vasac

I have a 10-year-old LG TV that runs webOS 3. The first update slowed it down - not that it was particularly fast to begin with - and every subsequent update made it even slower. It also constantly nags you to update the firmware. You can’t just refuse once; every time you turn on the TV, it asks you again. I won’t make the same mistake the next time I go shopping for a TV.

Forgot to mention - there were no improvements whatsoever in terms of functionality.

It was possible to connect the MIC or EAR connector (I don't remember exactly which one, as this was 40 years ago) to a cassette recorder and start recording, which caused the cassette recorder to amplify the Spectrum's sound.

And when I'm mentioning cassette recorder - I had a neighbour in my building who also had a Spectrum and whose window was some 12 meters away from my window and once we connected our computer with audio cables (MIC to EAR and vice versa) so one types some short program (or just REM message) and enters SAVE while the other one enters LOAD and gets the message. Our networking adventure started bad as it turned out that cable had large signal loss so it seemed that this brilliant idea failed but then we connected cassette recorders between computers that hugely amplified signal and thing actually worked.

Experiment ended when a party-line neighbor started complaining that his phone line was unusable for hours - we used phones as yelling through the window while trying to synchronize wasn't producing satisfactory results.

Fun times.

The first attempt failed, so they caved in, but they’ll try again after a while and lay those people off again.

IIRC, my problem with Quake multiplayer was that one node acted as the server, so when I connected to a friend’s computer via modem, my lag was a serious disadvantage (neither my friend nor I ever won as clients). Doom, on the other hand, simply froze both computers whenever there was a communication issue.

Although, to be fair, we played Doom over an RS-232 cable - hauling a PC across the city every weekend was a testament to our love for the game :)

> If one spouse stays home to watch them, that covers as many kids as you have.

That's debatable ;)

I have two kids, and taking care of both during the day is vastly harder - both mentally and physically - than working two jobs. As they say, it takes a village to raise a child, and I don't think many people have that village anymore. As a result, a lot of kids are being raised by TV or the internet, and if you don't want that, you'll find yourself occupied with them almost 100% of the time.

Another issue is that the spouse who stays home can effectively kiss their career goodbye if they spend seven or eight years out of the workforce. Given current divorce rates, that's not a trivial risk.

I wish I had grandparents living nearby, but that's not the case either.

I'm not saying it's impossible - I have two children myself and would probably have had more if I'd started earlier - but it's not easy. And, judging from my admittedly small sample size, it seems to be getting harder.

And there was Wham! The Music Box if you wanted to compose music :).

Here’s how it sounded on the original ZX Spectrum, equipped with only the beeper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNDVJLma-W4

> It's an advantage, but I don't see that changing for a very long time:

It’s an interesting question: for how long will it remain important to know multiple languages in the age of LLMs? Of course, it’s better to know foreign language(s) — no doubt about that — but for day-to-day work, unless you’re living abroad, it seems that their practical utility will slowly decrease. And speech-to-speech translation will likely continue to improve as well.

Ah, Clipper was a major force in the late ’80s in Yugoslavia, as economic reforms enabled the widespread establishment of private companies that needed accounting software, and PCs became cheap enough for one-person shops to develop custom accounting solutions. It was the Wild West for a few years, with a zillion different applications, until some bigger players emerged.

IIRC, it needed one or two 360K floppies for a full install (a pirated copy; maybe the legal distribution was larger - at that time, all software was pirated). Compiling was fast (on a computer where you type dir and can read the filenames appearing on the screen faster than the computer can print them), but linking was slow, so everyone replaced MS Link with Borland’s TurboLink, which was an order of magnitude faster. It didn’t support overlays, but there were ways to work around that.

There was also documentation available in some third-party TSR app.

Later, another linker became popular: Blinker, which had a bunch of interesting features, such as loading overlays into EMS memory and providing various security functions to help protect your software. But by that time, the writing was already on the wall for DOS.

Funnily enough, many customers actually preferred DOS, since navigating with the keyboard was far faster than using a mouse, and Windows apps generally weren’t designed with keyboard navigation in mind.

A few years ago, I bought a bunch of magnetic cables (with both Lightning and USB-C connectors - the cables are the same; only the connectors differ). I haven’t had any issues so far.

I’ve heard that lower and middle education aren’t exactly the US’s strong suits, but still? The US organized a coup in Iran over 70 years ago and has never really stopped meddling in Iran’s internal affairs. The US runs proxy wars around the world on a daily basis, and when we’re talking about barbarians, they’re certainly near the top - almost a GOAT.

Acquired taste. Ten years ago, I switched from a sugar-based soft drink to one with Aspartame - it didn’t taste great at first. Now the sugary one tastes awful, while the Aspartame one tastes great ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> Iran's situation is obviously very different.

Yes, very different as in 'Our blessed homeland vs their barbarous wastes' meme.

We (and our allies) should have nukes because we want to prevent wars. But no one else should have them, since the situation is obviously very different (we wouldn’t want them to be able to prevent wars).

And I used to think that Little Rocketman was a crazy bastard, but it looks like I was wrong.

> Germany would have to quickly get nukes

No shit? Why would they have to? Is someone ready to nuke them if it turns out they’re no longer under the U.S. nuclear umbrella, or are they some special snowflakes who should have them while Iran (and most other countries) shouldn’t?

I would guess that there's a big difference between assembling a drone (which can easily be done in a kitchen) and mass-producing parts such as batteries and gas engines for drones that have to fly more than a few dozen kilometers.

The OP probably thought of defense in the narrow sense as "the action of defending against or resisting an attack", and not in the broader sense defined as "we’re going to travel halfway around the world to kill a million people because that’s who we are". A common mistake.

I’m implying they aren’t getting ready because they think Russians are going to march on Berlin.

So while many of the reasons are questionable (understatement of the year), let’s focus on the last one. After America lost the war in Vietnam, what happened to those neighboring nations? Did they suffer from Vietnamese communists? The only Vietnamese intervention was in Cambodia, and hardly anyone thinks that wasn’t the right thing to do.

Yes, the previous time they were getting ready it was because those pesky Poles being an inch away from invading the Third Reich.

The Turbo button worked wonders for Tetris. You start it with turbo turned on, so Tetris adjusts to the computer’s speed - but it only does this once, at startup. As soon as the blocks start falling, you turn the turbo off, and now your Tetris runs at half speed. I even managed, a few times, to roll over a score of 32,768 (ah, those signed integers).

Both scripts have been taught in the early years of elementary school in Serbia for the past 80 years.

So Croats and Muslims fought each other bloodily because all Serbs wanted to live in one state? Funnily enough, they were already living in one state - Yugoslavia - so they certainly had no reason to start the war.

Russia pretty much took over all the USSR's external debts too.

> Do you think some evil military planners sat in the Pentagon...

Why shouldn’t he believe it?

You people believe the same kind of crap when you're told that X (insert the current boogeyman de jour) hates Murica and wants to kill you all.

Americans can be convinced of anything without too much effort so that isn’t really a factor here.

One of my better cinema experiences was watching Austin Powers 3 at the theater in some random late-morning screening where there were only three friends and me in the hall, plus two elderly ladies in their 70s. They were laughing so hard that the movie became even funnier for us, because you somehow wouldn’t expect them to find it that hilarious.

Also, growing up in a small town in Yugoslavia in the 80s definitely didn’t guarantee a top-tier cinema experience, to put it mildly. But the feeling I had watching the James Bond opening credits from a damaged film reel, with frayed subtitles projected from a decades-old projector, is something I can never quite recreate when watching on a 4K screen from a perfect source. So there's that.

</old-man-rant>

The worst part is that the discrete GPU was used to drive external displays, so now I’m stuck with a 17” integrated display, which is large for a laptop but still small for a computer that I’ll never again lug with me (it’s heavy by today’s standards).

> ... in the Balkans this was exclusively done in areas to harm civilians ...

It wasn’t.

While there were probably some areas that were mined with the intention of harming civilians, most of the mines were laid in places where you would expect the enemy to advance. In the section of the front where I was located, all minefields were laid with the intention of slowing down or preventing enemy infiltration (which does not exclude areas near human settlements).

There was simply no point in mining places that were under your control and where you expected your people to live after the war, unless it was necessary.

> Do we want to fight this war on someone else's soil or on ours?

Russia thought so too.

> The point is you don't have to attack Kaliningrad. A siege trivially collapses the place.

This is hilarious as naval blockade by itself is an act of war.

You’re in for a big surprise once you discover what happened after Nuremberg.