No one commenting on your playlist? You’re cathartic music experience is showing :)

That reminds me…

In circa 1995 I was running a dial upBBS service – as a teenager. So if course, it was full of bootlegged video games and such, and people would dial in, download a game, log off.

Someone uploaded Descent or something like that. But they had put "deltree /y C:" or similar into a batch file, used a BAT2COM converter program, then a COM2EXE program, then padded the file size to approximately the right size with random crap (probably just using APPEND)… And uploaded it. Well, fortunately for the rest of my users, I say the game and said: oh, that’s neat, I should try it and copied it to another computer over my internal network and launched it. It started deleting files right away and I hit CTRL-C to abort. I lost only a few dozen files.

Banned the user, deleted the package. Got lucky.

Threading intensifies

I’m excited about this, even if it is just baby steps. It’s been one of my very few complaints about python, having spent two decades using it.

I’m hoping that pyside and QThreads can be made to work with noGIL. That would be super sweet. :)

I’ve met the devs in person. They keep turning down literal suitcases full of cash from people who want to bundle adware and crap in one of the most popular programs ever. Don’t assume VLC is going down that road – they’ve stuck to their ethics for decades.

Ouch. I know Bandcamp isn’t owned by its founders anymore, and the new owners in theory are sketch… But it’s still close to the best webstore ever conceived for music. The payment processing alone is worth it. What is Faircamp in that space?

As a long term slackware aficionado, I agree that it meets the criteria. But it also is significantly different from other distros in enough ways that you may find yourself relearning things you took for granted. And that is off-putting for a lot of users.

Hey, a lot of open source software is really warty too. But you could probably also blame that on capitalism if you tried hard enough :)

Lemmy (like its predecessors) is temporally arranged content. Think of it like having a discussion in a pub. Imagine bringing up a topic and someone said: but we discussed this 5 days ago, so we cannot discuss it now. Your obvious response would be: but I wasn’t here five days ago. It’s okay to repeat a conversation.

If you want more of a hierarchical structure, use wikipedia article conversations. Then each conversation only occurs once (ish). Not encouraging repeated conversation here will lead to slow content death – like on StackOverflow.

In this thread: a bunch of people making it more complicated than it needs to be.

Grab an old laptop, grab a user oriented distro that has a live-USB boot option. Play and learn.

Live USB options that should be user friend enough. Choose at random – because you like their logo or whatever.

https://pendrivelinux.com/put-mandriva-2010-on-a-usb-flash-drive-windows/

https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Live_USB_stick

https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2230389

https://linuxmint-installation-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/burn.html

You’re not wrong. KDE 1.x very much aimed at the Win95 market. They even directly targeted the windows userbase with jokes. The ordinal Win95 had a little fly-in animation that said “Where do you want to go today?” with an arrow pointing at the start menu. KDE 1.0 had this too, but it said “tomorrow” instead of “today”. Etc.

KDE also stole good ideas from wherever they were found. Trash is thus called because of Apple. The virtual desktops came from CDE. Etc. Sometimes it stole too much, and we would have discussions about flying too close to the sun, and tweak something so it would be just different enough not to raise the ire of lawyers.

Corel Linux was a KDE distro, so it largely had that familiar Win9x look, even if it felt different once you were actually using it. KDE later developed it’s own identity, but it retains its history and the baggage that comes with it.

I remember it and was there, on the KDE side of it. Summarized half-remembered version.

Corel WordPerfect had been ported to linux late in the 90s and they got this notion that people only bought Windows to use MS Office. So if they made their own OS, people would buy it just to use WordPerfect. They had grand plans to take KDE and linux and package it as a consumer grade OS. The closest other competitor doing that at the time was Caldera, and they were seeing some success, so why not eh?

They hired two people to “fix” KDE. But the people they hired had no idea how open source worked – how to interact with a community that functioned more like a meritocracy than a managed hierarchy. They showed up on the mailing list and tried to make demands – work on this, fix these bugs, adhere to our standards for this other thing, etc. When KDE didn’t jump to their whimsy, they sort of got annoyed and just decided to maintain a patchset or something.

The distro flopped hard. And it started with their management. They could have instead hired a half dozen KDE developers that were already contributing, started feature or bug bounty programs (like Google Summer of Code, which was great but came later), and possibly have pulled something amazing together.

Prediction: this will be considered Apple’s biggest product flop in decades, and may even unseat the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_5300 for worst in company history. The whole product line will be scrapped before 2027.

Fortunately they have the cash to burn on projects like this to see what takes.

I’ll post this in !prediction@lemmy.ca so someone can call me on it one day ;)

Kids these days and their type hinting. Back in my day, all objects were ducks, and we liked it!

Instead of the blogspam, here are the real release notes: https://numpy.org/devdocs/release/2.0.0-notes.html

Konsole and xterm, although I haven’t had to use xterm in a while. Actually, circa 1997 I used kterm, the predecessor to konsole. ;)

Straight up Linux ttys are also quite common for me. Most old school distros still let you escape to the terminal, with CTRL-ALT-F1 or similar. I haven’t distro hopped in a long time, so I don’t know if other distros still do this.

Still difficult in another sense. The person who was reading the code live on twitch or whatever, could never in the future work on wine. They’d have to commit to long term seperation from the project.

(Plus, they’d probably want to do it anonymously, since they’ve illegally obtained the source code.)

Wow, you’re the most entitled user of free software I’ve met in a while. Just buy a windows license next time.

Ask for a refund

Not without getting sued, no. But you could do a double blind on it. One person reads it and describes it in freeform prose, and another reads the prose then writes code to implement it as described. In the absence of documents describing the implementation details, this can sometimes work as it will avoid the copyright argument.

Still sketchy though, and you’d really have to verify isolation.

You do realize this is about the Unity game engine, right?