Well, now we have Safari holding things back, being it’s the only browser engine on iOS (other iOS browsers are just Safari reskins). It’s the buggiest and most outdated of the major browsers, but you can’t ignore it because the iDevice market is too big. It’s pretty much the new IE6.

I’m also in the club of having a couple of Manjaro installs that now date back a few years to when it was still cool.

Honestly as a distro it works pretty well and my complaints are few. If I had to reinstall I’d take a closer look at CachyOS, EndeavourOS, or even just Arch, but I can’t really be bothered to replace something that’s working just fine so I’ll stick with it for now.

When I saw that, I was like “wait, is Knoppix still around?”. A quick search revealed it hasn’t been updated in some time.

Back in the 2000’s Knoppix was a life saver more than once, but once other distros gained the ability to run live from the install media, I didn’t really need Knoppix any longer.

My assumption is the lease payments will more than cover the cost of the computer, and when you turn it back in at the end of the lease Apple is just going to scrap it.

I suppose that doesn’t preclude them charging you extra if you return it all scratched up just to extract even more money from you.

Windows has had to deal with memory pressure a lot more than Linux. Some of this is bloat, but historically there’s also just been a lot of low end systems sold with Windows. All of the Windows 7 systems sold with 1GB, the Windows XP systems sold with with 256MB, running Windows 98 in 16MB, and so on.

Windows is always looking for memory it can page out and does a lot of preemptive paging so that if it suddenly needs a bunch of free RAM - like if the user suddenly launches some memory hog of an application, Windows has it available. Windows is also a bit smart about it - it’ll page things out but still keep the data in RAM too. So for example an application idle in the background will be paged out in case Windows needs that memory, but it’s also kept in RAM so if the user pulls the application back up, Windows doesn’t have to read everything back from the page file either.

This has lead to complaints about Windows constantly thrashing the disk and doing things in the background, but there is some method to the madness. Though I will complain that Windows still seems to do this even in situations where the PC has a lot of RAM and large amounts of it aren’t being used.

The Linux kernel, on the other hand, doesn’t do a lot of this like Windows does. Which is fine so long as you have enough RAM. But in a situation where there isn’t a lot of free RAM and suddenly the user launches a big application, the kernel suddenly has to do a bunch of swapping to free up memory and that can take a bit, especially if the drive is slow.

The Linux kernel does have a “Swappiness” setting that can modify its behavior, but I’ve never really played around with that myself.

The funny thing is, the people who care about Group Policy and Active Directory are the same people who aren’t happy about their network potentially being compromised because someone hooked up their work laptop up to a monitor at their home.

Hate is perhaps too strong of a word, but personally, I just don’t care for their default desktop environment. If I had to, I could still use it but as I have lots of choices I’m going with something else.

On the other hand, I find Ubuntu to be a fine server OS, especially if you want something in the Debian family but want something a bit more up to date than what’s currently in Debian stable but still widely supported.

It’s always seemed to me that MacOS is still suffering from design decisions made back in the 80’s when it was running on a single 9" monochrome screen, and Apple is far too stubborn to change it.

At least Microsoft isn’t afraid to change things up, even if a lot of their UI changes end up pretty questionable.

The Union had about 22 million people, and the Confederacy was about 5.5 million if you don’t count the slaves or about 9 million if you include them. So it’s not really half in that sense.

If you put all of the Union in the “approve” category and all of the Confederacy in the “disapprove” category (and leave the slaves out of this) then Lincoln would have about an 80% approval rating, which is far higher than Trump can claim.

Not sure myself. Like many I used WinRAR back in the day, but it’s been at least 15 years since I last installed it.

Well, it’s not like it would be the first time something like that happened.

I still don’t get the people who say they are going to watch the Super Bowl for the ads, then the day after the game they’re bitching about how terrible the ads were.

I’m like… yeah… they are ads…

Admittedly back in the .com days there were some good ones.

I’ve still got a pile of DDR2 around, mostly 512MB-1GB sticks in the slower speeds. The better stuff got used, some of it is still in use.

The real money is the 2x16GB 2400MHz DDR4 sticks I have sitting on a shelf. Not long ago I figured it wasn’t worth trying to sell some old, slower DDR4 memory but now it’s apparently worth something. On the other hand, I might need it myself if one of the old DDR2/DDR3 era systems kicks the can.

As someone who is lazy, I find running Linux to be less work than fighting with Windows.

The Windows GUI (Explorer) has been using the word “folder” since Windows 95. DOS and Windows before that uses the word “directory”.

The surprise is that while Microsoft did announce how they were changing how Copilot usage is billed, they didn’t really give users a good way to gauge how expensive their current usage would be under the new billing system. Turns out it’s a lot more expensive than most people were expecting.

There was actually four different standard designs. You had the rectangular lights which came as either a 4x6" quad configuration, or the larger 5x7"design with one light on each side. Then there was the 5 3/4" round lights which were also a quad configuration, and the 7" round lights with one on each side. Prior to 1975 there was only the round designs and prior to 1958 when the quad 5 3/4" round light configuration were allowed, the only legal headlight was the 7" round design, which itself dated back to 1939.

The reason for the standardization in 1939 was that similar to today, every car had different designs in different configurations, though the main problem then was finding replacement lights when they inevitably burned out or got damaged.

The first car with composite headlights (in the US) was actually the Ford Thunderbird, but the Taurus is one everyone noticed.

A number of e-bikes now come with built-in lights that are just on all the time, hence the reason why bikes that are all lit up in the middle of the day are starting to become common.

A lot of these lights have little or no adjustments either.

I point mine down so it illuminates the road in front of me, and slightly in the direction facing away from oncoming traffic. I also use the dimmest setting, and don’t have it in blink mode unless it’s foggy out.

There’s also the projects that people think are dead because they haven’t seen any significant updates in some time. But in actuality there just hasn’t been any need to make changes. The code works, is mature, and feature complete. Unlike proprietary software there isn’t any pressure make changes for the sake of change to convince everyone they need to buy it over again, so once the code becomes stable development naturally will slow down.