+1 for Home Assistant, and then with Add Ons it can also do other useful home network stuff (network ad blocker, VPN, *arr, etc).

Every military in the world uses UTC so I’m gonna say that.

Otherwise, I’d go for UTC-1 because… well, look at it. There’s no way they could lose because there’s nothing there to lose. Nuke away, boyos, it’s all ocean.

Yeah, me too. Two VPSs (one Helsinki, the other Nuremberg) each with a couple of IPs. Been running perfectly for years aside from when I fuck them up.

Paradise City from Burnout was pretty amazing, especially given you were supposed to navigate it at 250km/h. Lots of three-dimensionality about it too, with tunnels, overpasses, rooftops, etc.

It’s actually even wilder than that.

The earliest know pyramids date back to around 2600BCE, and Cleopatra reigned around 50-30BCE, so her reign is closer to the modern day than to the first pyramids by about 600 years. One of the earliest surviving pyramids, Djoser, was built by Imhotep (with help, I assume) during a period called the Third Egyptian Dynasty meaning, as it’s name suggests, the unified Kingdom of Egypt was already well-established by the time it was built. The First Dynasty started about 3100BCE so even ignoring the proto-Dynasty period of Egypt, that’s pretty humbling: if you drew a timeline with the founding of Ancient Egypt on the left and the founding of OnlyFans to the right, Cleopatra would be three-fifths of the way along it.

I don’t know if you’re asking seriously, but if you are the answer is: Enterprise manageability and accountability. There’s a reason why every hospital, Fortune 500 corporate campus, military base, supermarket, distribution centre, etc, etc all run Windows workstations. Why would a ruthlessley profit-driven corporation buy expensive Windows licenses when Ubuntu is free? Because when you’re dealing with ten thousand workstation in 150 countries, each with own requirements for data protection, working time, employee rights, etc that not only need enforcing, but need to be audited, you can do all that with a single Windows server and a half-motivated sysadmin. And for everyone smaller than that, you still get access to those same tools for your school, office, factory, whatever on your fleet of twenty mismatched laptops from eight different vendors.

Nothing else comes close, and until it does nothing will change. They would all drop Windows in an instant if there was a sensible alternative.

Cows.

A friend of mine was taking over his family farm with access to open moorland for grazing and as an experiment we wanted to see if we could implement tracking without giving a monthly small fortune to a company for a proprietary product or noisy polluting methods like a helicopter. BLE beacons are cheap and long-lasting so each cow got one, and we bodged together about twenty solar powered Meshtastic nodes with GPS that were small enough to be worn on their collars (since the cows tend to heard together only one in the group needs a node), plus another dozen we could install at choke points on the land (old gates, land bridges, etc) the cows were likely to traverse. The nodes were like this, but smaller and shitter. The nodes were programmed to report every time they saw a BLE beacon nearby, with the mobile ones also reporting their own GPS location, all being fed into Home Assistant for mapping. I just checked and apparently, aside from a couple of storm-damaged fixed nodes and replacement batteries it’s still going strong after two years.

Is this loss?

Not sure what you mean. I use Meshtastic a lot, both as a hobby but also for remote sensor reading and herd tracking. Works a treat.

Amazing that they weren’t using Signal for comms outside their group, but for internal comms it’s even more amazing they weren’t using something like Meshtastic.

This is yet another reason why you don’t use whatsapp

ftfy

Look on eBay for USFF PCs. They’re mini computers the size of paperback books that are designed for use in large organisations, and they’re made by the usual suspects - HP and Dell mostly. Because they get replaced regularly they’re cheap but they’re just regular desktop PC hardware. A ten year old i5 can handle being a 4K media centre no problem and can be had for €/£/$70.

TIL that NextCloud can use an external database.

It’s cloud all the way down.

UK here. English, obviously. That’s it. Modern languages - either French or Spanish - were optional. It’s honestly embarrassing.

Kinda, but also that Clippy (real name Clippit, as it happens) was included as a feature that was genuinely intended to be helpful. Like, that’s not to say it was successful, or appreciated, but that it came from a time when you could buy a product in the expectation that you’d own it, you could keep it and it’d work for you, not for someone else.

When I was a kid my primary school did but my secondary schools didn’t, though they did have offices with phones in scattered throughout the campus so a phone was never far away.

That said, up until a couple years ago I worked in schools IT and whoever we were doing a network refit schools would always spec a couple of points in each classroom for a VOIP handset. Most could only make internal calls though.

In Enterprise: manageability. It’s hard to overstate how powerful Windows Group Policy is. Being able to configure every single aspect of the OS and virtually all major applications, Microsoft or otherwise, using a single application that can apply rules dynamically based on user, device, user or device groups, time of day, location, battery level, form factor, etc, etc. Nothing on Linux comes close, especially when simplicity is a factor, and until it does most large organisations won’t touch it with a barge pole.

There really are no depths these people will not stoop to, are there?

I have a bunch of mid-century Roberts radios that I’ve convert to smart speakers (using the original speakers and, where possible, the amplifiers) if that counts.