Countries where you have to drive as much to the right as possible also have laws stating it’s illegal to overtake on the right. Overtaking on the right has the same fine as jogging the middle lane if there’s space on the right.

I guess this mostly indicates to always check the actual road laws of the regions you’re driving in. But generally in Europe hogging the middle lane indicates you’re a danger on the road who should not be allowed to drive a car.

Like others stated, if it’s not someone I’m close to, I wouldn’t want to do it. If my partner however asks me for help, being able to help her and solve a real problem she has, brings me tremendous joy.

I’ve mentioned it in another thread about this, bug in case you really want to understand: people sign up for much more than the desktop office applications. It’s a full on groupware package that comes with 1TB of cloud storage. Which automatically gives you access to your documents on any machine you use. If you get a new windows device you basically don’t need to put in any effort into setting things up because it’s already there. And for 80 euros you can do this for five people.

So in short: convenience for a reasonable price. To the point where it’s hard to justify running it yourself. Especially because your family will start to ask you how they can get MS office again.

Office alternatives have long existed and have been good enough for a long time. I remember writing my evening class project reports in them 20 ish years ago. Funnily enough on how to integrate Linux servers into a Windows domain and authenticating with domain users on that machine. But if you want to compare M365 to something, compare it to NextCloud.

I would agree that right now there are more choices. I don’t entirely agree they’re inherently safer. Nor that this choice would have been available as a choice when the original decision was made. (At a time when the US was at the very least considered to be an ally to Europe)

If you think security of infrastructure has anything to do with PGP you’re misunderstanding what I mean. Self hosting mail for an organisation like the ICC would require multiple FTE’s. In the same vein that the current US administration is retaliating against them other rogue nations are constantly specifically targeting them. It’s already hard to deal with this without being specifically targeted and a couple times being targeted usually causes you to be compromised, dealing with it full time is almost impossible. Unless your team is monstrously big and securing your groupware is one of your core activities.

I’ve literally had jobs like this, and the idea that the average university that self hosts is more secure than Exchange Online is just plain wrong. I’m sure you can point to a couple of them that are safer of course, but they 'll be the exception.

Which is why I specifically phrased the part you didn’t quote in that specific way.

If you think you can set up mail infrastructure with on premise everything that is available to your not on premise workers safer than Microsoft, you will be spending a huge amount of money to do so.

It just turns out that the US has become a rogue state that alligns with the type of war criminals and dictators that the ICC wants to prosecute. I really don’t think anyone would have predicted this 10 to 15 years ago when this mail choice was made.

And your arguments have the strength of the hobbyist with the homelab he’s constantly having to reinstall, not understanding why companies are so stupid to not do the same thing as him.

If you think SSO and easy profile migration doesn’t save time, there’s simply no point in discussing it with you. I don’t like MS and their near monopoly position as a company much either. But that doesn’t mean every product they make is utter trash for every situation.

There are undoubtedly other solutions but to pretend every one is too dumb to use them shows how little actual experience working in a variety of companies is.

Back in the nineties you might have had Novell NetWare or just plain old LDAP instead of AD, but unlike those competitors AD kept working and offered upgrade trajectories. And it offered decent integration with a decent mailserver (that ofcourse sucked to set up securely for outside access), and that mailserver was fantastic versus the utterly terror that was Domino combined with Notes. I don’t like MS for basically forcing you to go to their cloud now, but pretending it’s a bad product through and through on a functional level is just being willingly blind.

It integrates very well with your M365 you need at work, and it saves a ton of time when people can use SSO to basically get everything up and running immediately on a new laptop. Including bookmarks and passwords.

By default I install unblock on any user machine I touch because it’s equal parts user experience and security.

53Kbps was what you got? Psst, damn younglings. In my day we reached 8Kbps speeds and considered ourselves lucky if our moms didn’t want to call anyone…

Spending time on it, stops making it free. I’ve used Linux on off for more than 25 years now, but always switched back to Windows because in all those previous instances something weren’t working well enough on Linux. I’m not blaming Linux for this and will at some point try again as I dislike what Windows does in the background.

But my time is not ‘free’.

And practically I mostly find using Windows extremely easy. Being in IT specifically for my knowledge about Windows obviously helps there. I follow the notices they send out for my job, so know how to turn off or prevent many of the user annoyances quickly.

Surely you’re not implying that wanting to avoid unnecessary social interaction with overly familiar strangers means you have high anxiety? You could claim they’re socially awkward but that’s still pretty far from anxiety.

Fair point that roads should be designed a lot better, but in the mean time, if you’re going to be driving on roads that got put down originally 50 years ago without cycling paths and no lights in the middle of farmland. Wear the high Viz gear or make sure you have working lights and reflectors.

What? Where is this? In Belgium you’d get pulled over for sure. Depending on if the car could get made road legal again it could get towed too.

In Belgium at least they are required (reflectors aren’t on all styles of bikes), problem is that cyclists often have battery powered lights which are not very bright to the point you could say they are not even working. And in my experience it really renders cyclists invisible at night until you almost run into them.

In that sense high-viz vests definitely help because they usually make them stand out more than even normal lights.

Ofcourse this is mostly needed in the places with no separate infrastructure and no street lights. (Edit: which is what the situation is in near where I live, the shortest route to bike is through farmlands with no infrastructure for bikes and no streetlight ms for sections of it. I’d personally love better and separate infrastructure since it’s basically part of the reason why avoid biking there during the lang dark winter)

Fair enough, though from my use case, which was mostly support, it worked fantastic.

Well that’s cool at least.

I honestly don’t know. Just figured that if I see them on Formula 1 cars with other despicable companies they most likely are horrible too.

Salesforce specifically? Global availability for 1000’s of users simultaneously. While integrating with mail and VoIP services are easy ones off the top of my head. It’s extremely expensive but a hidden cost on top of that is actually configuring and maintaining it well. The initial fine-tuning for large orgs will take years for example. But if it’s done it’s actually a joy to work with, especially if you switched from a half-baked solution like a graphical shell over a FoxPro database or something.

At a previous employer of mine the helpdesk side was integrated to it and it was brilliant. All calls and mails were autoregistered and after using it for a while more and better answer templates were included. (Templates we could modify with situation specific parts as well) The template approval process was another great example as technical experts from different continents were part of a review committee to make sure only good solutions were allowed, and after that local experts could add translations of the templates.

I’m sure there are many things morally wrong with Salesforce the company, but a well implemented instance of it is a dream to work with.