10,398 karma · joined April 1, 2019
"Hey dad, what's this trip I hear you talking about?"
"Well son, even though you're 8 years old, I've decided to spend the next 28 years walking around the world."
"Gee dad, that sure seems like a long walk. Are you sure about this?"
"Well of course I'll be taking breaks rather than doing the whole thing at once."
"Great, so you'll be able to visit me, your 8 year old son, right?"
"Nope! I've decided to add my own self-imposed rule that I can't visit the UK until I've completed my walk. Instead, whenever I don't feel like walking, I'm going to fly to Mexico and hang out there. Then when I do feel like walking again, I'll fly back to where I was and resume my walk."
"So you're leaving me, your 8 year old son, to go on a 28 year long, non-contiguous walk around the world where you'll rarely see me? And by the time I grow up we'll barely know each other? And you'll end up missing the birth of your granddaughter?"
"That's right, son! I hope you're excited for the first of 4 times we'll see each other, 6 years from now! Aren't you proud of your dad for being such a great explorer?"
"..."
Macs had managed to avoid this degradation for a while because they didn't have touchscreens, but Apple put in the giant finger-friendly padding regions as part of the UI changes in Tahoe, which got a lot of negative feedback. Now that they're introducing touchscreen laptops, it's unlikely that they'll ever fully revert those changes since it will make the touch experience worse.
A few years ago Lenovo put out a buggy firmware update for the Thunderbolt controllers in a couple generations of Thinkpads (the list is here: https://pcsupport.lenovo.com/ca/en/solutions/ht508988 ) that caused excessive writes to the controller's EEPROM. This would eventually wear out the EEPROM, which would stop the controller from functioning. You would then have issues like USB-C devices not working, display over USB-C not working, and charging over USB-C not working. Lenovo released a firmware update to fix the issue, but everyone whose controller had already broken needed a motherboard replacement. If your device was out of warranty, Lenovo made you pay full price for the new motherboard even though it had broken because of their firmware update.
Because of how much of a radical departure Windows 95 was from previous UI designs, and because of how driven the design was by user testing, there's a lot of information available going over why the design is the way it is. For example, there's an article going over the iterative design process here: https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-9... and there's a detailed document explaining the UI for reviewers here: https://web.archive.org/web/20260209083725/https://tech-insi...
If you read through old HIGs, they generally have actual concrete reasoning behind the choices they made. They're pretty interesting to read because back then they did scientific user studies to try to make computers more usable.
For example, Microsoft didn't make the UI gray because of some aesthetic preference. They chose gray because black-on-gray text is easy to read, and because it makes it immediately obvious what's UI vs. what's content (vs. if they made the background white or something). They made all the buttons three-dimensional because it makes it immediately obvious that something is clickable. Getting rid of stuff like this makes the UI prettier, but it also gets rid of hints for how to use the software.
> 1–2 weeks’ pay per semester of tenure, based on level; six months of fully covered COBRA (remaining 12 months paid by you) and two vesting events in February and May.
> L65-L67 get 4w of pay per year of service, while L64 and below get 2w per year. I’ve been with MS for 10 years, so I qualify for the max payout of 39w.
> Eligibility this time is up to L70, not sure what the package is for L68-70.
> 1–2 weeks’ pay per semester of tenure, based on level; six months of fully covered COBRA (remaining 12 months paid by you) and two vesting events in February and May.
> L65-L67 get 4w of pay per year of service, while L64 and below get 2w per year. I’ve been with MS for 10 years, so I qualify for the max payout of 39w.
> Eligibility this time is up to L70, not sure what the package is for L68-70.
There's one part where he goes over how he felt scorned because a remake of a different Touhou game that he wasn't decompiling came out, and people in the Western Touhou community worked on it, but nobody told him about it prior to its public announcement. There's a different part where he's complaining about how some FreeBSD user submitted a PR to fix his Seihou port to build on FreeBSD since the niche build system he uses doesn't have good support for *BSD. He spends a paragraph ranting about how he would never support FreeBSD, then the next paragraph is about how he would have loved to get it working on FreeBSD if the person went about asking for the feature the "correct way", then he says he'd rather quit programming entirely than support FreeBSD on desktop.
I think he saw the project as an obligation that he couldn't get rid of rather than something he did out of passion. There's a section at the end where he goes over how his life will improve now that he doesn't have to work on the project. Notably, throughout the post he calls out by name various people in the Touhou community that he doesn't like, but he never calls out any of the vibecoders. I hope that he can now spend his time doing something that he actually enjoys.
I think it's just Panasonic at this point?
It's strange that Sony are retiring their current player so soon after they introduced it. As the article mentions, that model was introduced last year. It's the exact same as Sony's previous model from 8 years ago except they took out the streaming functionality and raised the price. It's the sort of thing you'd expect them to do if they were going to keep the product on the market for a long time, since they wouldn't have to invest in firmware development to keep the streaming functionality working.
Besides the issue of games leaking early, piracy groups would also use Switch emulation as a workaround for the PC version of a multiplatform game having Denuvo DRM. They would make an installer that bundled the Switch version of a game with a preconfigured emulator, so people could run the game by double-clicking an icon without having any knowledge of how to set up a Switch emulator. This isn't really relevant anymore because of hypervisor cracks making it far easier to bypass Denuvo, but I think it demonstrates how widespread Switch piracy was.
I agree that this won't have any sort of major impact on Nintendo's bottom line, but I imagine it'll have some impact. I doubt this will lead Nintendo to change their exclusivity policies. They didn't change anything when the GBA was emulated during its commercial life, when DS piracy was rampant during its commercial life, when Wii piracy was rampant during its commercial life, when 3DS piracy was rampant during its commercial life, or when the Switch was emulated during its commercial life.
> Given the severity of these vulnerabilities, the PHP security team provided minimal source-backports for PHP 7.4, PHP 8.0, and PHP 8.1 to help people building from source or without access to an LTS vendor.
> I always thought he should start a Youtube channel interviewing Silicon Valley celebrities. I sent him a few emails along those lines, but Bob would mostly just ignore me. He was usually too excited about his new/current startup idea.
He did do a series of video interviews with tech people that got distributed online in the early 2000s. They're a good watch: https://archive.org/search?query=subject%3A%22nerdtv%22 . I agree that it's a shame that he didn't keep going with that idea during the rise of Youtube. He wrote a blog post where he basically says that the economics of Youtube didn't allow for the scale and spectacle of content he wanted to put out: https://www.cringely.com/2012/06/28/why-youtube-isnt-future-... . He did try to return to being a TV presenter by making a show about traveling around the US to interview various company founders, but for whatever reason PBS chose to pick up a similar show rather than his. The production company uploaded some clips from the project if anyone's interested: https://boondogglemedia.com/project/startup-america/
> NTIA and Verisign have agreed to extend and modify the Cooperative Agreement. These modifications are in line with policy priorities of the Trump Administration. The changes create a new commitment to content neutrality in the Domain Name System (DNS), provide market-based pricing flexibility, and reduce the regulatory burden on Verisign.
> Amendment 35 confirms that Verisign will operate the .com registry in a content neutral manner with a commitment to participate in ICANN processes. To that end, NTIA looks forward to working with Verisign and other ICANN stakeholders in the coming year on trusted notifier programs to provide transparency and accountability in the .com top level domain.
> The amendment repeals Obama-era price controls and provides Verisign the pricing flexibility to change its .com Registry Agreement with ICANN to increase wholesale .com prices. Specifically, the flexibility permits Verisign to pursue with ICANN an up to 7 percent increase in the prices for .com domain names, in each of the last four years of the six-year term of the .com Registry Agreement. The changes also affirm that Verisign may not vertically integrate or operate as a registrar in the .com top level domain.
In 2024, the NTIA announced that it had renewed its agreement with Verisign. Their statement said that the NTIA believed that lower .com prices would be in the public interest, but were unable to reach an agreement with Verisign on pricing https://www.ntia.gov/blog/2024/com-cooperative-agreement-ens... .
The reason why the NTIA were no longer able to limit wholesale .com pricing was due to the 2018 amendment to the .com contract basically removing all negotiating leverage the NTIA had over Verisign. The amendment included provisions that made the agreement automatically renew every six years unless the NTIA gave timely notice of nonrenewal (so if the two sides couldn't reach an agreement it would continue in its current form), and allowing Verisign to continue operating the .com TLD even if the agreement was terminated.
The plaintiffs will have to prove that Verisign was acting unlawfully despite its prices being explicitly permitted by its arrangements with the US government. They'll also have to prove that they even have grounds to sue, when the Illinois Brick doctrine establishes that indirect purchasers of goods/services can't seek damages for antitrust violations. In this case, this means that the end domain purchasers may be unable to sue because they purchased their domains from registrars rather than directly from Verisign.
There's a lot of myths around 2600 Pac-Man. The game was made in around 5 months, which was a normal amount of dev time for a 2600 game. The ghosts flickering was due to insufficient RAM, not insufficient ROM. Tod Frye, the game's programmer, had a kernel that would reposition the sprites as the screen drew, but it needed additional RAM. Frye really wanted Pac-Man to have a 2-player mode, as the arcade version did and he felt that having a 2-player mode gave the consumer more value. This meant that there wasn't enough RAM to get rid of the flicker, since the game had to keep track of the game state for each player. The 2600 version of Ms. Pac-Man was 1-player only, which is how they avoided the flickering.
Because he knew in advance that he would be crossing the border. If your threat model includes ensuring that US border control does not view the contents of your phone, and you're returning to the US after an international flight, then you need to take appropriate precautions (i.e. wiping your phone beforehand rather than after they've taken it). It's not like the police suddenly raided his house in the middle of the night. Obviously I feel bad for the guy, but if he had acted differently he would not have been criminally charged.