palordrolap

⊃))⁠・⁠▽⁠・(⁠(⊂

Yes it does bother me a little that the letters in the latter half of my username can’t be written backwards. (Well, some can, and the p can become a q, but then it’s not a p any more.)

“I’ve said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that." – an actual Bill Gates quote referring to the 640k quote that won’t die.

But yes, it was probably satirically ascribed to him because of MS-DOS not having the capability to deal with any more than that amount of RAM for a lot longer than it probably should have.

The “temporary” solution of requiring an extra driver to be able to do so (EMM386.SYS or similar) remained in place right up until DOS-based Windows was allowed to die.

(The underlying reason was almost certainly ancient IBM PC memory-mapped IO standards, so maybe we could ascribe the original quote an engineer working there some time around 1980.)

The last thing I messed around with choked on some wide characters that weren’t in the current locale, so I guess picture the top half of the burger bun, about two thirds of the top part of the patty, a small pile of raw ingredients off to the side and some inexplicable six-inch nails through the raw meat, maybe.

Most of the rest of the stuff I do could be compared to those nouvelle cuisine jokes that have been running since the 1980s. Large plate, inexplicably small serving of something allegedly gourmet but is probably a cube of the cheapest pâté from the closest supermarket that was flash frozen and then stylishly drizzled in jus de menthe or something.

Bon appetit

There’s the idea that he believes he’s entitled to a second term. And there’s so much he wants to do and it must be done as soon as possible. If any of that is even vaguely true, he won’t drop out.

(The fact he’s not getting any younger might be in there somewhere, but he probably doesn’t think about that at all if he can help it.)

Has he actually gone to the great Chinese restaurant in the sky this time?

Pretty sure there was a hoax that he’d died a while back, and though there is a Wikipedia article for “Democracy Manifest”, the way it’s written and put together doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.

The genie grants your wish. Everyone on Earth at the moment of the wish emerges from cryosleep 50 years from now with no memory of how they got into the cryosleep pod, nor how they got to it, and worse, as well rested as they were right before the event happened. Important parts of infrastructure have crumbled in our absence. Nature has taken back over.

Mankind finds itself with different problems, but are they any better?

(FWIW the downvote wasn’t me)

That sounds like you’re suggesting that Microsoft wouldn’t care what was installed locally to be able to net-boot / run the rest of Windows.

I think it’s all but certain that they’d want user’s computers to to boot into something they made, or at the very least, slapped their branding all over, even if that was only a wrapper for their web browser.

I can definitely see them going down the line of saying that their online apps aren’t guaranteed to work under any other system, going so far as to throw in a few deliberate stumbling hazards for anything that isn’t theirs. (Until anti-trust, etc.)

And thus, dual booting will still be something that people do. Even if - as you clarified - they’re not going to cripple that as well.

There are people of all genders who enjoy being kicked repeatedly in the crotch.

Would you like to volunteer to see if you are one of those people? How about we do it a few times to see if you get addicted?

Check system settings for a keyboard entry / applet. I’m on LMDE Cinnamon and have no idea what the equivalents are on Kubuntu, but over here it’s definitely possible to change/remove the default keyboard assignments and set up custom ones instead.

For example, I have Shift+WWW (the multimedia key that starts a web browser by default) set to start the browser with an alternate profile. I could just as easily set plain old WWW to, say, start a terminal instead, or run that custom command.

The hardest part is knowing what custom command to run to get the desired effect.

The only way to prevent dual booting would require a UEFI/BIOS that pulls the OS straight over a network, bypassing local storage entirely.

Even if that didn’t already rule it out, the size that OSes are these days makes it even less likely. At least not unless Microsoft (or whoever) are planning to ditch absolutely everyone who doesn’t have gigabit internet. (It would be kind of funny for an OS to go back to being 1990s-sized to mitigate that though. And funnier still when someone inevitably captures it onto a hard disk anyway.)

A more likely vector would be to deliberately break third party bootloaders every time Windows boots. And that would last until the next anti-trust / monopoly lawsuit and they’d roll it back to the current behaviour of only breaking third party bootloaders on installation.

And even if somehow that didn’t get rolled back, just wait until hardware vendors introduce this thing called a “switch” that can be added just before the power connector on an SSD. Can’t boot from a drive that has no power. BIOS defaults to the next SATA channel. And now you’re booting into Linux.

Doing the same for a mobo-mounted NVMe drive is harder but not impossible.

PCX or nothin’

Apparently, The joe editor has a jstar mode, so says this old Stackexchange thread. I can’t verify because I’ve never used Wordstar, but joe’s available in my distro’s repository.

No idea if it can read old WordStar files, but maybe you don’t need that.

For the GUI version - and some old file capability, the same page and other searches turn up WordTsar which is in progress. The dev says they’ll be picking up development again next month.

“Uh, Boss, our customers are sending us the invoices for their RAM purchases.”

Should have gone for something like “Dennis Richie Advanced Computing University Lab Annex.”

Parses weird, but look at that acronym.

“Just a heads up that we’ll be shipping your machine to the client, since it’s the only machine on Earth known to support the software. You’re getting the spare machine out of the basement. Super fast Cyrix processor. Looks like it boots to Windows 11 release 3, but they’ve written it 3.11 for some reason.”

Mint definitely keeps a couple of previous kernels around, so that might be a Debian and Ubuntu thing too.

That said, there’s always going to be a critical point of failure that a power loss could cause things to break, no matter your OS or distro.

Writing the bootloader or updating a partition table for example.

O((2⁽ⁿ2))!) or bust.

A wild Elon appeared!

Twitter has evolved into X!

X attacks Twitter!

X has hurt itself in its confusion!

X has hurt itself in its confusion!

X has hurt itself in its confusion!

Not all con states want to secede from the union, but then again they’re not islands, so that one’s hard to gauge.

Also, most con politicians here were very invested in remaining in Europe right up until we weren’t. The promise of a referendum was a hail Mary to try to win the votes of a particular contingent of voters. They got the votes, but never expected the referendum to go the way it did. Leopard, meet face.

Now they’re having to pretend it was the intention all along. Make the best of it, etc.

There’s also an argument to be made that her stance on climate change was entirely because of the desire to hurt the workers of the fossil fuel industry, especially one in particular, which outweighed all other priorities.

The Israel thing I don’t know too much about, but I can be virtually certain it wasn’t about protecting the people of Lebanon from a bully.