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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.