Status: Got a weird renewal email for one of my domains. Thinking it was just spam, I went and logged in to check. Turns out my formerly cheap domain registrar was bought by the Network Solutions conglomerate, who promptly raised all the prices.
Best posts made by Parody
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RE: The Official Status Thread
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RE: In other news today...
@Bulb said in In other news today...:
@BernieTheBernie said in In other news today...:
have some issues with the filesystem
How the 𝔽 do they cause issues with the filesystem when they only present an array of blocks in the interface and the operating system builds the filesystem on top of that itself‽
Of course if they have problems with the data, it will also affect the metadata, so the filesystem will become corrupted, but that's still data problem, not a filesystem problem.
If it screws up when writing/moving/remapping/wear leveling/etc. the blocks with the partition tables and filesystem info or the area where the drive stores its internal data then you'd see something like this. With the former you can probably repartition and reformat the drive and it'll work until it screws up again, with the latter the drive is probably unrecoverable at the user level.
ObStory: Once upon a time I worked for WTF Drive Company Technical Support. We started seeing a lot of a specific model of drives die in the same way; it turned out the factory's clean room got contaminated and so if you were unlucky you got one with a speck of dust inside. Naturally we weren't allowed to tell the customers this; we just replaced the drives and, if they complained enough, bumped them to a slightly different model.
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RE: The Official Status Thread
Status: My car's alternator let out the magic smoke. Guess I'm not getting new computer parts anytime soon. :(
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RE: The Official Status Thread
Status: Mom's car battery died. Spent a few hours failing to jump it, driving them around to get a new one, and helping them replace it. My thanks go out to the folks on the Internet who write up where the manufacturer decided to hide the battery this week and how much of the car you'll have to take apart to get to it.
Back in my day they put the batteries right in front where they were easy to replace and easy to smash in an accident!
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RE: UI Bites
All the Google apps have new and amazingly wonderful, not at all garbage designs:
At least the middle one didn’t get worse. I have no idea what either the old nor the new one represent.
I can explain it. See how the old Docs icon is blue? Sheets' one is green and Slides' one is yellow. Go print out one of each, take a page from each document, fold them in half, and put them on your desk in an overlapped triangle shape. Now you have a bunch of wasted paper, a messy desk, and are qualified to be an icon designer.
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RE: The Official Status Thread
Status: Internet has been flaky the last few days and is now out again. They're sending a tech tomorrow to see what might have gone wrong, Hopefully it's something simple.
My nieces were here earlier this week when it blurped and they got frustrated because there's no YouTube. I told them about how, when I was their age, I had exactly 5 shows I could watch at any one time and if I didn't like anything that was on I'd go read a book or play outside. They were unimpressed.
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RE: The Official Status Thread
Status: Now celebrating 12 continuous hours of Internet! (They came and ran a new fiber line today. The old one was apparently damaged by something that totally wasn't my well-meaning family members cramming a not-to-be-bent "wire" behind the siding.)
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On The Verge of a new Brand
So last week The Verge rebranded itself. I don't regularly read the site's main page, but I do get sent to specific articles by posts elsewhere. Before the brand change I found the articles easy enough to read, with a decent choice of logo, fonts, and layout. (Sample old article.)
Now the logo has a bunch of chunks taken out of it, which is not a good look in my eyes. Articles use a variety of header colors; these two neon greens are particularly hard on my eyes. The article text is fine, assuming you're ad blocking.
The main page is all black and a mishmash of articles, Twitter posts, and links to other sites. Not that different than before except for the narrow font I find harder to read, especially in black-on-random-color.
They also have a new comment system that they wrote themselves. Its two main features are looking like the pre-photocopying copied pages we used in elementary school and the JavaScript code failing to load comments after the first few.
I'd give this one a .
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RE: The Official Status Thread
Status: I voted. Can't wait to see if the three people running for the school board win the three open spots.
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RE: WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else
@loopback0 said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
@TimeBandit said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
My sources tell me CorePC will allow Microsoft to finally deliver a version of Windows that truly competes with Chromebooks in OS footprint, performance, and capabilities. A version of Windows that only runs Edge, web apps, Android apps (via Project Latte) and Office apps, designed for low-end education PCs is already in early testing internally
As long as that's just a version of it and the rest of us can avoid it like we do Chromebooks.
History tells us that they will fail to finish it on time and will hurriedly cram a poorly-chosen subset of its features into the existing codebase so they can release something to sell to businesses. (See: ME, Vista, 8, 10 [1507], 11.) This will anger a small amount of its power users enough to rail about it on Reddit and in the
ComplaintFeedback Hub whereupon they will be completely ignored. -
RE: What are some typical pain points using crypto wallets?
Judging from the stories I've heard both in person and from random places on the Internet: people forget the password(s) for their wallets.
Easiest way to solve that problem is to not buy cryptocurrency.
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RE: Can I borrow an apology?
ETA: do you have a story about that? I'm curious. Fortran shouldn't be ported to anything, but the grammar is actually simple compared to today's languages.
From The Development of the C Language by Dennis Ritchie, presented in 1993 and later published by the ACM:
[Ken] Thompson was faced with a hardware environment cramped and spartan even for the time: the DEC PDP-7 on which he started in 1968 was a machine with 8K 18-bit words of memory and no software useful to him. While wanting to use a higher-level language, he wrote the original Unix system in PDP-7 assembler. At the start, he did not even program on the PDP-7 itself, but instead used a set of macros for the GEMAP assembler on a GE-635 machine. A postprocessor generated a paper tape readable by the PDP-7.
...
Challenged by [Doug] McIlroy's feat in reproducing TMG, Thompson decided that Unix—possibly it had not even been named yet—needed a system programming language. After a rapidly scuttled attempt at Fortran, he created instead a language of his own, which he called B. B can be thought of as C without types; more accurately, it is BCPL squeezed into 8K bytes of memory and filtered through Thompson's brain.
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RE: IT departments of the world
@remi said in IT departments of the world:
facilities wants the building to be pristine
Facilities wants people to leave them alone. Cleaning the building and fixing HVAC issues are side effects.
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RE: Stack Exchange experiences Stack Meltdown, by enforcing preferred pronouns in site-wide communications
@Zerosquare said in Stack Exchange experiences Stack Meltdown, by enforcing preferred pronouns in site-wide communications:
It totally sounds like an honest, unconditional apology from SE
As always, the only winners are the lawyers.
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RE: Google+ officially coming to an end
@The_Quiet_One said in Google+ officially coming to an end:
...after a security bug.
Which means this was inevitable:
After hearing the initial news I fired up the Google+ app. Nothing new for me for 74 weeks.
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RE: The Official Status Thread
Status: I did something useful with PowerShell. It might be helpful after all. Who knew?
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RE: Microsoft Build 2018
@dkf Thankfully they've moved on to other things. I was worried that there'd be Graph in my peanut butter before too long.
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RE: WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else
@topspin YMMV, I guess:
Don't get me wrong, Settings in Windows 8/10/11 are a mess and the developers don't seem to be in any hurry to improve things. Right now they're too busy cramming Bing AI into every nook and cranny. :(
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RE: The Official Status Thread
Status: Black case + black screws + black motherboard = gimme that flashlight, I can't see a darn thing in here.
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RE: The Official Status Thread
@cabrito said in The Official Status Thread:
Daytoonaaaaa! Daytoonaaa!
A favorite arcade moment: was playing on an 8-player machine set with a few other people I didn't know. Another player started bumping my car as we were coming around towards the start/finish line. I turned away a bit and then slammed back into him...which shoved him into the pit lane. The computer took over (Daytona USA has auto pitting) so he lost half a lap while the rest of us raced on.
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RE: WTF Bites
@Gustav Sounds like that's about code size. What about execution performance?
That's the user's problem. Tell them to get a better phone.
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RE: Temperature Conversion
@Benjamin-Hall said in Temperature Conversion:
@Zecc said in Temperature Conversion:
@Benjamin-Hall , if you will.
Very good! I vote that that be added to our standard emoji set here. It has great promise for utility.
Maybe we should go all the way and get COMBINING WTF added to Unicode?
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RE: UI Bites
Former UX guy at Microsoft takes aim at the current iterations of the UI.
is that Jensen Harris (whose recent Twitter posts sparked this article) was the guy in charge of UI for Windows 8.
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RE: Will ASP.NET MVC ever go away?
@Zenith said in Will ASP.NET MVC ever go away?:
They're really bad at managing licenses though. Did you ever have a younger sibling or cousin that broke all of their toys and couldn't understand why you wouldn't let them anywhere near your stuff? Same deal, except with CDs and license keys.
Heh. Many, many years ago one of my work-study jobs was technical adviser to the college newspaper. They told me they had purchased multiple licenses for Version 5 of an application but no amount of searching turned up more than one license and the documentation relating to that purchase. My advice was to continue using Version 4 of the application as we had plenty of licenses for that until they could properly purchase more Version 5 licenses.
Their solution was to install Version 5 on all the machines and then disconnect them from the AppleTalk network so the application wouldn't see any other installs running. Sure, that prevented them from printing or copying the individual articles to their main computer for assembly, but they had to have Version 5!
Eventually they relented, deciding that having to switch wires around or quit applications all the time in order to get their work done wasn't worth the hassle. Regardless, I was fired for "incompetence". Yeah.
This was also the job where I got a call at 3 in the morning from a girl who had "lost all her icons", a problem solved by scrolling the Finder window so they were all visible again.
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RE: I hate printers, with a passion
HP's marketing department has heard your complaints! Now they have "less hated" printers!
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RE: Monolithic Software
@Steve_The_Cynic Exactly! I didn't use Trillian because of a bunch of open protocols made it easy to write a client for all chat programs. I used it because each one was its own walled garden and I'd otherwise have to run half a dozen to communicate with various friends. That was a drain on systems of the era.
Not mentioned: the services changed the protocols regularly to break programs like Trillian.
Luckily, I got to avoid most of the "this site only works on IE/(Netscape/Firefox)" except at various jobs where things only worked in IE for years past its prime.
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RE: WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else
@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
Also. *puts on sniveling glasses* But didn't they actually discuss this like years ago and found little to know real-world impact?
The real-world impact it's had on me is that I had to waste hours fixing my sister's computer when it stopped booting. This particular computer is a laptop that almost never leaves her desk, much less the house. Upon booting to a Windows install USB, it required us to enter the Bitlocker key to get access to the drive. She wouldn't know what it was or how to enable it, so it probably came enabled by the vendor or she unknowingly enabled it during OOBE.
Anyway, getting the Bitlocker key required us to go on a different computer and log in to the Microsoft Account attached to her laptop. You know, the Account that Windows goes out of its way to get you to not use the email/username and password to log in to Windows, so you don't have a daily reminder of the username and password needed?
It took us a couple hours of going through every email address she could remember using, doing password resets and verifications and whatnot, and then checking to see if there were any Bitlocker keys attached to the Account to find the right one. After getting access to the drive, fixing the boot process took about 30 seconds.
After we got back into Windows I left it decrypting the drive, which probably meant it had poor performance until it was finished.
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RE: NEW SKYPE SUCKS BIG GREEN DONKEY DICKS, hows that for a longer title????
When I upgraded my computer and installed Windows from scratch a few months ago the Store version of Skype came with it. I didn't really care; I haven't used Skype for a long time and this computer doesn't have a camera or microphone anyway.
The other day they changed it to run in the background all the time with an icon in the notification area. That got me to uninstall it and leave it a junk review in the Store and the Feedback Hub. Good work, Skype team!
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RE: Internet of shit
@JBert said in Internet of shit:
Source: https://twitter.com/seanhecht/status/1493432613628825600
Where were the hordes of ravenous students popping the things open for their delicious insides?
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RE: Internet of shit
@topspin said in Internet of shit:
@PleegWat said in Internet of shit:
For your "I don't know if it's chicken or pork" I'd likely use a grill setting on my combination steam oven.
It's not that I don't know if the food is chicken or pork, it's that I don't know what these stupid buttons do.
I think the only buttons I've used on our current microwave are Add 30 Seconds, Start, Stop, and Popcorn. Everything else is a mystery that shall never be solved.
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RE: Automation!
@Watson Sounds about right. I always thought the only approved way to update those dedicated navigation systems was to buy a new one.
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RE: Teams is directionally challenged
@Gąska said in Teams is directionally challenged:
TIL DisplayPort can carry audio.
Why have just one standard when you can have two nearly-identical ones?
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RE: The Official Status Thread
@error The bathrooms in my townhome have large oval mirrors with fancy wooden frames (leaves and such carved into them) that are painted gold. When we moved in I cleaned the dust off the one in the small bathroom in the main area of the house and noticed that the mirror was just hanging there on a wire and hooks like a large picture or painting.
Fast forward a few years and I'm wiping the fog off the mirror in "my" bathroom after taking a shower. Bringing my arm down I accidentally pull on one edge and it swings open! Unlike the other three mirrors, this one is glued to the door of a medicine cabinet that's set into the wall. It looks just like the others if you don't pull on it from the right-hand side.
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RE: WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else
@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
Status: Windows wanted to know what I do with my computer.
I got the developer one. It popped open a survey asking me what other OSes I've programmed on and whatnot. Hopefully my answers will push them to improve Windows 10's developer experience to match the Commodore 64's.
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RE: Bethesda dealing with Fallout
@CodeJunkie said in Bethesda dealing with Fallout:
@dkf Imagine if there was a way that players could connect to a centralized server that could handle cheat detection in an authoritative manor...perhaps a dedicated type of server maybe... IDK... might be impossible. :)
Oh! Oh! I've heard of that! It's called Stadia!
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RE: WTF Bites
@Gustav What if (stay with me here) we replace the file with a URL with the GUID attached that links to a web service that tracks what they're doing and returns the app and activity they need to do it? If the app isn't installed the OS could go get it and call back afterwards. This would even work on the web, letting sites across the world continually prompt you to install their app and continue in it instead of using their perfectly usable website!
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RE: Do people actually like poor quality user interfaces?
@Tsaukpaetra said in Do people actually like poor quality user interfaces?:
@levicki said in Do people actually like poor quality user interfaces?:
@Jaloopa said in Do people actually like poor quality user interfaces?:
Yeah, it must be terrible to be dismissed just because of your age and presumed lack of experience in the matters being talked about.
Yeah. How would those pesky adults know about all those things that their kids are going through now when they never were kids themselves? Oh wait...
"But, back then there was no dihydrogen monoxide poisoning, you can't even compare!"
You had dihydrogen monoxide? All we had was hydroxic acid!
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RE: In other news today...
@TimeBandit said in In other news today...:
@DogsB said in In other news today...:
Can probably be bested by crowbar though.
Probably opened under a minute by the Lock picking lawyer
Yup, and in two different ways. Unfortunately, he brings up but doesn't answer the question "How sturdy is a deadbolt with the center hollowed out for a battery compartment?"
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RE: Stack Exchange experiences Stack Meltdown, by enforcing preferred pronouns in site-wide communications
@levicki That is how we got here, after all.
More importantly, I'm 99.99% certain that Commodore 64 BASIC is the next hot language and absolutely told them so! Who needs more than 38911 bytes of memory anyway?
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RE: Certificate warnings go Hollywood
I like that one of the theories about why some setups were still working and others were not is that the related spec says you need to check the certificate's validity relative to a date. What date? The spec doesn't specify, so some systems might check that it was valid when everything was generated (still works) and others check vs. the current date (fails).
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RE: Microsoft Build 2018
@magus said in Microsoft Build 2018:
@parody The ability to deploy and update them sounds kind of interesting... but javascript is horrible at data types...
Just be careful with
=LEFTPAD(...)
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RE: Visual Studio Live Azure DevOps Hyper 365 .NET
Just wait until we get to AzureHub.
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RE: WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else
@topspin said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
When it comes to something like actually being able to move the taskbar to different locations on the screen, there's a number of challenges with that. When you think about having the taskbar on the right or the left, all of a sudden the reflow and the work that all of the apps have to do to be able to understand the environment is just huge.
Amazing. Like that's somehow a new challenge and not something that's already been possible since 1995. Guess such a small company with a brazillion developers just can't afford to have one of them spend 5 days on such an irrelevant feature.
Yeah, I listened to some of the linked video and I'm not sure where she was going with that one.
Later on a reason for having a bottom-only Taskbar was brought up: moving the Taskbar would interfere with touchscreen gestures like swipe in from right for Notifications or swipe in from left for Widgets. Continuing on with
- The swipe gestures worked for me in Windows 8 even when the Taskbar was on the same side.
- My guess is that people who want to move the Taskbar are willing to give up the swipe gestures, if they're even using a touchscreen device.
- Widgets?
Look, if you're going to volunteer to answer questions just be straightforward. I may not like "We're putting things on the sides and corners and having the Taskbar elsewhere would cause problems we aren't interested in solving right now. Sorry." but at least I can respect them for giving an actual answer.
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RE: The Official Status Thread
@Zecc said in The Official Status Thread:
What does it say about Visual Studio that being able to quickly add new files and folders is an exciting feature?
(video)
Escape should Cancel the dialog. Nobody respects the long standing keyboard shortcuts nowadays.
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RE: Mars!
Mars, the only planet known to be populated entirely by robots.
I'm waiting for them to declare independence. If science fiction has taught us anything, Mars always rebels.
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RE: WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else
I'll give a favorite that relates to Windows 10 and how programs use the Documents folder: the way Microsoft keeps bugging me to replace my Documents folder with OneDrive's Documents folder. My Documents folder is ~6x the size of my allowed OneDrive space without me keeping any of my actual documents in it!
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RE: WTF Bites
@Polygeekery said in WTF Bites:
Also, how would a wired machine be able to connect to a Miracast display?
By plugging in an HDMI cable.