And even if you do boycott Sony, that’ll discount entire market segments and almost entire content niches as I just mentioned.

I’ve been daily-driving Linux for over a decade at this point so you don’t need to convince me, and I’ll just spin up a Windows VM for things aren’t picky about baremetal OS installs, but also don’t play nice with WINE.

Sure, but I’m not touching anything Sony with a 10 foot pole.

That’s going to discount most of the camera market if not the entire camera market then because Sony makes basically everyone’s imaging sensors, plus a large portion of the anime genre given that company bought out Funimation.

That rootkit thing failed miserably, thankfully, and audio CDs have been DRM-free ever since.

At least you can watch BDs without a web connection still. For now…

Also, LibreDrive is a thing for hacking BD drives with in order to bypass DRM, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that got blocked and/or taken down at some point.

No prob! I’m more into oil pastel or crayon as a medium lately, but from the little experience I’ve had with Prismacolor pencils, they seemed solid.

If you can afford it and want to splurge? Prismacolor. Otherwise, any decent student-grade pencils like Daler-Rowney’s Simply line or even some basic Crayola pencils will work fine.

Not going to help when you have a monopoly over the user-generated content field like YT and by extension Google basically does.

Only Freetube is being actively attacked by Google and Invidious is basically dead.

And it’ll be nuked the moment it announces its existence publicly.

Not in the traditional sense anyways.

Vo-techs at least kinda have to be based on the types of things they tend to teach, you can’t really teach things like masonry out of a book, for example, that’s one subject where you actually need to go in and get your hands dirty as it were, and actually do the thing being taught, to learn it, or really anything else having to do with building a house.

I could very much argue that this also applies to art school as well, but there’s also a lot of theory and history and such that very much needs a lot of reading to pick up, although things like color theory are best picked up by actually mixing different paint colors together, as well as the practical side of things in terms of actually doing a painting or drawing or sculpture or whatever.

I didn’t even know that was a thing. Cool!

Or even actually show what they learned in a practical sense. In a vo-tech, for example, have the students fix up a car or get a small LAN set up, or even in the case of an art school, have the class do a mural or a sidewalk-scale mosaic outside as their end-of-instruction project (both of those sound like really fun end-of-instruction projects, btw), with admin approval, of course.

And virt-manager is pretty solid for hobbyist tinkering too.

This is why KVM is a good option, or even Hyper-V for Windows hosts. The only problem with KVM Is graphical support for paravirtualized drivers is basic at best with no full 3D acceleration that I know of for Windows guests; virtio-win isn’t exactly the best option graphically and QXL to my knowledge is even more lacking, but one can just pass a hardware GPU through over vfio-pci for that.

Unfortunately for Mac hosts, Apple has no KVM/Hyper-V equivalent so your best option for virtualization there is Parallels.

(and it’s honestly kinda stupid that Apple can’t build their own KVM equivalent into the Darwin kernel which macOS is based on)

How long before Respondus introduces an education equivalent of BattlEye or other kernel-level anticheats as a result of stuff like this?

And I don’t mean the Lockdown browser, I mean something beyond that, so as to block local AI Implementations in addition to web-based ones.

Also, I’m pretty sure there’s still plenty of fields that are more hands-on and either really hard or impossible to AI-cheat your way through. For example, if you’re going for carpentry at the local vo-tech, good luck AI-cheating your way through that when that’s a very hands-on subject by its nature.

If this literal malware (I say that because again, what MS is proposing here is what some actual viruses used to do, typically to an even worse degree than simply changing settings) gets ported to the Enterprise/Education and IoT SKUs, the people who work on this stuff for a living at the local call center or public school district are going to have a nightmare on their hands.

Looks like this isn’t ripe for abuse in any way… sarcasm

You just know MS is going to find a way to abuse this ‘feature’ to change people’s settings behind their backs in any way they see fit.

This reeks of the type of malware that used to take complete control of your PC and change settings maliciously, and even delete important files or straight-up nuke your OS install in the worst-case scenario, but made ‘legitimate’ somehow. Yes, MS is really stooping that low to make one of the worst types of malware an actual OS feature.

More like MS enabling Bitlocker and causing data loss without the user knowing about it, something that’s been pissing a lot of people off lately, and forced obsolescence refers to Win11 blocking everything prior to Zen+ and Coffee Lake, compounded with Win10 going EOL soon, which has at least the intended effect of making people buy a new PC even if their old PC is still good otherwise, and not all people are comfortable with having to sign up for an online account just to install their OS and would rather make a local account if possible; MS recently axed the workaround which enabled that for the consumer versions of Windows.

Also, I didn’t know local backups of your data ala simply copying it to an external drive at the minimum, weren’t an option that existed anymore. sarcasm