digdilem

joined 2 years ago
[–] digdilem@lemmy.ml -2 points 1 year ago (6 children)

I am not very well versed in Australian law, but this indicates to me that free speech is indeed protected in Australia.

It aims to, but it is not a right.

See the two exclusions on the page you linked.

blocked when...

( a ) For respect of the rights or reputations of others; ( b ) For the protection of national security or of public order, or of public health or morals.

In this case, public order may be considered valid, although my personal view is that it wasn't.

In Australia, humour has a long history of bad taste, but a longer history of religious repression through law. Think 1960s America - that describes much of Australian rural culture, with extra bad language. (Although NSW was a lot more tolerant when I travelled around the country)

In the UK, free speech is not possible either. See D-notices, and later super-injunctions to stop media and individuals reporting on facts.

[–] digdilem@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That is of course where Linux shines - you can have an up to date operating system on 12 year old hardware that is secure, usable and responsive In fact, it's the only option.

I was actually talking about the royal 'we' - generally we have become trained to buy new shiny things. Computers, phones, tvs, every few years. Marketing works, folks. Apologies if it rubbed a bit raw for you.

You've accidentally triggered a core thing with me. I've done the poor thing, I have actually had zero money and no way to pay rent. I've had pretty much nothing at one point in my life. Although I've got some spending money now after 35 years of working too hard for it, that never really leaves you - if you've been truly poor, then you'll always be looking for money off deals when buying food, and you'll always be several steps behind the latest hardware just because it doesn't feel right to spend that much. The laptop I'm typing this on was one I found in a skip. It's a HP pavilion about 8 years old. Runs just fine on Debian.

[–] digdilem@lemmy.ml 19 points 1 year ago (6 children)

It's interesting to think it's taken a long time before a President was able to so obviously expose the cracks in the American constitution. It took someone entirely without shame or integrity to do so, but he did it during his first term and his second is going to be even more abusive. How does America fix this system going forwards? With the country so divided and polarised, it feels like another civil war might be the only way to solve that, but a civil war is unthinkable. But then so much else that was unthinkable has already happened in recent years.

[–] digdilem@lemmy.ml 14 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Windows has an entirely different set of objectives. The coders have to layer on so many services that are insisted upon by marketing that no matter how optimised they make the kernel, it's always doing to be a little boat carrying far too much cargo.

There's also a lot of fairly reliable rumour that the Windows codebase is very messy. Evolved and complicated, supporting many obsolete things and has suffered from different managers over the years changing styles and objectives. We don't know for sure because it's proprietary.

But that said, I use both and find each good for different things. Windows is much more stable than it used to be, and speed is adequate for most things, largely because we've become used to buying better hardware every few years.

[–] digdilem@lemmy.ml 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

(This is as much an answer to some of the comments already raised, as to the article - which like most such personal pieces has pros and cons.)

As part of a previous job I used to host email for a small business - this was about 15 years ago. I ended up spending several hours to a day a week working on it; apologising to users, tracing and diagnosing missing sent email and the endless, ENDLESS arms war against incoming spam (phishing was much less of a problem then). The trust from the company in our email operation was very poor and you'd regularly hear someone apologising to a customer because we hadn't contacted them, or answered their email. The truth is much was going astray and staff were relying more on the phone than email because they knew it worked. You might guess from this that I'm terrible at running an email system but I don't think I am. I started moving email back in the late 80s when Fidonet was the thing, so I have some miles travelled. Tools have improved a bit since then, but so have those used by the bad guys.

I still consider one of the best things I did for that company was move our company email onto Gmail Business (which was free for us as a charity) Every single one of those problems went away immediately and suddenly I had a lot more time to do more important stuff. I would never self-host email again despite running several personal servers.

Plenty of people say they self-host just fine, and great for you if that's so. But the truth is you won't always know if your outbound mail silently gets dropped and you have a far higher chance of it arriving if it comes from a reputable source. There are a huge number of variables outside of your control. (ISP, your country, your region, your software, even the latency of your MX or DKIM responses factor into your reputation)

You take the decision on whether any perceieved risks of privacy through using a third party outweighs the deliverability and filtering issues of self hosting, but please don't say it's simple or reliable for everyone. If it's simple for you, you're either incredibly lucky or just not appreciating the problem.

[–] digdilem@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

You're spot on, and even smaller ISPs routinely get blocked by larger hosters (anyone who doubts this, please look around for the many stories along the lines of "gmail silently drops my email")

Residential IP blocks are scored much higher and given a negative trust from the start - not surprising since that's where much of the world's spam comes from through compromised computers, routers etc.

[–] digdilem@lemmy.ml 10 points 1 year ago

We replaced our vm hosts recently with AMD ones - literally half the price with a lot more performance.

Xeon's always led the pack for enterprise hardware, but no longer. Confidence in Intel has been dropping for a while.

[–] digdilem@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

My employer paid for a course heavily based on it (No cert, but condensed and more useful), and for my time. One tutor and two pupils over a week.

I found it moderately interesting, and slightly useful. It was the most relevant training available for administrating our (then) CentOS 5/6/7 servers. There were bits that didn't transfer across to CentOS, mostly the proprietary RHEL software aspects which we largely skipped. There was much that was useful for any linux distro.

Highlight for me was properly learning awk during it - I still use that every day.

[–] digdilem@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Got to admit, the zypper argument is compelling.

"zypper up"! is the best upgrade command.

[–] digdilem@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Absolutely. I will never buy another Early Access game - it's buying something that is clearly unfinished, and you the player never get a second chance at the first impression. There's too many other games to expect us to come back and try it again once there's more content and the bugs are ironed out.

[–] digdilem@lemmy.ml 44 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

I just want to buy a game that's actually finished. Early Access has ruined that first play experience.

view more: ‹ prev next ›