fps_doug

Time to check it out again. Last time was 15 years ago, iirc.

I also like RTTR[1], a re-implementation of Settlers II, requiring the original game for graphics, sound etc. Which is actually a big plus for me, for purely nostalgic reasons. Widelands looks just "wrong" to me subjectively. ;) Unfortunately quite understaffed and some internal issues last I checked on the project.

[1] https://www.siedler25.org/index.php?lang=en

Compared to Google, where you can't contact anybody at all if you're not on a payed account. Yes, it's free, why do you expect service, but they're still making money off me with ads etc., so locking an account down forever because of suspicious activity seems a bit over the top in that case.

Yes, it's funny how everything that was lacking on Mobile is slowly falling into place. However, support for Android apps would have to be stellar I guess, as getting developers on board after the quadrillionth reboot of your mobile platform isn't exactly going to be easy. ;-)

> Save us from the dichotomy of surveillance capitalists and forty-dollar-dongleists.

I doubt Microsoft is much better in this regard though.

They weren't, not by design. A lot of them just have bootloader exploits, and even back when WP was still supported, they didn't really bother to fix it. They're an ideal target for Windows 11, as all the hardware components already have drivers for Windows and bootloaders available.

True, that part was specific to WP8(.1), which is actually my favorite. It just seems so lean and no-nonsense, very unmicrosofty.

Yes. I really would want a bootloader unlock, and unlimited side-loading for Windows Phone 8-10. One last update that enables this would be so awesome, although you'd also need a Visual Studio version that doesn't require a dev account, but there's probably hacks for that.

I just like collecting old and obscure HW and actually use it. WP8.1 is unusable: Store shut down, no new apps. Logging in with your live account doesn't work anymore. If you were already logged in, you could keep using it for quite some while, but in January, the calendar stopped syncing with your live account, and since then, it will regularly wipe all appointments you add, so it's completely unusable, even without cloud sync. MSN weather is also broken, and I can't get an alternative app.

Today you can show people how tech from 30 years ago worked. The same isn't true for anything made today, or 10 years ago.

Not in Germany. The mobile network has distinct numbers. You can have a land line number mapped to a cellphone, but it's rare these days, don't know anybody who does this. It was popular back when calling cellphones was more expensive than land lines.

When it still was available they had a license, but only when using Google Maps in China.

OSM has an extensive article about mapping in China. Generally it's not allowed. Still, in the bigger OSM is quite accurate. :>

I wouldn't limit this to nation states, seems a general approach by politicians all over the world. A certain one made it much more popular over the past four years.

I'm using vim with the detectindent script (with ugly hacks and enhancements)[1] for that, it gets this right most of the time if the source file isn't too short, including the number of spaces in case it's space-indented.

[1] https://termbin.com/qzwzy

This is the first thing that came to my mind: Different languages have different traditions/defaults here, and might correlate stronger with salaries.

Disagree. As an open chat platform -- ie. not for private/confidential communications, to me, IRC is still superior to Matrix. We use it at work in parallel to IRC, and it still happens today (at least with elements.io) that a message or two can get lost when you restart your client in an unfortunate moment, and sometimes channel user lists get out of sync, so you're addressing a person that's not there, or suddenly someone replies you don't see in the user list. It's happening rarely, but it does, and it is annoying.

IRC's concept of requiring an active TCP connection for your session is archaic but dead simple, and the only times you have to wonder whether or not someone received your message is if they got a ping timeout shortly after, and the user list might get out of sync once in a honeymoon when there's a net-split. Nothing about IRC changes anymore, so you won't get surprised by regressions and bug fixes every month. I can see how people miss long multi-line messages and animated gifs in IRC, but I just don't. It's straight forward text communications, no bullshit.

It's kinda sad that you can't just run a web server and host your own homepage anymore. You need to mess with your webserver config to make it spam the client with a dozen HTTP headers to disable FLoC, enable HSTS, set this weird same site origin policy thing, disallow iframe embedding... Luckily enough someone had the idea to make it so HTTP headers will be compressed too, so we can add some more before the request header completely fills up the initial RWIN of the server.

> It would be in a register. Of course. Or it would be eliminated by a compiler optimization. Of course.

Since you mention relevance for beginners later on in your post I'd argue this isn't relevant either. This concept holds true for simple code that doesn't do advanced stuff like working with hardware. As soon as you do &variable, you get an address and can work with it. If the compiler optimized something away you never use you might as well just pretend it's in memory somewhere for the sake of a mental model that's easy to grasp. Same with passing variables via stack. A simple compiler could do it just like that.

That isn't to say the tutorial is good/not good, but these points in particular seem rather sane to me. Far from "Mastering C Pointers" at least :)

You don't seem very confident, betting only a dollar. ;-)

But honestly, just buy a Thinkpad and everything works out of the box. Yes, everything.

Unset them after right after evaluation.

> the techies inside unversities are horrendously underfunded. m365 at least will bring consistency and will probably also make your date more secure to third party actors.

True, but no reason to dig an even deeper hole.

> of course it would be possible to have everything open source. BUT with our current governement M365 is the best solution. the cdu sleeped for over 20 years to have a great open source solution. so it would be impossible to have something integrated ready within a short window, it would also blow a huge budget. the only thing you can be mad about is our government, the m365 is the best thing that could happen.

You're completely ignoring that I'm complaining about the move to the cloud, and the restrictiveness of the contract. Even just continuing the old contract and staying with offline-Office would have been better.

> btw. I hate the strange bashing against american companies, as if german companies are any better (they are not).

I never even hinted at this being about Microsoft being American. I don't want my University to upload my PII to "the cloud" so I can use Word in a Browser.

You're basically saying we shouldn't even be trying anymore. Why not shut down the CS departments of universities entirely and just hand out accounts to Skillshare et al., so those still interested in CS can learn from there? There's nothing left a University could offer that you can't access from there. Maybe a couple credits for the Azure cloud if you need to do something computationally intensive. Your University surely doesn't have anything left in-house for this anyways.

Yes, Universities can simply refuse to participate in this deal, but it puts them in a worse position, as previously, the deal was usually made on state level, which afaik no state does anymore. I'm in BaWü and now the choice is either negotiating with MS individually or taking the Bundesvertrag. I think technically they are still considered individual deals per state, but they are effectively the same everywhere ("Campus und School-Rahmenvertrag").

E.g.:

https://www.urz.uni-heidelberg.de/de/microsoft-landesvertrag

https://www.rz.uni-freiburg.de/services/beschaffung/software...

https://www.tu-chemnitz.de/urz/software/mslandesvertrag.php

Great. Just great. This is days after I learned about the new Germany-wide deal with Microsoft for licensing their software and services, so it perfectly fuels my fears. Before, it was mostly just a volume license for Windows and Office, but now it's the full arsenal, M365, Teams, and, announced very proudly by our University, we'll be moving our Active Directory to the hybrid cloud. Every Student and Staff will automatically have their personal data deployed to the Azure cloud. Isn't that great? Finally Germany is working on tech incompet^Windependence! What could go wrong?

I mean, they assured they'd form a working group with other Universities about remaining concerns regarding privacy issues in Windows 10 and planning to confront Microsoft about them. I guess Microsoft is shivering with fears and busy removing all telemetry right now.

Other great changes form this new deal are that Universities now have to pay a full Windows license for every employee, no matter how many hours they work; before you'd pay by how many full-time jobs all the employees would make up for. That means most Universities pay twice as much now. And did you know the new deal explicitly forbids remote access to any Windows machine under this license? You have to pay extra for that. What a strange coincidence regarding the current epidemic. Universities' legal departments are clueless whether this only applies to RDP, or alternative 3rd party tools as well (or rather whether this would hold up in court).

This is the first time the deal is made nation-wide, you'd think this puts our Universities in a better position, but we got fucked in every way possible.

I realize this is only marginally related with the original post, but 1) sorry, I just had to vent somewhere, this seemed just like the final straw, and 2) am I the weird one for seeing a problem in this trend? Universities were once driving innovation in technology, students were fiddling with emerging and expensive tech, but today we already have some Universities that don't even have their own datacenter anymore, everything is hosted elsewhere and maintained by contractors. Students access SaaS via a Browser. Walled gardens everywhere. This doesn't help.

Whoa, do you live in their data center? ;-)

Even my ISP's next hop is 2.5ms, 8.8.8.8 and 1.1.1.1 are both at 4.7ms.

I felt a bit stupid; I re-read the important parts several times but failed to visualize what that looks like on the disks, and how blocks are reconstructed on disk failure. A little googling lead me to a paper by Intel[0] which has a simple visualization of how this works on page 11, in case I'm not the only one.

[0] https://docplayer.net/117362530-Draid-declustered-raid-for-z...

When is music in shows or movies manipulation, and what counts as genuine use? If one of the characters plays an instrument in the show?

I'd say music is always manipulation as it's always triggering emotions in some way. Unless it's some genre or band you absolutely hate. But even then it's triggering emotions, just probably not the intended ones. :-)

Yes yes, sperate content and markup/style. But you can already do this with HTML?

The only advantage I see is that you can actually support markdown like you do in your page, since it's less verbose than HTML-tags and doesn't make the text unreadable if you read it as plain text.

But with HTML5 you can introduce arbitrary tag names to pretty much get the same with an XML-like structure instead of json. Just use <subtitle> <what> <description> and supply CSS for it. If you want to consume it with something else, swap out the JSON parser for an XML one, navigate to the body tag and from there on it's the same thing.

I mean it's a cool trick you came up with, but it doesn't seem worth the effort, and relying on quirks mode seems brittle.

:-) It's not like I'm using an old analog camera, or delete the files after printing.

It's just nice to a/ have an extra copy just in case and b/ it's more enjoyable/sentimental than looking at photos on a laptop, smartphone or TV.

At least my kids really enjoy it a lot. They liked to look at the albums my mom made from my pictures when they were between 2 and 5, still do today, even though they perfectly know how to navigate to all the photos on a tablet. That's when I decided to do it.

Physical photographic album here.

How prevalent is that? Some nerds doing this is a drop in the ocean. Rather my bet would be on Youtube as the hungry beast that can't get enough storage. There's a loooooooot of videos that have single digit views yet need to be accessible at any time, instantly. Video is large. Doesn't youtube even keep the original file nowadays?

Are people just buying more, or are they moving from buying in stores to buying online?

I don't immediately see how the latter would be bad for CO2. Online shopping is like public transport for goods. Instead of having 100 people drive their 100 cars downtown to go shopping, a delivery truck drives down the street and hands out packets. Returns are obviously more than when you buy in a store where you can try it on first, but how much impact does it make?

Yes, that was sarcasm, sorry if that wasn't clear enough.

Just the other day I was wondering whether these old games were just so much fun because I was much younger and it was simply something new and exciting to me, or whether there's something else to it. You know, sometimes less is more, if the game world is just about detailed enough that you can make out what things are supposed to be, you have to let the creative part of your brain do much more work to fill in the blanks, which ultimately gives the final product that your consciousness consumes a more personal note, since it's filled with your fantasy. Maybe this is part of why Minecraft is so successful. Everything is so chunky and rough, you have to imagine what things are. And your crude buildings and creations easily fit in with the rest of the game world, there automatically is consistency in detail, so your mind accepts it.

I tried Unreal Editor a few years ago. The engine is really impressive, there's a ton of assets, high res textures, it's easy to create a natural looking terrain, but then bringing it to life is hard work and takes skills. Everything I built looked clunky, out of place, lacked details, lighting seemed off, it was rubbish. Minecraft fixes this problem. Everyone can build good looking stuff.