deadbeef

That is a great point. Even if you look at it from a total psychopath accountant's point of view, chucking a few scraps at the parents to keep them from totally giving up is a tiny fraction of the cost of the alternatives.

When our child was diagnosed the fairly bulky information pack that the DHB gave us had this depressing sheet at the start with a foreword that said you need to rethink any goals you might have had for your child. In the same section there was something to the effect that more than half of marriages where a child has this diagnosis end in divorce.

I was freaking amazed they would put that in writing ( even if it is true! ). I told my partner that she would be best to skip the start and look at the rest of the information.

I'm one of the parents of a child that qualifies us for this funding. It was fairly challenging for us to find an angle to use it prior to the changes, and after them it is very close to useless.

The kids covered by it often can't leave their homes without a huge amount of distress ( think of the worst meltdown your neurotypical kid has ever had ). Parents of kids at the higher end of the autism spectrum are often being hit and bit every day. Finding anyone who will deal with this for the $80 a day respite funding is often incredibly unrealistic.

The single brain celled analysis of the minister complaining about pedicures being paid for with respite money annoys the hell out of me. Having a kid at the extremes of disability is a life sentence. It is a marathon rather than a sprint. Your kid might never smile at you or thank you ever for a life time of care. If a pedicure is what will fit in the hour and a half window that you can arrange for the your kid to be safe, and it keeps you going for the next couple of weeks I think is an absolute bargain.

Stuff that might seem frivolous on its face like buying lego or games might be the only option for some parents to get a couple of hours without needing to wrangle their kids.

We have a great kid that is towards the more high functioning end of the autism spectrum and are in a financial position where it doesn't matter that much to us. I feel horribly bad for anyone who was making good use of this funding and now are facing having to go it alone again.

We did an address check when we could first order it and about a third of the folks in the office could get it about a year and a half ago. I know the majority of the address checks that we do for commercial locations in tenders come up positive now.

It is not cheap to get an off the shelf router that does a solid job of forwarding multiple gigabits and the vast majority of folks ( me included ) probably will rarely notice the difference outside of speed tests. The last firewall build that I did for home was with a pair of virtual Linux boxes with 10G interfaces just so I could do a 2G or 4G GPON upgrade later on without having to throw everything out.

In New Zealand it seems like 10G GPON services are mostly cannibalizing high quality lit ethernet services at 1G and 10G subrate rather than replacing consumer tails. So more likely a business is going from spending $1500 a month on uncontended 1G to spending $400 a month on contended 4G, rather than a residential user going from spending $150 on 1000/500 to $280 on 2000/2000.

My day job is building ISP networks. It's been about 20 years since I had a home connection that I didn't configure up both ends of myself.

I've got a 1G / 500M tail into home where I am right now, not that that is particularly impressive. One of the jobs I've been putting off at work is standardising our usage of the 10G GPON platform available here in NZ, when I do that I'll get one of the >1G tails to use at home.

Usually the answer is how ever much I can be bothered building, but my usage is pretty low.

Solve for feef.

I have an A1502 Macbook that I have been using for work since it was new in 2014. It triple boots Windows, Linux and OSX, but I only really use Linux.

Mine has the same CPU, a i5-4308U but 16GB of memory, I think it was a custom order at the time.

If I recall I did the regular bootcamp process you would do to install Windows, installed Windows on a subset of the free space and Linux on the rest.

I've got Linux mint 21 on it currently, but I have had vanilla Ubuntu at different times. I can't think of anything on it that doesn't just work off hand.

I swear allegiance to the only one true storage vendor, Micropolis. The Micropolis 1323A being the embodiment of perfection in storage basked in the glow of the only holy storage interconnect, MFM.

I wait patiently for the return of Micropolis so that I may serve as their humble servant.

I'm not the PR department for desktop Linux for everyone man.

People who only have Windows experience see an Nvidia card that is premium priced product with a premium experience and think that this will translate to a Linux environment, it does not. I've been using Linux for like 27 years now and that was my opinion until a couple of years ago.

Hopefully the folks that might read this thread ( like the OP 20 year IT veteran ) can take away that Nvidia cards in linux are the troublesome / subpar choice and are only going to get worse going forwards ( because of the Wayland migration that Nvidia are ignoring ).

Oh yeah. That video of Linus Torvalds giving Nvidia the finger linked elsewhere in this thread was the result of a ton of frustration around them hiding programming info. They also popularised a dodgy system of LGPL'ing a shim which acted as the licence go-between the kernel driver API ( drivers are supposed to be GPL'd ) and their proprietary obfuscated code.

Despite that, I'm not really that anti them as a company. For me, the pragmatic reality is that spending a few hundred bucks on a Radeon is so much better than wasting hours performing arcane acts of fault finding and trial and error.

If you go back a bit further, multi monitor support was just fine. Our office in about 2002 was full of folks running dual ( 19 inch tube! ) monitors running off matrox g400's with xinerama on redhat 6.2 ( might have been 7.0 ). I can't recall that being much trouble at all.

There were even a bunch of good years of the proprietry nvidia drivers, the poor quality is something that I've only really noticed in the last three or so years.

The support for larger numbers of monitors and mixed resolutions and odd layouts in KDE vastly improved in the ubuntu 23.04 release. I wouldn't install anything other than the latest LTS release for a server ( and generally a desktop ), but KDE was so much better that it was worth running something newer with the short term aupport on my desktops.

We aren't too far off the next LTS that will include that work anyway I guess. I'm probably going to be making the move to debian rather than trying that one out though.

It isn't something that is in the distro vendors control. Nvidia do not disclose programming info for their chipsets. They distribute an unreliable proprietry driver that is obfuscated to hell so that noone can help out fixing their problems.

If you use an AMD card it will probably work fine in Windows and Linux. If you use an Nvidia card you are choosing to run windows or have a bad time in Linux.