AnyOldName3

Someone was telling me the other day that the cheapest new car available in the UK was an electric Dacia. Obviously, you can get a used car for less than a new one, but electric cars are within reach of normal people, or at least normal enough people to not have Mr Moneybags budgets.

Towards the back of the machine normally counts as up for upwards-facing sockets, unless it’s a case with feet on the side, in which case it’ll be away from those feet so the sockets would be the right way up if it were sideways and on the alternative feet.

Also, the overwhelming majority of USB plugs have the logo on the side away from the plastic bit, and sockets have their plastic bits towards the top of the device. You want the plastic bits on opposite sides (as physical objects don’t like to overlap), so that means that if you can feel the logo with your thumb, that side goes up when you plug it in, and you don’t even have to look.

Most of the languages you’ve mentioned aren’t systems languages, so don’t make being a good language to write an OS in a high priority. More languages might be accepted in the future, but if they are, it’ll be ones that are a natural fit for the problems they’re solving.

Arch is at least more likely to update to a fixed version sooner, and someone getting something with pacman is going to be used to the idea of it breaking because of using bleeding edge dependencies. The difference with the Flatpak is that most users believe that they’re getting something straight from the developers, so they’re not going to report problems to the right people if Fedora puts a different source of Flatpaks in the lists and overrides working packages with ones so broken as to be useless.

PowerShell has a system to sign scripts, and with its default configuration, will refuse to execute scripts, and with the more sensible configuration you should switch to if you actually use PowerShell, refuses to execute unsigned scripts from the Internet.

I suspect that most of the scripts you’re referring to just set -ExecutionPolicy Bypass to disable signature checking and run any script, though.

If you write cross-platform software, the easiest solution is usually to pretend everything’s Unix. You’ll hit some problems (e.g. assuming all filesystem APIs always use UTF-8 will bite you on Windows, which switched to UCS2 before UTF-8 or UTF-16 were invented, so now uses UTF-16 for Unicode-aware functions as that’s the one that’s ABI compatible with UCS2, and passing UTF-8 to the eight-bit-char functions requires you to opt into that mode explicitly), but mostly everything will just work. There’s no XDG_CONFIG telling you to put these files anywhere in particular, as Windows is Windows, so most things use ~ as a fallback, which Windows knows to treat as %USERPROFILE%.

It’s pretty plausible that Epstein would be suicidal after being locked up and would have killed himself if left unattended in his own jail cell with some rope, especially as giving him some rope would signal that he wasn’t going to get saved. The more sensible conspiracy theory is that he was taken off suicide watch intentionally to give him the opportunity.

I don’t think it’s guaranteed that Linux will be a viable kernel in a future where NT’s forced to be abandoned unless it’s simply because Microsoft refuses to maintain it. Linux is older than NT, so if age alone killed kernels, it’d die first. I think it’s a pretty safe bet that Linux can be kept viable for a long time, so if Microsoft wanted, they could keep NT viable for a long time.

You can jam the Windows UI by spawning loads of processes with equivalent or higher priority to explorer.exe, which runs the desktop as they’ll compete for CPU time. The same will happen if you do the equivalent under Linux. However if you have one process that does lots of small allocations, under Windows, once the memory and page file are exhausted, eventually an allocation will fail, and if the application’s not set up to handle that, it’ll die and you’ll have free memory again. Doing the same under every desktop Linux distro I’ve tried (which have mostly been Ubuntu-based, so others may handle it better) will just freeze the whole machine. I don’t know the details, but I’d guess it’s that the process gets suspended until its request can be fulfilled, so as long as there’s memory, it gets it eventually, but it never gets told to stop or murdered, so there’s no memory for things like the desktop environment to use.

Even by crypto standards, Bitcoin Cash is dodgy. Its origins were a temporary hiccup in the Bitcoin network which forked the blockchain into two branches. As blockchains are designed to tolerate this, the network quickly decided that one branch was worse than the other, so everything switched to the good branch and Bitcoin continued chugging away and consuming enough power for a small country. However, a few people were cross about this because they had more Bitcoin on the dead branch, so manually configured their wallets and mining hardware to use that branch, and tried encouraging other people to do the same. That didn’t work. They then decided to provide a preconfigured wallet and mining software that would prefer the dead branch but claimed it was its own new cryptocurrency and everyone who had Bitcoin already would get some of the new one for free, and that was enough to get some people to sign up.

Nintendo used to have a page on emulation on their website incorrectly claiming that it was always illegal and all emulators had solely been created to enable piracy. This new claim is not compatible with their previous action of having that page.

You’d expect musk of all people to know you need to spend 45 billion to buy the server first.

Sometimes when a product is whitelabeled and can be bought directly from its real manufacturer for much less, there’s still a good reason to buy the expensive one. The main one is that sometimes the ones that pass QA are sold via the whitelabeler and the ones that fail QA are sold directly, so the cheaper ones are known to have something wrong with them and you’re gambling that it’s something without symptoms.

It adds the executable permission (without which, things can’t be executed) to all the files in the game’s directory. You only need to be able to execute a few of those files, and there’s a dedicated permission to control what can and can’t be executed for a reason. Windows doesn’t have a direct equivalent, so setting it for everything gives the impression that they’re trying to make it behave like Windows rather than working with the OS.

Selling old games and new games isn’t mutually exclusive, and more money tends to be spent on new games than old ones. It’s not unreasonable to expect that selling new games too could subsidise the work to make old games run on modern platforms.

Sometimes people write their reasons for doing things down and other people read them and they don’t need to read anyone’s mind to know why they said they did something.

Lots of the privacy violations already existed, but then the EU legislated first that they had to have a banner vaguely alluding to the fact that they were doing that kind of thing, and later, with GDPR, that they had to give you the option to easily opt-out.

They used that TLD because it had the same letters as Marxist-Leninist, not because they’re from Mali. They’re not from Mali.

Blaming us would be too close to root-cause analysis for them even to consider. We weren’t normally QA testers, but they’d left it until too late to hire internal QA, so roped in the developers (us) from a SaaS vendor their app replied on as emergency QA.