Less than half of all eligible voters voted.
According to Ballotpedia it was 63.7% of eligible voters, which is a very good turnout by US standards.
Still means that only about a third of eligible voters voted for Trump, but, y’know, that’s really quite a lot.
There are a lot of reasons people might want to switch to Linux from Windows, but I don’t think it’s usually the GUI that’s the main problem on the Windows side. I think it’s pretty reasonable to want the GUI to work in the way you’re used to but still want an OS that doesn’t shove ads at you, install AI without your permission, bug you about Teams and OneDrive, reboot every time it needs to update anything, etc.
Clearly something is pushing in the direction of voiced instead. The ultimate form is presumably “lambdop.”
I had something like this with Final Fantasy IX. Like two-thirds of the way through the game, there’s a minigame that crops up where you have to use a chocobo to walk around these tiny scenes and peck to try to echolocate hidden treasures within a time limit. And I don’t know why, but I got totally addicted to that stupid little minigame, to the point that I kind of broke my brain and had to stop playing the entire game. I did later see some dorm mates in college getting frustrated with that task and get to just zip right through it for them, though, which made it feel slightly less like a savage waste of my lifespan.
My first home computer was an Apple IIgs. It had no hard drive. You need to use a “boot disk” that loaded the operating system, and then once that was in RAM, you could swap out that disk for the one with your program on it. The OS looked a little like early MacOS; it was called ProDOS. You could technically use it to copy floppy disks (the program for that was “Copy II Plus”), but it took forever, because the copy program had to copy a chunk of the disk into RAM, then get you to swap to the target disk, write that chunk, get you to swap back to the first disk, load a new chunk, get you to swap disks again… It generally took about 40 swaps for a 3.5" high-density (by which they meant 800kb) floppy. It was incredibly tedious. If you had two disk drives, though, it could just work continuously without needing to wait for you to swap disks all the time.
I had a thought along the same lines. I was thinking we should coin the term “immunition,” and tell people it was a way to arm your immune system to defend itself. It’s not even all that misleading.
Oh, you’re right, it’s right there in the link you shared–it was built in to MS-DOS, but only from version 6 on. I must have misremembered it as paid because it was something we didn’t have, and then later we did.
Tell me you use an ad blocker without telling me.
It’s so much worse than that. From the article;
“Homeless is a misnomer. It implies that someone got a little bit behind on their mortgage, and if you just gave them a job, they’d be back on their feet,” he told former Fox News personality Tucker Carlson in October. “What you actually have are violent drug zombies with dead eyes, and needles and human feces on the street.”
Basically, it’s not the “homeless” part of “homeless people” he thinks is a lie.
Ah, yeah, I think that may actually have been a paid program. It was something folks were willing to pay not to have to do, because, as I say, it was surprisingly tricky to manage the memory below 640K.
IIRC the application was just “edit.com”, as in “edit autoexec.bat”. The different kinds of memory were expanded memory, extended memory, and the high memory area; high memory was useful regardless which of the other two you were using, and those two were for the most part kind of interchangeable. You also typically had to mess with config.sys, which handled some things like the mouse driver. It was really common to have specific floppy disks that had only those two files on them (well, and were set to be bootable), so that if you needed a particular configuration for some game–maybe you didn’t load the CD-ROM driver, since that took up a lot of precious low-memory kilobytes–you could leave your normal setup alone and just stick your custom boot disk in for that program. Some programs were really tricky to make enough room for, even if you had a ton of RAM, because that privileged low ram area was so hard to manage.
Oh, I was using Keepass2Android as a password vault, but was a little frustrated with it because occasionally it’ll forget to synchronize with the file before adding an entry and leave a “conflicted copy” I have to deal with manually. If KeepassDX will also do TOTPs that sounds perfect.
Do you have a replacement you would recommend?
I think there are a bunch of things at play here. The whole pricing structure of this generation is kind of problematic; the 3 is a little too expensive for the mass market, and the 3S is supposed to be an answer for that, but the discount below the 3 isn’t large enough to make it seem like a good deal given the visual and comfort downgrades involved. Meanwhile family budgets are pretty tight, and folks are feeling really uncertain about the future, so big-ticket items that are purely for escapism seem like something you can postpone.
There’s also some crossover with folks who do have the money, but may be saving it for a Switch 2 next year, or one of the Steam devices (Steam Deck 2, Deckard, Steam OS consoles) if any of those ever actually turn up. (Not holding my breath on them, but hey, Brad has been saying…) I think there’s also some degree of fatigue over the cadence of device replacements in so many categories these days (phone, console, handheld, headset…) that may be inclining people to wait and see a bit more. Some folks are probably also saving for a computer replacement, thanks to Microsoft’s strict requirements for Windows 11 and next year’s End Of Support for Windows 10.
TL;DR: I would expect most niche luxury goods to have decreased sales this holiday season over last year’s.
I definitely considered FFmpeg (I mean, it does everything, and pretty much as fast as possible), but the sense I had was that people were mostly posting about tools that were reasonably accessible to novice users, with nice-ish interfaces. FFmpeg is pretty daunting to newcomers.
OpenSCAD (CAD, but with a programming language-style interface) is kind of in a similar category. It’s pretty powerful, and for someone who thinks like a programmer it can be relatively easy to learn, but if you don’t already understand 3d transformations on a pretty intuitive level, the program doesn’t have a lot of features to ease you into that.
Adding on:
Inkscape - vector graphics program
Meshrom - photogrammetry
Handbrake - video transcoding
MakeMKV - rips DVDs and Blu Ray into video files
7zip - file compression and decompression
Droid48 - Truly excellent HP48 emulator for android
LibreOffice - free word processor & office suite (not without some recent drama though, I guess)
I’m sure I’m forgetting plenty, but hey, more for additional commenters to name.
Edit: Removed Audacity, apparently I’d missed privatization drama around that one too
The “idiot” part comes in where I encountered this problem, and didn’t even stop to consider whether this might be specific to this model, or even try something as basic as turn the model on the print bed, which wouldn’t have fixed the slicing, but would have told me my assumption about how the “bridging angle” setting worked was wrong. Instead, I leapt straight from “huh, this model sliced in a weird way” to “this basic slicer feature is designed in a bizarrely poor way and I’m the first one to ever notice,” and posted about it on social media.
So I appreciate the sentiment, and I’ll leave the post up as it I agree it’s a mildly interesting and counterintuitive result, but I still maintain I acted kinda dumb. :)
A bit of a weird one because it never actually came out, but I was really excited about the news that Michel Gondry was set to direct a film adaptation of Rudy Rucker’s novel The Master of Space and Time. I really like both Gondry and Rucker, and their sensibilities would have worked really well together. The story is kind of a sci-fi three wishes fable. It’s not my favorite of his–that’s gotta be White Light–but it’s really light-hearted and fun. And Gondry is terrific at getting bizarre, dream-like ideas onto film. I’m still bummed out that they cancelled that.
For something that actually did come out but then got cancelled, I enjoyed Disney’s adaptation of The Mysterious Benedict Society. Then they threw that one down the memory hole for tax reasons, so there’s no way to watch it anymore short of piracy. I feel like that shouldn’t be allowed. Seems like they should add least have to provide the Library of Congress with a copy. It’s weird that our cultural history can just be yanked away like that now.
This depended on the phone. The HTC One M8, for instance, had a surprisingly good built-in DAC.
At this point I actually wonder whether Steam Deck owners might represent the majority of Arch users.