argv_minus_one @ argv_minus_one @beehaw.org

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2 yr. ago

That's why people switched to cable to start with. Broadcast TV had ads and cable didn't.

People have depressingly short memories and a depressingly long patience for megacorporate thievery.

Because most phones don't have a stylus.

Adobe: “You need to pay us over and over to edit PDFs! Suckers!”
Inkscape: “Hold my beer.”

There are alarm clock apps requiring a subscription now? Good heavens.

None, because I never subscribed in the first place.

Most of my media consumption is video games, and I often revisit decades-old games, so only temporarily having access to a game is not acceptable. Neither am I interested in paying more than once to retain access to content I already paid for; that's a scam. Perpetual license or GTFO.

I don't generally watch movies, but if that ever changes, I'll be buying them on disc, keeping them, and ripping them so I can play them on my Linux PC. If I can't rip a disc because available tools can't break the DRM, then the disc is defective as far as I'm concerned, so I'll most likely return it for a refund without watching the movie.

I'd like to credit early-2000s Slashdot for teaching me to think this way. If everyone did, a lot of today's problems wouldn't exist, including the subscription scam we're discussing in this thread. Shame what happened to that website and its community, but it was good while it lasted.

The Grim Distro Reaper has been busy this year.

Anybody remember BitchX and the various scripts for mIRC? '90s IRC was edgy.

You realize IRC servers can read all of your messages, right? If you're trying to hide from Israeli intel, that's not how you do it.

Okay, so, let me get this straight. This panel said aspartame is safe, but it's got a conflict of interest, so we should ignore all that and fall back to the conventional wisdom that…aspartame is safe?

the good folks who told us “safe and effective.”

…weren't wrong, and we've got a global vaccinated population to prove it, so I'm not sure what your point is.

Of course they still tell diabetics to keep chugging down carbs and just buying more and more insulin…

To be fair, that's pretty much what a lot of non-diabetics do, except they make their own insulin.

Well, that's the nice thing about virtual machines! 😁 You can copy them and bork them freely.

In case you feel like experimenting, WinWorld has installation disk images for most of Apple's and Microsoft's vintage operating systems.

Good luck with that. The only such protocol I know of that people actually use is Tor, and it's a US government honey pot.

I just tried this in an MS-DOS + Windows 3.1 virtual machine that I have, and no, that doesn't happen. del *.dl does exactly what you'd expect.

• del *.dl does not delete DLL files. Your friend probably accidentally pressed the L key twice.
• del *.dl does not delete anything in any folder other than the current one. Your friend probably stored his porn in the C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM folder or something.
• I don't think there even is a built-in way in MS-DOS to delete files matching a pattern across multiple folders. You can delete files in a single folder matching a pattern (del), or you can delete a folder and all of its contents (deltree), but neither of those does what you're talking about.
• Deleting DLLs stops Windows from starting, but doesn't stop MS-DOS from booting. MS-DOS doesn't have any DLLs to delete.
• MS-DOS isn't even capable of loading DLLs at all. If you were writing an MS-DOS program and you wanted to link code dynamically, you had to bring your own dynamic linker to do it with. Fun times.

You're right that it doesn't stop you from deleting system files, though, which is kind of odd as MS-DOS does have a mechanism for stopping you from doing that: the “system” attribute. This is used to protect the MS-DOS kernel files, IO.SYS and MSDOS.SYS. For whatever reason, though, the Windows installer doesn't give the Windows system files this attribute, so you can still see them and delete them at will.

Like what happens when someone from that instance is in the middle of a comment chain?

Presumably, the same thing that happens if you block that user individually.

Don't celebrate until he's behind bars. There's still a lot of Teflon on him.

Is–is anybody even payin' attention to me?

Now what the hell did they think was gonna happen when they shipped defective drives? Did they really think people wouldn't notice their bytes vanishing into the ether and their drives dropping off the bus?

So, now I have to choose which I dislike more: government surveillance spooks or jerks with loud engines? Jeez, that's a tough call.

I think if that was proposed in the USA, people’s heads might actually explode.

We already have traffic cameras everywhere, and I don't see anyone's head exploding.