You can do that in Linux too! Just put an entry in crontab to reboot the system sometime during your working hours.

As I say, when you’re hunting around for something in Windows and you come across a dialog box that came straight from Windows XP… you’re getting close.

Scientific calculators were some of the first pocket computers.

I have two color laser printers. The old one is a Dell branded printer from about 15 years ago and was about the cheapest color laser printer you could buy at the time. It has some issues now particularly with color printouts, and combined with poor Linux support meant I went ahead and bought its replacement, a much nicer Brother model. But as the old printer can still give acceptable results for some things I’m keeping it until it runs out of toner which could be a while.

On top of that I still have an HP LaserJet 4 but that’s been disconnected for a while. Still prints but desperately needs new rollers.

To be fair, Windows 11 also runs like shit on a desktop with an i9 and 32GB of RAM.

That’s tackling a different myth about light bulbs using a lot of energy to start up so it’s better to leave them on rather than pay the extra energy cost of starting them up again.

Here, the hypothesis is that stress of thermal cycling of the components in LED light bulb by cycling it on and off will shorten the life of the bulb and the cost of replacing the bulbs prematurely is greater than the energy costs of just leaving it on. While it’s certainly true that almost all LED light bulb failures I have seen are not the actual LEDs themselves but the other components, I’m still skeptical. Especially as LED bulbs have gotten really cheap now.

It’s the latter for all of the Bluetooth audio protocols that I’ve worked with.

I don’t know about ChatGPT, but Github Copilot can act like an autocomplete. Or you can think of it as a fancier Intellisense. You still have to watch its output as it can make mistakes or hallucinate library function calls and things like that, but it can also be quite good at anticipating what I was going to write and saves me some keystrokes. I’ve also found I can prompt it in a way by writing a comment and it’ll follow up with attempt to fill in code based upon that comment. I’ve certainly found it to be a net time saver.

Actually, the web browser is one of the major offenders when it comes to consuming large amounts of RAM.

The van itself doesn’t make sense. It’s a weird mashup of Ford and Chevy styling and details, with a bit of Dodge thrown in for good measure. It’s actually pretty plausible and very realistic looking but that’s not a Chevy van (nor is it a Ford or a Dodge with a badge transplant). Some thing with all the cars in the background. They are all very plausible but I can’t actually ID any of them.

Either someone has been busy with Photoshop, or the AI stuff is getting scary good.

Smells like AI slop to me…

I suppose it depends a bit. Most of the people who want a hobby farm also want the amenities that big cities offer, so the hobby farms tend to be at the edges of the outer-ring suburbs which could be considered sprawl. There’s also working farms in those sorts of areas, but I’d not call that sprawl since those farms are using the land productively and in most cases were there long before the suburbs started encroaching on them.

A rural hobby farm out in the middle of nowhere I’d be less inclined to call sprawl.

FDR didn’t stack the supreme court. He threatened to do it, but ultimately didn’t follow through. We’ve been at 9 supreme court justices since 1869.

It was probably a combination of using the motherboard RAID and AMD motherboards to boot.

Microsoft also updated their Windows XP install disk a few times over the years. If you were installing from an original launch disk from 2001 on a PC with 2006 hardware it was quite a different experience than with a disk that already had SP3 and a bunch of newer drivers.

I would think the instructions to the scientist would be to only send a thumbs up if you’re confident everything is good. Otherwise, send a thumbs down (or send nothing). I mean, the future of humanity is at stake here.

I also kind of assume that the original mission didn’t know about the time dilation thing, but the whole reason to send a human is the human can adapt to a new situation. And in this situation the scientist would realize that thanks to the time dilation problem they either aren’t going to be able to respond in the expected (Earth) time frame or to completely half-ass the job they are supposed to do. And they chose the latter, when the former would be very reasonable (Earth might at first wonder about the lack of a response - but later missions would discover the reason why). Though given the experience at the next planet I suppose you can conclude that when they sent out the original batch of scientists they didn’t send out their best.

Of course there’s also thing with only being able to send out a very basic thumbs up/thumbs down message is a highly contrived thing that’s only there to make the extremely weak plot work.

30 years ago, Windows 95/98 (not sure about things like NT4) would just fall back to going through the BIOS to access the disk. It was slow, but it worked, and you could install Windows and then install your storage drivers later. Needing to push F6 and install your storage drivers during the install was a Windows 2000/XP thing.

The installing Windows 20 years ago panel is missing the bit where you have to push F6 and have a floppy disk handy with the drivers for your storage device. Yes, an actual floppy disk. Ditto for all the other drivers (video, sound, network, etc.) that you usually had to install once you were booted into the OS.

Most American bathrooms you have a combo tub/shower. So you get the shower on the wall and use the drain in the tub. Since you have to step over the side of the tub to take a shower that’s not what many people consider a “walk-in” shower. In higher-end, generally newer construction sometimes they’ll have a separate walk-in shower and tub. Bathrooms with just a shower are somewhat uncommon. If you see a 3/4 bath listed in a house that’s a bathroom with just a shower and no tub.

I’ve considered getting rid of my tub and just having a shower as I never use the tub part, but as I only have one “full” bathroom supposedly having a house with no tub hurts the resale value. I might do it anyway, but also what I have is working fine and I’m lazy.

I didn’t look at it as so much of a plot hole, but the first clue that when you’re in the “real world” you’re not actually in reality but really still in the matrix (or perhaps another matrix that doesn’t work quite the same). Same thing with the whole scorch the sky bit - doesn’t make sense in reality but in a simulated reality you can change up the rules a bit. The second movie, to me, played into this further with a bunch more clues dropped about that what the characters considered reality wasn’t actually real. The third movie, obviously, would deal with that… but instead… well I’m still not sure what the hell that movie was about.

The other big problem with the time dilation aspect is the scientist they originally sent to that planet to check it out beforehand couldn’t have been there very long at all. They must have landed, took a quick look around, and been like “hey looks good, thumbs up!”. I though the whole reason they sent a human to do that job is so the human could thoroughly check things out and might notice unusual things like massive planet-wide tidal waves.

To add to that, if you sent me to check out an unknown planet I’d first spend a considerable amount of time in orbit surveying the planet, looking for things like a livable temperature range, a non-poisonous atmosphere, reasonable gravity, and no massive planet-wide tidal waves before attempting a landing. Hell, even if I wanted to get to the landing part as quickly as possible I’d still want to do a quick survey of the planet if only to find a good place to land. Clearly the original scientist did none of that. Nor, for that matter did the crew in the movie, though I suppose I could kind of excuse them as they were in a hurry and they had the “all good” signal.