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.

Be sure to stick an AR500 plate between your saddle and the mine as well, so you can enjoy a free added speed boost when you flak your enemy without scorching your buttcheeks.

It’ll totally work. I saw it in a cartoon once.

And setting upperbound limits on input length. Because if you expose it to users, it’s not a matter of if some joker will insist on entering precisely 4,294,967,297 bytes of random data into it to see if they can crash your shit, it’s a matter of when.

Also, an important message to everyone in the Lemmysphere: This one’s got Jeffrey Combs in it. That should be good for a sale right there.

The TLC NAND chips used in most commodity memory cards these days are only good for something like 1500 write cycles per cell before they are prone to wearing out and coming back with errors. The difference between a dedicated SSD and a dinky memory card is partially the amount of extra space reserved for relocating data as the memory cells wear out, of which a consumer MicroSD card typically has little (on expensive ones) or none (on cheap ones).

I’ve heard it said, or rather seen it written, that some TLC NAND can endure “up to” as many as 3000 write cycles, but everyone is cagey about the true number and most consumer grade card vendors are tight-lipped about what kind of chips are actually in their products. So in other words, if you’re just scarfing a cheap card off of Amazon or from Microcenter or whatever, don’t expect ironclad longevity.

The one thing with flash storage writes that’ll bite you and it’ll bite you fast is logging. Unix-like systems love to incessantly write little one line additions to oodles and oodles of log files all the time, and if you want to extend your poor overworked little SD card’s lifespan you can dabble in turning some of that stuff off, once you’re positive you don’t need it for troubleshooting.

There also exist high reliability cards sold for industrial embedded applications, which will use lower capacity SLC but be able to endure upwards of 100,000 write cycles (per the marketing literature, at least). Expect capacities to realistically top out at about 64 gigs and for a single unit at that capacity expect to pay north of $100 for the privilege. It may be more appealing to use an NVME SSD at that rate and connect it with USB adapter or a hat.

Interesting to see where this leads, but I’m not terribly excited about this yet. The article mentions, but doesn’t necessarily explain, how these are supposed to work with pancake lens assemblies — only that they propose that they are. One of the major problems with those is light loss, which is the stated reason Valve went with LCD rather than OLED for the Steam Frame. LCD brightness can be fairly trivially increased simply by… well, making the backlight brighter. LEDs, on the other hand, largely provide their luminance as a function of the surface area of the die. If you make them smaller it also makes 'em dimmer, and there isn’t any mention of whether or not TCL has somehow managed to overcome this. That may explain the rather underwhelming bump in panel resolution.

Option B is just to drive them harder, which is probably not a great plan for an OLED panel’s already finite lifetime. The blue subpixels die first, then the greens, then the reds…

Regarding She-who-must-not-be-named, somebody already kinda tried it, it didn’t work because the fomrer was already in possession of large sums of money by that time (and the challenge was kind of spurious anyway) and then everyone forgot about it.

Works on your motorcycle, too.

Posted directly, no. Not anymore, anyway; there was a bright and shiny albeit very short period early in .world’s days when you could upload a video instead of an image and it would take it and work. I imagine the admins disabled this for obvious reasons.

You can still post an animated .gif, though. I do it all the time.

When I managed a hardware store back in the day we got scam calls fairly regularly via these types of teletext-to-operator schemes. It was always some bullshit about somebody needing 144 chainsaws or 200 lawn mowers or some shit, and they always wanted to try to pay with a check routing number, and they always wanted it delivered sight unseen to some highly suspicious location. It must have been extra infuriating for the operators, because they know damn well it’s a scam but apparently they weren’t allowed to interject or add to the conversation in any way to tell the recipient this. Of course we knew what was up, so I’d instruct the operator to relay to the scammer the longest and most inventive list of insults I could think of to see if I could get them to giggle. The operator, that is. Not the scammers.

I presume the scammers were connecting to the phone network via the internet, probably itself dial-up at the time.

Neato. Out of all of those I passed in my travels, the last one I could tell you the location of off the top of my head was this one, but I notice that as of this year it’s also gone. If you check the latest Street View image you’ll see the cables dangling from where it used to be. There ain’t no hooking this one back up, alas, unless you bring your own.

Note the horse and buggy. Where we are standing is indeed out in the sticks.

I was in a random diner somewhere in Appalachia this year which had a functioning payphone and one of those old pull-knob cigarette vending machines in the back. I don’t recall exactly where it was. I should have taken a picture or written it down.

Pro or Enterprise? Or even better, Enterprise IoT LSTC? The latter is going to get security updates until 2032.

And those enrolled ($61) in the Extended Security Updates program get one more year of security support (not feature updates), and the various Enterprise versions will continue to get updates for up to another seven years, depending on the version.

Microsoft didn’t stop updating Windows 10 and they won’t for quite some time. They’re simply no longer offering those updates to most users of the consumer versions of Windows.

Windows Update can also hand you updates to your drivers independent of the support status of your copy of Windows. For instance, if you install a copy of Windows 7 even today it will still pull driver files from Microsoft.

Steam Deck: Already runs Linux.

GabeCube: Confirmed it will run Linux.

Steam Frame: Confirmed it will run Linux.

Obviously Valve has made no overtures whatsoever towards making a phone. But if they did, what on Earth would lead you to believe that it wouldn’t run Linux?

I imagine I’d make a not totally incompetent blacksmith, or some other equivalent allied trade. In fact, I’d probably have a better chance at that 300 or so years ago than now.

Yes, I do already have my own anvil. Jury’s out on whether or not I feel like lugging it with me, though. The fucker is heavy.

Or consistently fail to make Beyond Good and Evil 2 for several decades.

And he’ll get it there, too.

The US Postal Service is basically the only part of the federal government that actually works. And still works, amazingly, despite all the politicking and bullshit that’s been thrown at it. My uncle once mailed me a letter but didn’t remember the address of the place I’d recently moved to. He addressed it to, “White house near the corner of [street] and [street] in [town],” with no ZIP code, and it still made it to me. I saved the envelope. I’ve still got it somewhere.

The flag on the door is also super fucked up. It’s only got 34 stars, with the bottom row being cut in half by the border of the blue field.

Before anyone pops out of the woodwork and goes, “Well, acktshully…” about the Union flag during the Civil war, note also that this one’s only got twelve stripes. If what I learned in elementary school was true, there is no point in history where the American flag did not have thirteen stripes on it.

Hearing that, honestly I’m amazed that Microsoft and their myriad of blunderous and unfocused handheld OS options had any penetration in that part of the world at all.

Whatever else Windows CE/Palm-Size PC/PocketPC/Windows Mobile may have been in the West, one thing it certainly was turned out to be a clusterfuck. Windows CE itself hung on for a surprisingly long time in non-handheld industrial and embedded applications, but interest in the PDA oriented side of it basically vanished in a puff of smoke shortly after the release and subsequent Earth-shattering popularity of the iPhone.

Somehow the shambling husks of Palm OS and PocketPC managed to shuffle on until 2009 and 2010, respectively, to little fanfare and practically nobody in the world caring anymore. For what it’s worth that means PocketPC/whateveritis technically outlasted Palm. Just, not to the real benefit of anybody.

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.)