palordrolap

joined 2 years ago
[–] palordrolap@kbin.run 23 points 1 year ago

“I’ve said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that." -- an actual Bill Gates quote referring to the 640k quote that won't die.

But yes, it was probably satirically ascribed to him because of MS-DOS not having the capability to deal with any more than that amount of RAM for a lot longer than it probably should have.

The "temporary" solution of requiring an extra driver to be able to do so (EMM386.SYS or similar) remained in place right up until DOS-based Windows was allowed to die.

(The underlying reason was almost certainly ancient IBM PC memory-mapped IO standards, so maybe we could ascribe the original quote an engineer working there some time around 1980.)

[–] palordrolap@kbin.run 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There's the idea that he believes he's entitled to a second term. And there's so much he wants to do and it must be done as soon as possible. If any of that is even vaguely true, he won't drop out.

(The fact he's not getting any younger might be in there somewhere, but he probably doesn't think about that at all if he can help it.)

[–] palordrolap@kbin.run 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Has he actually gone to the great Chinese restaurant in the sky this time?

Pretty sure there was a hoax that he'd died a while back, and though there is a Wikipedia article for "Democracy Manifest", the way it's written and put together doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

[–] palordrolap@kbin.run 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The genie grants your wish. Everyone on Earth at the moment of the wish emerges from cryosleep 50 years from now with no memory of how they got into the cryosleep pod, nor how they got to it, and worse, as well rested as they were right before the event happened. Important parts of infrastructure have crumbled in our absence. Nature has taken back over.

Mankind finds itself with different problems, but are they any better?

[–] palordrolap@kbin.run 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Do you not know why people would want to block lemmy.ml?

[–] palordrolap@kbin.run 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

(FWIW the downvote wasn't me)

That sounds like you're suggesting that Microsoft wouldn't care what was installed locally to be able to net-boot / run the rest of Windows.

I think it's all but certain that they'd want user's computers to to boot into something they made, or at the very least, slapped their branding all over, even if that was only a wrapper for their web browser.

I can definitely see them going down the line of saying that their online apps aren't guaranteed to work under any other system, going so far as to throw in a few deliberate stumbling hazards for anything that isn't theirs. (Until anti-trust, etc.)

And thus, dual booting will still be something that people do. Even if - as you clarified - they're not going to cripple that as well.

[–] palordrolap@kbin.run 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There are people of all genders who enjoy being kicked repeatedly in the crotch.

Would you like to volunteer to see if you are one of those people? How about we do it a few times to see if you get addicted?

[–] palordrolap@kbin.run 4 points 1 year ago

Check system settings for a keyboard entry / applet. I'm on LMDE Cinnamon and have no idea what the equivalents are on Kubuntu, but over here it's definitely possible to change/remove the default keyboard assignments and set up custom ones instead.

For example, I have Shift+WWW (the multimedia key that starts a web browser by default) set to start the browser with an alternate profile. I could just as easily set plain old WWW to, say, start a terminal instead, or run that custom command.

The hardest part is knowing what custom command to run to get the desired effect.

[–] palordrolap@kbin.run 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

The only way to prevent dual booting would require a UEFI/BIOS that pulls the OS straight over a network, bypassing local storage entirely.

Even if that didn't already rule it out, the size that OSes are these days makes it even less likely. At least not unless Microsoft (or whoever) are planning to ditch absolutely everyone who doesn't have gigabit internet. (It would be kind of funny for an OS to go back to being 1990s-sized to mitigate that though. And funnier still when someone inevitably captures it onto a hard disk anyway.)

A more likely vector would be to deliberately break third party bootloaders every time Windows boots. And that would last until the next anti-trust / monopoly lawsuit and they'd roll it back to the current behaviour of only breaking third party bootloaders on installation.

And even if somehow that didn't get rolled back, just wait until hardware vendors introduce this thing called a "switch" that can be added just before the power connector on an SSD. Can't boot from a drive that has no power. BIOS defaults to the next SATA channel. And now you're booting into Linux.

Doing the same for a mobo-mounted NVMe drive is harder but not impossible.

[–] palordrolap@kbin.run 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

PCX or nothin'

[–] palordrolap@kbin.run 16 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Apparently, The joe editor has a jstar mode, so says this old Stackexchange thread. I can't verify because I've never used Wordstar, but joe's available in my distro's repository.

No idea if it can read old WordStar files, but maybe you don't need that.

For the GUI version - and some old file capability, the same page and other searches turn up WordTsar which is in progress. The dev says they'll be picking up development again next month.

[–] palordrolap@kbin.run 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

"Uh, Boss, our customers are sending us the invoices for their RAM purchases."

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