I’m hoping to have bought my last x86 portable device. Hell it wouldn’t hurt my feelings if my Ryzen 7700x was the last x86 processor I ever buy.

I honestly can’t be mad at this point because what they SHOULD do is sell cables in bulk packaging to the Apple store, and then when they sell a phone they say “Do you need a USB cable? Free with the phone.” If they say “No we’re okay I’ve got hundreds of them by now” no problem, if they say “Yeah in fact can I get two?” Sure. Same with chargers. Of course this is Apple we’re talking about, so they’re probably $69.99 each.

A surprising amount of Fractal Design’s cases do.

You copied that floppy?!?!

You mean that inferior version of Scorched Earth?

I thought Gen Alpha was very explicitly NOT learning cursive.

I had typing tutor software on the family PC. It made the mistake of trying to teach typing by starting with only home row keys, then expanding outward from there. So for a very long time, you would type things like adj daf jal ls; dal fka and so forth. It was a very long time until you really started to get it.

And then MSN chat rooms and messenger happened to me, and suddenly touch typing was the main way I had to hit on chicks. I knew what the home row was, so I knew what touch typing looked like, so I started actually doing it, but typing things I wanted to type. I’m now the third fastest typist I know. On a good keyboard with a passage I’m familiar with I can key 106WPM, right now typing conversationally out of my brain I’m probably hitting about 65 or 70.

Humans are indeed creative by nature, we like making things. What we don’t naturally do is publish, broadcast and preserve our work.

Society is iterative. What we build today, we build mostly out of what those who came before us built. We tell our versions of our forefathers’ stories, we build new and improved versions of our forefather’s machines.

A purely capitalistic society would have infinite copyright and patent durations, this idea is mine, it belongs to me, no one can ever have it, my family and only my family will profit from it forever. Nothing ever improves because improving on an old idea devalues the old idea, and the landed gentry can’t allow that.

A purely communist society immediately enters whatever anyone creates into the public domain. The guy who revolutionizes energy production making everyone’s lives better is paid the same as a janitor. So why go through all the effort? Just sweep the floors.

At least as designed, our idea of copyright is a compromise. If you have an idea, we will grant you a limited time to exclusively profit from your idea. You may allow others to also profit at your discretion; you can grant licenses, but that’s up to you. After the time is up, your idea enters the public domain, and becomes the property and heritage of humanity, just like the Epic of Gilgamesh. Others are free to reproduce and iterate upon your ideas.

Is that calibrated against the Universal Prototype Kilobyte in Paris?

Until you open a web browser or an Electron app. Them folks don’t really seem to give a shit about RAM usage.

Electronics Enonymous.

It is my understanding that ME was the last DOS-based Windows. My understanding is you can find “MS-DOS 7.0” ISOs floating around out there which IIRC is the DOS version ME is based on that was never released separately but for some reason it happened in China? Like it was used in Chinese computer factories or something? Half remembering an LGR video or something?

They effectively don’t. Several of the hardware OEMs saw the Steam Deck and rushed copies to market that run desktop Windows with some launcher they slapped together, and they don’t hold a candle to something someone thought about for a few minutes.

Especially with something like a movie trailer. Do they really get asses in theater seats via stockholm syndrome?

No we need to replace all industry standard terminology and acronyms every few years or so to keep datasheets unintelligible. Shop teachers need to be able to call their students stupid for not knowing that “tension” used to mean “voltage” 90 years ago.

I mean that does actually work better. If there’s only one, it has to be the Primary. If there’s two, one of them has to be the Primary and the other one is the Secondary. That makes more sense to me. Because neither drive is sending the commands here, the IDE controller either built into the motherboard or on an expansion card is sending the commands, that’s the “master.”

I think I could argue that master/slave doesn’t describe that functionality. Does the master drive control the slave drive?

I think a better example is the SPI bus, which has a one-controller-many-peripherals bus topology with two data lines often referred to as MOSI and MISO: Master Out Slave In and Master In Slave Out. (in addition to a clock line and one or more chip enable lines) In this case the controller does literally control the peripherals, which aren’t allowed to put data on the bus unless commanded to. Newer documentation is using the terms COPI and CIPO, for Controller Out Peripheral In and Controller In Peripheral Out. Personally I prefer MOSI and MISO because there’s a definite way to pronounce them; how do you pronounce “CIPO?” See-poh? But it’s something for someone somewhere to be uppity about so sure let’s expand the glossary.

The most recent ad that actually got my attention was on Reddit, so this was at least a year ago now. It was an ad for caffeinated chocolate candies. I don’t remember the brand name but they had an owl motif, because caffeine = awake. I saw that ad in passing ONCE. Just enough for me to learn the product existed.

In the case of that Mission: Impossible movie, if it had played the long form of the trailer at me once or twice in an entire week, and then the shorter version of the trailer once or twice the next week, I might have gone “You know that looks like a cool movie I might go see it.” But I got served that ad and only that ad several times an hour for weeks on end, and I have now resolved to never watch another Mission Impossible movie, a movie starring Tom Cruise, or any film distributed by Paramount Pictures ever again. When it comes to boycotts I do my brain surgery with a backhoe.

Gonna blast another ad I hated: A scarecrow dancing around on a GE coal-fired powerplant to the tune of “If I only had a brain” from the Wizard of Oz. Apparently the show I was watching was sponsored by General Electric’s heavy industry division, which okay fine, but…what decision was the average SyFy channel viewer supposed to make based on the contents of that commercial? “Gee Tina, we should run out and buy a 1.5GW steam turbine generator.” Why’d they feel the need to bother me about it?

I don’t mind if they used either data I entered or general trends of my watch history to serve me Degree For Men rather than Secret ads. “Data indicates this viewer is a male in his mid-30’s, serving this viewer a tampon ad is unlikely to generate sales.” I get that.

It’s when I got the same exact ad for a Mission Impossible movie that had that annoying “Ready or not, here I come” song thing in front of every single video for three weeks straight that I downloaded uBlock Origin, stopped using the official app in favor of the website in the browser.

It’s gotten to the point that I associate advertisements with bad products. I’ve had good functional search engines for most of my life, I’ve been able to find the products I want and need. The more you feel the need to pay to have your brand shouted at me the shittier I think your product is. Case in point: I’ve never seen a commercial for Sennheiser headphones but holy SHIT I’ve seen ads for Raycons.

What will this accomplish other than facilitate brigading?