Task Manager is launched by the listener in winlogon if you use the Ctrl + Shift + Esc method though, right? I’m pretty sure you can still launch Task Manager, and from there attempt to relauch Explorer, even if Explorer is borked or not running. You’d just have to know how to do that and that you can.

That’s what I always do when Explorer’s ears inexplicably catch fire and I’m either too lazy or too naively hopeful to reboot.

For anyone following along at home, Windows Explorer is also responsible for displaying the start menu/taskbar. In the example in the article there’s something else funky going on inside Explorer, though, because the taskbar and even the desktop icons are all there, it’s just not rendering correctly. (Explorer is also responsible for showing all of your desktop icons.)

I’m sure it’s possible, but it’s going to make it damn difficult to play.

I’ve never retrobrighted anything because I always had a hunch this would be the case. It turns out I was vindicated. We all know full well that oxygenation is one of the things that deteriorates many materials, including embrittling plastics, and what you’re doing with this stuff is literally just oxygenating the shit out of your plastic in order to bleach it.

For stuff that I’ve really cared about de-yellowing, I’ve always just cleaned it thoroughly and painted over it. This has the added bonus of the paint being an additional protective layer rather than a destructive chemical reaction inflicted on the material itself. Sure, it sucks that you also paint over any logos printed on it or whatever, but you can recreate those with stickers if you really care. I figure that if nobody can identify what an NES or Dreamcast or whatever is shaped like, even without the logos on it, they’re probably not invited to any more parties anyway.

Then they can kick rocks. Anyone who claims you “need” to use the Bullshit Machine to achieve productivity is a moron who is setting themselves up to lose. If any interviewer tries to tell me this is required I’m picking up my stuff and walking out right then and there.

If nothing else those people are outright admitting that they’re not offering stable employment because the corporate dream is that these LLM schemes will allow them to eliminate all of their coders, tech writers, artists, and marketing department. Not only this this an anathema to anybody earning a living, it’s also mathematically impossible. So why would I even want to work for them in the first place?

When the inevitable collapse occurs, these idiots will have to pay the remaining dwindling number of competent people left to come back and bail their stupid asses out, and that’s even if any of us deign to do so for them.

I don’t use generative “AI” and I never have. Not even once. What I create is my own, I can understand and document all of it, and I can maintain it in perpetuity. Every pixel I’ve pushed, every line I’ve written. All of it, without exception. That’s not changing.

“Calls.”

There’s only one call, and it’s coming from Tim Sweeny at Epic. It’s just more of his usual yelling at clouds, because he’s got a pathological hate-on for anyone else who runs a storefont, including Apple and Google but especially Valve. He hasn’t made any positive contribution to the world since about 1998, and at this point we can all safely discard his opinion with nothing of value being lost. He wants to allow AI slime on his own platform because he thinks it’ll make him free money, but maybe he ought to worry about the smell coming from his own house before he goes around trying to dictate at others how they should run theirs.

They also need to be able to replenish that stock at current prices. I’ve worked retail many times in my life and arguably kinda-sorta do so now (albeit largely over the Internet) and I’ve never run any store where we did not set our pricing by replacement cost rather than original invoice cost. In my current operation there are some rare exceptions for clearance items and the like, but for the vast majority of products we sell for what it’s going to cost me to get the next one to put back on that shelf, not what it cost me for the one I’m selling you now.

I don’t have any insider insight into other companies’ operations, but I imagine a lot of other retailers work things the same way. Especially these days.

I’ve got a Timex Expedition that I’ve had since high school. That means I bought it some time during the early Triassic. Its stainless steel backplate is held on with four Phillips screws and I have never in many decades had any problems undoing them when I need to replace the battery every six years or so. It remains resolutely waterproof. I know this because it lives outside rather frequently: at the moment I have it stuck to the gauge cluster on one of my motorcycles with Velcro.

“All” digital tech?

I don’t think most people realize that any powertrain new enough to even have fuel injection is going to be a “computer vehicle” in some capacity. How are you with carburetors?

Windows 98 SE, maybe. We didn’t gain much traction there until about Win2k or XP.

Windows 98 in its original flavor didn’t even support USB mass storage devices out of the box without drivers. Hands up everyone who remembers having to carry around one of those tiny driver CDs that came in the box with every single Sandisk Cruzer for a couple of years? Yeah? How quickly we forget.

As already thoroughly explored in the apparent documentary “99 Red Balloons,” in 1984.

For fuck’s sake.

In terms of Windows 11? You can move the start button back to the lower left corner in the settings, but you can’t stick the taskbar itself to the sides or top of your monitor nor resize it like you could do in previous versions. Even Windows 95 supported all of the above.

The functionality is still there, mind you, and you can do it via registry hacks or third party tools. Microsoft just saw fit to remove the option for the user to do it themselves for some inexplicable reason.

I’ll bet I can make your left eye twitch.

Are you ready?

A “large” amount of information.

Bitch, my computer has 128 gigabytes of RAM. It’s a tiny god. The fact that I have as many as 100 cells copied to the clipboard (which is the threshold that triggers this stupid message, if you’ve ever wondered) is not even a rounding error. I’m sure this was marginally important in 1982 or whenever this was first coded into Excel, but today my computer could lose an entire megabyte of memory or maybe even ten down between the couch cushions and neither of us would notice.

There is still no setting to disable this dumbshit message.

I do too, but I’d highly doubt it will. It’s well known that Meta sells every headset at a loss and funds the expenditure via revenue from their gargantuan advertising and spy network, specifically to squeeze out competitors and make it harder to enter the VR market as a newcomer. Zuck Zuck still thinks all the prime real estate in the metaverse is going to be his, because he only read the first half of Snow Crash.

Gabe is a rich man and I assume he and his company could take this approach as well if they wanted to, at least temporarily. But based on their pricing for their past hardware (particularly the Steam Deck), I predict they won’t.

Insufficient pedantry detected.

The PC platform is an extension of IBM’s Personal Computer architecture, which was not a description of what it was so much as it was literally the brand name. It’s long since been forgotten that this is now a shorthand, and the full name of the platform arguably ought to be PC Compatible. Unless you bought your machine from IBM, anyway, which these days would be quite the trick.

Being PC compatible was a big deal back when the original PC was also a big deal. Probably slightly less so now, since it’s the assumed default.

It should go without saying that the original IBM PC, model 5150, did not run Windows… Because Windows did not yet exist. It didn’t even necessarily run the then-nascent PC-DOS provided by Microsoft, because IBM also supported running CP/M and and UCSD Pascal on it.

The whole Windows-as-default thing didn’t happen until well after the appeal of the PC specification had escaped containment at IBM and x86 had handily taken over the desktop computing world.

A personal computer is basically anything you can stick on your desk (or lap) and doesn’t require hooking up to a mainframe to run. But a Personal Computer, capital P and C, implies an x86 compatible platform with architecture designed such that it is technically still capable of running all those decades old 8086 programs and operating systems. (Just, several orders of magnitude faster than their designers ever envisioned, and probably only by sticking your UEFI BIOS in legacy mode first.)

FYI, technically Meta/Facebook had already owned Oculus for something like five years before the original Quest came out. They just started getting really blatant about the branding shortly after that time, probably to acquiesce to Zuck Zuck and his huffing of his “metaverse” crack pipe increasingly frequently.

That was never actually an official statement. It was an offhand comment by some staffer that didn’t carry any legal weight nor accurately describe the internal trajectory for Windows in any way. As much as we like to poke fun at it regardless.

As opposed to what, buying a viable phone from those other guys?

What other guys?

At minimum a stampede of people moving to iPhones should theoretically cause Google to shit enough of a brick (providing capitalism actually works as advertised, and for the record I am trying like hell to keep a straight face as I type this) to correct their behavior in an attempt to win some of those users back.

Because at the end of the day most consumers are consumers, not nerds, and if neither platform is going to allow you control over your device and they’re both privacy nightmares you’re not much worse off with an iDevice if you plan on owning a smartphone in the first place.

What we really need is a viable third option. Hopefully an inherently non-shitty one. The barrier to market entry seems pretty high, though.

It’s the same line of logic as when you see people post on a forum something like [img]c:\Users\Bob\Documents\My_Image.bmp[/img] and then wonder why it doesn’t work.

“But I can see it on my computer!”

Over the internet, the origin of all data is on someone else’s computer. All means all. And all of it needs to come down the wire to you at some point.

You’re on the right track in one regard, though, in a roundabout way with caching: Browsers will keep local copies of media or even the entire content of webpages on disk for some period of time, and refer to those files when the page is visited again without redownloading the data. This is especially useful for images that appear in multiple places on a website, like header and logo graphics, etc.

This can actually become a problem if an image is updated on the server’s side, but your browser is not smart enough to figure this out. It will blithely show the old image it has in its cache, which is now outdated. (If you force refresh a webpage by holding shift when you refresh or press F5 in all of the current modern browsers, you’ll get a reload while explicitly ignoring any files already in the cache and all the images and content will be fully redownloaded, and that’s how you get around this if it happens to you.)

That’s how it works.

You may be thinking of “lazy loading,” where some scriptwork is used to delay downloading images until some time after the initial page load completes. This still requires all the data to be sent to the user — all of the data always has to be sent to the user eventually — but just not right away. This can have perceptible load time benefits, especially if whatever content you’re loading won’t be visible in the viewport initially anyway.

Oh, yeah. Or, if you’re very close to the horizon and reflecting light that’s already plowed through most of the atmosphere at a very shallow angle before it can hit the mirror satellite, how much attenuation you get from that. Tons, I’m sure.