palordrolap

joined 5 months ago
[–] [email protected] 12 points 7 hours ago (2 children)

So there's this commonly stated thing about ageing which is that we perceive each day of our lives not as a day, but as being the size of the fraction of our lives a day represents. Or more simply, a day is as long for a 5-year-old as two days are for a 10-year-old and so on.

With that in mind, and knowledge of a little mathematics, our lives viewed this way aren't linear, but logarithmic, and it means that we reach middle age not at 40-something but at something on the order of the square root of our life expectancy.

Looked at this way, we've lived far more than half our lives by the time we're ten, even if we expect to live to be a hundred.

No wonder so many of us feel like children. Or act like them.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 12 hours ago

It's not just that. There could be thousands of civilisations of Earth-like life in our own galaxy and we have literally no way to detect them.

Our current exoplanet detection abilities extend only to systems with some very specific peculiarities, and our Solar system doesn't have any of them.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 15 hours ago

This isn't strictly true. Most houses built between WWII and the '90s were built with sockets that didn't have switches on them. It was only later safety regulations / suggestions that made the switches preferable.

Where I live was built in the late '80s right before switched sockets became more common. All the original sockets have no switch. Some in the kitchen have switches, but it's clear these were added at a later date.

I'm not sure of the exact rulings and where and when a socket must have a switch, but you can still find switchless sockets for sale at the sorts of retailers who sell those sorts of things, so there are definitely places where those sockets are still allowed.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

It's a rich text box with a few controls to enable or disable those features at certain points in the text. The whole thing was entirely built from components used elsewhere in the OS, or at least the earlier versions were. One competent employee could manage it in an afternoon; a week at the outside. If Microsoft has let it get so ridiculously bloated that it's now unmanageable by one person, that's on them.

I never said confusion

People expecting Word capabilities

Now, why would they expect that?

See also: Java and JavaScript.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (2 children)

They could have just renamed it. Wordpad's Win3.11 predecessor was called "Write", for example, so that name could have been revived.

For a long time, write.exe still existed and all it did was launch Wordpad, so they'd only have to reverse that.

They could also have chosen another name entirely. Or, since they've recently added a bunch of unnecessary crap to Notepad, they might as well have merged the two.

"Confusion" is merely an excuse.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago

Straight up killing a known criminal is not the accepted way to mete out justice, no matter how right it seems. We have (international) courts for a reason, even when the case is open and shut, and even if the same courtesy would be unlikely if the situation was reversed.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago (4 children)

It would almost certainly be a requirement to prosecute and then likely lock Zelenskyy up if he did that, even if he might be doing us all a favour. And even the nicest prison is still a prison.

It would be better if there was a way to have the targets neutralise each other.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago (7 children)

Very much this. I can see one potential future Microsoft product being something that is to be installed on a thin client PC sold to consumers for cheap. It will run not much more than a browser in which all apps will load from Microsoft servers, and all storage will be on the Microsoft cloud. And if you miss a monthly payment they'll basically hold all your files for ransom until you start paying again.

I can practically hear the Microsoft execs making some very unsavoury noises about that idea.

As for (admittedly somewhat weak) proof they're headed in this direction: Wordpad is a useful small program that would easily fit onto a thin client and there'd be room for documents created by it on the limited storage available. It has to have some storage for browser cache after all.

Wordpad was recently cancelled, and users urged to use Word instead. Which is not free of (further) cost like Wordpad was.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

I guess I do. I put the computer (a desktop) into suspend most nights so that it's pretty much up and running as soon as I turn it on the next day.

Even so, rebooting doesn't take that long. 30 seconds tops. Definitely not enough time to visit the bathroom or make a hot drink.

But the advantages to suspend are that it's quick and all my programs are as I left them. A reboot undoes most of that.

Yes, hibernating is also an option to keep open programs, but why do that when it can be quicker?

My only real concern with putting the machine into suspend is if there's a power cut and things end up in a weird state or I lose work because programs weren't closed properly, but then, that could happen at any point when I'm using it too.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

drive to Canada and hope they let me in

The Canadian folks are slightly more likely to let you pass than their counterparts on the other side, but unfortunately it's not the Canadians you'll reach first.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago

My guess is that they could do that, but eventually doing so would be called out as pointless time wasting and be disallowed.

I can see a directive going out that any participants are to be barred from participating in anything at all. Even if there's some legislative rule that says they can't be, because we all know how the new administration feels about old legislation. And then actual, literal guards will be brought in to keep those people out.

And maybe all others in the same political party "just in case they decide to try the same thing".

TBH, the Trumpists are probably looking for any excuse to do just that.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I remember making one of those.

It had a faux URL bar at the top of both the left and right frame and used a little JavaScript to turn each side into its own functioning browser window. This was long before browser tabs were a mainstream thing. At the time, relatively small 4:3 or 5:4 ratio monitors were the norm, and I couldn't bear the skinny page rendering at each side, so I gave it up as a failed experiment.

And yes I did open it inside itself. The loaded pages were even more ridiculously skinny.

 

Edit: Welp, I'm an idiot. After posting, I stepped away and realised that the name of the config file had to be the answer.

The game is literally called colorcode. Found and installed it and lo and behold, the game's author is someone called Dirk Laebish, which explains the directory name.

Ah well. I'll leave this here for posterity


Looking through an old backup, I've found what appears to be the config file for some game or another at the path ~/.config/dirks/colorcode.conf, but searching the Internet (DDG and Google) turns up nothing for this, and searching apt, Synaptic (yes, I know they're basically the same thing) and even the online "wayback" part of Debian's package archive also gives no result.

The reason I think it's from a game is that the config file, despite its name, contains entries like GamesListMaxCnt and HighScoreHandling.

The only think I can think is that "dirks" is an acronym of some sort, which is why it's not showing up in past or present packages.

Based on the sort of games I usually try out and play, it's more likely to be a simple in-window puzzle or card game than a 3D game.

File dates seem to suggest 2021 as the last time I played / used it, whatever it was.

It would have been under some version of Linux Mint or LMDE, if the Debian commands didn't give that away.

Anyone have any idea what it might be?

view more: next ›