrical work, including work on any electrical fixtures. Light bulbs were counted as a fixture, until the law was amended in 1998 to specifically exclude light bulbs.
Australia is still a lot stricter than the USA in terms of electrical work you can do to your own house. It’s still illegal to replace a light switch or outlet if you’re not a qualified electrician.
So I took the plunge and installed Fedora Silverblue because of all that immutable buzz. And it’s the most frustrating change I have made in almost 20 years of my distrohopping....
My understanding is that the core system is immutable (read-only) and major upgrades essentially just swap out that whole layer. Updates are atomic, meaning the entire thing either succeeds or fails and you can never end up with a broken half-updated system. UI apps all run using Flatpak.
I just installed EndeavorOS on an HP Spectre360 that’s roughly 2 years old. I am honestly surprised at how easy it went. If you google it, you’ll get a lot of “lol good luck installing linux on that” type posts - so I was ready for a battle....
Explicit sync. It’ll fix most of the issues with Wayland on Nvidia CPUs. Wayland landed support for it in April, and Nvidia recently released a beta driver that supports it. I think every graphics driver will implement explicit sync eventually, since it’s a lot better than implicit sync.
Excite still exists, too. My mum had the Aussie version of it as her home page for a long time. By the time she changed it, the news section had been broken for maybe 7 years.
Language models are just one type of AI, so it’s overly reductive to say thay all AI is like this. The computer players in Mario Kart are also AI, for example.
They’re copying Apple, which has similar clauses. They’re all going to copy Apple, unfortunately. Say that they support independent repair stores, but in reality place so many restrictions and requirements on them.
Samsung have gotten better with updates. In 2021, they promised all new models would receive four years of updates (which helped the industry because other brands started matching them), and they bumped it to seven years with this year’s S24 series.
Samsung and LG appliances are interesting things. Some are horrible like their fridges (which are some of the worst available today), but some are fantastic like LG’s washing machines (which rank #2 in reliability behind Speed Queen).
This is a myth. The Win32 API doesn’t even have a method that returns the string “Windows 95”! Windows version numbers are numbers, not strings. Windows 95 was actually 4.0. Windows 98 was 4.1, ME was 4.5, and XP was 5.0.
Actually it’s not entirely a myth - there was some Java library that did this - but it wasn’t widespread at all, and certainly not the documented approach to check the version.
I remember them being exactly the dame many years ago
This is one of the reason I like Debian. They don’t change stuff unless there’s a good reason to. Network configuration on my Debian servers is in /etc/network/interfaces in mostly the same format it was in 20 years ago (the only difference today is that I’m dual-stack IPv4/IPv6 everywhere).
Chest freezers don’t actually use a lot of electricity. They’re a big insulated box that’s closed most of the time, and since they open from the top rather than the front, the temperature doesn’t change much when opened (since hot air rises, while cold air stays lower). The compressor doesn’t have to run for very long to maintain the temperature.
In the USA, Energy Star estimates 215kWh per year for Energy Star certified chest freezers (open from the top) and 395kWh per year for certified upright freezers (open from the front): www.energystar.gov/products/freezers
I always wondered the same thing when I was younger, since my monitor had an Energy Star logo on it even though it was an American thing but I was in Australia. Being Energy Star approved just means the product is more efficient relative to others in the same category.
The Energy Star site is useful since they list all the available rebates for energy efficient appliances (federal, state, county, electricity company, etc)
One of the reasons stuff costs more in Australia is that there’s significantly more consumer protection. Steam originally didn’t allow refunds at all, and were fined AU$3 million as a result.
Game breaking bugs or bug that significantly affects the experience but don’t completely break the game
Changes that make the game behave significantly differently to how it was originally described on the site or in the documentation
Games that initially support Linux but the company dropped Linux support later on, etc.
Steam’s policy of only refunding a purchase within 14 days of purchase and less than 2 hours of play time is also not legal in Australia. You can’t have conditions like that on a refund policy. They have a separate refund policy specifically for Australia which excludes the 14 day / 2 hour limits.
Appliances also have to last for as long as a ‘reasonable consumer’ thinks they should last. For example, even if your TV or fridge has a “1 year warranty”, the manufacturer will still have to repair, refund, or replace it if it breaks down in 3 years, as a regular person would assume that a fridge or TV should last more than 3 years. The store or manufacturer has to cover the cost of picking it up and delivering a replacement. It’s also illegal for a store to tell you that you have to contact the manufacturer - the place you bought the product from has to let you handle all warranty claims through them.
Looking for another part time job. the vast majority of these available jobs read like the creepy listing where some guy is looking for a roommate but is specifically looking for female roommates only....
These are usually jobs that are listed by recruitment agencies. They don’t want you to know the company since then you could just apply directly to the company, and they won’t get their cut.
Recruitment agencies often take a percentage of the salary, at least for the first year, as payment for referring a successful applicant. It’s transparent to the jobseeker - the salary you see is after the agency’s cut.
The other time I see that here in Silicon Valley is for “stealth startups” - startups that are operating quietly, out of the spotlight, and haven’t yet applied for or gotten VC funding.
Depends on what you include in the percentage. 31% is definitely possible if you’re looking at the full effective tax rate, including federal, state, city (if applicable), social security, Medicare, etc.
In California, which has high state income tax, you’ll reach 30% total effective tax rate around $115-120k/year if filing single.
Also, definitely less likely, but an income around $600k/year (if filing single) will also get you a ~30% effective federal tax rate.
(numbers are rough estimates but should be close-ish)
don’t know if I can run & debug .net 8 applications on a linux machine
The .NET SDK is cross-platform. Try install it then run dotnet run in the same directory as your project file (.csproj).
Most .NET APIs are cross-platform, but there’s a few that still only work on Windows, and it’s also possible to write code that only works on Windows, like using P/Invoke to call a Win32 API.
Usually I end up moving back to Windows because of font rendering. I far prefer Windows cleartype font rendering on 2160p desktop screens
I’m surprised this is still an issue. I remember it being an issue when I used desktop Linux 15 years ago. At the time, Linux devs didn’t want to risk accidently infringing on Microsoft’s ClearType patents, so the text smoothing techniques had to be completely different.
Going through my usual scanning of all the “-next” Git subsystem branches of new code set to be introduced for the next Linux kernel merge window, a very notable addition was just queued up… Linux 6.10 is set to merge the NTSYNC driver for emulating the Microsoft Windows NT synchronization primitives within the kernel for...
still do the scripting in Bash for portability reasons,
For what it’s worth, Debian and most of its derivatives use dash (a Linux port of ash) instead of bash for /bin/sh. It’s ~4x faster and uses much less RAM than Bash. Usually the only scripts that use Bash are scripts that aren’t POSIX compliant or that use Bash-specific features.
Of course Apple collect data. The reason they wanted to prevent other apps from collecting data was so only they can use their data, and their ad network could have an advantage over the others.
Yes, they have an ad network, and want to significantly expand it:
There’s a lot of people on Discord (around 200 million monthly active users) but it’s still the smallest out of all the major messaging services that support group chats. For example, Telegram has over double the number of users, and WhatsApp has 10x the users.
For open source projects in particular, something that integrates with Github and Gitlab login (like Gitter which is now powered by Matrix) is a better choice, as developers are practically guaranteed to have one of those accounts.
Just tried out that playbook to set up a staging server, and it works pretty well.
I feel like it’s a bit too magical though. I like knowing how all the software I’m using is installed and configured, and introducing another layer of abstraction makes that harder. I have particular ways things like my web server (Nginx), database servers, Let’s Encrypt (certbot), etc are configured and want to keep things that way. I think I’ll just use the Ansible playbook for the staging server, and set up the real server using the Docker containers directly, based on documentation from the upstream projects (Synapse, etc)
It looks like they have both Docker containers and Debian packages avaliable, so I’ll have to see if it’s worth using the Debian packages instead.
I want to keep using self-signed certs (my server is only reachable internally and I do not want to expose it to the internet). And the new server they use (I forgot which) didn’t really have that option.
If you have your own domain name, you can get Let’s Encrypt certificates for internal servers by using DNS challenges instead of HTTP challenges. I use subdomains like whatever.int.example.com for my internal systems.
Of course, it’s possible that the Ansible playbook doesn’t support that…
Thanks for the note about Python and the Debian packages. That’s a good point. I’ll definitely use the Docker containers.
Today the KDE Community is announcing a new najor release of Plasma 6.0, and Gear 24.02. KDE Plasma is a modern, feature-rich desktop environment for Linux-based operating systems. Known for its sleek design, customizable interface, and extensive set of applications, it is also open source, devoid of ads, and makes protecting...
The default software was one of the main reasons KDE was created. The original creator didn’t like that every app on their system seemed to use a different UI toolkit, and wanted a consistent appearance across everything.
math checks out (fedia.io)
I'm breakin' rocks in the hot sun (fedia.io)
Fedora Silverblue is the most frustrating distro so far
So I took the plunge and installed Fedora Silverblue because of all that immutable buzz. And it’s the most frustrating change I have made in almost 20 years of my distrohopping....
Linux really has come a long way
I just installed EndeavorOS on an HP Spectre360 that’s roughly 2 years old. I am honestly surprised at how easy it went. If you google it, you’ll get a lot of “lol good luck installing linux on that” type posts - so I was ready for a battle....
Everyday, as an American (midwest.social)
Which is which? (sh.itjust.works)
List of unofficial console PC Ports with Tutorial (Re-/Decompilations) (github.com)
cross-posted from: leminal.space/post/6997656...
https://google.com (lemmy.world)
AI is the future (lemmy.world)
Samsung Requires Independent Repair Shops to Share Customer Data, Snitch on People Who Use Aftermarket Parts, Leaked Contract Shows (www.404media.co)
The contract requires repair shops to “immediately disassemble” devices that have parts “not purchased from Samsung.”
KDE Plasma 6.1 Beta Release (kde.org)
Scientific dietary advice (lemmy.world)
Learn how to count with Bill Gates (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
Oh god, kill it! (lemmy.world)
Wayland usage has overtaken X11 (lemmy.world)
Source: linux-hardware.org/?view=os_display_server...
Finally made the move (lemmy.world)
Just don’t ask how long it took to get my dGPU working properly :D But thankfully, there were a bunch of helpful folks with tips!
Day one and done (lemmy.world)
Choose your difficulty (lemmy.world)
Capitalists hate competition, especially when it comes to wages (lemmy.world)
Looking for another part time job. the vast majority of these available jobs read like the creepy listing where some guy is looking for a roommate but is specifically looking for female roommates only....
I wish to give this many fucks (lemmy.world)
Mark Cuban is ‘proud to pay’ $275.9 million in taxes (www.cnbc.com)
Trying to ditch windows
I really want to switch to Linux, up to this point there were two things keeping me on Windows, gaming and work....
Linux 6.10 To Merge NTSYNC Driver For Emulating Windows NT Synchronization Primitives (www.phoronix.com)
Going through my usual scanning of all the “-next” Git subsystem branches of new code set to be introduced for the next Linux kernel merge window, a very notable addition was just queued up… Linux 6.10 is set to merge the NTSYNC driver for emulating the Microsoft Windows NT synchronization primitives within the kernel for...
Nothing like that "new distro" feel (lemm.ee)
Apple users "don’t know what is going on": New study shows that Apple's default apps collect data even when supposedly disabled, and this is hard to switch off (www.aalto.fi)
'Privacy. That’s Apple,’ the slogan proclaims. New research from Aalto University in Finland begs to differ....
Discord is nuking Nintendo Switch emulator devs and their entire servers (www.theverge.com)
I'm enjoying Plasma 6 (lemmy.ca)
KDE Plasma 6.0, and KDE Gear 24.02 released (kde.org)
Today the KDE Community is announcing a new najor release of Plasma 6.0, and Gear 24.02. KDE Plasma is a modern, feature-rich desktop environment for Linux-based operating systems. Known for its sleek design, customizable interface, and extensive set of applications, it is also open source, devoid of ads, and makes protecting...