Somewhat. A lot of those recommendations seem to be of the type, “I bought the most expensive brand possible and it works great! No complaints after seven days of ownership”
Also frustrating when it might be, “Look at this 30 year old Craftsmen wrench.” Unfortunately, that 30 year old version is no longer made, as production has been MBAed and quality is now an afterthought because they can still sell the logo for a premium price.
I always found the latter to be a huge problem with that sub. So much stuff like "these products from X are the greatest thing ever...but that brand is terrible now, don't buy from them"
Turns out, BIFL products are only recognized as such in hindsight, which is often after enshittification hits.
I've found a good source of recommendations can be friends and family who bought something similar 3-4 years ago. If something is going to go catastrophically wrong, it probably will have happened by then, and it's still possible that the same product is available.
Sounds a bit like the old Problem Steps Recorder (PSR) tool in Windows. It was a little known tool that recorded keystrokes/clicks/screenshots, which was great for troubleshooting.
Sadly, the screenshots were all lossy jpegs, and it wrapped the whole thing into an mhtml file.
That just encourages bad behaviour in the other direction though. A massive multi-level nested ternary on one line is usually going to be worse than a longer but clearer set of conditions. Trying to make code brief can be good, but it can often result in an unmaintainable and hard to read mess.
> No reason to not just host email with any domain provider and manage the rest with a small NAS in the office.
Sounds like even more of a single point of failure, just on your domain provider (who's much more likely to go out of business) than Microsoft. And one with no chat, or phones, or conference calling, or shared calendars, or endpoint management, or SSO, etc, etc.
Just sticking all your data on a cheap NAS in the office works for a few people, although it becomes PITA to do granular permissions when you don't have any proper central authentication. But then it's also a massive single point of failure, so you need to implement a backup solution, and then a way to share files outside of the organisation, and then a VPN so that people can work remotely, and then some monitoring so that you know when a disk fails....and that's getting way beyond what a non-technical person can manage.
It's fine if you're just using it for your hobby. But building your business on top of something like is very likely to come back and bite you in the arse.
What do people consider as NAS? A Network Harddrive? If you buy a "normal" Synology Nas it comes with shared calenders, office, VPN control, several backup options including Aws and Azure and a lot more. Typical setup and forget setup, thanks to their high package quality.
And I am sure there are even better options than a household Synology.
But putting everything in a cloud and fully depending on a single provider that for the majority of people is in a foreign (and politically dangerous) country is definitely not the obviously better option.
Well yeah, that's what a NAS is. What you're talking about is just self-hosting a all-in-one server, like people used do with Windows Small Business Server, and all the problems and limitations that comes with.
And plenty of small businesses and hobbyists do that, and then after they "setup and forget" it they get compromised or lose their data a few years down the line.
Yes and no. I've been in companies with windows business servers that were a constant pain to manage. Whereas the modern NAS, Building on stable open source software mostly offers the 'just works' experience people are looking for + the business grad documentation.
Why would using a NAS (or small server) mean ignoring any basic logic (and business requirements) and not having off-site backups?
SBS server "just works" if you just set it up once and then ignore it, your requirements never change, and and don't do basic things like maintenance and installing updates as well.
People absolutely should be setting up offsite backups. And more importantly, testing them so that they can prove that they work. But if they have no technical team then neither of those things are going to happen.
TF2 had lootboxes ("crates") back in 2010, a couple of years before CS:GO was released - I think this was Valve's first major foray into them. And it was really easy to trade the items, or buy/sell them on the Steam marketplace.
I don't know how the relative market caps compared, but I remember reading years ago that a hat in TF2 had sold for $14k...
People probably not buying, but the most expensive item now on marketplace.tf is $9,499.99. Myself bought ~$200 cosmetics, mostly strange killstreak ones I play (Sheep with a gun).
But also never bought a key. Recently sold old loot boxes for $15 each, nice.
I always found it interesting that the older crates (or at least, some of them) sold for so much. I'm sure it's not unique, but the idea of selling the lootboxes themselves to other players doesn't seem like such a common thing compared to just opening them and selling the contents.
The main issue was explaining to the layman that TLSv1.0 was in fact newer and better than SSLv2 and SSLv3. I remember having quite a few discussions about this with people who assumed that the bigger number must be better..
I had the same issue with my Kobo, which I've had for about 8 years. I was looking at the replacements, but they're quite a lot of money for...what? Slightly faster page turns? A screen that might look a little bit better?
I think it's mostly down to how cheap tablets and phones are. The cheapest Kindle on Amazon's site seems to be $130, which doesn't sound that expensive on its own. There's also a version full of adverts for about $20 less.
But when you stick it next to a 10" Android tablet with an 8 core CPU, 12GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, full colour higher resolution screen, dual cameras and all that jazz, which is less than half the price of a black and white Kindle...suddenly it doesn't look so great.
For someone who has never used a Kindle/e-ink reader I would agree with you, they will be tempted by the "cheaper, more capable" device but as someone who has owned iPads/Fire Tablets/Android tablets _and_ an e-ink reader (Kindle) I can tell you it's a whole different world. E-ink is just so much nicer to read when you are reading a book and the battery life is amazing.
Compare that to Android where you might be tempted to install Social Media Z app (I can't use X anymore :/) or your email/IM app. The distractions from that make it a sub-par reading device IMHO.
Absolutely, I have a e-ink reader and I love it. But if you stick it next to a tablet half its price, it looks outdated and overpriced by comparison, because things like the benefits of e-ink and the build quality meaning it lasts years aren't very visible or apparent.
> But when you stick it next to a 10" Android tablet with an 8 core CPU, 12GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, full colour higher resolution screen, dual cameras and all that jazz, which is less than half the price of a black and white Kindle...suddenly it doesn't look so great.
$60 for all that? I wonder how it runs in reality, and how well it'll run in just a year or two.
The thing about these dirt cheap tablets is... they're cheap for a reason, and it's not simply because that hardware is cheap these days. I've never once used, or had a family member bought, one of those super cheap tablets or laptops, and not have it be unusable in less than a year. They grind to a crawl, stop receiving updates, etc.
On the other hand, as many other comments here say... my Kindles are the absolute best value electronic device I've ever bought, no contest. I got one of the first generation Kindles, and only had to replace it a couple years ago after quite a few drops eventually broke the screen.
That's just from a quick look at Amazon - I'm sure you could find something cheaper and with better specs with a bit of effort.
And yeah, it's probably a bit crap. And there's good odds that it'll be dead or broken or unsupported in a couple of years - although you could throw it away, buy a second one and still be cheaper than the Kindle was.
I certainly wouldn't buy one, and in the long run you may regret doing so. But it looks shinier than a Kindle, it has colour, it's far more responsive, and it has far more functionality. So when you stick the two side-by-side, the Kindle looks pretty overpriced by comparison. Just like how graphical calculators look horribly overpriced when you stick them next to a dirt cheap Android tablet that has 100x the functionality they do for less.
The biggest thing I've experienced with cheap tablets is that the underlying storage medium of the device just sucks, and there's often no good way to actually know how bad it'll be when just looking at a spec list. Auto-updates from the Google Play store of the apps will quickly wear out the on-board storage and lead to everything going extremely slow until it finally dies.
Also, usually they have extremely bad screens with terrible viewing angles. Using them as something you're going to stare at for hours is miserable. Sure, the spec list says it's a higher resolution than the paper-like e-reader, but in practice the paper like display is far more comfortable to stare at for long periods of time.
A surprising number of sites still support RSS even though they don't have an icon or a link to the feed in the UI - so it's worth checking the page source to see if there's a feed URL.
It's one of the big things I'll credit Wordpress for - they enable RSS by default so a lot of sites support it without even meaning to.
It's not exclusively aimed at non-smart stuff, but there tends to be a pretty strong overlap between the two - so it might be worth taking a look at.
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