_NetNomad

forums face a lot of the same issues federated platforms do, chiefly- why the hell would the proverbial i join it when reddit and discord already exist? i already have an account there, there’s already a community there… i think for some people that’s just never gonna change. there’s no closing pandora’s box. i run an online community with a small but fairly active discord and we have a forum as well in anticipation of discord going full enshittification, but it’s just impossible to get younger people onto it. the fedi at least has the advantage of looking like the monolithic platforms people are leaving, but forums are such a foreign concept

getting a community going is a bit of a catch 22. the best way to get users is to already have users and appear active. if i recall correctly, early on reddit had a ton of staff sock puppet accounts to do just that. i’m certainly not advocating for it but it goes to show how tricky the problem is. the only real answer on an individual level is to pick a platform and stick with it through the thin years and try to recruit a few friends- after that MAYBE hopefully it eventually gets some momentum

i’m gonna level with you, i completely forgot IBM cloud was a thing and just thought this was MS pointing fingers at system Z or system . thanks for catching that!

so Delta’s non-Windows machines were the ones that suffered the most from a Windows software malfunction? that makes sense

seconding this. despite the url, the instance i am on runs mbin and it’s the bees knees

“I’ll be right back, gotta check if the bathroom still works”

not a single mention of SEGA Rally or Power Drift? shameful!

a lot of games these days have higher graphic “fidelity” but it’s at the point where they’re exaggerating them just to show off. light and reflection systems in particular have kind of an uncanny valley feel to them now at least to me, and it makes the games much less pleasant to look at

windows 8 is a strong candidate, because that was their huge push into trying to remodel the OS in the image of mobile OSes. you had to perform quite the exorcism to get it functional. i skipped Vista so I’m not the best source on this but my understanding is that the issue with Vista is less that it was loaded with dark patterns and trying to be a walled garden and more just an unfortunate time to be an OS with the technology and security landscapes changing.

of course, while the base OS wasn’t necessarily always the problem, Microsoft has anti-competitive practices going back even further and you could argue Windows stopped being good when MS started bundling Internet Explorer with it, so it all depends where you draw the line. might be safest to say their last truly good OS was MSX-DOS just because they abandoned it before they could do anything scummy

i THINK he went through these guys but i’ll double check tomorrow and let you know if i was wrong https://www.franklinapprenticeships.com/

if you have an edu email, IBM also does a “master the mainframe” program every fall that takes you from zero experience to developing a full application, which is a great way to learn the whole stack

yeah, at least where i am the cowboy days are long over. we have a modern change control system on the box that ties into our company’s broader service management system, and methodologies like agile are used (and misused) just like in the newer departments. the software and hardware are also constantly being updated by IBM and keeping up with them and other vendors is a full time job all on it’s own- really the only things ancient about it are the oldest parts of our own codebase and the terminal interface. we actually have a product that lets us bypass the terminal now and do everything in eclipse but the old timers don’t use it because the terminal is easier for them and then the newbies don’t use it because any time the oldbies teach them how to do something, it’s on the terminal emulator lmao

i have a mainframe (the type of computer that runs COBOL) IT job after four years of school majoring in CS and minoring in mainframes. my most recently hired coworker got the same job with no college and an aprenticeship program. if i could do it all over again, that’s the route i would take in a heartbeat

i can remember all of them from when i was a kid, but that number has since tripled. if i was a kid now i don’t think i would be able to learn all of them in the first place!

i think a lot of great points have been made in this thread, but it’s also worth saying- you can’t be wrong about what you do and don’t dig!

Alan Stivell does some incredible fusion of rock and Celtic folk. i usually avoid the term “Celtic” for music because some people find it dismissive to lump multiple musical traditions together like that, but he very deliberately draws from most (all?) of the musical traditions that would fall under that umbrella. i highly recommend the E Dulenn and Á L’Olympia live albums

which of course is a distraction from the fact the main show serves the same purpose in the real world!

does that have a free tier or only paid plans

what antivirus are the cool kids using these days? i feel like whenever i finally settle on one it ends up embroiled in this or that scandal

time-traveling to save Time, it’s poetic!

your mission, should you choose to accept it: 1983. CBS is going to tell you that you only get one disc for your double LP. a deflated Jeff Lynne is just gonna slap A1 on the first side and a few random tracks on the second and be done with it. you cannot let this happen under any circumstances. everything wrong with the world in the last half-century? it all starts with Secret Messages not ending with Hello My Old Friend. if you can fix that, you can save us all

if you can also convince him to move Loser Gone Wild to the b-side it would greatly help the flow and pacing of the album but that did not have nearly the same level of impact on the space-time continuum so we’ll just file that as a “nice to have”

yamaha all the way. nothing beats the fresh taste of frequency modulation