palordrolap

Warm freshly baked white bread is 10/10 for a bread lover.*

Supermarket own-brand plain white sliced loaf is generally ordinary, basic and inexpensive, but nonetheless acceptable. 5/10.

This knowledge may raise more questions than answers, but it may help narrow the scope.

* Scale may extend past 10 for sufficiently exotic bread. Ask the continental Europeans offended by that 10/10 rating.

Humanity - civilised Greeks or not - didn’t have the metallurgical knowledge to be able to build locomotives and rails out of strong enough materials yet. Ancient Greece basically coincides with the Bronze age.

You’d have to not only bring (knowledge of) steam locomotive tech, but also every single bit of iron tech required to build one. You could skip the requirement for rails by opting for a steam traction engine, not a full locomotive, but those are far closer together in technological ability.

None of this factors in the propensity for steam boilers to explode, which you may or may not consider important.

There’s a reason we were still using beasts of burden (horses, oxen, etc.) for traction until the 19th century.

Tiny Core Linux seems to be 32-bit by default (inferred from their downloads page which links to a separate 64-bit version)

Their minimum package is GUI-less.

Haven’t used it myself, but maybe it’s what you’re looking for. Spin it up in a VM, etc.

This site lists that and four others: https://www.tecmint.com/lightweight-linux-distros-without-gui/ (I only looked at Tiny Core for the sake of this comment, so I don’t know if the others are 32-bit or not.)

Crazy alternative: FreeDOS. Pros: Lots of abandonware out there for that platform. Cons: I can’t tell how good its support is for USB-connected drives and networking. It definitely has some. Maybe it would be enough for your hardware.

I am old. I am still not over JavaScript existing outside of a browser. I’m not sure I ever will be. And that’s from someone who uses a Linux DE that uses JavaScript and XML as part of its GUI.

Files, hardware / peripherals and programs. The distinction can get a bit blurry what with drivers and the fact that Linux exposes most of the hardware via the filesystem.

OK, WTAF on those word replacements. I’d be freaking out about malware.

The claim that the Nazis were actually socialists is an early Nazi lie - it’s in the name of the party after all - to gain votes. They never changed that name, so they perpetrated that lie and never officially retracted it. They were fascist, not socialist. It’s not impossible to be both, I grant you, but one does not imply the other.

Modern right-wing detractors of socialism, especially those on the far right, like to use the lie to decry socialism, all the while secretly revering a good portion of Nazi politics.

Did you miss the whole Jimmy Kimmel thing? Disney cancelled him so people started cancelling their Disney subscriptions. Suddenly they reconsidered.

Boycotts don’t always work, sure, but sometimes they do and that’s enough to prove that they’re worth trying in the first place.

Obligatory mention that Linux Mint’s dev team have forked some GNOME apps into their own XApps* project. Part of the reason is so that those apps retain the user’s window manager’s look and feel rather than GNOME’s enforced interface design. That might even be the main reason, but they also throw in their own improvements to the apps where they feel they’re necessary.

They’ve not yet forked all GNOME-looking applications in Mint, and I’m not even sure they intend to, but it’s a noble effort.

* Yes, it really is called that. Like I’ve said before, they probably could have chosen a better name, but they chose it before Wayland was a real threat and before Twitter got lobotomised.

Top right quadrant is full of forgetful carpenters.

I saw the 20 second version of that video around that time. I thought it was a fake at first and then the next time it replayed it became clear that this was no fake. The person who showed me it was showing it to share the burden of having seen such a thing.

No desire to see it again. And after that I saw all sorts of things like rotten.com, goatse, the BME Pain Olympics and all sorts of other gross stuff on the early WWW. Some of that came pretty close but nothing has topped it.

I kind of want that to mean we can now insult and impugn the Taliban on the internet without fear of retribution but 1) that’d be cruel even if they are wilfully backward, 2) it would undoubtedly devolve into racism and Islamophobia from the less bright among us, and 3) you can bet the top brass of the Taliban won’t have given it up.

I bet at least one of them is a closet Swiftie.

Wikipedia seems to agree with you. Dropping the J was probably a good idea considering the people who would have to read it on a regular basis, and how J sounds in English.

As I recall, that is remarkably close to the true story. They wanted something that could make web pages dynamic, wouldn’t crash the browser or any pages that used it and they wanted it in the Netscape browser ASAP.

One man thus threw something together that looked a little bit Java-like and it ended up in the browser fairly shortly thereafter.

Hard to believe that was 30 years ago.

Then you should have sex with as many rich people as possible then die as quickly and quietly as possible, there’s a good chap.

Best regards, Your corporate overlords

Are you one of those pro-Zionism cranks or am I missing a trick here?

So I went down the rabbit hole of the etymology of “Gentoo” and you might say that “too” and “two” are more closely related as words and meanings than either is to the “-too” of “Gentoo”.

The latter is a corruption / evolution of Latin -tivus of which the -tiv- part still exists in modern Latin-derived English words, like “adjective”, “active” and, perhaps importantly here, “genitive”.

Start with the Latin root: genitivus; push it through early (*gen(i)tiū) then colonial Portuguese: gentio; and then confuse the meaning with “ill-born” or “gentile” in colonial British-Indian English to get “Gentoo”. The word was used there to describe the non-Hindu inhabitants of India. Because of course it was.

So, apparently, Gentoo penguins are called that because they’re somehow reminiscent of 19th century Indian Muslims. Oof.

Pausing for a second to let that one pass…

And now…

English “too” evolved from “to” into its own niche (compare how “than” came from “then”). The second-ness / two-ness of “too” is an accident more than anything, even though the pronunciations have converged.

Do not ask about Ubunthree.

Dead people can’t own land. Murderers can take that land. Profit.

No idea. I did find that WDC are still making a variant of the 16-bit successor to the 6502, so I hadn’t considered that the tech might not still be around for the earlier generation.

It was only very recently that they stopped making Z80 cores for embeddable use, so if that tech was mothballed rather than thrown out it, theoretically it wouldn’t take long to spin all that back up again.

That “theoretically” might just be an uninformed dream though.

Of all the - often eldritch - parodies of Garfield, I like this the least.