RandomGuyDTB

> Windows 2000 also served as an alternative to its successor, Windows XP, for several years. XP included some features that were controversial at the time. These included an Internet-based product activation system that complained if you changed your PC hardware, and a colorful new shell interface some derided as “Fisher-Price.”

Did nobody ever change the theme back to Windows Classic? It was really simple to switch over (like, ten clicks at most) and then you could get comfortable with the 2000 interface again.

This but unironically. I can get C code from the 70s to compile in GCC but I can't get Windows programs released twenty or so years ago to run in Win10. Open software will always be easier to support and always be more stable than proprietary software, because one invites a free community of maintainers and the other one tells them that they aren't welcome. In the short-term, writing for proprietary systems is fine, but if you want your application to be use-able after you die you should probably open-source your stuff and make it compatible with free platforms.

If only the world was rational enough that this would end Fox News's claims of credibility.

There's an interesting article on Paw Patrol by Walt D[1]. It's a bit extreme at points (calling Paw Patrol "everything Trump’s Republican Party is pushing on the United States") but it does get the point across, that there are many problematic components of Paw Patrol's formula that may not be the best things to show children. Paw Patrol is an Internet "meme" among Leftists, actually - ACAB including Paw Patrol made the rounds a while ago. Paw Patrol without Chase would not be Paw Patrol and I think removing the main character abruptly would be, frankly, a stupid decision. Canceling the show as they did Cops would be wiser. Paw Patrol is a remnant of the Obama years, where the President ordered more than 500 drone strikes[2] that ended up killing a lot of civilians too. It's best that we leave the show in the past and let future historians gawk at how we let our children watch stuff like this and soak up the propaganda.

[1]: https://medium.com/s/story/paw-patrol-is-a-republican-dystop...

[2]: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/obama-drone-strikes/

I don't really see how master/slave is such a controversial issue in the computing community. The name change doesn't really affect anything either way, so if it makes people feel more welcome to the field I don't see much wrong with that, but of all things do we really need to go after terminology?

I should quickly edit this to make my stance more clear. Slavery is bad and America should be ashamed for its past. But slavery as an institution is older than the racist Western implementation of "Africans are property". I feel like the implication behind changing the master/slave terminology is that the people who decided to use these terms were racist (which may be true) when they were probably just using the terms that made the most sense to them. At the end of the day, I'll use the new naming conventions whenever I write relevant code and I'll use them gladly. But we're bickering about names right now when Black people are getting shot by cops in broad daylight.

Exactly.

> There's something wrong with our civilization when some people have to go in for the increased risk to their health for $15+ just to feed their families while we comfortably and safely sit at home getting paid multiples of that and ride that great stock market.

This isn't a jab at workers needing to go back to work, this is a jab at the fact that we treat retail workers like garbage when in reality our society would crumble without them. The whole "just get a better job if you want to be paid more" argument levied at those who push for a higher minimum wage not only ignores the fact that, when in poverty, it's very hard to get a "better job", but also ignores the fact that these jobs are necessary. Somebody has to do them. Why are sanitation workers getting paid less than stock brokers when sanitation workers are doing objectively harder work and are at far more risk (especially now)?

> perhaps you can invent a society where the work needed to live can get done without any humans doing work.

No, I'll invent a society where people whose job it is to move money around are paid substantially less than retail workers or janitors, and where those that do labor like this are respected more highly than someone like Warren Buffet or Crissy Teigen.

It's odd to highlight that Forth is 50 years old, considering C is 48 years old and still in very heavy use in operating systems development.

It's a social thing - and a particularly stupid one. If you're ostracized by your peers for having the "green bubble" you're not gonna have great luck asking for the class notes or what Joey got on question 13. iMessage is the messenger of choice for students who don't value privacy or portability.

Complete and utter bullshit.

A look at the homepage for William M. Briggs tells you the kind of person he is - it seems every article he's shared repeats obviously incorrect nonsense from biased sources. A quick lookup shows that he's also attempted to use statistics to deny the existence of climate change.[1]

But these are just ad hominems, nothing I say actually shows that this article is completely incorrect. To look at the article we can see that the first graph shown[2], by a self-claimed statistician, doesn't make any sense. I would tear it apart but I can't even tell what it's supposed to be saying. Are the X and Y axes the same? Why is there a curve if the data is sorted by deaths per million?

In the next graph[3] data is arranged better. We can see that there seems to be a correlation between there not being a coronavirus lockdown and lower deaths. It doesn't mention that the United States (one of the more lethal dots, in lockdown) has conducted 1.11 tests per million people versus Ethiopia's 0.03 tests, Myanmar's 0.01 tests, and Coromos and Burundi (all four of these being exemplary countries with no lockdowns) not having any data on testing whatsoever.[4]

What Briggs fails to keep in mind - which I don't see as anything but willful ignorance being that he's a statistician, is that correlation is not causation. There's no logical reason lockdown would cost more lives than lax restrictions.

He should be ashamed of even thinking suck bollocks given his education but I think he lost his sense of shame long ago. I just hope nobody's foolish enough to believe a word he says.

[1] - https://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2012/02/01/william-m-brig...

[2] - https://i2.wp.com/wmbriggs.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/lo...

[3] - https://i1.wp.com/wmbriggs.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/lo...

[4] - https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-country-by-country?co... (scroll to the middle of the page)

Don't get so ahead of yourself. Even people in relative poverty, in many cases, have new(er) iPhones, and HEIC is default on my SE, the budget iPhone model from 2016. In high schools you're alienated if you don't have the "blue bubbles"* - although it's stupid, if you're in high school in 2020 you probably need an iPhone, and you can get older models for a relatively small price (my SE was <$100). If anything, the ones with the most privilege will have enough technical training to know to make their phones default to JPEG rather than HEIC.

[1] - Source: I currently go to high school.

I wish Microsoft would officially release the source code for Windows 7 or even XP. I use Windows 7 now (with AV and common sense) and although slower it's a marked improvement from 10 in terms of customization and privacy. If Microsoft gave the open source community the tools to start improving Windows it would completely change the game.

I think Microsoft knows this and I think they don't want to make Windows open-source for fear that they could create their own competitor.

In any other world, this would be newsworthy. Even after Donald Trump, this would be newsworthy. But Elon Musk tweeted that we should open the country up in the middle of a pandemic. I've lost all my respect for him. He is, at the end of the day, another figure on Twitter, and one whose actions have very little if any actual effect on most people's lives - right now in particular it seems like the effect he would have on most of my friends and myself would only be negative.

Elon Musk isn't the new Nikola Tesla. He isn't a real-life Iron Man. Elon Musk is the new Jack Parsons[1] and I'm certain time will prove me right.

(( to be totally clear, i appreciate OP for sharing this. i just think it's very weird that the Verge of all agencies is even covering this when an article like this would be much better suited for a financial publication ))

[1] - Jack Parsons - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Parsons_(rocket_engineer)

I have experience using Wordpress; in sixth grade I tried out the Wordpress editor and felt writing HTML was easier. I admit it's popular with less-savvy users and with companies with money to burn, but it seems unprofessional to use Wordpress for anything you can write by hand. I don't think anyone would be using blogging software if they didn't have their own domain.

I've only ever seen userdir URLs hosting static content - ideally, static HTML with lesson plans or a resume or something. Why would anyone host a web application on a userdir? This seems like a complete non-issue.

Also - why would a blog be threatened by XSS? A blog is a collection of static HTML files and I assume the creator would be using a composer or just a text editor + browser to add and edit pages. Why would anyone log into a blog? Nowadays anything like a comment section is generally handled by iframes to some other service (like Disqus) anyway.

Ah, Hacker News, where you get downvoted for making a joke.

(to be truthful this comment didn't really add anything, which makes it fair game to downvote, but I still got a bit of surprise seeing a decent joke grayed out)

I finally found an option in Firefox to change things around, but it still only changes the font and not actual foreground/background colors.

If I recall, Netscape or one of the other early browsers used to have an option to change the default font/color of text and the background in its settings. Nowadays you have to use an extension to do so.

The intent is for users to style it themselves.. or it was, until browsers stopped having that functionality.

> (though admittedly I don't spend as much time on it as I should)

It's pretty much just a howto and link repository for myself and my friends right now. Still mostly a work in progress. Consider it as an example for look rather than for function.

I guess it is more aptly called bigotry. I was thinking along the lines of cloneship being a physical property of someone that's inherent to how they're produced (like how a newborn is probably going to be Black if its parents are Black) but the more I think about that the more it doesn't really apply because clones can really be any race.

Having both pirated GOG games and then later bought the same games because I liked them so much, I can confirm it is easier to pirate games. GOG is DRM-free, which is excellent when playing the games because it doesn't suck up megabytes or even gigabytes of memory (for DOS-era games), but when it comes to piracy you can just download the installer executable and run it without any problem whatsoever. No torrents are even required, you can just download the EXE through HTTP(S) on most sites.

I've had less problems pirating GOG games than I've had playing legitimately purchased Steam games.

The weirdest form of racism is being prejudiced against groups that don't exist yet.

Actually, on re-examination I thought I might've been a bit angrier than one should be when commenting on this site, but the poster confirmed they were serious.

Blocked at my school :/ you can use Firefox's (probably Chrome's as well) reader mode to bypass the paywall though.

Any hyperlinks about that overlocking? I have an MK-52 and didn't know anything about that.

What? Are you delusional? I rarely ever get this concerned at HN comments, but to say outright that one should be willing to give up any liberties or rights a corporation deems are dangerous, in order to participate in a group that has no inherent need for their products anyway, is beyond nonsensical. This is more than can be called a "social contract"; Facebook is committing social theft by stealing away any local groups into its servers.

(assuming it's A + A = B, there are still 4 sequences that could be if every number is an integer between 0 and 9, but if they remembered one of the numbers was a 1 it would drop the possibilities down to only 1 + 1 = 2)

The explanation I've seen a lot is that once men realized computers could be used for more than trivial math they took over the field. It's obviously more nuanced but I do think it's mostly out of sexism, which is why organizations like Girls Who Code are so valuable.

I wonder if this would be effective? If a site is obnoxious enough to warrant explicit blacklisting it's probably obnoxious enough to give you a PLEASE DISABLE YOUR ADBLOCKER.

edited top comment, didn't know that!