At work, we needed a PC for a Linux-based Webkiosk the other day. The computer proposed by the colleague who actually orders stuff comes with a Windows license. I said we don't need that. A fruitless, lame effort was made to locate a substitute w/o a Windows license. I renewed my protest, but the feeling that the problem is me was already floating in the air. I gave up. We purchased a Windows license to run Linux. For the umpteenth time.
It's like a Microsoft tax on PCs.
Those OEM licenses do seem quite cheap. I think it was Dell who gave an option for a while. To remove the Windows license and have Ubuntu instead only saved $10.
It was low enough where I think most buyers questioned if it would be worth it to have the license just incase.
I can’t help but think what this means is just that the menu isn’t that’s important as a marketing tool. If having an up to date website and menu resulted in a noticeable boost in business, every restaurant would have it.
Average person either finds the place through google maps or a TikTok video, checks a few photos of the food or venue, then goes. Doesn’t matter what the exact menu is because there are plenty of options and something will be appealing.
Or it’s good for customers and bad for restaurants. There are such things, and menu can be easily one. Especially tourist focused restaurants infested with such tactics, and you can avoid most of them just looking on their menu.
Yeah that context matters significantly. What’s the turnover rate for restaurants in your area? What’s the variance in menu? “Success” in my neck of the woods is staying open more than 2 years, and menu availability plays a significant role.
We usually order by phone, then drive by and pick up the food. Can't do that w/o a menu. The solution is usually to take a printed menu with you when you're there. But that's a chicken-and-egg problem!
I think it's important for customers and they usuallly post the menu in google maps thing, basically the customers are doing the labor of the business owner and the business owner as he still gets the results he doesn't do it
The conversational context did not involve anyone making any claims about the viability of businesses operating sans info. You can check—nowhere does the person who you're responding to (or any of the ancestor comments in this thread) write in their comment that companies are losing business because of the lack of up-to-date information, whether on their own site on through Google Maps.
The context is people, very reasonably, making a plea that that info be published on the open web.
Website? Ha, with local restaurants here you're in luck if the photos of the menu posted by customers on google maps or FB or where ever aren't too fuzzy to read.
Yet, living in Germany, the problems I hear about our healthcare system from friends or in the media are an absolute far cry from the insanity that I hear about the US system. Maybe some of it is sensationalism, but I very much doubt that would account for the whole story.
What's usually missing from anecdotes is class cohorts - so, US working class with Medicaid or a crappy marketplace plan vs working professional with an amazing plan vs retiree with Medicare vs...
Nothing's perfect, but the plan differences seem stark. For example, my wife had a crappy marketplace plan and I had a plan through my employer. For her, an MRI was denied, denied, then finally approved with many calls. For me, it was approved immediately. For her, pre-auth to a specialist was denied until her doctor went and tried a different referral strategy. For me...well, I haven't been denied yet. It goes on - same city, same hospital, some of the same referrals, etc.
I've come to think the price discrimination really does mean we have class-based care which seems to allow for the sensationalism. Combine a dire scenario with a working or indigent class American, and they don't have to exaggerate much at all.
Having lived in both Germany and the US, my experience with the German system is that there are a lot more, smaller hospitals and private practices, the care is good, and all I ever paid for out of pocket was prescription medications. I didn't have to wait long for an MRI (two weeks) versus months in the US. I had a number of things that would have been hundreds or thousands of dollars in the US that I never paid a penny for in Germany. I'll also say that hospitals are absolutely crazy about sending bill collectors after you. I had a handful of small charges--like $10 or $20 things--that I hadn't realized were even there and two months later they freaking inundated me with bill collector notices.
It does make a big difference exactly where you are in the US, however. Some places have a glut of healthcare providers and other places don't.
> I didn't have to wait long for an MRI (two weeks) versus months in the US.
Where in the US did you have to wait months? There seems to be an MRI/imaging location in every other shopping center in the US right now. I've never had a problem getting a same day MRI when needed. Perhaps you were waiting for the 'free' one your insurance would accept?
A bad moment to have a make-or-break moment for your CPU business - a lot of customers will probably hold off purchases right now because of the RAM prices, no matter how good your CPU might be.
Isn't this new server CPU a drop in replacement though? So the DC could pull off the old CPU, drop in the new one and not touch the existing RAM setup, yet be able to deliver better performance within the limits of the existing RAM. Then once RAM prices drop (okay that might be a while) separately upgrade the RAM at a different time.
That's semi-dependent on supplier arrangements; i.e. lots of shops won't want to upgrade CPUs on a server out of fear that they can't get support later; sometimes that's justified by contract, sometimes it's not.
I have 2 thinkpads, and one of them is better in every aspect - except that the inferior one has it's 2 USB-C ports on opposite sides of the laptop, while the other one has both ports on the same side. Being able to plug in the charger from either side is really great, will definitely look for that in a future laptop.
I think there is a tendency to simply give in and buy bigger hardware if something doesn't work. With friends and family, I sometimes feel like having to talk them off the roof with regards to pulling the trigger on really expensive (relative to the tasks they're doing) hardware, simply because performance is often abysmal due to the fact that they trashed their OS with malware and bloatware and whatnot and can't understand all of that.
It's the same at work, to some degree. Our in-house ERP software performs like kicking a sack of rocks down a hill. I don't know how often I had to show devs that the hardware is actually idle and they're mostly derailing themselves with DB table locks, GC issues and whatnot. If I weren't pushing back, we probably would have bought the biggest VMs just to let them sit idle.
The blog is fine, it just looks like he didn't foresee that there would be a month where wouldn't post anything, so the navigation links break down. If you go to the last month he posted in, everything works as usual: http://blog.fefe.de/?mon=202505
> [...] I'm not even sure what exactly "Microsoft Copilot" entails anymore [...]
Watching from the sidelines (not a Microsoft user), I've completely lost track. Between this, the Azure 365 cloud whatever stuff, I have no idea what many of the products even exactly are any more.
Simply put Microsoft is the worst company at naming stuff. Even when they come up with a good name for something, they'll name 3 other totally different products the same thing to maximize confusion.
I gotta say though, I'm actually not sure which VMware (well Broadcom I suppose) products I use anymore. I'm pretty sure they took the Aria name off something else they called Aria for a little while. So Aria is no longer Aria but they still have Aria but it's what used to be called XYZ
Xbox Series with X > S (so if you want the high end of the current generation you want the Xbox Series X; if you want mid-range things are more complicated because you can now get an Xbox One X, but not the Xbox One, used for much less than you'd get an Xbox Series S for and which one is "better" is a dice roll depending on the games you want to play and if 4K matters to you…)
Series is a real weird word to use there. But it also doesn't help that the versions are extra complicated because with "PC-like compatibility" in everything after the Xbox One playing just about the entire same library you need a bit of a matrix to figure out which is best for you if you don't care about the "latest and greatest".
Oh wow yes, completely forgot about that one. To me, it's a complete blur made from single words and letters, one series x s one box 360? Maybe they should create a 365, with MS office pre-installed. Or something.
Seriously? Does anybody know what Copilot is? I don't think I have ever seem a "Copilot user", so I don't know what it looks like. Is it the little macro key on new laptop keyboards? The chatbot you get in Bing? A technical philosophy? Or is it in essence just copilot.com, the mediocre chat interface which you used to get free GPT-4 three years ago?
I wish. I got a Dell laptop for work and they've replaced the right Ctrl key with a Copilot key, and (because it's a locked-down work sysyem) the only thing I can remap that to is the Windows menu. And I keep hitting it out of muscle memory, interrupting everything. But at least now it doesn't launch Copilot.
Which I could add is "the only AI approved for use by IT" because they hate us.
> Which I could add is "the only AI approved for use by IT" because they hate us.
It's the same at our place. It's basically the lowest effort way as we already have data agreements with Microsoft 365 it eliminates a lot of the paperwork. And they do promise that they won't train on data even in the free (well, included with basic M365) version for corporate users. A lot of others don't unless you pay.
It's too bad because it seems to be the worst AI around. Even compared to ChatGPT itself which uses the same model as copilot in MS Office. I don't really understand why there's such a difference. If you do pay the $30 it's a bit better especially the researcher.
Double check if the (hopefully not locked) BIOS gives an option to customize the CTRL key. I had a previous work laptop which also got cute with the CTRL button, but thankfully did let you remap it.
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