I always figured BSD should lean into the daemon imagery with a full heavy-metal branding: a suite of wallpapers with decidedly less cuddly daemons, a succubus OS-tan character… make it the go-to Edgelord Desktop.

Then FreeBSD introduced that stupid sphere logo. No sense of branding. :P

Can we get the politicians to shift from illegal aliens to Sasquatch? Build a wall across Washington state and make Canada pay for it?

So thry’re saying they have plenty of licenses for the use case, but somehow people are still pirating?

Maybe their license management paradigm is just garbage. This could be the vendor, but also poor IT policy if the users can’t requisition what they need.

As usual, service problem.

So much licensing fuckery-- dealing with floating or reissuing licenses, users needing to move to different machines-- could be solved via affordable site licensing. But that might leave dollars on the table if users don’t overbuy.

As a non-amateur who every few months thinks “I should consider getting a license”, I’ve been hoping for an obvious bootstrap point.

The library has some old “here’s every exam question” style cram books, but I’m actually looking for a course for understanding, so I don’t pass the exam and proceed to have no idea what to do or how to behave. That went so well eith the driver’s license exam. :)

I think you’re thinking of the Socket A Athlon/Duron/Sempron. A lot of coolers used shitty mounting designs so it was possible to get it off alignment or over-pressure it and crack the die, and no heatspreader + poor thermal controls allowed for a meltdown if the mountng was bad.

The K6-2 was pretty solid aside from not quite holding performance crowns.

No, this is a general practice-- I see it a lot with third-party vendors who want you to integrate with their services. They’ll expire the documentation portal password after 90 days, but the actual user facing service still accepts the same “password123” that’s been set since 2004.

I suspect the pattern is to protect the vendors from developer scrutiny: by the time you’ve jumped through enough hoops to read the docs and realize it’s trash, the execs have signed the contracts and the sunk costs are too high to bail out.

Also add another 6 months to actually get the credentials for the test environment.

Chromebooks maybe?

I always figured the browser part mostly falls out of doing the Electron-for-cross-platform thing.

Imposed multipkayer content can be toxic.

I played Revelation Online for a while and one feature of it was that you needed to play some 5/10 man raids for desirable upgrades. These were timegated to once a week, so if you weren’t there at 00:00 server time on Sunday, everyone else had already done the run and the place was dead.Hard to stsy committed when you couldn’t progress effectively.

I’m not there. You might try a forum like Audiokarma.

Don’t toss the Technics reciever either.

Back in the Windows 8 era, I bought a little 8" tablet PC from Dell. It was flaky from basically day 1, and after ~2 weeks it bricked entirely.

I go to RMA and they ask “If we refund you $50, would you be willing to keep the unit? How about $75?”

Admittedly, they did give me a refund, but that was so the wrong branch to follow on the chat script, honey. If I’m going to be out over three hundred dollars for a paperweight it better at least be made of something cool like meteorite.

I guess I was startled when I went for my go-to desktop (fvwm) and it wasn’t in the main repo, but the AUR.

It feels like it means they’re not actually maintaining a lot of their package pool, just tossing it off on third parties.

I started with some UMSDOS-based “full X11 desktop in 5 floppies” distro on a 486, then went through Slackware, RedHat 5 with glibc breakage, actually bought a SuSE boxed set in the 7.x era, mostly stuck with Slackware unril I realized I wanted stuff like Steam and perhaps some degree of dependency resolution is nice. Bounced off of Arch (the AUR is a terrible concept IMO) and ended up on Void, which gives me Slackware-like vibes, but a little more built for broadband instead of CD images. Been trying Debian Sid latrly, just because I put it on my new laptop and I figured I’d go consistent, but I’m not sure I’m sold. Everything works, but even for an “unstable”, the packages are dated and I dislike systemd on principle.

I think 2049 is the 100th anniversary of the current PRC, so a reasonable target for ceremonial goals.

No different than saying an American leader said he wanted a Mars landing for the tricentennial in 2076. It’s good symbolism, not necessarily a technical merric.

I’m surprised nobody makes an affordable PCI or maybe even USB GPIO box.

To me, the RasPi served two purposes:

• if you wanted GPIOs and the associated ecosystem of hats/shields/capes/straightjackets but a less barebones experience than a bare metal MCU
• RiscOS, because an Archimedes is far rarer than even an Amiga or ST in the Rogue Colonies

Silly idea: computer vision for classtoom rollcall. Take a photo and it generates a list of absences.

If I’ve learned anything from GTA… just drive the news van around and hit pedestrians until you make budget.

I was under the impression thar’s what the mid-grade petrol was for; it had a high-enough octane factor to be non-knocking in engines designed for leaded.

Amtrak was historically a lifeboat. By 1971, passenger rail service was haemmoraging money. This was the year the Penn Central formally went insolvent (an all-but-foregone conclusion from its inception, but still, at the time it was the biggest bankruptcy in history at the time).

The government promised the freight railways they’d take the burden off their hands, and they mostly all lined up and said “sure, take our ancient coaches and obsolete E8s!” They never controlled the rails outside the Northeast Corridor and a few other corner-cases. Perhaps there was a bit more good-faith cooperation earlier on with the freight carriers, but it was never a big priority for them.

I find any claim of short-term viability questionable: it would take them years just to refurbish and retire obsolete equipment. The only possible angle for savings would be by combining redundant routes from different private operators. However, they probably had to quote optimistic situations to paper over the legitimate real reasons we need passenger rail. (among other things, it’s scalable to rural communities in a way air isn’t)

And before that, a bad firmware flash could garble the MAC.