palordrolap

You had me concerned for a second, but “mists of time” shows up on Wiktionary (easier to be wrong), Merriam Webster’s site (likely to be right) or the Oxford English Dictionary (practically canonical), whereas “midst(s) of time” does not.

Collins Dictionary and Dictionary.com don’t list either, but the existence of the former in other places would seem to suggest that that’s the right one.

You should have seen it when the typos were still in it. Now try to figure out whether the parenthetical was there before the edits.

You like cursed?

Way back in the mists of time I got a 32MB (not a typo) upgrade for an 8MB computer. In total: 40MB.

Since I knew it ran fine with just the 8MB, I set up a RAM disk of 32MB and put the Windows swap file in it. Windows absolutely insisted (and maybe still does) that there be a swap file, so why not put that back in RAM?

It worked perfectly, but that memory was better used for other things, so the cursed setup didn’t last all that long.

Edits: Typo city baby.

I feel like proponents of that calendar might be better off giving all the months completely different names. It would avoid some of the potential confusion during the changeover. Sol could keep its name, I guess, but the rest, no.

On the other hand, that still wouldn’t disambiguate numeric YYYY-MM-DD and the like.

Due to the omission of the year number on the grid, it’s somewhat reusable too. 2037 is the next time all the dates and days of the week will match.

I figure they’re more likely related, in spirit and vocalisation if not etymologically, to the French phrase «et patati, et patata», translatable as “blah blah blah” or “yada yada yada”.

The venerable Jargon File has the French metasyntactic variables (i.e. the equivalents to foo and bar) as toto, titi, tata and tutu.

Or to take this in another direction: foo sounds like French “fou” which means “mad” (as in “insane”), so “coucou” might be an interesting alternative.

I assume they’re using (year - 2000) as the version number, which happens to match “last two digits” and will do until 2099. So any version of Minecraft released that year under the new system would be Minecraft 1002.x, not 2.x.

And here’s me thinking it was called Vintage Story.

Actually, Minecraft 26 comes out this year. They dropped the “1.” and bumped the sub-version from 21 to 26 to match the year. They’ve also changed the way the new second tier works to be related to the quarter-year.

26.1 is due next month.

So yeah, there’ll never be a Minecraft 2.0. The versioning no longer allows for it.

(This doesn’t rule out a game called “Minecraft II” with its own set of unrelated but identical version numbers. Minecraft II 36.1 drops in ten years. Maybe. But probably not.)

Ha. I’ve heard of Amazon offloading heavier parcels to municipal mail carriers, so I don’t see that working out.

The day they codify in law that public services should not make a profit, the lawsuits will begin. Those to reclassify all and sundry that we think of as public services as not being public services.

A necessity argument would result. Do people need electricity, gas and municipal water treatment? No. They can live off-grid. Therefore these are not public services.

Do people need public transport? No. They can walk or buy rent a car. Therefore public transport is not a public service.

Do people need police, fire, medical? No. Most people can go months, years without needing any of those. Therefore they can’t be public services either.

etc. etc.

I’m not saying I agree with any of that, but the expensive lawyers will be arguing these points and they’ll continue to argue them as long as there’s a profit to be made.

Although a processor might be nominally capable of accessing a bus of a certain width, it does not mean that all address or data lines need be connected.

orange = {
    you = "glad",
    I = {
        didn\'t = {
            say = "banana"
        }
    }
}

It says “was” not “had”.

Some people genuinely do not understand the concept of GUI windows and how they work. They do not generate a full mental model of the desktop and the windows on it and only see the whole screen as one bewildering interface. They focus on what they do know in order to get by.

This may be especially true of people who learned their IT with small screens or low resolutions where running an application full screen (or as the only active application!) is required to get anything done.

Your colleague saw you click on part of the interface they were ignoring because they didn’t understand it and magic happened.

Is it any more maintainable with four levels of abstraction?

Be aware that a lot of distros will be switching from X11 to Wayland at some point in the not-too-distant future and these ancient tools will not work there.

People have tried to write equivalents (ydotool is one I’m aware of), but Wayland has intentionally been written to make doing such things difficult, for “security” reasons.

I will be grumpy until I can make my scripts work again, but that’s for future me to deal with.

They allow the user to script changes to, and pull information from, windows in the window manager. Like read, if not also set, a window’s title, change a window’s dimensions, move it around, send it to a different desktop, send keypresses, bring a window to the foreground, etc. etc.

Basically, anything the user can do with the mouse, keyboard or window manager via the GUI, and a little more besides, can be automated.

The two commands work slightly differently to each other and one can often do something the other can’t.

As an example, I have a script that resizes the active window to a 4:3 ratio at full vertical height on my 16:9 monitor. I’ve then bound that script to a keypress in the window manager. It’s a lot like having something halfway between window mode and maximised mode.

Couldn’t I do that with the mouse? Sure. But with the script I don’t have to gauge by eye and spend multiple mouse clicks and movements trying to get it just right.

You know how slackers tend to make more of an effort to at least look like they’re doing what they should be when the boss walks by?

This is the same relationship between the computers and the IT department.

And the real truth may be somewhere in between. The user may suddenly regulate their behaviour and take extra care, or at least act sufficiently differently, when the IT person is watching over their shoulder.

They don’t do the thing that makes the computer complain. Everything looks normal. IT person goes away. User reverts to original habits. Computer complains.

Or else the IT person uses the computer themselves, but does not emulate the user sufficiently well, so the computer behaves.

I know it’s not always this but it goes a long way to explaining how tech aura became a thing.