digi_owl

While not at guaranteed, killing the data wires (or shorting them) makes the device think it is dealing with a charge only port.

Thus various companies have made devices that conditionally apply said short.

Here is one example: https://www.startech.com/Cables/USB-2.0/USB-Adapters/USB-2-F...

Yet again something M-I complex adopts a norse term...

The layers of VMs and interpreters involved in this gives me vertigo...

Dosbox?

I think you would be better off getting Windows 3.x going in Dosbox.

I really with the FOSS world would take backwards compatiblity more seriously, but all i hear is "we lack resources" when it is more correct to say those rainbow haired devs think C and such stale and boring.

I dunno about broke, if they had backported the DirectX stuff to XP there would not have been a breakage. But MS tried to use DX10 as an upsell of Vista, thus making DX9 the last directX version on XP.

What we ended up with was a whole host of game engines that stuck with DX9 to try to reach the largest possible market.

The underlying Windows platform still allows for external installs. And the other big names, EA and Ubisoft, already operate their own storefronts.

Android technically allows for the same, see the existence of f-droid for example, but the experience is less smooth (more dialogs to tap through) than when using Google Play.

My, likely flawed, understanding is that the Chinese trust the government more than the west have a history of doing. The mentality is something more like a family elder, if i have understood things correctly.

Ah yes, visual stories 2.0...

Seems like gaming has long since hit an "eternal September" as producers are spewing out ever more impressive tech demos.

I have long since taken to killing every graphical effect game devs can think of throwing into a game (if they supplied a toggle for it) simply so i can tell where the enemy is without wearing sunglasses indoors in a dark room.

User friendliness is a smokescreen, it is about being upstream friendly. This in that now you get the kitchen sink of dependencies on each install rather than them actually having to care about API stability (not that they did much in the past).

This because they do not want to admit that distros being slow with rolling out new releases of their software, is because of the dependency tangles that they have created for distro maintainers.

It depends. If you use the NDK you have to make sure you can build for both x86 and ARM (the play store will hand out the relevant variant silently).

Also, Google have done some serious work to ensure at least some backwards compatibility (and providing a support library, that i fail to recall the exact name of, for backporting various functionality).

While the FOSS world seems to lean on "compile it" along with "lacking resources" as an excuse for not maintaining anything more than incidental compatibility across releases.

> It's like they looked at everything bad about Chocolatey/NPM/pip/AUR and just ran with it.

Basically they did just that. The only "desktop" devs left in Linux land are really cloud devs that dabble in desktop on the side. Damn it, i have been basically told to clam up when i complained about the cloud mentality having no home on the desktop. Because apparently only could mattered because it was the big Linux user case.

IMO proprietary lags way more because you do not know if your chosen framework (unless it is Qt, heh) will function 5-10 years down the line with minimal investment in updates.

The Linux kernel is everywhere thanks to Torvalds (overly late in the opinions of some BSD devs) declaring the API/ABI sacrosanct, and holding the other kernel developers to that (much to the chagrin of some that want to do hail mary changes for sake of security or ego).

But the userspace above had been reimplemented again and again because the various libs and such are fundamentally unstable. In far too many cases you can even do a x.y.z+1 update without getting some kind of breakage.

Often because someone decided that spec adherence was more important than real life stability, and thus pushed a patch through that altered the API behavior to be more in line with a spec that nobody had complained about for a decade or more.

Want things to make it into STABLE distros quicker, do not break APIs because the latest bling bling framework/language/whatever got released!

And most of that come out of upstream not having a farts care about API stability!

Thus distros have to work around that by freezing lib versions and any software depending on said lib version for the support period of the distro release (5-10 years).

What is "funny" is that Debian here is doing no different from what RH had been doing with RHEL for ages, yet Debian gets all the flak...

Never mind that xscreensaver has a very prominent splash screen with JWZ's email on it on every launch. Maybe if he didn't want every idiot on the net emailing him, he should not show it in their face all the time. He may be brilliant in some ways, but sometimes he can be an raging asshole.

Hell, sometimes i wonder why he keeps supporting Linux as he seems to have no love for anything but Apple these days.

The FOSS of today is as much driven by buzzword bingo as the big corporations (perhaps so much of it is made by people working for big corporations now a days). And the really big buzzword in FOSS these days is containers. In large part thanks to the massive presence of cloud derived thinking (i have been told that basically all that mattered was cloud, as that was were the usage was).

AV1 will win if torrents adopt it...

Reminds me of an article on crows, and how some that were slackers most of the time would step in to take care of the young when the more active members of the group got ill.

Something like Delta Chat?

https://delta.chat/en/

I am of two minds about this.

While i want to see the x86 desktop get a serious contender once again, it has risen on the back of a very open and modular platform.

But ARM based products are virtual black boxes by comparison.

Thus i worry if ARM rising to the challenge on the desktop will lead to an acceleration of the trend of "devicification" the desktop.

I can't help wonder if we lost something in our race for realistic real time 3d rendering.

Reminds me of some years back when a single driver was added to Linux that allowed it to support 100+ models of webcams. This because every damn brand and model used the same internals, but had different USB IDs.

And we should not forget that RMS' initially rallying call was about printer drivers. where as with the old printer he had the source, so he could add a bit of code to notify the people with jobs in the queue that the printer was out of paper, the new printer only came with a binary blob driver.

Computers at its core have no clue about offense or defense, that is in the realm of context (and lawyers).

Reminds me that i have a "fun" one here.

Two tablets, both using the same Intel internals (as best i can tell), but one has a non-functional SD reader while the other works just fine. The difference between them is that one uses 32-bit Windows (no clue why) while the other uses 64-bit windows.

Thing is that the SD slot worked fine when i initially got the tablet, but broke at some point after a major Windows update. And thee is no way i can find to roll back drivers.

From personal experience, any site will render quickly of you kill the 10+ externally sourced JS frameworks it loads (or it will just show a white on white page that you can throw reader mode at).

Frankly what went wrong was that print media designers got involved and used flash and JS to turn static text into virtual pamphlets etc.

Gets me thinking of an episode of the original Connections, where the host muses about how computers will make corporate management mostly obsolete.

He envisioned them doing little more than sitting idly around waiting for the computer in the basement to churn out the game plan for the next business period.

As i recall, most heroin overdoses happen when someone tries to get clean, slips, and ends up injecting a dose based on unknown purity and fails to account for their loss of tolerance.

Sounds like a variant of the mops and sociopaths problem.

https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths