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• Post #2430475

  IPv5 existed. It was called the Internet Stream Protocol. The fact IPv4 used 4 octets was a happy coincidence more than anything, so v5 wouldn't necessarily imply a ninth chevron fifth octet. But IPv4+, whatever that might have been, could have been an extensible system like, say, Unicode, and taken advantage of the unallocated/reserved 240.0.0.0/4 block to flag that the address is longer and the rest is encoded elsewhere in the packet. I mean, if you want to go completely crazy, you cou...

• Post #455668

  I assume they're using (year - 2000) as the version number, which happens to match "last two digits" and will do until 2099. So any version of Minecraft released that year under the new system would be Minecraft 1002.x, not 2.x.

• Post #455234

  And here's me thinking it was called Vintage Story.

• Post #411471

  Ha. I've heard of Amazon offloading heavier parcels to municipal mail carriers, so I don't see that working out.

• Post #407110

  Although a processor might be nominally capable of accessing a bus of a certain width, it does not mean that all address or data lines need be connected.

• Post #377014

  It says "was" not "had".

• Post #251919

  Most of the age verification things I've seen are wise to that and require a video camera, not a still one.

• Post #240698

  Some people genuinely do not understand the concept of GUI windows and how they work. They do not generate a full mental model of the desktop and the windows on it and only see the whole screen as one bewildering interface. They focus on what they do know in order to get by. This may be especially true of people who learned their IT with small screens or low resolutions where running an application full screen (or as the only active application!) is required to get anything done. Your collea...

• Post #202837

  Yes. The institution in question is human society. We generally grant the permission to make rational decisions over our lives to other humans who know better that we do or are more skilled than we are. Sometimes, yes, those humans turn out to have been deceitful or dishonest, but there are mechanisms in place for when that happens. And yes, sometimes those mechanisms are wilfully avoided by the deceitful. Politicians and rich people are especially good at this. Guess who's pushing &qu...

• Post #197060

  Fake AGI is like fake banknotes. Some of them are really good approximations. Nigh indistinguishable. A lot of people will be fooled by it but eventually it will be discovered to be a fake and people will get hurt in some way or another. And it won't be the people who are pushing for "AGI".

• Post #195081

  The people who are seeking AGI will be happy when an LLM appears clever enough to fool them, not anyone else. They may even realise this, because they think everyone else is less clever than they are. This is why the whole thing has been called AI in the first place.

• Post #184990

  Is it any more maintainable with four levels of abstraction?

• Post #149676

  ... so you don't think Mastodon is a worthy competitor? How about Bluesky?

• Post #139774

  Long was it known fact: Windows versions and OG Star Trek films. Every other one was terrible. ... but I note there are a few important releases missing there. 3.0, Win2K and 8.1 especially, and we might argue for 3.1 and 98SE and maybe even the unreleased Longhorn too.

• Post #134427

  My unending soul-sucking void is also named Bort.

• Post #133967

  Openwraps, Hail Marys and cheesebreads. Why Hail Mary? Burrito means "little donkey".

• Post #133918

  A weird and distressing noise woke me this morning. Pretty sure it was a fox. It's not even near the woods here, but I've seen urban ones around if I've looked out early in the morning. The alternative is that it was a dog being suddenly and unexpectedly hurt, and I'd prefer to think it wasn't that.

• Post #133901

  Whenever the character came back from the future, his future incarnation had a mouth. And he was drawn with one occasionally before it, uh, stopped being cool to read the strip. Hate to say it, but I think Adams would have been OK with this. Not with being hated and dead, obviously, but you know.

• Post #132849

  Doesn't work like that for me. If I see someone in pain, I feel their pain. If they cry out, it hurts to my core. That's empathy. The hard part for me is not being able to do anything about it. It is often not my place, I don't know the correct course of action or I don't have the means. It doesn't mean it doesn't play on my conscience. And it's harder still is seeing those with the means apparently be able to completely ignore any empathy or conscience they might...

• Post #132047

  They weren't thinking big enough. They've only doubled the address space. I say this at least half seriously, well aware that mine is far more ridiculous the other way. ... but I probably should have tried searching for "IPv4+" before using it as a generic term. At least one other proposal shows up when I search for that, and one of them is a proposal that adds a couple more octets.

• Post #131877

  Uh. You should keep your hands to yourself - regardless of intent - unless the job explicitly requires it or there's some kind of danger to life or limb. Someone that "needs cheering up" does not qualify. If you think there needs to be an exception, ask for consent. "But then it wouldn't be a pleasant surprise!" Wrong. You have no idea how the person will react, and they might even pretend to like it for the sake of decorum. Just don't. And remember, even if...

• Post #131650

  No. You're right. I'll never completely understand until my bank account goes negative. Or I have no bank account. And I have to go a day or more without eating. But I do have anxiety. And a very limited income. My grocery shop spend for two weeks now is about the same price as I paid for one week, fifteen years ago. I have to budget every little thing. So while I can't fully understand, I have more understanding than you think I do, and it's not just me that needs to be care...

• Post #129005

  That first tale is clearly a case of when tech aura goes bad. I mean, we like to let the non-techs believe that our mere presence can cause technology to behave, and we might even like to believe that ourselves, but that comes back to bite us if the hardware breaks instead. ... I'm not saying the tech should have grabbed something heavy and made a show of threatening the device, but I don't think it would have hurt!

• Post #124700

  Terry Davis tried to do for the PC with TempleOS what the C64's BASIC and KERNAL did for its hardware. Terry was all the more a mad lad because he didn't get to create the hardware spec he was working with. Could you imagine someone doing the same as Commodore did but starting with 64-bit era hardware? Taking it another direction, there are free and paid "easy programming" platforms that provide a sandbox not unlike a modern version of what it was like to program a C64....

• Post #124682

  The 64GS was one of Commodore's last gasps at trying to make some money using the 8-bit parts they still had left in stock. The whole thing was a disaster. It wasn't based on the C64. It was a C64. Without a keyboard and some of the other ports missing. A fact that came to bite anyone who tried a C64 cartridge game that needed keyboard input. And IIRC one of the games that came bundled with it was a game like that. They were at least smart enough to have the BASIC startup pointer (...

• Post #113559

  Copilot copilotted your Copilot. Something something marklar.

• Post #101314

  Are you sure that's not pre-Python? Maybe one of David Frost's shows like At Last the 1948 Show or The Frost Report. Marty Feldman (the customer) wasn't one of the Pythons, and the comments on the video suggest that Graham Chapman took on the customer role when the Pythons performed it. (Which, if they did, suggests that Cleese may have written it, in order for him to have been allowed to take it with him.)

• Post #98094

  Actually yes, but I didn't expect they'd go down the same avenues with the Pi. I actually considered getting one of the computer-in-keyboard versions precisely because I'm of that same generation, but I couldn't justify the expense.

• Post #85781

  The real question might be whether the compiler was smart enough to change var++ and var-- into ++var and --var when the initial values aren't needed. As compiler optimisations go, it's a fairly obvious one, but it was 1974 and putting checks like that in the compiler would increase its size and slow it down when both space and time were at a premium.