benjaminpv

Anyway, since it transcodes the WP into a JPEG, it has the ability to select a compression ratio. That ratio is pretty famously < 100% and as a result there's some degenerate cases where a wallpaper that looks good when viewed in the filesystem looks terrible when set to the background.

https://superuser.com/questions/1377883/how-to-prevent-wallp...

Comment · 2 years ago

Do things like the upgradable firmware and integrated text editor live in a path that's separate from the 8KB of data? If not I'd fear it would die before the actual storage did.

I also vaguely recall that Sonic 3 used this storage type? Like it was a weird outlier for cartridge-based saves IIRC.

Edit: Yeah, it did: https://hackaday.io/project/13425-sonic-3-feram-adapter

Comment · 2 years ago

Or more broadly, don't do something unbidden on my behalf then complain when it doesn't work. I swear 75% of the times I've daydreamed about a return to a single-tasking OS like DOS was on account of software trying to 'help' me.

Comment · 2 years ago

Yeah, people frequently trot out the Sim City classic example, but the fact is that games in particular have borne the brunt of Windows API changes. If it didn't happen we'd have no need for wrappers like dgVoodoo: software once only meant to wrap Glide calls, but now used to get around deprecation to DirectX as well. Not to mention the breaking changes to the audio stack that happened between 9x and Vista.

Comment · 2 years ago

I don't know if anything's changed but for a long time a lot of Word's formatting was impacted by the printer you had installed and/or selected. So it was pretty easy to run into scenarios on a network where printers being taken offline/their capabilities changed resulted in documents getting reformatted.

Comment · 2 years ago

>mService always immediately returns the “drive ready” code

I've read enough of these emulation / reverse engineering blogs to know this will inevitably come back to haunt them.

Comment · 2 years ago

Decades late, but they could have told you to use Special: Eject Disk if dragging to the trash was too much for you. Then you'd have to grapple with what to do now that the physical disk was in your hand but its icon remained. There was also...Command+Y, I think?

Comment · 3 years ago

Absolutely this. My parents would take an impromptu vacation toward the tail end of winter and every time they basically just told the school 'we're leaving, give him the homework he'll be missing, end communication.'

Years later I was having dinner with a coworker and his teacher wife and explained it to her. "Yeah we'd go to like science exhibits and museums and all, it was really fun!" She was just aghast. Like 'y-you can't just t-take kids out of school?!'

Comment · 3 years ago

COBOL was actually in the CS curriculum for my university, a fact that several of my friends brought up when the 'COVID is prompting a real need for COBOL programmers in light of the need to change benefits rules and unemployment!' stories were a regular feature on the nightly news.

'You should do it, man!' Yeah, sure. I'd already suffered through the liquidation of my entire department in 2018, the prospect of the heat around COBOL dying down and facing that once again with the additional stain of 'oh, what've you been doing? Cool, popular JS frameworks? No, COBOL? Pass.' on my CV during my next round of interviews didn't seem at all appealing.

That mentality should set the expectation for anyone looking into a COBOL job. It's not just this job, it's the next one.

Comment · 3 years ago

Yep, you still see it come up nowadays with people running it under virtualization.

https://www.os2museum.com/wp/those-win9x-crashes-on-fast-mac...

Comment · 3 years ago

Something I haven't seen discussed very widely: it feels like there's not only a balance needed in determine what to log vs what not to log, but also logging in a way that isn't a detriment to the readability of the code overall.

Over time I've actually found myself logging less just because having to sorta mentally elide logging lines added to the cognitive overhead of reading & understanding code.