Windows ME was a crapshoot. One of our computers blue screened a few times during the couple months we had it installed; the other couldn’t even run an hour without hard crashing.
Nowadays I can’t even remember the last time Windows crashed. Newer versions are definitely a lot more stable, though suck in different ways.
The funny thing is the whole commercialization process started with one of the future partners messaging the project lead out of the blue on LinkedIn. I don’t know about you, but taking ideas from a random LinkedIn user doesn’t strike me as good business sense.
Then again, getting something out of your years of unpaid volunteer work must be incredibly tempting, given how many open source projects have sold out over the years. At least it was to form an actual legitimate company this time, unlike when SuperSU (the Android root solution before Magisk came along) sold themselves to a scummy foreign ad company. That one still ranks as the all time top WTF sale.
It’s a forked up world.
CyanogenMod, which was the base of most custom Android ROMs at one point. After taking venture funding, incompetent business majors crashed and burned the project trying to commercialize it. It was then forked and LineageOS was born.
I’ve never asked, but I believe medical issues cropped up and their reduced retirement funds wouldn’t have been enough, forcing them to keep working, and the situation spiraled from there.
Magneto hates Beast?
Yeah, I remember my parents talking about how badly they were hit in the late 00s. They were considering retirement just as the recession struck, and they lost a huge chunk of what they’d hoped to retire on.
They still haven’t retired fifteen years later despite declining health.
They don’t have it for the same reason Sony later removed it from the PS3: letting users run arbitrary code on your console provides a massive attack surface for piracy and jailbreaking exploits.
They canceled the GTA V story DLC after seeing the success of GTA Online, and their long-time head writer and producer resigned. I have little faith that GTA6 will capture the same spark that their earlier games had.
In pog dog form!
Genie was locked up at 20 months old. I don’t think they locked her up because of her mental illness. They locked her up because of their mental illness. I reference Genie because she’s the most documented “wild child,” which is a completely disgusting term.
I was going off old college memories - after looking it up, it sounds like her father thought she was mentally disabled and began/increased his neglect because of it, despite her only outward health issue being delayed walking due to a hip problem.
Also re: “wild child”. I agree, and thanks for pointing it out. That’s what they were called in my books, but catchy rhyme aside it’s a horrible way to refer to a victim of such abuse. I’ll edit my original comment.
Language is universal to all humans, even though it is multifaceted. Humans also have massive brains that require extra care to bring to fruition in comparison to other animals. Language is one of those things. You can learn other languages at any age, but you first need learn a language.
It would be fascinating to know what inner thoughts look like without the construct of language to frame them in. Unfortunately there’s no ethical way to find out, short of uplifting a non-sapient species and asking them.
There was an old study showing that London taxi drivers develop enlarged hippocampi, the part of the brain used for navigation, to deal with the labyrinthian London streets. The growth continued over several years even in mature adults as they used those navigation and memorization abilities. I’d like to see a study of the brain of an adult prospective language learner over a long period to see if any similar plasticity exists for the brain’s language centers.
(I’ll admit I’m horribly biased. I was exceptional at picking up new languages as a teen, but let that knowledge decay into nothingness as an adult. I’d hate to have wasted such a useful talent.)
Given the success of foreign exchange students, I’m willing to bet the age factor is much less important than people claim.
People bring up the abused or abandoned children that had trouble learning to speak when introduced to society later in life, but usually fail to mention the reason they were neglected/abandoned as children was due to mental disabilities, so they aren’t really a viable data point.
I think this is showing how much faith people have in regular commercial pet food. Normal pet food isnt great for your pets, look into what the ingredients actually are and their quality.
Not stepping into the vegan drama here, just wanted to chime in here about cat food. Two of my three family cats growing up had terrible kidney issues in their elder years. It turns out that - even setting aside the grains and fillers added to kibble - dry food is bad for cats unless they drink a ton of water with it.
Domestic cats are descended from desert wildcats that obtained most of their water content from their prey, and they inherited a low natural thirst drive because of this. Kidney issues are common if cats don’t get enough moisture in their diet, and since they instinctively hide symptoms of illness, you might not notice anything is wrong until it’s too late.
Kibble became the norm because a) most people are used to dogs and b) it’s cheaper and way more convenient than canned food (which is a messy bacterial magnet that can’t be safely left out for more than an hour). If anyone reading this feeds their cat exclusively dry food, consider switching to at least a partially wet food diet or buying a cat fountain (the sound of flowing water entices some cats to drink more often). Watching your beloved family members suffer from kidney failure is a hell I wouldn’t wish on anyone.
Three things in CS meet the qualifications for arcane runes: complex regular expressions, pointer arithmetic, and bit shifting.
Hear, hear! You can burn out at anything, even your most beloved hobbies.
I was a video game modder for most of my life, but burnt out on the hobby completely after several years of maintaining a dozen or so mods for an early access game.
Making new features was great, and hunting down reported bugs in my own code was enjoyable. Constantly fixing compatibility issues due to updates (and having to rewrite perfectly valid code due to shifting or deprecated APIs) wasn’t.
I love modding, but even things you enjoy get old after a while, and the feeling of obligation to continue (even if only not to disappoint your fans) wears at you.
Ponder Stibbons inserts another punch card into Hex. Ants flow through tubes and gears begin turning.
Megumin’s other problem is she only specced into things that would improve her explosion’s damage output, neglecting basic mage things like mana capacity and efficiency. So she can only cast one (stupidly overpowered) explosion spell before all but passing out from using more mana than she actually has. It’s why no other party would take her, because even in situations where the spell would be useful she becomes a massive liability after casting it.
I’ve been to Subway twice in the last twenty years. Both times the shop was understaffed and it took more than half an hour to get our meals, and they weren’t even good compared to other sub chains that cost less, let alone the local non-franchise sub shops.
The last attempt was a few years before COVID. I can’t imagine how bad it is now.
8 changed a lot of UI for no reason other than to chase the mobile market. 8.1 reverted a lot of that and people liked it, but the damage to 8’s reputation had already been done.
If they kept the edition alive for a few years 8.1 might be remembered as a redemption story like Windows 98 Second Edition, but they rushed 10 out the door - as a free upgrade, no less - to get back the goodwill they’d lost.