As long as you are using official Microsoft install media downloaded from Microsoft (or verify the hash to ensure what you downloaded matches the official Microsoft isos) then you should be fine.

MAS is just a PowerShell script you run after install. It’s open source, and PowerShell scripts aren’t compiled, so you can examine it yourself to see what it’s doing. It tricks Microsoft servers into issuing your hardware an official “free upgrade” license key. The one I’m familiar with as reliable is MASgrave.

That’s not an 100% guarantee that it couldn’t be doing anything shady, but it would be incredibly hard for it to hide anything if it was.

How would it detect that the currently playing section was an ad then?

What is Teams missing? I’m not familiar with the mobile app, but the desktop client eclipsed Skype ages ago (except for scrolling back through old messages).

It went from direct connections between user computers to all routing through Micrsoft’s centralized servers. I wonder why everyone started having connection and lag issues after that.

Man, it seems so alien to me to use anything related to your legal identity as a username online.

If by “only so much” you mean every BS thing in OP’s image, sure.

To be clear, you can turn off all web content in the search menu/start menu search.

Sounds like your IT team messed up the setup. In their defense, Microsoft doesn’t make it easy to set it up well.

A “good” setup hides all this shit from the end user. All your “library” folders (Documents, Desktop, Pictures, etc) can be invisibly made into OneDrive folders. Still save your shit where you normally do, navigate in the file manager like you normally do, no lag for changes you do locally to show locally, minor lag (like 1-2 minutes) for changes to propagate to OneDrive itself (and other machines you are currently logged into). Just now everything is backed up to the cloud.

Same thing with all the folks who took the “copy pasting from stackoverflow” joke literally.

I regularly have to find guidance online through code examples, but you need to understand what the code you’ve found actually does under the hood for when it inevitably has issues because it wasn’t made for your specifc use case.

I’m probably a freak, but I can’t stand working on something complex, being pulled away from it for a week or two, and not being able to pick things back up because it’s not documented well. Especially when I’m the only person to blame.

I also make scripts and programs with the goal to hand them off when I’m done. I’ve got more than enough to keep me busy at work without having to be the only person able to support my projects forevermore. Ultimately I’m still the go to, but I never want to be so critical that I can’t take time off, or that I’m effectively on call 24/7. I want the credit, but the whole point is to reduce responsibility by making shit more efficient and easy.

Just find a place that hasn’t solidified their IT structure and processes enough for people to have time to invent BS overhead.

THE STANDARD PRACTICE IS WHATEVER I SAY IT IS JANICE! how are business critical things no one knew existed breaking

I’ve spent a significant amount of work time for a few years working with Powershell. There’s a hell of a lot it does right, and it’s set up such that the grand majority of commands and modules follow the same syntax in terms of pattern and terms. It’s not hard to just pick up and go with new stuff within it. That is it’s biggest strength, and it makes Windows SysAdmin work a hell of a lot smoother.

That said, there’s a shit ton of little idiosyncracies that would catch me every time if I wasn’t using VSCode/ium with Intellisense suggestions.

Specifying the properties to return from Get-ADUser? Use -Properties. Specifying the properties to return through Select-Object? Use -Property.

Working with Exchange Online? Import the module. Confused that the commands you need don’t exist after you imported it? You have to use the Connect-ExchangeOnline command to authenticate, connect, and generate and load a new temporary module first with just the commands for shit the account you used to authenticate has access to. This is the only module I’ve found that does this.

Need to send an email using your script? I sure hope you like using third party modules or loading dlls to do .Net/C# shit through PowerShell, because if you use the built in Send-MailMessage function we’ll give you a warning that it’s insecure, with a link to more info that’s just a wiki page on github for .Net, not PowerShell, without any actual info that notes this has been an issue for six fucking years! The warning even states that there is no built in alternative in PowerShell despite it being insecure.

Don’t even get me started with the absolute clusterfuck of the multitude of modules for working with Azure, half of them deprecated without equivalent functionality existing in the replacement. The latest and greatest one doesn’t even has documentation pages with shit like “NOTE: FILL THIS INFO IN LATER” in them.

Like ffs, am I using a professional product developed by one of the largest corps in the world, or someone’s open source project? It often feels like you get the worst of both worlds.

Don’t get me wrong, I love PowerShell, it’s an amazing tool for Windows environment sysadmin work. I just often find people’s attitudes about it to be either “it’s a neat toy” or “it’s the most amazing tool on Windows ever” when the reality is between.

I believe there’s an addon for Kodi for this. Been a while since I used it though.

You could also just remove chapters from the video files during ripping, or by using something like ffmpeg.

Only if it’s enabled by default, or the dev knows to enable it.

I had a lot of weird problems processing some info with names in Powershell until I found out that Powershell doesn’t default to unicode format when shoving output into files. You can easily specify the encoding, but if you don’t it replaces any non-ascii characters with “?” by default, so it’s not even immediately obvious that there’s an incorrect character, as it just silently substitutes a valid one.

Absolutely the latter. This is similar to how Snowden had access to all the stuff he leaked. He worked at a place that did contract work with the government and was mortified at all he had access to that he should have never been able to see.

There’s a shit ton of articles in the tech space about how companies keep fucking up with stuff like this. No reasonable expectation that the government and their contractors would do any better.

This isn’t hard. Torrent with a seed box somewhere outside of copyright enforcement is likely the best option as a “backup” source.

My man, you’re commenting on the piracy community, in the piracy instance, run by a former /r/piracy mod.

If it’s actually controllable, and not just hardwired on, openrgb is your friend.

That absolutely was a huge part of the marketing pitch, but as one who supports his company’s cloud infrastructure…

Lol. Rofl. Lmao even.

Maybe that works for places that don’t have heavy tech needs. Maybe.

Plus, a lot of companies don’t bother going back to the film when they do rereleases. A lot can’t due to all the post processing and special effects dome digitally. So most upres’d releases make significant compromises in one area or another, to the point where for some you can have better quality just stretching the video and using some shaders.

And as people are starting to find with old cheap CDs, they have a shelf life and just degrade after a certain amount of time. That time may be decades away, but depending on your use case it’s worth consideration.