Never mind recent motherboards, I’m still salty about the era of boards from 2004-2010 or so which had USB ports but the BIOS would refuse to accept inputs from them until after POST so you’d have to dredge up a separate PS/2 keyboard and jack it in to be able to configure the damn thing or use the boot menu.

And I had at least one board from that time period which has this same flaw, but with the added layer of joy and excitement that they’ve removed the PS/2 port block in order to appear “modern.” It’s still there, of course, but only as a pin header that you need to access from inside the case and plug a breakout board into. If you lose that board the gods themselves couldn’t even help you. I used to keep it stuck with painters tape to the inside of the case side panel.

Can confirm; I used to manage a hardware store with an attached small engine repair shop. There’s a reason Briggs and Stratton abbreviates so readily to “BS.”

They’ve been trying to do the absolute bare minimum possible to maximize profits and making their machines flimsy and deliberately uneconomical to repair for several decades, now. All I can say is that we ought to be thankful for aftermarket parts.

I think we can all safely assume that EV’s are not relevant to this discussion.

It was the same story with DVD and the PS2, which was in no small part a major reason for its early success.

Sony also sold the PS3 itself at a loss at launch in order to get a bigger install base, and hoped to make their money back on software sales.

I’m pretty sure the Wii won that battle. 101-some-odd million units of that were sold, 87ish for the PS3 and 84ish for the 360. The PS2 still blows everything else out of the water, still being the best selling console of all time at 160 million or so.

People had a big time hate-on for the PS3 in its initial years. At launch the PS3 was the most expensive of the current gen options and Sony didn’t have much of anything very compelling to run on it. The mantra at the time was “going Wii60,” i.e. getting an Xbox 360 for all the big name AAA titles and a Wii for all the niche Nintendo stuff and pointedly ignoring the PS3 entirely, because the notion was you could buy a base 360 and a Wii for about the same as the cost of a PS3. All that took a few years to get turned around.

?

You can just right click on it and hit “remove from toolbar.” That’s all it takes.

Putting it back in my toolbar for the purposes of taking this screenshot was actually more clicks.

You can actually do this with most, but not all, of the toolbar items. You can even 86 the refresh button that way if you’re feeling truly perverse.

A curse for you: A crooked scan of a printout of a cell phone picture of someone’s screen, embedded in the first top left cell in an otherwise empty Excel document, attached to an email, with read receipts turned on. Marked urgent.

I actually once had a client do the image embedded in an Excel document thing. You know how people use Excel for absolutely everything, even when they shouldn’t? Yeah. Some people really live their lives that way. I pointed out that they could have just attached the picture by itself to the email, but did not receive a response. You can’t help some people.

New cars absolutely do have dipsticks; they’re the ones designing them.

Notwithstanding the potential for software bugs or other issues inherent with monitoring oil levels only digitally, monitoring just the oil level is not the sole purpose of the dipstick. Being able to physically see a sample of the engine oil is a vital diagnostic tool and can alert an owner or mechanic to a head gasket problem or other oil contamination issue, or if something is grinding metal shavings into the oil, etc.

For what it’s worth I have yet to actually physically see a new vehicle without an oil dipstick. I guess they’re out there, but so far I’ve been lucky. But I have already had quite a few automatic transmission equipped cars without a transmission dipstick cross my path, and that’s already enough of a pain in the ass. If you’re lucky there’s a side plug in the transmission case you can use to check the fluid condition and level (after crawling under the vehicle…) but in a lot of cases there isn’t even that – your only recourse is to drop the transmission pan off entirely, which causes you to lose all the fluid in the process. And you’ll probably also have to replace the gasket while you’re at it. Needless to say, this is an incredibly moronic design decision.

Regardless of whatever it did or however it did it, the way Pocket was suddenly shoved in everyone’s faces by default definitely left a bad taste in a lot of mouths (including mine) and everybody just considered it more unasked-for adware. Especially since in its default configuration about a quarter of what it serves you is indeed flat out ads, when most of us are using Firefox with uBlock or similar specifically not to see ads.

Pocket provided a feature I suspect few people actually used, and in the process had an obnoxious presentation that a lot of people actively disliked. Add me to the list of people who won’t be sad to see it go.

I want my browser developer developing browsers, not other ancillary side projects and certainly not “curating content” or whatever the fuck.

I would not be at all surprised to learn that Pocket costs Mozilla a nontrivial amount of money and manpower to maintain, what with doing all that curation and all, and provides them bupkis in return.

Pocket absolutely would suggest you articles (and ads) by default unless you explicitly told it not to in your settings. This is separate from the tiles of frequently visited pages from your history.

The second slider down is your history/pinned shortcuts on the home screen. The third one is recommended junk, “Powered by Pocket.”

More info on that here, for however long this will do anyone any good:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/pocket-recommendations-firefox-new-tab

It was redundant anyway, since it was just bookmarks with extra steps. But you can sync bookmarks between devices with Firefox anyway and you’ve been able to for years, so I have no idea why they kept it around other than to use it as a vehicle to push ads (because it seemed like roughly 25% of the “articles” it suggested to you were actually ads). I can’t say as I’m too sad to see it go.

Fakespot could arguably have been useful on paper, but I have to admit I never used it because I treat most online reviews as if they’re bullshit anyway.

There is no incorrect way. The typical shoelace knot is actually just a square knot, but one where you make the second part out of two loops (bights) rather than the standing ends. What technique you use to arrive there is completely irrelevant as long as the end result is the same.

(You could use a traditional square knot instead if you really wanted to, but it would be annoying to untie.)

True, but I’ll wager most of the things people are filching for these purposes get displayed on the screen at 100% scale anyway. Unless you’re sniping a picture for large format print, in which case I figure you’d probably be under less restrictive conditions… Hopefully.

use on a locked down school computer.

Shift + Win + S

I’ll bet they didn’t disable that in Group Policy. Lasso that sumbitch right off your screen and then just paste it into whatever.

The solution being, for the singular person on Earth who hasn’t heard already, “If you were the other guard, which door would you say is the safe one?”

Alternatively, the barbarian in the party just splatters one of the guards in one hit and asks the remaining one, “Which door? You’ll go through it first.”

I don’t hate Discord, I simply hate that so many projects and companies have unanimously decided to use it as the wrong tool for the wrong job.

It’s fine for its intended use case, which is bickering with my friends about video games and fiction, and spamming each other with .gifs and meme images.

This is in contrast with how pi is otherwise consistently expressed on the Disc, which is “three and a bit.”

Notably, Bloody Stupid Johnson is so skilled/inept that he actually does make pi equal to three within the machine… somehow… which breaks reality in a small amount of space inside it.

Apparently King David had this skill as well, since this is mentioned twice in the old testament:

1 Kings 7:23: And he made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one brim to the other: it was round all about, and his height was five cubits: and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about.

Everyone knows at least 3.14

And biblical authors.

I approve of this message.

Yes, and PHP can even implicitly (or explicitly!) cast variables between different types. Dot (.) is for strings and + is for math. It’s one of the few things about PHP that makes sense.