AnyOldName3

AnyOldName3 , 3 days ago

They update on two Tuesdays a month, and have done that at least since XP. Even with the most reboot-keen settings, the update doesn't happen until the time of day you're least likely to be using the machine based on when you typically do it. It tells you when that time will be and gives you several hours of notice with a popup with the option to delay. Depending on the variant of Windows you're using, you have settings to delay a forced reboot for up to a week (Home), a month (Pro) or forever (Enterprise). Obviously, that's not enough to make sure no one ever gets updates forced on them when they don't want them, and it would be nice if there was a way to distinguish users who know what they're doing from users who don't so people who do could be given more power to control if and when they install updates, but it is enough to ensure that checking the equipment before you use it is enough, potentially two weeks in advance.

AnyOldName3 , 3 days ago

They tried. UWP and the Windows Store did loads to boost security and make the source of apps verifiable, but people hated it and barely used it, so the holes they were supposed to patch stayed open. The store itself did have the problem that part of its raison d'être was to try and take a cut of the sales of all software for Windows, like Apple do for iOS, and UWP made certain things a pain or impossible (sometimes because they were inherently insecure), but UWP wasn't tied to the store and did improve even though it's barely used.

AnyOldName3 , 8 days ago

Looks cheaper than a horse or motorbike, too, so also cost effective.

AnyOldName3 , 10 days ago

What if I wasn't gay this morning and thought it would have to be Marceline from context, but looked nothing like her?

AnyOldName3 , 1 month ago

Tankies are advocating for the USSR, with any eventual communist utopia being optional.

AnyOldName3 , 1 month ago

Different people have different skill levels, so will experience different levels of hardship. Someone who'd played every Dark Souls game ten times (which isn't that rare) would find Elden Ring much easier than someone who'd never played a soulslike before. If the difficultly could be scaled to normalise for that, then everyone would have a more consistent experience closer to the intended one. It's probably not remotely practical to achieve that in every case, though.

AnyOldName3 , 1 month ago

I think you're reading things into my comment that I intentionally didn't put in it. I'm just making the point that games already don't get to control the amount of hardship the player experiences because some players start out better than others, and some improve faster than others. If a game has a fixed difficulty level, there'll always be people who find it easier than the developers intended, and people who'd still be unable to finish it with thousands of hours of practice (and plenty of people will play for ten or twenty hours before deciding they don't have time to find out if they'd eventually get good enough). On the other hand, if a game's got several modes, then there's a good chance a player will pick a difficulty level that's too easy or hard for them, so it could make the problem worse, but, critically, it wouldn't be what introduced it in the first place.

Regarding your point about Animal Farm, it's a bit more like deciding not to read an encrypted copy of the book. It might be a trivial Caesar cipher that could be easily broken, and you could be reading about some animals being more equal than others in a few seconds, or it could be modern AES that can't be broken before the heat death of the universe, or it could be anything in between. If you don't quickly make enough progress to see that you're actually going to get to read it, then you've no way to know whether it's seemingly insurmountable or literally insurmountable.

If someone's saying they don't have time to get good at Dark Souls, they're agreeing with you that not everything has to be for everyone, and they've decided that Dark Souls isn't for them. They don't have to be happy about that, though, especially if they've had to pay for the game to find out.

AnyOldName3 , 1 month ago

It's a 250W+ part running at around 1V, so it's going to draw a lot of current. Power is supplied via many pins on the back of the CPU, and they're connected to many traces, so it's not putting all that current through just one. It still puts out a lot of heat anyway, which is why modern motherboards have large heat sinks, sometimes with fans, on their VRMs.

AnyOldName3 , 2 months ago

Circumventing DRM is illegal under the DMCA, but the DMCA has an exception saying you're allowed to ignore parts of the DMCA if it's for purposes of interoperability between different computer systems. It's that exception that makes emulators legal in the first place. However, there's no case law setting a precedent as to whether the DRM circumvention prohibition or interoperability exception wins when both apply.

That means that the decryption is in a grey area if it's part of an emulator, but definitely illegal if it isn't.

We also don't know if this is an argument Nintendo relied on to stop Yuzu. Their initial court documents claimed things like emulators being totally illegal and only invented for piracy, which weren't true, and they settled out of court, so the public can't see what the final nail in the coffin was. It could simply be that they'd make Yuzu's position expensive to defend with spurious delays until they were bankrupt or shut down and gave them all their money, which doesn't require Nintendo to be legally in the right.

Not long before this, Dolphin's Steam release was cancelled because Nintendo asked Valve to block it, so the Dolphin team double checked they were entirely above board with their lawyers. Despite Dolphin containing the decryption keys from a real Wii, and using them to decrypt Wii games, they were confident it wasn't at risk. The keys are an example of a so-called illegal number, but they're generally believed to not actually be illegal (hence the Wikipedia article about them featuring several examples). The decryption should be safe as the lawyers thought that if push came to shove, the interoperability exception would beat the DRM circumvention prohibition.

AnyOldName3 , 2 months ago

Some Bluetooth controllers can't handle the bandwidth required for sound input and output at the same time unless it's at very low quality, and if Windows suspects such a device is in use, it defaults to the low quality mode as users are more likely to be able to tolerate it than tolerate their headphones not working at all. It's overly cautious, though, and uses the low quality mode far more than it has to.

AnyOldName3 , 1 month ago

It's super quick to swap it on Windows once you know the problem exists and know where to look. You just click the audio icon in the system tray and change the output device in the dropdown from the headset version of the device to the headphones one, and it enables all the higher-bandwidth modes. I'm not sure there's user-accessible control over which specific codec gets used, though.

AnyOldName3 , 2 months ago

Look at the wheels to check for bogies. A train or tram without bogies will come to a stop. One with bogies will multi-track drift until the tracks get too far apart.

AnyOldName3 , 2 months ago

WSL2 is, but WSL1 implemented the Linux kernel API in NT, so ran things directly.

AnyOldName3 , 2 months ago

You dun goofed here. You don't need to agree to the GPL to use GPL software, so the Next button shouldn't be greyed out when the checkbox is unchecked. You also only need to show the user the GPL when you give them a copy of the software, so there's no need to show it during the installation process.

AnyOldName3 , 2 months ago

It's not expecting a terrible reaction from everyone, just acknowledging that there's a slim chance of life-ending consequences. It's not discriminatory against vehicles to avoid tailgating because of a one in ten thousand chance that they'll brake too suddenly for you to react and you'll crash, so it's not reasonable to demand women to be happy putting themselves in a situation where they've got a comparable chance of getting stabbed by a nutter.

It's by no means all men's fault that there are nutters who'll stab women for rejecting them, but they are real, and are much more common than women who'll stab men for rejecting them (not least because of women being less likely to hit on men they don't know in the first place). The problem makes the world worse for everyone, but denying it or saying we should pretend it's not real because it would be sexist still leaves women with a disproportionate and quantifiable actual risk of death, which is a much worse consequence than having to only hit on women in environments they feel safe.

AnyOldName3 , 3 months ago

It's not a good tool if one party is likely, but not guaranteed, to win without your vote, but is much worse than the other. You should only spoil your ballot if your constituency is has a large enough majority that your vote won't matter at all, or none of the parties are less bad than the others.

If you're voting on the single issue of Palestine in the US presidential elections (not the primaries), then no state has a large enough majority to justify as spoiled ballots, and one party wants to support a genocide while the other wants to discourage it (even if they're doing a crap job of it), so there is a least bad option to vote for.

AnyOldName3 , 3 months ago

There's a good argument that Nvidia only had the money to do the work because of anticompetitive practices, and so shouldn't be allowed to benefit from it unless everyone's allowed to benefit from it, otherwise it's just cementing their dominant position further.

AnyOldName3 , 3 months ago

Part of it depends on how you define things. They're not a monopoly in terms of having eliminated all their competitors, but they're a defacto monopoly in terms of being able to do the things a monopoly can. As an example, they can dictate pricing for the whole market as their margins are better than AMD's, so if AMD undercut them, they can retaliate by dropping their prices to the point AMD would have to sell at cost, so AMD can only sell things in the narrow price window where Nvidia doesn't feel threatened. On the other hand, AMD does exist and does sell things.

AnyOldName3 , 3 months ago

If the AI had any actual I, it might point out that the most recent Halloween Document was from twenty years ago, and Microsoft's attitudes have changed in that time. After all, they make a lot of money from renting out Linux VMs through Azure, so it'd be silly for them to hate their revenue stream.

I'd be unsurprised if it's just set up to abandon the conversation if accused of lying, rather than defending its position.

AnyOldName3 , 3 months ago

The archive sites used to use the API, which is another reason they wanted to get rid of it. I always found they were a great moderation tool as users would always edit their posts to no longer break the rules before they claimed a rogue moderator had banned them for no reason, and there was no way within reddit to prove them wrong.

AnyOldName3 , 3 months ago

Yeah, the Wayback Machine doesn't use Reddit's API, but on the other hand, I'm pretty sure they don't automatically archive literally everything that makes it onto Reddit - doing that would require the API to tell you about every new post, as just sorting /r/all by new and collecting every link misses stuff.

AnyOldName3 , 3 months ago

People insist it happens in the UK, too, and we don't have school shootings, so wouldn't have that source for the claim.

AnyOldName3 , 3 months ago

I think it's currently in A/B testing as it's not like this on either of my Windows machines that installed updates this week. I don't think they let you disable the things you're in A/B testing for.

Either that, or it's not GDPR compliant, and they're not rolling it out to the UK or EU.

AnyOldName3 , 4 months ago

It's not that clear-cut as cis women with abnormally high testosterone levels are overrepresented in top level sports, to the point where competitions that tried to define the men's and women's groups based on testosterone levels end up with cis people on the wrong side of the line. Also, hrt for trans people is usually stronger than the natural hormone levels of a cis person of the same gender as it's meant to change their body rather than just maintain it, so the attributes that are more dependent on hormones typically overshoot.

AnyOldName3 , 4 months ago

Sounds like you've got some Dells with USB ports, and some Dells with off-spec not-USB ports.

AnyOldName3 , 4 months ago

If things are done according to the spec, the logo's engraved/embossed on one side and not the other, so you can learn to feel that and get it right first time even in the dark.

AnyOldName3 , 4 months ago

It says few opposite of that, i.e. to try the webapp in Microsoft Edge or Chrome, or use the desktop app.

AnyOldName3 , 4 months ago

You can theoretically make a Bethesda-Game-Studios-style game with no Bethesda IP if you do it with OpenMW. Come to the light side, our website has no tracking cookies.

AnyOldName3 , 10 months ago

Plenty of people call North Korea the DPRK as that's it's official name, despite being well aware that it's undemocratic, not a republic not for the people, and only of half of Korea, even in the same sentence as condemning it for not being the things it claims to be. What you're saying is effectively equivalent to saying anyone in favour of democracy is evil on the grounds that North Korea labels itself as democratic, and is a bad place.