If you have a smartwatch, does it support contactless payment? I have a Fitbit that does, technically it implements Apple Pay even though Fitbit is owned by Google now. I was able to set it up just fine through the Fitbit app on GrapheneOS (though I don’t think I’ve actually tested it yet).

The whole reason I took this job is the stake in the company

Man I was suppressing the red flags up until now; this is the straw that breaks the camel’s back. You are going to get shafted at this job. It might be because someone is embezzling, they’re committing fraud in their manufacturing processes, or one of the owners is going to cut and run and leave the rest of you holding the bag. Maybe one day you’ll just show up and the doors are all locked.

You need to do absolutely everything by the book, document, document, document, CYA, and in a way that when shit goes south you’ll still have that documentation. And always have an exit plan.

There are plenty of document management solutions. What is the actual problem you’re trying to solve? Not just “it’s a mess” because I can solve that with a trash can. What are the needs of the users?

The value in those products is that it takes much less management, brings much greater reliability, and support teams if you have issues. If your dinky NAS shits the bed, the company’s data is gone, the company is kaput, you are all out of a job.

Of course there is a middle ground. I know there are plenty of open-source hosted products. They’re still subscriptions, but that monthly expense probably comes out cheaper than the time and effort building and maintaining your custom systems.

If you still really want to host it yourself, make sure you run through your disaster and recovery scenarios. You will have to have a 3-2-1 backup system. And remember because shit will go wrong, two is one, and one is none. That includes you personally, in the event you get hit by a bus lottery.

I would recommend an actual Dell tower server with idrac for remote management, and with prosupport for when something blows up (sometimes literally, I had one PSU go bang on a server under my desk at one point). Fill it with enough disks for redundancy and data growth for the next few years, but leaving room for expansion. Put your favorite hypervisor on it, set up some vms or containers to run those services, test backups, and document everything so that a semi-trained monkey can follow it.

But don’t host your own email. Getting each individual email server to not consider you spam is a Sisyphean task.

For business? What’s the value to the business over services like Office 365?

Personally, unless there’s a very good reason for it, I strongly recommend against this. I used to work for a company that did business IT, and there were far too many times we got called in to take over for a guy that did it himself and got in over his head, left the company, or just plain died, and it ended up costing the company much more in the long run.

Unfucking a Bethesda game with day-one mods is a time-honored tradition. Toddition.

Legally, it’s probably not. The OEM desktop license probably doesn’t cover virtualization.

How should we know? Ask them, not us.

That is, in fact, how game engines work, if the game logic and renderer are decoupled. Usually they’re not too tightly coupled in the first place, but Unreal is specifically designed to be used in more than just games.

French doesn’t deserve such nice treatment. They’re not even using those letters!

Not really. The user has full control over the PC, and they could completely image and restore the whole drive. There’s no way you could detect that without an outside reference point.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/rewards/about

The most effective motivation is intrinsic. It’s very hard to make someone want to do something. It’d take Apple-level marketing, or Microsoft-level outright paying people to use their products.

Can you play online with your friends?

Probably not the only one, but there’s not very many of you, because there are plenty of engines. Unreal, Unity (rip), and Godot are the big general-purpose ones, for good reason: they’re modern, powerful, and most importantly easy to work with. But there’s also Source, CryEngine, Frostbite, id Tech, and many more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_game_engines

Protests are just a statement. That’s the first step. If the statement is ignored, next comes action. A protest is a warning.

I build and set up services I want for myself and at the level I’m willing to put up with. For the most part I can be handed something already implemented and work within that space to keep it going and adjust it to what I want it to do or fit my set up. I can usually find my way through log files and error codes to figure out what the problem is and duckduckgo my way to a fix.

Congrats, you’re more qualified than most of the people I’ve worked with.

Why are you using some random blog post? The page you linked to shows how to use it without Cloudflare…

¿Que dumbasses?

It comes from not using huge amounts of water to grow water-intensive crops in the California desert.