vikingerik

C# or VB.NET or MS Access with Winforms still exists and you can still use it, but you wouldn't for anything more than a personal toy.

I don't think you can do anything nowadays that replicates the VB style of interface design. That was completely tied to a fixed layout and only a few desktop screen sizes, but everything these days needs screen size responsiveness from mobile to 4k. And you also need cross platform, accessibility to screen readers, language localization, dark mode, and so on. A flowable and styleable layout just works better for everything, and runs in the HTML/HTTP client that every device already has. Sadly the VB style of design was a temporary waystop and not an enduring norm. I guess the closest you could do would be a big HTML table and just let the small screens scroll biaxially painfully.

Football fields also have the fun property of varying in the third dimension. They're built with a crown in the middle so that water will drain off towards the edges, and that can vary significantly between instances.

And pixels are even starting to vary in the third dimension too, with the various curved and bendable and foldable displays.

2 being the only even prime isn't really anything fundamentally weird. Every prime is the only divisible-by-that-number prime. 2 has nothing unique about that.

We only notice the case for 2 because our human languages happen to define divisible-by-2 as a word and concept. If our languages called divisible-by-3 "treven" or something like that, we'd think it weird that 3 was the only treven prime.

And remember the median number of flights taken by an American in a year is zero. The majority of the population is never affected by it, so they can happily vote and support anything that makes them feel more secure or like they're helping, with no downside they ever feel.

The postal service has learned and knows to compensate for this. If you mail something with four digits for the zip code, it will be treated as if it had a leading 0 and routed to the northeast.

Did anyone try the setting for "when laptop lid closes" set to "do nothing"? I've always used that on a half dozen Windows laptops over the years and never seen it not work. Even if sleep is finicky, that will just make it stay fully running. If you want it to sleep, do that separately from the start menu or whatever, don't tie the sleep state to the lid state.

Same here. The problem, though, is that on the internet the articles stick around past that day and confuse everyone forever.

Etsy as a private platform banning it doesn't necessarily mean it was actually legally infringing. Like all the content hosting platforms, they would err super cautiously to avoid any possibility of anything even remotely resembling any legal case, even if they would virtually certainly be in the clear.

They must be generated. Hand designed levels probably wouldn't have things like pawns on the first rank, or four opposing rooks, or situations where the first move unavoidably loses points.

Thermodynamically speaking, the energy in tides does come from Earth's rotation.

The moon raises a bulge in Earth's crust and ocean. Earth's rotation carries that bulge ahead of the Moon's position. The bulge pulls the Moon forward (raising it to a higher orbit), while the Moon pulls the bulge backward (slowing Earth's rotation.)

Once Earth's rotation slows enough, tidal lock is reached. Then the tidal bulge stays in a single place always pointed at the relatively non-moving overhead Moon, and there is no motion to extract energy from.

There's a cusp between them, birth years '78 to '82. We're the Xennials, also dubbed the Oregon Trail micro-generation. We're the ones who grew up playing that on the Apple IIs in the school computer labs, and the other hallmarks of that tech era like typing in programs from magazines, and then eventually we formed the BBS scene before the internet.

We have the best of both ways regarding technology. We use it and we're comfortable with it and can pivot careers with it, but we also remember a time before computers and so we're not chronically attached to and dependent on tech. We have the detached cynicism of Gen X, but it's tempered with the worldly connectedness of the millennials.

Uptown can mean anything out of: geographically north, upstream on a river, higher elevation, or higher income and wealth of the residents.

It just so happens that for Manhattan which is the most famous uptown, all four of those indicators point in the same direction. In general I think an area would more likely be called an uptown if it met more of those criteria relative to some downtown. (And there would be correlation, wealthier residents would buy higher-elevation land.)

There's also this failure case: I know a pair of sisters who look and sound identical enough that they can unlock each other's phones with face and voiceprint recognition.

> Something that always bugs me is restaurants that charge $2 or $5 surcharge for takeout. I'm saving the restaurant a ton of money by not using the dining room, why would they discourage that?

Because takeout isn't competing with the dining room. Customers don't go to a restaurant and then choose between those options; they've already planned whether to eat in or out. Restauraunts charge that because customers have shown they will pay it. Once you have that meal in mind, that $2 or $5 doesn't discourage you.

I figured that out just from playing Tombstone City. It's the first paired cactus by scanning the board in reading order (each row from the top, left-to-right.) (You mean a cactus that turns into a monster, not a tumbleweed.) And yes, once you know that, the game is pretty easy when you can anticipate every threat. I remember being able to go for at least a couple hours in one game; don't remember if I ever rolled it over or got bored before that.

Same here, I'm in the TI-99 as first computer club as well.

98% of what I did on it was just play cartridge games, but I did have a year or so of trying to type in Basic programs from library magazines. None of them ever came close to working since they were never for TI's weird dialect of Basic and I didn't know anything about the differences. Mostly what I did was CALL COLOR instructions for some pretty colors. I think the furthest I ever got with Basic was the "higher/lower" guess-the-number game. Eventually then we got a Tandy 1000 with GW-Basic and I moved on to that.

Parsec still rocks hard though. I've rolled over the score on it: http://dos486.com/misc/parsec.jpg

There's observation bias there - the cheaters that we see are the obvious ones, we never know who gets away with it when they got everything to appear perfectly consistent without any telltales.

Like even for RNG, it'd be possible to fake that on a real console, with extra hardware writing to the bus. We'd never detect that, all we'd have would be the statistical arguments of like "one in 10^10 tries" or whatever.

Of course, the backlash to that will be "so parking is only for the rich?"

Same as when we built express highways and priced the tolls to demand - see the complaints about "Lexus lanes".

Capitalism is still the least-bad way of allocating a scarce resource, but of course those who get priced out will be unhappy.

It's not clear if we're talking consistently about the sizes. If 15-20s is referring to a 7800 cartridge that's up to 48kb, that makes sense. This subthread is talking about 2600 games up to 4kb.

Also it's not clear how the console reads cartridges with bankswitching hardware. It can't really know if a cart has that. So it may just have to try all the common schemes on every cart, and read through the entire ROM space multiple times in case anything changed. That would account for the timing.

The post office has adapted in turn to that Excel problem. They know it happens. If a parcel has only four digits for the zip code, they'll treat it as a leading zero for routing and delivery.

The Gameboy one attempts to compensate for clumpiness by reducing the chance of repeating a piece, but it turns out that that's even bugged so that the overall randomization is unbalanced.

https://harddrop.com/wiki/Tetris_(Game_Boy)#Randomizer

  L: 10.7 %
  J, I, Z: 13.7 %
  O, S, T: 16.1 %

Counterpoint, though - this supermarket pretty obviously is using that name because it's known from Nintendo. Something like "Mario Market" would be a coincidence of naming (like nissan.com for example, or MikeRoweSoft vs Microsoft), but it's pretty impossible to deliberately call it Super Mario in 2013 and not know you're intentionally free-riding.

How much of that should we allow? Taken to absurdity, or maybe not: should someone name their child "Nintendo" so they can put that name on anything they operate?

I know you're not exactly serious, but to answer anyway: McMurdo isn't near this flight path, it's at New Zealand's longitude (so 2000 miles east of Australia) and much farther south. Perth would be the closest airport for almost all of that flight path.

(Your core point is correct, this trajectory is about as remote as SpaceX can possibly get, even if it's near a small number of flights. Let's not extend NIMBYism to space and ban SpaceX from everywhere.)

It goes the other way too, nouns as verbs, and just as cringy: "you can solution this", "we need to action that".

Both ways come from subtle manipulation of language. "Ask" sounds like a polite word while "request" sounds demanding, so the former gets used even if it's the wrong word class. "Lesson" sounds harsh while a "learning" sounds positive. The word that gets used is whichever frames the speaker or conversation better, making them sound more courteous or cooperative and nudging the recipient towards complying.

To save you a click on this clickbait: the sign is "Maintain Top Safe Speed", and the intent is to tell you to spend minimum time on this road to get out of this area as soon as you can because of nuclear contamination.

A car turning on a green light can be simultaneous with the pedestrian's crossing light being green. The driver is obligated to see the pedestrian and wait.

What's not simultaneous is a green turn arrow with a green ped crossing. Intersections in the US are designed so that a green arrow will mean the driver has no conflicts and can proceed.

Not everyone (both drivers and peds) understands that distinction.

The Great Migration wasn't as real as the headlines made it look, though. It was an artifact of time-shifting from the pandemic. Normal job switching didn't happen in 2020 and became pent-up demand in 2021. So the numbers looked high for a short duration, but it wasn't really any fundamental shift, just the same activity pushed into a shorter time period. Look at the total numbers from 2019-2024 and I bet it's about the same as any five-year period.

Yup. I have my clocks in the house set 30 seconds ahead to counteract exactly this.

Just to clarify on what actually happened the first time:

He wasn't trying to protest the dress code or make a scene, it wasn't on his mind at all. He had been out for an appearance with a sponsor during a break, then came back to the venue for the next round, and didn't notice that he was wearing jeans and it didn't cross his mind that that would be a violation.

The controversy was about exactly how the penalty is imposed. The rule is a fine for the first violation and disqualification for multiple. It wasn't clear if his appearance for the day would count as one violation (so he could just incur the fine and wear correct clothing tomorrow), or if each round would be a separate violation. It also wasn't clear if he could play while in violation or would be excluded from each round until he changed. Precedent from other events wasn't clear for either of these. He thought he was told he could continue, but then FIDE said he would be excluded from each round until he changed, and then he said f--- it and withdrew entirely.

Also, what he withdrew from was the Rapid tournament. He is now joining the Blitz event - a separate tournament at the same venue following the rapid.

Just to clarify on the facts, as gathered from reddit threads:

He wasn't trying to protest the dress code or make a scene, it wasn't on his mind at all. He had been out for an appearance with a sponsor during a break, then came back to the venue for the next round, and didn't notice that he was wearing jeans and it didn't cross his mind that that would be a violation.

Then he was told to change, and there wasn't enough time for him to go do that before the upcoming round. He thought he was told he could do it either after that round or for the next day, but then was told he would be excluded from that round, and at that point he said f--- it and withdrew entirely.

The controversy was about exactly how the penalty is imposed. The rule is a fine for the first violation and disqualification for multiple. It wasn't clear if his appearance for the day would count as one violation (so he could just incur the fine and wear correct clothing tomorrow), or if each round would be a separate violation. It also wasn't clear if he could play while in violation or would be excluded from each round until he changed. Precedent from other events wasn't clear for either of these.

The headline of "disqualified" is wrong and did not happen - he chose to withdraw.