bcrescimanno

Oh man...this one hit me tonight! I remember watching Triumph of the Nerds in high school and loving every second of it! I read his column on PBS for years and followed him to his blog later...and kinda fell off as I fell off of so many things. Bob was influential in turning my childhood passion for computers into my career.

It's especially tragic for his family as Bob had announced that his son Cole, aged 21, had passed away back in April. Condolences to all those who knew Mark, Cole, and their loved ones. RIP.

Obligatory Dennis Reynolds / It's Always Sunny... thoughts on this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzb355qT8RI

I honestly don't mind downloading apps for things I use all the time so long as the app isn't a nightmare. It's when I am having a single interaction with a brand (such as buying my wife a gift) and I'm bombarded with "it's better in the app" that drives me nuts.

I realize that I am perhaps not the target demographic of this app-centric culture; but, I cannot count the number of times in a week that I utter the phrase, "no, I don't want to download your app" as I try to accomplish what should be a simple task.

The 555 version is the current version. It was officially released on June 27.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-555.58-Linux-Driver

> Compared to the overall effort invested, that's careless, badly planned or underfunded.

Not at all. It's a pattern that's very easy to spot while the eyes of the world are looking for it. When it was needed, it worked exactly as it needed to work. Had the backdoor not been discovered, no one would have noticed--just like no one did notice for the past couple of years.

Had anyone noticed at the time, it would have been very easy to just back off and try a different tactic a few months down the line. Once something worked, it would be quick to fade into forgotten history--unlikely to be noticed until, like now, the plan was already discovered.

> does the nouveau driver these days allow enabling higher power/speed?

My understanding is that, yes, with the Nouveau GSP code in Kernel 6.7.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Nouveau-GSP-Merged-Linux-6.7

Like many others in this thread, I've enjoyed a ton of Orbital. My introduction was when 99x in Atlanta played "The Box" a few times and I picked up a copy of In Sides. Also, like many, I spent many a late night learning to code with some Orbital album as my soundtrack.

So many great tracks listed here and I'll add another: one of my personal favorites is their collaboration with Angelo Badalamenti "Beached" from the 2000 film The Beach.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBRgfm0osig

Valve getting involved. Proton. SteamDB. The progress that's been made over the past couple of years is absolutely amazing. For a huge number of games and gamers, Linux is so close to being considered a viable option.

The big problem is that the games that don't work now are for political / financial reasons more than technical reasons--notably incompatible anti-cheat systems or developer refusal to enable the Linux support for their chosen anti-cheat. And these aren't small titles either: PUBG Battlegrounds, Call of Duty Modern Warfare, Fortnite, Destiny 2, Genshin Impact, just to name a few.

I play a variety of games and I would love to boot back into my Arch system as my main daily driver. But, I'm sadly still forced to keep Windows around because my desire to get off of Windows isn't as strong as my desire to continue to play some of my favorite games.

The public repo for the new version of Cosmic: https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-epoch

> does it fail to track the mouse on wayland apps?

Exactly. It will work properly if the app is using XWayland and fail for native Wayland.

Always glad to see someone else who remembers that era at GT!

CS1311 - Data structures in pseudocode (or Scheme if you had the "X" class) CS1312 - Build the game "Risk" in Java CS2130 - Die a painful death at the hands of Jim Greenlee's compiler class.

Per the article, the size of "mid-size" trucks today is about the same as full-size trucks were in the 1990s.

When the pandemic began and I started working from home, I gave up my car because it just didn't make sense to have two and I've continued to work from home and we've continued with only one car. I've decided that I want my next vehicle to be a pickup truck because, as a home owner, I often need to do minor hauling. The truck I have in mind is something like a late 90s Ranger or Tacoma; but, I don't want to buy a 25 year-old vehicle. Unfortunately, the modern alternatives are all so huge (and expensive) that it puts me off the idea almost entirely.

It's so rarely an issue on Arch. Between the massive official repos and the incredibly comprehensive AUR, I've only needed to do it a couple of times.

My initial comment was about needing to do that on non-arch systems. I've created my own RPM and DEB packages in the past as well; but, at least when I did it years ago, it wasn't as effective as a PKGBUILD on arch.

I've been a user of Arch for the past several years and I've always been a huge proponent of the rolling release model. When I first picked up Arch, it was because I needed more modern versions of several tools than were packaged with Fedora or Ubuntu and Arch was a really easy way to get those updates. No more waiting 6 months for the next release cycle to get a new piece of software (yes, I know, "compile it yourself" is always an option--but, I've personally found that nothing destabilizes my system like adding a bunch of software from outside the package manager).

I find my own argument somewhat less compelling today. With systems like Flatpak gaining traction, we're seeing a trend towards separating the Operating System (and I'm thinking more of the overall foundations of a complete, modern system, not just OS = Linux kernel) from the applications for that operating system. Existing package managers handling the OS while Flatpak, AppImage, Snap, etc. become how applications are installed and managed seems to be a good direction.

To be clear, the divide today is far from perfect and we still run into the "Are you running the Flatpak or the distro version of X?" There are also compatibility issues to be worked out. All that said, I do still find the story of "a stable OS with up-to-date applications" compelling.

I'll share my own story of the Windows 3.1 -> 95 migration and MS Tech support. At the time, I was using my grandfather's old PC that had originally been a 486sx 33mhz processor with 4mb of RAM and a 200mb HDD. We upgraded the machine using an Intel "Overdrive" processor to a 486dx/2 66mhz processor with 8mb of RAM and added a Soundblaster 16 sound card and triple-speed CD ROM drive. I received a copy of Windows 95 for Christmas 1995 and proceeded to install it on the system. It worked pretty well and, a few months later, I decided I wanted to add the "MS Plus!" pack.

I was 14 years old and knew very little about PCs at the time; though, I was learning. What I definitely didn't know at the time was that the HDD in the machine that I was told was nearly 500MB was actually a 200mb drive that had been compressed with an older version of DriveSpace. The addition of Plus! upgraded the compression to DriveSpace 3 which corrupted something on the drive that caused the system to hardlock as soon as the Windows 95 UI appeared no matter what I did.

After spending 4-5 hours on the phone with a very patient tech support specialist at MS, he eventually concluded that I would need to format the drive as nothing we did in those hours worked at all. Definitely a major learning experience for me doing my first full system format and OS reinstall.

By the end of 1996, I'd be doing my first Linux installation on a slightly newer PC that I saved money from a summer job to buy. If it hadn't been for DriveSpace 3 and an MS tech support specialist who educated the hell out of me for a few hours, who knows when (or even if) I would have gone down the rabbit hole that led to my career.

I'm excited for this feature. My brother purchased a small karaoke machine for my daughter for her birthday this year. It connects to her iPad via Bluetooth; but, so far, she's only been able to use her regular iTunes library for music. This is because the "karaoke music service" pushed in the box for the and available on the app store was a subscription for $19.99 PER WEEK.

I don't care if their audio processing to drop the volume of the lyrics isn't perfect. It will give my daughter the whole Apple Music catalog to sing along with and without the side of price-gouging.

Proton Next - Candidate build for the next major version release.

Proton Experimental - "Bleeding edge" builds.

He's not personally liable for the $13B. If (when?) Twitter implodes, he gets to walk away not owing a dime of that money--so why spend it if he doesn't have to?

I'd share your surprise; but, I sometimes question if they believed it themselves. I've spent the last 15 years in public companies and if there's one thing "The Street" demands, it's growth upon growth. The context of a pandemic being a once-in-a-lifetime event is meaningless. Your business experienced record growth and we expect you to continue that trajectory of increased growth no matter what--so get to investing for it!

The emails are not spoofed. They are actually generated by PayPal to notify an account holder of an invoice. The vast majority of the emails that these systems generate are legitimate emails with legitimate invoices.

The vector here is:

1. Create a PayPal account. 2. Create an invoice through PayPal's invoice tool and send to nabakin@example.com. 3. PayPal sends an email to notify the recipient of the outstanding invoice.

When PayPal detects fraudulent invoices are generated, they cancel those invoices so consumers no longer see them and can no longer pay on them; however, it's too late to stop the emails.

Former PayPal employee here.

In truth, you got the best possible experience and it's good that you reported it. Ultimately, what would happen internally is that we'd detect this malicious use and cancel the invoices so it's not possible for the scammer to continue to collect on them--but we couldn't "claw back" the emails that had already gone out. The email looked legit because it was an email from PayPal about a real invoice.

I don't know if they should be more proactive in their communication with folks in this situation and it's been over a year since I left; but, this is not a new issue at all and it's something we would contend with from time to time while I was there.

A couple of things. First, I used the phrase "debit card number" to basically mean, "they didn't have my physical card--but they did have the information to be able to use it."

Second, this happened circa 2004-2005. In the US, at the time, all card use was magnetic strip swipes. Debit cards occasionally used a pin at terminals equipped to do so; but, it wasn't a requirement and most use didn't involve the pin. As an example: a grocery store terminal at the cash register might require your pin; but, if you paid the bill at a restaurant, it would get swiped like any Visa/MC.

At the time, in an online setting, asking for additional information like CVV or using address for AVS wasn't standardized so not all merchants required anything beyond a card number and expiration date.

In that era, nearly everyone I knew had experienced a debit card or credit card stolen and used in this manner--and those with debit cards paid the extra price of actually losing our money for a time.

That fear isn't irrational at all (at least, it wasn't). About 20 years ago, I had a debit card number stolen and my account was cleared out. It took about a month to get resolved an, in that time, I had some very unpleasant conversations with quite a few people including my landlord about my inability to pay my bills. In the grand scheme, I suppose it didn't harm me--but it was an extremely unpleasant situation to deal with.

Since then, I've only used a debit card very sparingly and usually more as an ATM card in the event I need cash.

This comment thread on the previous conversation has a lot of good replies:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31908731

A few highlights:

* "If it ain't broke, don't fix it"

* People don't like Lua (or just simply prefer VimScript)

* Divergence over time means that they are not still compatible.

Former Netflix employee here (left back in 2013 so their stance might have changed).

At the time, Netflix was very opposed to what we called "meta search" (e.g. having Netflix titles available to look up outside the Netflix interface). The idea was that we wanted people to "consciously choose Netflix" as opposed to just choosing what they want to watch and getting it on whatever service happened to have it or was randomly chosen. I've always assumed they maintained this perspective (though, I'm somewhat surprised if they do considering the landscape today with every service leveraging their original/exclusive content more than their generic licensed library).

In my opinion (disclaimer, I'm currently test driving Arch again in a VMWare installation) this phenomenon is one that is routinely glossed over in discussions about challenges of the Linux desktop. The fact that the most active people hanging out in supposed "community support" channels are the type of technophiles for whom the statement, "You should really just use mplayer to watch YouTube videos" is a completely acceptable solution. They love their home-rolled digital duct tape built system and you should too!

That's just not at all acceptable to the majority of people who want to know they can click a link in Firefox (or Chromium or whatever) and watch the damn video. Perhaps more important: it's a prime example of sidestepping the question that is so frequent in these communities where you don't get answers to your questions, you get told random things sort of related to your question that others have done.

I started this recent test drive after installing Arch on a secondary system intended to be a home server and, within an hour, I had Steam installed, a DualShock 4 controller connected via bluetooth, and I was playing a windows game (Final Fantasy 12 - The Zodiac Age) at 60FPS stable. I honestly couldn't believe how much "just worked."

Prior to the regulation of pseudoephedrine, NyQuil also contained pseudoephedrine and since the nasal congestion from a a virus can often be the most disruptive factor for sleep (at least, in my personal experience, that's the case) it's considered by some to the be most important component.

NyQuil with pseudoephedrine included is now marketed as "NyQuil D" and is available behind many pharmacy counters with the same restrictions as other pseudoephedrine products. However, it could also rightly be called "NyQuil Classic" (to borrow branding from Coca-Cola).

Best Buy made some really good moves about a decade ago that have paid off for them; I think (one of) the biggest is investing heavily in Buy Online - Pickup in Store (BOPIS). After not having shopped there for years due to online shopping like NewEgg and Amazon, I found myself a few times needing something today and being able to put in an order and pick it up an hour later was really helpful. I still don't use them nearly as often as true online competition; but, they are useful for that.

As an aside, some of them have gone to the "Store within a store" concept where, instead of ill-informed blue-shirted kids wandering around aimlessly, you can find yourself in the LG TV section staffed by an LG-trained salesperson who can at least answer general questions about the units.

I loved Freshmeat from about 1998 to maybe 2002 or so and I remember checking it multiple times a day from my first dorm room at Georgia Tech. In those days, the "./configure && make && make install" was burned into my mind. As others have said, it really felt like the "wild west." I remember needing to turn in a printed paper and looking frantically for an updated version of AbiWord that fixed a bug I was experiencing.

By the end of my time using it, it already felt superfluous. I moved from RedHat to Debian and apt was clearly a better system for managing the software on my system than the random mix of installing RPMs and grabbing source tarballs.

My primary issue with paying for Google services is that, when it comes to Google, I am the product being sold. I honestly haven't looked into YouTube Premium despite consuming a fair amount of YouTube content because I don't strongly feel it will change the dynamic with Google: they will still take my viewing data on YouTube and package that to sell me to advertisers in other avenues.

So now, yes, I get a better YouTube experience by removing ads on my mobile device; but, I'm now paying Google money so they can make money off my viewing habits.

It appears to use BattlEye which is another anti-cheat solution

https://www.protondb.com/app/578080

The thing is, part of the challenge is that we don't really know if the game itself will work because people can't get past the anti-cheat to see if the game itself works.