Definitely not… I was pointing out how the raising of both cable and subscription services led me specifically to find alternative cheaper services to go to. Because they keep rising them so aggressively, it’s super noticeable and a kick in the face. Obviously, my situation isn’t the same as others where I was already spending too much due to live tv, so figuring out how to get it as low as I can now felt like an accomplishment for me and a wake up call. I hope, just like everyone else here, that rising prices hurts them, but I really have my doubts seeing the stats that show otherwise.

Started with cable and paid about $120 excluding the internet. Ditched that like 5 years ago, but my wife really wanted live tv. We went with Hulu live, and I wanna say it was like $40 fully loaded with unlimited screens and no ads. Then it went up and up and up. I think 1 year it went up twice. By the end, after ditching the no ads and unlimited screens, it was still $85 a month… just ditched all that last August and convinced my wife to ditch all cable except for 1. We now use Peacock with teacher discount for the live tv. She likes the news, some sports, the Olympics, and SNL, which is about the only things she watches live. It comes with other stuff as well, so for $9 a month, it was an incredible deal. We opted to also get Netflix with ads since we were saving so much anyway, which is about $8 i think, and paid for 1 additional year of hulu at $80. With all 3 theres not much thats missing honestly. We never use Hulu anymore, but occasionally she tells me a show we dont get and find out most of the time its on Hulu. We will probably cut it once the year is up as well. They keep rising the costs, and we keep consolidating. I love that after all that we somehow got everything, and for the lowest cost it’s ever been at just under $20 a month. I host my own music, so we never cared about stuff like spotify.

I got my Windows 11 key and office key from here:

https://shop.lifehacker.com/sales/microsoft-office-professional-2021-for-windows-lifetime-license-5

There may be better places but the prices were better than I expected so I tried it. Site was fine, and both licenses worked perfectly. I think i saw get another 15% offer if your a new user so don’t forget to sign up at the bottom to get more off your first purchase. I actually see office 2024 as well now and it’s a bit much at $160, but from what I see Amazon and newegg are selling it for $250. I would still wait, I honestly have no idea what new stuff they ever add that is useful to me anymore, 2021 is probably fine for $100 less.

I know people mentioned the free alternatives, but if the subscription is really just for office, then why not buy a license to a non web based office version? They do still make them, as much as they want to remove them completely. You can even get them heavily discounted off 3rd party sites. I got my copy of 2019 for like $20 a year before it went EOL and I’m still using it because I really don’t have the highest use for it. If you want office 2021, which is good with support until end of 2026, it’s about $50 right now but I see them go lower all the time and can probably get it for $30. This is the pro version as well. Sadly I don’t see office 2024 for sale yet on my site but I guarantee it will be a year from now.

They could just buy 40’s now? They are probably a little cheaper now as well?

And here i am super happy about 2 days ago redoing my entire home network… on ipv4 still. Had Orbi for about 8 years now, and it’s getting outdated. My job is actually in networking, and we recently were throwing away tons of equipment, so I was able to grab brand new Cisco unmanaged 24 port business switch and a fortigate firewall that’s way overkill for me. Configured the firewall with new networks and separated the orbi onto its own interface so it’s basically just dedicated to wifi now and everything else on the new Cisco switch including my synology which I was finally able to use all 4 NIC ports bonded without my orbi struggling. I definitely notice a difference, and it’s amazing. The biggest gain has been my ability to stream my 4k movies now without stutter. One day I’ll attempt ipv6…

But it’s public facing, so your devices would join the rest of the devices in the world, which may one day get to a fraction of that percentage!

I do this for my game apps on my phone. I also do this for all the apps I don’t use but can’t or not allowed to remove.

I just saw this article last week! I love RSS feeds and set up a bunch through my work email outlook client. They been there since like 2010 (yes I still have the same job…) and I barely touch them these days due to time, and some sites died, but it’s still the quickest way to catch up on the news you want. Wherever I saw this posted last I saw a recommend for FeedFlow and have been messing with that phone app to try and make some ultimate new feed for myself.

As much as they are pushing to stop 1 time purchases of office, they do still offer it. I purchased a license for like $20 off a discount site for Office 2021, and i have no clue why people need a subscription plan for this. It would take some very specific needs for that to ever be needed and I’m sure a huge percentage would be just fine with the 1 time purchase that lasts 3-4 years of support.

As for businesses that part stinks… once you get integrated with all the services offered, it’s going to take a lot to back out since it’s not just office they are probably subscribed to but everything else that enterprise has to offer. They are absolutely banking on people to suck it up and accept the position they are in and give in. It’s awful, but at the same time if your business went all in and didn’t anticipate this then they didn’t do their job if you ask me when vetting everything. This feels similar to the recent buyout of VMware and are now pushing insane new license costs. The problem is they went to high where despite the effort it will take to change products people have to. We can only hope Microsoft is on the edge of crossing that line.

To bad they didn’t hear about Loops. I don’t use this stuff so I have no idea if it’s good or not, but it’s not Chinese or collecting your data so it would be worth a try. Although if 400k users flooded it I have serious doubts they could scale to meet a demand like that.

Thanks! I like it a lot.

Or enough time for everyone to realize, “Why did we need this?” And go away forever.

I always thought the entire point of them releasing this was not to make crazy money, but see how to improve upon what they built by having everyone beta test it for them. They really didn’t have much info on how to make VR successful since none of them are really big. Sure, there’s a market, but they want to know what it will take to get everyone on board not just the enthusiasts. Personally, I think it’s going to take more than just an app to get there.

It will be interesting to see what big changes they make to the next version since I bet they are willing to change just about everything if they think the data collected proves it’s needed. At that point I feel like version 2 will really be the product I want to see. I’ll never buy or own one of these, and I hate apple products, but it’s interesting to see what they will bring to the table since they obviously are investing a ton of money into this.

I gave mine up spring of 2016 and never looked back. Surprisingly it didn’t have to do with the election either. I remember talking to a few friends a few months later and they said I got out at the right time since it was the start of the crazies coming out of the woodwork.

I have no clue how people can be so addicted to stuff like this that they make all the excuses in the world to not go through with it.

I believe the precision series kind of took over. They are high-end models but not really built for gaming. At this point, the XPS wasn’t built for gaming either, so I guess having 2 high-end lines just didn’t make sense?

Edit: I should have read the article first! I guess all the names are going away. I don’t care for the new names either, but both were pretty bad. The only difference is we got used to what it is now despite how little sense it made.

I say don’t worry. There’s no way they will be able to change this system anytime soon. Even if airports are able to accommodate the change, it will be extremely hard for all borders and other checkpoints to do the same. We know how slow progress is for stuff like this. If this is implemented, it will not mean passports won’t still be required for a long time. My guess is a minimum of 20 years at the least before seeing any change.

I don’t use Linux much, and I still agree. If the market share for Linux continues to rise every year, then it’s absolutely true.

I wonder what consultants told them they need them. Do you think any work for General Atomics, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrup Grumman, and Blue Halo?

This is us. We have a heavy footprint with VMware and have been going over plans to switch since before the buyout. Sadly were not there yet but should be mostly migrated to something else by EOY 2025. Our issues come with some solutions we have in place for some complex situations that is taking a bit longer to test and have a working solution with the next company we pick.