palordrolap

m’user

Who knows what data type they’re using. Based on the values given, it’s already getting close to 128 bits, and most languages don’t have a data type that large in their standards.

I figure it will be more like “Vasily! Print another page of zeros!”

Yeah, Usenet was where it was at back at the turn of the millennium. Then again, I had access through a university. Access wasn’t free outside of places like that.

ISPs were spotty on coverage because even at that time, they needed at least a terabyte of storage to dedicate to it, and still not be able to cover everything that was on there. Of course, they might’ve got away with less if they decided not to carry the binaries newsgroups…

The way it worked was a lot like how Fediverse federation works now, or similarly, filesharing. It was possible to be reading a thread of messages and the older ones wouldn’t be available on your local/ISP news server because their space had been recycled for newer data.

If you were lucky, your attempt to access that message might cause your host to grab it on a future request to upstream hosts or peers, but some Usenet messages are completely lost to time because everyone purged them.

Google buying Dejanews, the largest archive of all messages, and merging it with the travesty that was (and still is) Google Groups just about killed the whole thing.

For those interested in getting into listening to internet radio, see also: https://dir.xiph.org/ (Icecast network) and https://directory.shoutcast.com/ (Shoutcast network), both of which have been around for ~25 years at this point if the domain registry is anything to go by. Definitely in their current forms for over a decade.

Caveat: Lots of commercial content and stations, which is, of course, antithetical to Fediverse ideology. Still worth a look if you can’t (yet) find what you want in the Fediverse.

(There’s also http://radio.garden/ which has a very pretty interface but has multiple negative points: in-browser only, needs a lot of JavaScript access to station-associated domains on a per-station basis, is HTTP(no S)-only and may not work for stations outside your own country.)

“… you don’t. You recover it from /dev/random. Eventually.”

Hiroshima was a man-made disaster that happened in 1945.

Chernobyl was a man-made disaster that happened in 1986.

And now generalise for the punchline.

Two types of people on Earth. Those in the bottom percentile and everyone else.

2K was my jam.

The death of the DOS line of Windows (3.x, 9x, ME) lead to the decision to inject clown DNA into NT in order to appeal to the masses and that’s how we ended up with XP.

Vista was an attempt to eradicate the clown, but it was still there, people hated it and because Microsoft thought they had eradicated the clown, they thought people wanted more clown, and that’s how we ended up with Windows 8.

What about 7? The clown gene skipped a generation.

You can’t fool me. I know Shia LaBeouf when I see hi—aaack everything is normal here use Wayland

Sounds like a job for a USB trial run on a rainy weekend when you’re not doing anything else.

Nvidia supply OEM drivers for the Debian family (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint), if not others, assuming the open-source drivers don’t cut it for you. Microcode updates are released for both Intel and AMD.

You’ll probably run into issues with some games. Things are getting better on Linux, slowly and steadily, but many games are written specifically for Windows with no Linux port available. Steam’s store, for example, shows which games are SteamOS compatible, which usually means they’ll run on Linux too.

For other games it’s worth checking the Internet - e.g. www.protondb.com to see if anyone else has a particular game running under Linux. You’re probably aware that there are programs that attempt to provide some layer of Windows behaviour that form part of the solution. Some of the solutions may or may not involve command line use.

This is one of those situations where explaining why I said what I said, when I said it, in the way that I said it, and bring into question whether I could have worded any of it better takes way more time than a glib aside. Something adjacent to the Bullsh*t Asymmetry principle, if not an instance.

Anyway, I was trying to encompass those folks who tend to set their system time to 12hr, and wasn’t really saying anything one way or the other about whether the person who made the screenshot (OP it seems) generally has their system set that way or not. It was more pointing out that having it be 24hr (or leaving it that way) makes the time look a bit like a year in the not-too-distant future (2028), and thus could form part of the date that is otherwise displayed.

It could be that the whole thing is a coincidence, but I was pointing out that it could have been part of the joke.

I feel like the choice of time of day (24hr clock) for the screenshot might have been an attempt at being prophetic.

nano with the new, alternative “GUI editor standard” keybinds or the old pico ones?

AMD graphics drivers might be an example of this. They’re made by AMD for Ubuntu specifically, not Debian. They work* on LMDE, so I assume they will also work** on Debian, but they weren’t specifically developed for that platform.

Installing them was a bit hairy, but they’ve survived at least one kernel update so far, which is somewhat reassuring***.

* on my specific hardware.

** for some hardware combinations, including mine, if not all.

*** but not completely. FrankenDebian is the word I use for it.

“Hurt me, daddy.”

“OK, now you’ve made it weird.”

“Aw yeah, that’s the stuff.”

I’m not sure I’m a fan of systemctl either, but I think your hatred of it has caused you to read way too much into what I said.

Love it or loathe it, systemctl is trying to do the right thing with regard to stability and data preservation.

If you really mean it, the manual offers a few levels of strength beyond the plain one: -i (don’t check for busy processes, which is what’s going on in the meme), -f (force, presumably asks even less nicely), and -f -f (don’t even ask, just do it now, preservation be damned).

But should $Age return the same value as $age if used in its place by mistake?

Thought experiment: Would you expect a programming language variable name to be case insensitive?

That is, if you set foo = 1 and then print FOO, what should happen? Most programming languages throw an error.

Is this even comparable with filenames, which are, after all, basically variable names that hold large quantities of data?

If there is a difference, is it the fact it’s a file, or - for a mad idea - should files with only a few bytes of data retain case insensitivity? And if that idea is followed through, where’s the cutoff? 256 bytes? 7?

(Anyway, Windows filenames are case sensitive, in a sense. If you save “Letter to Grandma.txt” it will retain those two capital letters and all the lower case letters exactly as they are. It won’t suddenly change to “LETTER to Grandma.txt”, despite the fact that if you try to open a file by that name, you’ll get the same file.)

“They’re back! In POG form!”

But seriously, with the way web search seems to be going these days, webrings coming back might actually be useful.