I think everyone should do what I did and stop enjoying such things. Kill the media by not watching ads, not buying movie tickets, not paying subscriptions. Cut them out of society entirely.

I know, right? Remember Encarta?

isn’t it the graphical equivalent to an rtx2070 or something?

I’m 37, and yes. Along with the laptop I took to college in 2007, I bought a copy of Microsoft Streets & Trips that came with a USB GPS receiver. The software itself worked fairly well, the GPS receiver worked badly twice and then completely gave up. Used that software for several years to print maps and directions on paper to refer to on the road until Google Maps surpassed it.

There was a time when Ubuntu was the distro for the masses. It was the one that “just worked.” It was the one you could use for school. They distributed marketing material with a bunch of diverse young people holding hands.

Now Canonical’s website is, by area, mostly corporate logos. They’re B2B now, we have lost them, and it shows in their engineering.

If the system you’re shopping for an OS for isn’t installed in a room with halon extinguishers in the ceiling, you shouldn’t even be thinking Canonical’s name.

I used to hold up Squad and Kerbal Space Program as the gold standard of early access campaigns, but Coffee Stain Studios blew them out of the water. The update trailers alone have been worth the price of the game.

Is that what that was? I got a grey box with no text in it that popped up over Satisfactory and my mouse control went from the POV to moving a cursor. I was building and it was a brief interruption. I got the actual text via email.

I’m saying it now: Get an amateur radio license and pay ARRL dues. We’re going to need to protect that bandwidth.

As in, would type up a memo in Excel? Woof.

Sometimes I want a more free-form tool that can be a journal or a checklist or a spreadsheet so that I can plan and calculate and such. My personal journal sometimes reads like The Martian, “Okay, my solar panels make 165 kilowatt hours per sol, and I need 47 of it for my project, meaning I have 108 kilowatt hours per sol left over…” But I look at things like OneNote and fall right off them.

I think it’s a hole in education. Unless you go to school for IT or programming the most advanced thing you’re probably going to be taught is spreadsheet, and yet out in the world of business you need actual database software, and Excel can kinda sorta look like it’s somewhat accomplishing that for a while so that’s what gets used.

When the only tool society has been taught exists is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

It is my understanding that Rush also hard-bottomed the sub (crashed into the sea floor) while diving to the Andrea Doria. And was a little piss baby about it the entire time.

That’s apparently a shorter version of the video I’d seen previously; eventually Rush does hand over the controls, by throwing the playstation controller at the guy’s head.

I know of at least a couple maintenance shops that will give their expired composite materials to a mechanic school for students to use in class projects. This usage is actually a good idea, completely unlike using it to build a manned submersible.

CDs like laserdiscs before them are read with an infrared laser.

DVDs use a red laser, and Blu-ray does indeed use a blue-violet laser. The smaller wavelengths, plus the ability to do multiple layers, are indeed how they cram more data more densely onto a disc of nearly identical size.

Yeah I would read “managed to burn the disc” to mean “managed to create a new CD-R copy of the original.” “Managed to rip the disc” would mean successfully created an .iso file.

CD-Rs and CD burners were first available in the early 90’s but they were “we’ll take the helicopter out to the yacht” expensive. By 1998 they were starting to become normal consumer-grade equipment. I had one as a teenager in the year 2000, along with a Rio CD-MP3 player.

I’ve still got the computer I had in later high school and college, a Pentium 3 rig that I plan on turning into a sleeper PC for my midlife crisis. It has a DVD-ROM drive and a CD burner. I wonder if they’re SATA or some older “we don’t do it this way anymore” buses? I remember that machien talking about SCSI during boot-up.

Idk why.

When writing to a CD-R, the laser literally burns a chemical in the disc which causes it to change optical properties, which will cause it to appear to be the same as the pits and lands on a manufactured disc. “Burning a disc” meant to write it. It’s not the original that’s being burned, it’s the new copy. In casual conversation someone might say “I really like this album.” “Tell you what I’ll burn it for you.” short for “I’ll burn a copy of it onto a new disc for you.”

The line “Jessup managed to burn the intact Half-Life CD”, in the context of “thought lost to disc rot”, I would extrapolate this to mean that the original old CD was thought to be damaged or destroyed due to age or mishandling, but he was successfully able to copy the data onto a new CD. Handling or using the fragile original my cause the data to be lost, so copying it to a new disc better preserves it.

The word “rip” is usually used to mean take all the data off of a CD and store it elseways. “I ripped the CD to my hard drive.” The nuance is, there isn’t a new optical disc, the data just exists on a computer’s internal storage. Which is probably what they actually did.

The term “burn” survived into the USB thumb drive age to differentiate writing the contents of a .iso file to a thumb drive replacing any file system or data that is currently there from simply storing a copy of the .iso among the existing file system. Often the same software you’d use for CDs would be used to image thumb drives as well so the “BURN!” button would be used to start both processes. Unlike on a CD-R nothing gets permanently altered on a USB drive.

I might play some Satisfactory. I might just be burned out on it though.

Got some projects to work on in the wood shed. Might get on that.

my RX7900GRE doesn’t have any issue pushing 1440p ultrawide.

I swear I still get letterboxes on a 16:9 television watching at least some movies. And of course I get pillarboxes for days watching “fullscreen” pan & scan DVDs or anything shot for TV before 2010.

16:10 is a pretty good laptop aspect ratio, but on the desktop I don’t think I’m giving up my 21:9 monitor. For gaming it’s simply majestic and having enough real estate for CAD and a spreadsheet open side by side and actually get stuff done is something I won’t give up.

I’m playing Satisfactory at High or Ultra settings 1440p ultrawide Lumen on with a Ryzen 7700x and a Radeon 7900GRE, and maintaining frame rates in the 80’s. What is out now, or is in the works, that my machine can’t run well?