Meanwhile, earlier this month, I had to literally disable quite a few bits of adblocks and other extensions just so that Ticketmaster's crappy CAPTCHA thing would allow me to even log in. Literally screamed "Why are you pestering me, I'm just trying to buy a ticket to a local car show, not a fucking Madonna concert"
You Chrome folks need extensions to use non-Google search engines?
Firefox uses just bog standard OpenSearch definitions. No shenanigans. Ships with both Google and Bing if you're into that sort of things. And you can add arbitrary search URLs, no probalo.
Well aren't the requests to backend by definition slow? Actually TCP protocol is pretty much turtle as opposed to UDP's hare: slow, but it gets you there.
For data gathering? Pretty much anything that doesn't fiddle with the values. Usually, bespoke apps or applications specifically designed for survey data. People actually use spreadsheet programs a lot, but those who do spend a lot of time on ensuring data gets entered correctly.
Clearly, the superiour mode is to just use keyword based scoping (à la Ruby do ... end). When I was a kid I read an OBSCENE MAGAZINE where I saw a Forth program go dup dup dup and I was like "ok so what's the problem here? Things happen and everything is just keywords?" and my young mind was corrupted forever I guess
When I was taking my introductory courses in computer science over 20 years ago, they told me to not use Excel if you can avoid it, because it's not very, you know, precise. So I'm well aware that this is an ancient joke. Excel will fuck your data up - AI is just another way to do it.
But it is a potential scifi plot point.
However, I will concede that it's probably not a scifi plot point for too long. Worse things have already happened.
(furious scribbling in the scifi worldbuilding notes) "In 2050, the names of the months got inadvertently legally changed when a megacorporation released a new version of their office suite and silently corrupted thousands of government document drafts."
In Wikimedia projects (and MediaWiki systems in general) you actually have to pay attention to other people's usernames (when working with histories and in article discussions), and at least in Wikipedia long long time ago there was a lot of trolling/vandalism where people impersonated other users (particularly the admins) and made bunch of sockpuppets with tiny variations in names when they got banned. So this rule makes sense.
I was like, ooh, I didn't know there were newer Nikon tilt-shift lenses (Nikkor PC-E) for the F mount that are still available for purchase new... ...and the bloody things cost like 1900€. Even the older PC-Nikkor lenses cost a pretty penny in second hand market.
These lenses are firmly in "would be extremely neat to have, but are both on the very expensive side and also I don't know how much use I'd get from them in practice" category of photography gear. ...which doesn't narrow much down if we're talking photography gear, but hey.
Actually this reminds me, what is the deal with tar command recommendations to use or not use dash? I know GNU tar accepts both (e.g.) tar xvf file.tar and tar -xvf file.tar, but at some points people were like "NO! Don't use the dash! It's going to maybe cause issues somewhere, who knows!" and I was like "OK". Something to do with people up designing the Unix specs?
Don Rosa worked with the various comics publishers, not directly with Disney. This one was published by Egmont (in Denmark). As a result the comics writers actually have a pretty high degree of creative freedom, compared to people in other parts of the Disney empire.
Though he did decide to retire, partly for health reasons, partly because while everyone feted him like a rockstar when he was visiting Europe, he certainly wasn't paid like a rockstar by Disney. (...or, given how little money flows toward music artists these days too, maybe he was paid like a rockstar.)
About 10 years ago I was like "FINE, clearly 512MB of memory isn't enough to avoid swapping hell, I'll get 1 GB of extra memory." ...and that was that!
These days I'm like "4 GB on a single board computer? Oh that's fine. You may need that much to run a browser. And who's going to run a browser regularly on a SBC? ...oh I've done it a lot of times and it's... fine."
The thing I learned is that you can run a whole bunch of SHIT HOT server software on a system with less than a gigabyte of memory. The moment you run a web browser? FUCK ALL THAT.
And that's basically what I found out long ago. I had a laptop that had like 32 megs of memory. Could be a perfectly productive person with that. Emacs. Darcs. SSH over a weird USB Wi-Fi dongle. But running a web browser? Can't do Firefox. Opera kinda worked. Wouldn't work nowadays, no. But Emacs probably still would.
In most programming languages, yes.
In Ruby? ...eeeeeeeehhhhhhhhh.