The reason people use Chromebooks is because they want to minimally manage the devices. The Chromebooks being locked down is ENTIRELY the point of using them in the first place...That and because Google.

it's actually because they are half the price of a windows laptop, which means double the devices per classroom

Perhaps not, but in the USA you don't have a sudden fight with windows and gravity if you do something against the regime, either.

I'm not reading this whole thread, but based on the title I figured it kind of boiled down to name calling bullshit by more open source maintainers.

Folks, we have to stop this bullshit. NOBODY is perfect. Not you. Not me. Not anyone. It IS entirely possible that some script thing was written by an intern and it doesn't quite work right. That's possible. Does that make them a shitty intern?

As I've told others, and try to tell others, empathy is super important in the tech field. As a fellow autistic person who used to be this way towards other people, I find it equally as jarring now and completely turns me off to listening to whatever that person has to say when they make posts like this.

Give people some grace, make fixes, move on with your life. That's the beauty of OSS development. Submit some patches, reach out to maintainers, open a dialog, have good conversation. Don't just shit all over someone for the sake of doing so even if they are doing something "stupid".

I promise you we will ALL be better for it.

Yeah. This is generally the type of thing that turns me off to working in the Linux/MacOS world. It's just a near constant "We're living in the 90s" attitude towards everything Microsoft does or has done. It's just absolutely insufferable.

I know more about both Windows AND Linux than most Linux Systems Administrators that I encounter. I know more about how making them work together in an enterprise than any Linux Administrator. I understand more about literally every underlying protocol AND how to manage those items on Linux and Windows, from DHCP, DNS, Networking, etc.

For all intents, I could be a pretty bad ass "Linux guru"--and for the most part, I hold my own quite well. I know how to manage SSSD, understand integrating Linux and Windows environments into harmony with each other. But my peers often see something in Windows they dislike, or a single thing that Microsoft hasn't really bothered to improve, and holy fuck in their minds the sky is falling and it's the absolutely worse thing they've ever had to do with a computer.

So I keep one foot outside of that world because these people are just fucking insufferable to work with and around.

Quite literally folks have done this for decades using Hamachi.

Hamachi and STUN were what I was thinking of when I referred to user-unfriendly NAT busting. It's true that these are not much harder to get working than a modem, but they don't match up with modern consumer expectations of ease-of-use and reliability on firewalled networks. It would be nice if Internet standards could keep up with industry so that these expectations could be met. It's totally understandable where we've landed due to modern security requirements, but I still feel something has been lost.

But how are you going to circumvent the user firewall? He still has to open ports there, even using STUN or Steam Relay or Hamachi.

Hamachi does not require you to open any ports on your firewall by nature. Except maybe the local firewall (Windows firewall, likely) which apps should automatically get asked for when they try to use a port.

I mean, internet standards kept up. IPv6 is a thing, and some form of dynamic IPv6 stateful firewall hole punching a la UPnP would be useful here. Particularly if the application used the temporary address for the hole punch--because once the address lifetime ends, it's basically not going to get used again (64-bit address space). So that effectively nullifies any longer term concerns about security vulnerabilities.

especially now that the example is gonna end up in some LLM somewhere and folks will just copy pasta.

The comments rebuking you appear to forget that by definition GDP and wealth are derived from the population. Wealth for social programs is not a finite resource as the general consensus is that over one's lifetime more wealth is created by one's work effort than is needed to sustain the individual. Capitalism by definition extracts this extra wealth for the private interests of a few. But there's no particular reason that this extra wealth can't be used to assist those that may not even meet the necessity of output of sustaining themselves.

This is a difficult concept for people to understand because they look at their paychecks and go "I'm not deriving so much wealth!" well yeah. A huge, large chunk of your wealth is being extracted for capitalism. And in manners that will be very difficult for you to understand.

I'll try to explain it, though, for the audience that peruses these forums. You're a software developer.

You work for a public B2B software company. Your wealth is being extracted to: Pay for those company pizza parties, pay for the office you work in, pay in to the healthcare system that "your company is paying for" that isn't directly part of the premium you see on open enrollment, paying for the company holiday parties, paying into everyone's various insurance plans to reduce the out-of-pocket costs for everyone in those insurance plans (outside of your company, of course), paying for the CEO's multi-million dollar paycheck, paying for the bonuses of all of the management, paying for shareholder value and dividends, paying for the taxes your company pays, paying for the taxes you pay.

If your existence at your job didn't pay for those things, most companies will tend to lay you off.

And this goes for pretty much the vast majority of workers in the vast majority of jobs.

So saying that more immigrants somehow puts a strain on the system is just by definition incorrect, even if a percentage of those immigrants don't generate the same level of value you do as an individual. Do you think every person in your organization generates the same relative value? Of course not. In most businesses in America, does the janitor generate the same wealth as the CEO?

To be fair, there is a snarky comment to be made there about CEOs--but the objective reality is probably not. But the janitor is still generating some wealth by ensuring a safe, healthy, and comfortable workplace for the employees. Does that mean the janitor is not entitled to income? to healthcare? to benefits? to company holiday parties? to company pizza parties?

Just convert this into a much larger scale of the entirety of a country's population--and well, the answer is that most populations have enough free money floating around somewhere to provide essential services to everyone: education, food, safety and security, health, and likely even housing, electricity, and pretty much any other public service we could provide.

And this scales as a population grows.

To build on this: One might ask, why don't countries with larger populations directly derive more wealth (particular by measurement of GDP) than smaller populations naturally?

There are a lot of reasons for this, but the short answer is that health, education, and enough individual wealth to explore figuring out ways to generate new revenue streams is important. Authoritarian countries are by nature not able to do this due to limits of their authoritarian nature, not necessarily limits of their population numbers.

It's all intertwined :)

As with any protocol and application, there's a big, massive, "it depends" on pretty much everything. There are pros, cons, tradeoffs to make that sometimes it's easier to just have the underlying platform make those trade-offs, or to surface those problems to the application layer for developers to decide how they want to handle those problems.

Folks shouldn't necessarily argue "one is better" more so than they should consider all engineering aspects of why you should use one technology over another.

I think one thing the internet community, particularly the likes of folks here who dominate the HN readership, is to stop listening to Google or using Google-derived services. The problem is everyone goggles Google's googleys every time they put something out: Chrome, Android, Kubernetes, QUIC, BBR, Analytics, Gmail, GCP, Go. And y'all continue to fucking do it.

I can't even go into my workplace and get the company to not install Google Chrome and use Microsoft Edge on Windows (mind you, Edge is now based on Chromium) because everyone is so far up Google's ass that they must run CHROME and not another CHROMIUM browser because MICROSOFT. It's fucking insanity. It's taken as a default.

Stop using their products. Stop giving Google so much power over the fucking internet. Meanwhile I go on internet forums, IRC, and places like HN and people still fucking cry about Microsoft as if somehow we're in the 1990s. Like literally Gen Z wasn't even born in the 1990s and they decry Microsoft because us Millennials and Gen X continue to think Microsoft is the absolutely worst evil ever and Google is like the patron saint of the internet.

Apologies for the little bit of pro Microsoft rant here, but the point I'm trying to make is we should evaluate both Google and Apple through the same lens that we all give Microsoft shit for.

DeGooglify your brain, and then the rest of the world will begin to follow. Stop changing everything in your fucking services to kubernetes and istio. Don't switch your projects over to Go. Stop letting them run everything.

Like every time Google releases a new piece of technology the entire industry jumps on their tallywhacker. And that just continues to cement their legacy in all of these stacks.

Nah screw it, it's late and I'm unable to sleep and gonna rant a little more.

Microsoft made changes to force consumer users to create Microsoft accounts to login to their PCs and you can go on Youtube and see 500 videos on how to use some bespoke tool to bypass this that has racked up thousands of views because some 'nerd' who literally walks around with a Macbook and an iPhone told them that it's the most evil thing Microsoft could make you do.

Meanwhile, once Google completes this transition on Android, you'll basically be forced to have a Google or Apple account to install any software on your devices, backup and restore the device, etc. And yet folks that dominate these boards are just like "yah that kinda sucks but like, ya know, ya know? ya know!?"

I agree that open software and even open hardware is a good thing. But both Apple and Google have done an incredible amount of damage to the open ecosystem of the web over the last 20 years in so many more ways than Microsoft could have ever dreamed of doing back in the 1990s.

And nerds not only let it happen, but embraced it, camped out in days-long lines wearing diapers to buy the latest shiny overpriced brick they could put in their pocket so they could look cool to all of their friends for a whole 12 months before the next one came out and made them look like a povo. And now walking around with a Macbook at college is like wearing the latest fashion trend because everyone has to show off that they're completely irresponsible with money and spend $2000 for something they could realistically get for under $1000 just so they can show off that they're in the same social class as everyone else.

It's the most infuriating thing to happen to the internet and technology.

Oh, and then to add on, they all get jobs in the tech industry and throw a fucking entitled childish hissy fit when their company hands them a $1000 Windows PC that's got monitoring and security software with no Admin rights on it instead of the $2500 Macbook Pro that they get root access to because mommy and daddy never told them no.

DMA in Europe required Microsoft to enable offline accounts without special tricks. When a government is doing their job properly they patch up holes in the laws that allow behavior that the majority consider to be against the prevailing norms.

You can also uninstall Edge and all the other Microsoft bloatware. Google on Android is actually one of the worse offenders in Europe for not being able to uninstall software as they consider far too many things to be critical to the operating system (for example, search).

Sure, but that isn't the prevailing norm anymore? What hardware doesn't effectively make you sign up for an account? Even Google does this under the hood with devices managed via Android Enterprise. Managed Google Play devices just create a device-specific account under the hood that isn't visible to the user. But it's still there. The requirement for this and the software infrastructure is still there.

Hell, even internet-of-shit devices make you sign up for an account to manage the hardware you buy (Ring, Nest, smart LEDs, etc.)

I'd give that on pure number of raw technical devices deployed to the internet today, some form of account and/or internet connectivity is a requirement moreso than not.

Nice rant, I’m here for it. This is what I miss from the early internet, a good old fashioned rant. It may go off the rails from time to time, but consistent in its frustration.

Note some companies give Mac books with admin, smaller companies though. It can be a real shock to go to a large company and get a locked down windows machine. What the boss can now see how much time I really spend working!?!

Thanks! Happy to oblige! lol

I mean, it also makes sense considering space debris would have hit that plane with significantly more force than a busted window.

Really depends on how big the space debris was and whether it had slowed to terminal velocity (the speed where the force of gravity equals the force of drag).

I'd rather be in a plane hit by 1 gram piece of space debris than in one that hit a 1kg sandbag hanging from a balloon.