I wish I could say Samba worked properly under Windows. I've been migrating file shares to Teams/OneDrive sync as Samba is not reliable anymore. Too many "Multiple connections to a server or shared resource by the same user" or variations on that theme.
It’s centered around a simple YAML configuration format and includes a desktop GUI and webDAV server for browsing snapshots. Developed by the same team that created Vorta and Borgbase, I’ve been testing it and it’s quite fast and user-friendly.
From the graphs it seems that the initial naming for it was V'Ger, what would had been a good match with Borg and Vorta in the Star Trek based naming scheme.
It was a bit surprising that, coming from the same team, it didn't use the same repository format, for more or less the same use case and feature list (may it be related to its native support of S3?)
Yeah, I love the original name, but it would have been problematic potentially with copyright. As for breaking the format, sometimes there's good reasons for it. I can tell you that it really flies though, when compared to Borg/Vorta. I can't tell if the speed improvements are from the Rust front end or the back end format changes, but it's a lot faster than Vorta/Borg and certainly way faster than Kopia on restore.
I have a lot of respect for the actors at the Simpsons, but listen to some clips of their voices now versus when they were in their prime. They can't go on forever.
I switched from Fastmail to Gmail/Workspace a year ago. I think but cannot conclusively prove that Gmail drops Apple transaction emails on occasion ( like receipts ). But I also think Fastmail dropped other emails too.
I was on Google Reader, then Feedly for a long time, until the Feedly iOS client just slowly degraded and got buggy. I'm not opposed to paying for a good RSS set.
I finally switched to NetNewsWire as the front end and FreshRSS on the backend, and could not be happier. NNW being free is just the icing on the cake, it's really great, and FreshRSS was also really easy to install.
What I like about FreshRSS is that it's PHP and will install on any old shared hosting plan and uses Sqlite as the database, super easy.
I think it's probably a little bit harder than you think with all the rules and regulations out there. I would highly encourage anybody who's remotely interested, listen to the Acquired podcast episode regarding Visa. It's actually quite fascinating how it was started. You may balk at the length, but the whole thing had me interested.
In the Netherlands, before VISA, there already was a national debit card standard called PIN [1]. Sure, times have changed and it's probably not super easy, but it's also not going to be super hard.
Fun fact: until about a year ago it was not possible to pay using normal debit cards in most Dutch shops, you had to have a local card. I distinctly remember that AH, Vomar and Jumbo would typically reject foreign cards while Lidl and Dirk would typically accept them. Of course there were exceptions, but that was the rule of thumb.
Most Dutch people were unaware of the issue (because Dutch cards worked abroad), and those who were, were fully convinced that it's because Dutch system is objectively better (it wasn't, it was just a separate network). Then in like 2024/2025 Visa and Mastercard finally retired their special V-Pay and Maestro brands, and now most terminals in the Netherlands accept most normal cards.
There are equivalents in several European countries. The problem is that these networks are national and not European, let alone global.
National banking players did not want to give up their turf. The European Union had to twist their arms to get them to agree to SEPA transfers, instant transfers, etc.
If banking players cannot agree, then regulation (or the threat of regulation) must be used.
CB actually have higher security standards than visa.
I once worked at a company doing payment card personalization (its the company who turn blank smart cards into finalized cards on behalf of banks. They print the customers names, emboss the account number, and program the chip and the magstrip)
Every year they had comprehensive security audits from Visa, Mastercard and Groupe Carte Bleue.
One guy there told me that they did the Groupe Carte Bleue audit first, because its the toughest. If they passed it they were sure to pass the others.
The most obvious difference being that unlike China or India, Europe (or the EU) is not a single country. This doesn't make things impossible but certainly complicates them.
Exactly, now that the internet is ubiquitous, none of the problems with replacing credit card companies like VISA are really technical. They are regulatory, they are political, they are social.
> one of the problems with replacing credit card companies like VISA are really technical
VISA and Mastercard never resolved major technical problems. It's nothing a bank wouldn't already be able to achieve internally from a technological complexity point of view. They didn't invent any of the technologies, they just navigated the political and regulatory hurdles, then leveraged their position for more.
Your comment makes it look like the problems are "just" political or regulatory. These are more often then not the bigger ones.
European countries each have their system. But they do not interoperate. You can't pay with blik in Germany, you can't pay with German debit card in Poland.
And who wrote those? Aren't they just another part of the moat?
> It's actually quite fascinating how it was started.
Visa was founded in 1958 by Bank of America (BofA) as the BankAmericard credit card program.[1] In response to competitor Master Charge (now Mastercard), BofA began to license the BankAmericard program to other financial institutions in 1966.[8] By 1970, BofA gave up direct control of the BankAmericard program, forming a cooperative with the other various BankAmericard issuer banks to take over its management. It was then renamed Visa in 1976.
My takeaway from the episode was that its actually really easy to setup up visa, you just need to get the banks, vendors, and card issuers onboard, which should be easy if you're the government
Sure, it’s hard, but a duopoly is skimming LITERALLY 1-3% off the entire consumer economy for a service that is not that expensive to operate. Additionally, interchange rates are higher for premium credit cards, to pay for the benefits (not to pay for the cost of operating the network.) This cost is shared among all consumers, not just the well-off who can get premium credit cards.
It’s a captive market, which means Visa & MC really don’t have a ton of incentive to compete. How do you get new payment networks to integrate? Banks typically only offer a single network on their cards, and businesses use whatever their PoS systems accept. For a new network to compete, it’d need to be available everywhere.
It’s the textbook definition of core infrastructure for society and frankly should be operated like a utility. It’s not like Visa & MC are innovating - just look at the lethargic rollout of contactless in the US until COVID forced everyone’s hands.
The sole purpose of visa & MC is to grow profit each year. That’s it. I’m not a fan of that being in the middle of practically all consumer spending
I work in academia and I've gotten most of my people to switch to Macs and no, Linux is not an option here.
I have about eight Windows PCs against about sixty MacBook Airs and guess which platform causes me the most work? 1:20 issue ratio. Even simple things like SMB in Windows 11 are hopelessly broken.
What makes Linux not an option? Is there specific apps you need to use? Or IT policies? Or something else?
The company I work for got bought by a big conglomerate, and I managed to stubbornly hold out using Linux for a really long time. It turns out if your workplace has adopted “Bring your own device” type policies, that often means you can auth with enough services that working on Linux is feasible.
The issue isn’t the technology, it’s that there’s more than one way to do everything and people tend to scratch their itches.
If you started a company today, you can immediately and cheaply hire people or an MSP to manage Windows PCs. I hire entry Windows techs for $70k. M365 E-whatever is $30-60/mo.
Apple fully aligned their products, so the guys running the iPhone fleet can run the Macs. They may need some higher level assistance to setup the configurations. Unless you have a lot of compliance work, enroll in MDM, done.
With Linux, other than Chrome, there’s no standard. You’re gonna need a smart/expensive person to setup things and you’re going to need smart/expensive people to operate. If you have compliance requirements appear, you’ll need to buy RHEL or something and rework stuff, which is more expensive than windows.
It's much harder for non-dev jobs where the management won't let you BYOD for whatever reasons, which could range from IT being too stubborn to allow you to keep company data on your own laptop that's not centrally managed, to everything including licenses for random 3rd party software the company is using being tied to the ActiveDirectory fleet of computers with centralized storage.
This is the reality of IT equipment in big parts of the non-dev world, and you'll have a hard time convincing the IT dept to take on extra hassle just for you to use Linux out of all hundreds of employees who're just fine with Windows.
Linux is good for a lot of things, but the end user has to be comfortable too. They've heard of a Mac, but a Dell with Mint or whatnot is a harder sell.
I have a friend that worked for a big corp back 15 years ago managing Macs. At one point they told him they were going to can him and switch the Mac uses to Windows. Didn't go anywhere when he pointed out he was managing all their Mac users. And he was managing 5 times as many Macs as his coworkers were managing Window Boxes.
"Old age and treachery will always beat youth and exuberance" - as misquoted by Jett Reno in Starfleet Academy.
I work in academia and the breadth of knowledge on how to get things done by the older workers in a bureaucracy is just astonishing. Lose them at your peril!
It's the senescence that makes the fall, more or less, inevitable. Warren Buffet wrote about it in his final letter to shareholders [1] : "When balance, sight, hearing and memory are all on a persistently downward slope, you know Father Time is in the neighborhood."
Yeah. My Grandmother lived a pretty long time but she had a boarder named Lillian who at 95 was still walking 2 or 3 miles to the store every day. One day her daughter gave her a lift and managed to get into a fairly minor accident. (My Dad claimed that the daughter was herself too old to be driving.)
Anyhow Lillian broke an ankle. Went to hospital. And there was some complication. And then another. And 2 weeks later she's passed away, never having gotten out of the hospital.
I think people - especially when you're old - are more like sharks then not. If you don't keep moving nothing good happens.
Muscles atrophy without consistent activity. VR can't replace that for someone with a broken hip / leg / spine. The whole cardiopulmonary system weakens with age, as does the immune system and healing takes longer, so an injury from a fall is much harder on the body than an equivalent injury to a younger person.
The comparison is between active VR participation (not simply watching TV in VR) and passive activities like crosswords during the recovery period of reduced mobility.
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