OP is more like Schindler, who was part of the system but didn't actually produce shells. Schindler was a net negative for the system and most likely a net positive for humanity.
In my home country, we have a saying: "No religion or politics in the bar." People who drink alcohol best avoid these as you end up in a fight sooner or later.
We also do this at work. I am here to do a job. Just keep it focused on the professional side. I don't need to be your best friend. Or share the same religion or political beliefs. At work, I come together to reach a common goal.
But that said, I hate people enforcing diversity for diversity's sake. They are actually introducing politics on the work floor.
And it didn't work very well. It didn't sell much, CP/M was dying at that time and the CP/M support in the C128 was not great. "Half my class" at school had C64's, but I only ever knew one person whose family got a C128. I really wanted one when they were introduced, but ended up with an Amiga a couple of years later instead.
Too late to edit but will correct myself slightly because the above might mislead: The C128 did sell well for a 1980's 8-bit home computer - about 2.5 million sold made it one of the best selling 8-bit computers ever.
It just didn't sell well for Commodore compared to the Commodore 64 and the Amiga. As a replacement for the Commodore 64, it was a sales disappointment. Most other manufacturers would have been thrilled with a failure like that, however.
That said, perhaps more accurate would be to say that using CP/M to position the C128 that was didn't help much - even of the people who bought a C128, most never used CP/M. Though to some it might have been what allowed them to convince parents it was a "serious computer".
Yes, 1985 was really too late for CP/M. Even Kaypro (the last surviving major CP/M machine vendor) had seen the writing on the wall and began to sell MS-DOS machines by then. Still, I was still using CP/M occasionally on my Apple II clone with a Z80 card, mostly for running early versions of Turbo Pascal (which was released for CP/M but never the Apple II natively).
> Only wimps use version control: real men just merge patches from their email inbox, upload release tarballs on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;)
Meanwhile, other people trust git so much that they treat it more as a tool for doing an incremental back-up than as a distributed VCS (git commit -a -m x && git push).
I must admit I have occasionally used git as a tool for transferring files (https://xkcd.com/949/).
I am actually doing exactly that to manage my personal KeyPass database, down to using "x" as the commit message; it works reasonably well since GitHub allows you to download files with just HTTPS.
I installed a FTP server on the professors computer. It automatically shared your network disk once you logged in. All the COBOL assignments and solutions where there. Juvenile but hey....
1/ Being "safer" using public wifis. I use 5g hotspot to my phone to avoid that.
2/ Proxy to other countries for streaming reasons. Still use it for this.
3. Avoiding government blocks/censorship/monitoring (if you trust your government less than the VPN provider). Not every country has open and free access.
4. Accessing your home country's internet while abroad, since many sites redirect you to a foreign market version
5. Checking if another geo has cheaper prices. Tom Scott mentioned he got cheaper prices on international rental cars by VPNing to the destination country than when going direct from a foreign country.
6. At least in the USA, ISPs can sell your browsing habits(DNS lookups, connection end-points) to third parties. A VPN that doesn't sell this data protects you from that level of snooping from the ISP.
Last: Self-hosting stuff and accessing it from remote. Reduces the burden to harden locally hosted and publicly accessible services. This is what I use VPNs the most.
Assuming all the sites you care about (From a security perspective) run over TLS, the wi-fi risk is less now than it used to be (when HTTPS uptake was lower).
In the UK at least, most major ISP block torrent sites, and if a copyright holder complains to the ISP that your IP was downloading a movie they have the rights to, you may get a warning letter from your ISP through the post, including the filename you were downloading. This has happened to me in the past.
VPNs solve both of these problems for me, however shady they may be under the hood
Another example. Happened to me today.
I was unable to pay online for a bus ticket until I set up VPN out of Cambodia to SG.
I tried two cards by two different banks on three different ticketing sites. Without VPN all my payment attempts were rejected.
Yep, I do my 8 hours then stop. If something's on fire in prod and I'm the best person to help, I'll respond.
But I'm a firm believer that having to put out fires outside of business hours is a sign of a fragile system.
And anyway, I learned my lesson about the unidirectional flow of loyalty in most businesses at a previous company.
I gave them untold unpaid hours outside of normal work time for years. About a decade of doing so when the next paragraph kicks in.
I unexpectedly got sole custody of my five children, and wanted to work from home when they were sick, as my sick leave had been quickly exhausted because, well, five children, and sick leave provisions in my country were minuscule - 5 days a year, recently changed to 10 days a year to the disgust of the business community.
After all, I wasn't sick, and could still write code while looking after my sprogs instead of not writing code and using my annual leave. Shit, when I was taking leave when they were sick, I was still writing code ( in between nursing duties) for my company because loyalty and my desire to deliver... .
...So it made sense to me, instead of me not working at all, I'd work from home on those occasions, knowing it wasn't ideal, but it was far more productive than not working, and I expected the company would understand and support me.
After all, how much had I done for the company for free in my personal time in the years prior? I'd had years of late night firefighting, and regular video calls in my evening with product owners 11-13 hours behind me.
An occasional bit of flexibility from the company was a fair and decent recognition of my years of flexibility and unpaid labour, I thought.
Haha, no, I got a verbal bollocking/warning.
(This was pre-pandemic, naturally.)
So yeah, these days, I give you 8 hours, and I'll do my damnedest to make sure you don't need me outside of those 8.
Not really, I think the shops close during the day, but those guys work until 9pm.
I mean it's 9am-6pm with an hour for lunch so it's still an 8-hour day if you don't count the lunch hour as working. But if you are working in the office it still kinda sucks as you can't really do much in that time.
Spain is also in the "wrong" timezone. It's directly south of Britain and should fit in the +0000 timezone, but politics and history put it in the same timezone as France (which should also be in +0000) and Germany.
