pythonmegapixel

I don't think he is any worse for offering it to you than you are for buying it to be honest.

Banned because you're banned - how can you ban me when you're already banned?

Banned because I don't either and you didn't ban me, hehe

The paper isn't digital, but the restrictions are! It is a rights issue because it concerns your right to do as you please with the equipment you have purchased.

You can go lower than that if you ignore the stuff aimed at the home market and buy printers aimed at business or education settings. Unfortunately, the printer manufacturers seem not to want home users to buy these so they are a bit harder to get hold of. Cheap home printers, I constantly feel like I am fighting with them to get them to actually print anything.

I'd say it's more likely to be the other way round. A stupid smart toaster that only accepts specific bread. I can imagine it now. You go to the website of the toaster manufacturer to order your bread, sign into your Toaster Account™, and it generates a unique ID for each slice of bread you order, which is burned into the slice as a datamatrix. Every time you start the toaster, it scans the slices of bread and checks the IDs with the server to make sure that your account is allowed to toast that particular bread slice.

Maybe Samsung should improve their software optimisation so that the battery lasts longer, and ship their phones with large batteries. Then they could implement a software feature which keeps track of when you usually stop using the phone each evening, and sends a notification slightly before which reminds you to plug it in. Then we wouldn't need all this "fast charging" stuff.

Yes, so they should both stop using it. Not sure what relevance it should have to my opinion of Teams though. I do think Teams has got massively more reliable and nicer to use over the past year or so FWIW, as I mentioned in another post, and I'm sure my opinion of it was biased last year because of how long I had to sit staring at it.

Huh? Looks OK to me... I understand being a bit confused by package managers but I think it's a matter of familiarity. Whenever I have to set up a Windows machine I find it quite an annoying and overwhelming task to have to go and search for all the software I want in the browser and download their individual installers, and then they all have slightly different UIs.

I disagree that it hasn't made any progress, but that's for another thread. Yes. I can say from personal experience that persuading an older person who is used to Windows 7, who doesn't know how computers work, and who only needs web browsing, email and word processing, to use a Linux Mint machine that I have set up to have basic things roughly where they would be in Windows is about the same difficulty as persuading them to use Windows 10. I've done both. The thing is it doesn't matter that Windows 10 is more similar to Win7 than LM, because as far as this particular category of user is concerned, they both involve a complete change of how their computer works.

I spent a lot of 2020 and 2021 using Teams, because we switched to online stuff suddenly for obvious reasons and our IT department just wanted to use it because it came with our Office 365 subscription. At the start it was truly awful in terms of both the call quality and UI, but it's improved enough now that I don't really have any problems with it. Plus things like the meeting chat being preserved after the meeting, which the competitors don't really do. Discord and Teams are not really competing though - they are offering what is in concept the same product, but to such vastly different market segments that they might as well be completely separate.

What you mean is that it's never been a solution for certain functionality on the desktop, and that functionality is a minority of use cases. Well, why couldn't you? It's not exactly like the average grandma is trying to play Cyberpunk or edit high-resolution video, is it.

All of the external DVD drives I can find are 'slimline' ones like this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B010OC6VTW/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_B5QQKK1MYG1M6QS2FSYQ These seem to invariably have a cheap-feeling eject mechanism which just pops the tray out partway, and then you have to pull it out the rest of the way. It will just sit on a desk so I'm not really that bothered about it being slim, and I would much prefer a DVD drive with a proper motorised eject mechanism which opens the tray all the way. These are much more satisfying to operate and drives with this sort of mechanism always feel a bit more robustly built in general. I know these mechanisms exist and are still manufactured, as I've seen them in new desktop PCs. But I can't find any that connect via USB. I also can't find top-load mechanisms anywhere. Does anyone know why these seem not to exist?

That is a very misleading statement. The vast majority of Linux systems do not make you link an online account. In Linux Mint, that popup doesn't appear automatically - to get it at all you have to find it manually or launch a Gnome application such as Evolution which actually uses that functionality before it will appear in the first place. And even in this screenshot you have an unambiguous Skip button which makes it go away and not come back.

Often I think people do it because they plan to leave it unactivated anyway so they might as well use the high end version

The people I am most annoyed with now are OEMs and software companies who refuse to support Linux. The number of people in this thread who are saying they want to ditch Windows but are hamstrung by the lack of proper alternatives is astounding.

There are two problems here. Firstly, the file name extension (.txt, .pdf etc) is a description of what should be in the file, but changing it doesn't actually affect what is in the file. Think of it as having a box of apples with "apples" written on it. I could cross out "apples" and write "oranges" instead, but doing that doesn't change apples into oranges. In this case, when you change the file extension from PDF to TXT, the file itself is still in PDF format. Secondly, PDF format files aren't readable as text, which is why Python is throwing errors - it is expecting to see Unicode characters but the bytes it is reading from the file are not valid Unicode characters. There are Python libraries available that allow you to read PDF files though so I suggest you use one of them. If all you want to do is copy the files, use the builtin shutil module https://docs.python.org/3/library/shutil.html

This seems quite meaningless to me. Putting the CPU in the slot is only one part of building the computer, and the brand of CPU doesn't realistically affect what it's like to use, no?

Banned for not thinking of a ban reason

Although that does entail giving money to Elon Musk. And it's rather a lot of money, too.

Indeed. Also an EV will get cleaner throughout its lifetime as the energy mix gradually shifts towards nuclear and renewables. An international combustion engine won't, unless we find some way to synthesise a fuel which is suitable in existing engines but burns more cleanly. I think that's the aim with increasing the proportion of ethanol, but we can't do that forever.

I think I mentioned it before, but I am quite a fan of Geany. It's a lot like Notepad++ except that it's cross-platform and has a few additional features, nothing which stops it from still feeling a world away from a massive IDE like VSCode though

I still maintain that the actual solution to this problem is high quality alternatives to driving, and offering strong incentives to use them. Until we live on a planet with unlimited space and 100% renewable energy generation, cars will always be suboptimal from an efficiency perspective. As with all such things it's a trade-off, and I'll be the first to acknowledge that cars have fantastic advantages. But I believe, for example, that those North American suburbs where you have to get in the car to do almost anything have got the balance way wrong.

The actual solution relies on reducing dependence on cars in general. If that is not an option, EVs are the least worst type of vehicle at the moment.

I think OP's question was probably adequately answered by the first 4 replies, before all that nonsense about Linux being the "one way" to have an acceptable computing experience....