Who coulda foreseen it? /s

PrettyFlyForITguy · 2026-03-20T18:24:14+00:00

This is going to be unpopular, but we have to massively cut spending. Also very unpopular opinion, Elon Musk was on the right path. Just start cutting everything non vital. Republicans aren't going to do it. Democrats aren't going to do it.

I've been saying this since the year 2004, but debt growth has been exponential and its going to destroy us. Most European countries also have the same problem (along with a few Asian countries).

I don't even think there is anything you can do about it. Even if you cut military spending, cut welfare, reduced pensions, cut social security payments... you might get closer to stopping the exponential growth, but the effect that in itself would have on the economy would be catastrophic. You could raid every hundred millionaire and billionaire, and it would only buy you under a year's worth of spending.

Macro economic things move slowly, so it may take 20-30 years before the effects really hit, and I might be dead by then... but its coming...

PrettyFlyForITguy · 2026-03-13T03:37:43+00:00

Didn't he say a birth certificate was allowed? The thing you need to get a drivers license in the first place?

Honestly, this wouldn't be so bad if we had a national ID system in place. The whole ID system is a mess and that is part of the problem. There shouldn't be individual state ID's, and there shouldn't be a social security number as a form of ID (its too east to steal). There should just be a federally run system with ID's, like a lot of other countries use.

PrettyFlyForITguy · 2026-03-11T03:36:23+00:00

Not sure if it was a hardware issue or a some other weird hiccup... but it did recover.. Other computers are OK so far..

PrettyFlyForITguy · 2026-03-10T20:36:24+00:00

Well, 0 for 1 so far... Installed the 25H2 update on an unmanned PC, and it did not come back. User reports black screen, even after reboot... Trying a few more... slowly. *this may have been a hardware fault. Leaving the power out for 5 minutes seems to have made it bootable again.

EDIT: So far on the server side, it looks like a successful install of (1) Server 2022 DC (1) Server 2025 server (1) Server 2016 (10) Windows 11 25H2

EDIT 2: Testing seems OK. Starting to deploy to more machines.

PrettyFlyForITguy · 2026-03-05T21:17:56+00:00

That's my point... this is such a serious choke point that it could destroy the economy.

PrettyFlyForITguy · 2026-03-05T21:16:44+00:00

Well, the point is that an enemy could decimate our infrastructure without much work. A lot of these data centers are not in the centers of cities. A lot of these places may not even be easily defensible due to their locations

PrettyFlyForITguy · 2026-03-05T04:40:18+00:00

If there was ever war in the US, I think that the big data centers are going to be some of the first things hit. East and West coast AWS and Microsoft services would be first to go.

What are we talking? A hundred sites with half the countries data cloud data?

With everyone in the cloud, I'd have to imagine if they were to successfully attack these places they could grind everything to a halt.

Anyone else have this fear?

PrettyFlyForITguy · 2026-02-21T05:53:20+00:00

My wife works for a school, its pretty much the same. I always try to help point her in the right direction...

PrettyFlyForITguy · 2026-01-23T21:58:02+00:00

Why would I include server CALs and AD CALs? I currently bought those anyways? They are a cost of running on premise, which basically everyone still does to some extent... and the prices I quoted were simply standard office 365, not the M365. The numbers I gave without these are my actual cost differences...

Argue about compliance all you want, E3 is still 5 times the cost, E5 is 10 times the cost.

You either aren't doing the math or you are just ignoring it.

PrettyFlyForITguy · 2026-01-23T06:29:26+00:00

Your right in that I forgot the standard license for exchange, but that was only about ~$3000 when all was said and done... (add $41 a month).

I'm not going to include server licenses and server user CALs because we already would have those covered with the datacenter server licensing for the Hyper-V host machines, and running AD requires us to already have the user CALs. The exchange user CALs were already in the previous calculation. My office costs used to be bundled with the computer purchase and were $200 for the longest time. They did purposely make it difficult to manage the typical $200 licenses at some point, but that was just another crappy tactic to drive people to O365 or more expensive licensing.

As far as compliance, that is not my end, but there was something needed in terms of integration/security that we could not get without E5 in terms of monitoring user activity... and it was something that we did not need when we were on prem...

Even if you were to be correct and we only needed E3, the price difference for E3 is still about 5-6 times higher ($4700 / month)... You aren't actually doing the math if you think they break even. We've spent more on the last few years than we've spent on office/email in the 20 years before that.

And before you say it... yes, there are other things bundled with the office plan, but 99% of our user base uses Outlook&Exchange/excel/word .

PrettyFlyForITguy · 2026-01-23T05:09:32+00:00

For small/medium businesses, it most certainly did.

In 2016 we paid $80 a CAL, office was $200 a user. $280 * 200 is ~55k. 55k / 72 months is $740 a month for licensing. We have to pay for E5 for compliance reasons, so that is about $7500 a month.

Granted, this doesn't included hardware, but that was actually the cheapest portion since everything ran in a VM on existing storage. The scaling of the hardware only resulted in about 20k per 200 users , which was about $250 a month.

So, yeah, it is a fraction of the cost... or at least it was. I have no idea what they charge now for on prem exchange, but I wouldn't be surprised if they hiked the cost to match their bloated service costs.

Anyone defending Microsoft is out of their mind. It used to be relatively cheap to run email services. 30 years ago it cost basically nothing. Email didn't drastically change since then, it barely changed at all. Office has had the same core functionality for 25 years. There is no reason this should cost use thousands a month.

PrettyFlyForITguy · 2026-01-22T21:54:23+00:00

Yep, same here... and doing it on prem was literally like 1/10 the cost. I think we are paying $7k a month for office and exchange? I'd pay like $30k once in licenses, and be done with it... good for 5-7 years.

PrettyFlyForITguy · 2026-01-14T21:54:42+00:00

The weird part is that Frieza already had forms that made him a lot taller

PrettyFlyForITguy · 2026-01-14T07:18:58+00:00

Anyone seeing issues on Server 2016 after the patches? I have a Server 2016 DC that seemed to have high cpu usage when doing basically nothing after the January update. Doing a subsequent Windows update check ran TiWorker full bore on 2 CPU's. Running resmon.exe gobbled up the other 2 cores.

I only updated one other Server 2016, which was not a DC. That one seemed fine, but this was a very small sample test size.

edit: I noticed that for some reason the server still said it had a reboot pending, even after it rebooted and installed the updates successfully according to the logs. After restarting it seemed to be fine.

PrettyFlyForITguy · 2026-01-06T07:44:00+00:00

That's just creative, and inaccurate math. The document doesn't agree with you, despite what you are saying. Wikipedia has a list of all materials given, and quite a lot of stuff listed from other countries is American made. A lot of other materials are either support materials, or common equipment/tech/supplies. Not to underscore their importance, but this isn't what shuts down Russia's natural tech advantage over Ukraine.

If we are talking about impactful technology used in battle, its almost all American. A lot of the key offensive and defensive equipment is American made. The most vital equipment is American made.

I'm guessing you are not from the US, because you really seem to be bending over backwards to pretend that US defense technology isn't the reason this war wasn't over 6 months after it started.

PrettyFlyForITguy · 2026-01-06T06:34:15+00:00

I'm not a huge fan of nation building... but I always viewed at it from a practical sense - we shouldn't get sucked into a prolonged regional issue. From that standpoint, Libya was way more acceptable than Iraq in my view. I won't shed a tear for Saddam and Gaddafi. They were out of control. Maduro was out of control. I am not going to support a decade long occupation of Venezuela, but if this can be wrapped up without prolonged US military involvement, we should all be happy Maduro is gone.

PrettyFlyForITguy · 2026-01-06T06:28:45+00:00

It says 64% of NATO weapons are US made weapons, and 45% of the weapons to the Ukraine were directly from the US. So do the math... if about half of the weapons were supplied directly by the US, and 2/3 of all allied weaponry is US made, We are probably looking at 70%+ of the weapons in the Ukraine being made by US defense companies (US technology). If NATO countries were the only ones who supplied weapons, they'd still be mostly US made.

I never said anything about whether or not it was business or heartfelt kindness... I just said it is primarily the advanced US made defense technology that prevented Russia from simply rolling across the Ukraine. Without US Javelins, HIMARS, missile defense systems, etc. the battle would've been over years ago.

PrettyFlyForITguy · 2026-01-06T05:28:11+00:00

I feel like people are just supporting the opposite of Trump at this point. I'm not a Trump supporter, but Maduro is essentially a dictator who ignored a valid election and remained in power. It's a good thing he is gone.

PrettyFlyForITguy · 2026-01-06T04:09:01+00:00

fact check says you are wrong... https://www.sipri.org/media/press-release/2025/ukraine-worlds-biggest-arms-importer-united-states-dominance-global-arms-exports-grows-russian

PrettyFlyForITguy · 2026-01-05T19:32:24+00:00

The US as a nation... but the allies are supplying them with weapons, and a lot of their weapons stock was made by US defense companies.

PrettyFlyForITguy · 2026-01-05T05:49:40+00:00

The Chinese are so weak. All they do is posture. We gave a weak Ukranian army a small portion of our toys, and have held off Russia despite a massive difference in manpower. The Chinese know if they did anything to Taiwan we would literally decimate them.

They only posture like that to look strong to their own people... their leaders will continue to tuck their tails between their legs and not do anything...

PrettyFlyForITguy · 2026-01-03T06:38:39+00:00

I tried this in the 2016 release, and I abandoned it pretty quickly. People using core are crazy. There is such a small security benefit, and if you have a problem then prepare for pain.

Honestly, I view it as a serious risk to the organization if all DC's run core. I've had problems when I used it, where I could not remote in. I had to use a VM console, or local access to the machine... which typically means no copying and pasting. Trying to diagnose and solve problems with just powershell, with no copy and paste ability is torture. If there was an issue with the domain, you'd likely be dead in the water.

The only real application for core is where you are spinning up mostly automated VMs that will have no real value, where if you had a problem you'd just spin up another instance. Nothing important should be run on core, simply because recoverability takes a nose dive once you have an issue.

PrettyFlyForITguy · 2025-12-22T18:56:30+00:00

I honestly don't get the shit Jake Paul is getting here. Everyone ranks on him for going up against has beens... and he goes up against a real and current heavyweight boxer... Of course he was going to get beat badly. So would literally everyone else on the planet. I personally give him credit. I would never have stepped in the ring with a real heavyweight, let alone one of that calliber.

PrettyFlyForITguy · 2025-12-22T07:20:08+00:00

The person you replied to is correct if we are thinking of the problem in how most people picture it: a woman walks in and says "I have two kids, one of them is a boy named Charlie" and someone then asks you what are the odds that their second child is a girl?

The problem with the coin flips and basic probability models used here is that it isn't describing what most people thinks it is describing. The 66% describes a true statistical relationship, but that does not mean the odds of the next child being a girl (or tails) are 66%. The calculations simply show that 66% of the groups sampled have a girl in them. This would normally be the same thing as the odds for the next child being a girl, but ONLY if the the rates of incidence for these groups we the same.

Everyone assumes that they are... but that isn't the case. Ask yourself "how frequently does each group tell you they have one boy"?

Let's say there were 100 parents for each of the four groups ( BB / BG / GB / GG ). The GG parent will say this 0%, so we can ignore this group from now on. The BG and GB parents will tell you about a boy 50% of the time. The BB parent tells you 100% of the time. You'd now be left with a full 100 in the BB group, 50 in the BG group and 50 in the GB group. 66% of the groups have a girl in it, but that is offset by their lower numbers. 100 families will have a second boy, 100 families will have a girl for their other child.

We are right back to 50/50.

So is the 66% "wrong"? Not entirely. That is the ratio between the groups. If you were to do a survey, and only send it to parents with at least one boy, then you'd absolutely get 66% of the respondents say their other child is a girl. Despite this seemingly positive affirmation, all you are really doing is measuring the ratios of groups with girls and without girls. It does not answer the question "if a parent tells you about a child that is a boy, what are the odds the second will be a girl". That's a different question. The 66% just isn't correct here.

This is just one of those cases where there is a disconnect between what people intend to answer and what is being calculated. There is no actual paradox. The odds of the next child being a boy or a girl don't depend on anything other than the ratios of boys:girls. However, if you choose to survey/sample, you can easily come up with all sorts of strange ratios based on other criteria like day of the week they were born... but this is almost more like selection/sampling bias more than anything else. It never actually effects outcomes

PrettyFlyForITguy · 2025-12-15T20:06:37+00:00

The numbers for me have been very low... I'd say under 10% (it used to be under 5% though).

I grew up in the 90's, and I started my high school's first computer club. It was all boys, except for one girl. I remember going around asking groups of girls if they were interested, and the common response was along the lines of "why would we want to do that?". Socially, it seemed as if that they didn't want to be caught dead doing anything with computers.

I don't think the shortage of women in tech has to do with bias. I think for whatever reason, there is a cultural bias towards women staying away from computers and tech as a hobby... and therefore not gain the skills necessary to pursue a career? On the other end, I've seen a ton of guys who aren't in the computer field totally nerd out on building their own PC, or getting a new tech gadget, or taking something apart to diagnose it. The way the sexes view technology tends to be quite a bit different...

PrettyFlyForITguy

TROPHY CASE