Well, I surprised myself by making it through the first video, at least. It was interesting to hear the guy ripping on the “hide the menus” concept as hard as I’ve always done. That shit drove me berserk when it came out.

You didn’t even mention the ribbon lol.

100% Ballmer is yakked out on coke.

I started working as a professional programmer in the mid-90s when three-tiered design was all the rage: a data access layer, a business logic layer, and a presentation layer. It seems that nobody actually knew what “business logic” was even supposed to be, because I kept inheriting projects where all the middle tier did was hand data objects from the data layer to the UI. In theory this prevented the UI from being fundamentally bound to the data access, but all three layers were always written in Visual Basic which got kicked to the curb in a few years anyway.

Surely the only people buying tickets are teenagers who want to have sex in an empty theater?

Looks like an ornithopter cockpit lol. I liked the new Dune movies well enough, but there is (was) a lot of stuff in them that was kind of jarringly off. One thing was the ornithopter cockpit with the shitload of modern (our modern) switches that Duncan Idaho had to flip to get started, completely not fitting in at all with pretty much every other example of technology on display.

I recently saw the first movie again and it seems they had edited that part out, although maybe that was just for the TV version. They had also edited out the exchange where Duncan sees Paul on Arrakis for the first time and says “you look like you’ve put on some muscle.” “Really?” “No.” Just a terrible Marvel-style cheap laugh and the movie benefited from not having it there.

Some women like tiny faces. Don’t kink-shame.

I wonder if my old app circa 2000 would actually run on Linux/Wine. One of my projects for this winter is to install Linux on one of my Windows laptops. I’ll have to give the old app a try.

It was originally written as a C DLL utilized by a Visual Basic front end. The C DLL used the Win95 API, though, so it wouldn’t have worked on anything but Windows 95 and onwards. I subsequently ported the entire thing to C# but still using the same API to do the actual playing of the audio (I experimented with using DirectSound instead but that was really not appropriate for an application doing its own audio mixing). Now I’m working on an iOS version and I couldn’t give two fucks about Windows at this point.

As a programmer, it’s pretty wild how much of Windows under the hood has remained completely unchanged. I started writing software synthesizer applications back in the late '90s, using a part of the Win95 API called “winOutX”. The functions are kind of clunky to use but they allow you to programmatically create your own audio buffer arrays filled with whatever sounds you’re up to creating and dump them into the playback stream for seamless audio. This shit has remained in place, working pretty much perfectly, for the last 30 years. It was even there in WinCE/Windows Mobile, which allowed me to write software synthesis applications for early smartphones circa 2005. And it’s still all there today.

I like to rip on MS as much as the next guy (not least for them completely dropping the fucking ball as far as smartphones were concerned), but sometimes their incredibly long-term conservatism can work to your benefit.

“I’m serious as cancer when I say that TikTok is a cancer!”

Fucking Federman before the 2024 election castigated his fellow Democrats for daring to use Trump’s actual fucking felony convictions against him as a political tool, because (according to him) Democrats are supposed to be “the party of forgiveness”. Just unbelievable bullshit from him, even worse than his “Trump signs are Pennsylvania’s state flower” comment.

I’m sorry you had to lose your mother to this bullshit.

Escort carriers?

He (King George V) would have done it (in 1911). Asquith (the Prime Minister) told him that his father (King Edward VII) had promised to do it before his death in 1910 and King George assented. Asquith actually prepared lists with hundreds of names on them.

The British House of Lords used to hold the same sort of power with their ability to veto anything passed by the House of Commons. The House of Commons took this veto power away, but unfortunately they were only able to do this by getting the King to threaten to ennoble hundreds of new people and overwhelm the power of the traditional Lords. Our (US) current King would of course never agree to any such thing.

Spend a half hour watching Fox News and you can see the alternate reality that magats are living in. My personal exposure to Fox News is an occasional accidental glance at the TV screens at the gym and even just from that it’s obvious what’s going on.

Slightly negative poll numbers + strongly-worded letter = REVOLUTION!

I’m a school bus driver and I drive across multiple freeway overpasses each day. On most days these have protestors with temporary signs up on the fences facing the highway traffic. The problem is I have no idea whether they’re pro-Trump or anti-Trump since I only see the backs of the signs. One time I could make out “Jan. 6” on one of the signs (this was on January 6th, natch) but I don’t know whether they were remembering the good old days or not.

their company has refused to read or implement one or several of the fundamental principles

The companies I worked for just kept doing shit the same way they always had but renamed everything with terms borrowed from agile.