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vasac

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vasac
·16 gün önce·discuss
The first attempt failed, so they caved in, but they’ll try again after a while and lay those people off again.
vasac
·17 gün önce·discuss
IIRC, my problem with Quake multiplayer was that one node acted as the server, so when I connected to a friend’s computer via modem, my lag was a serious disadvantage (neither my friend nor I ever won as clients). Doom, on the other hand, simply froze both computers whenever there was a communication issue.

Although, to be fair, we played Doom over an RS-232 cable - hauling a PC across the city every weekend was a testament to our love for the game :)
vasac
·geçen ay·discuss
> If one spouse stays home to watch them, that covers as many kids as you have.

That's debatable ;)

I have two kids, and taking care of both during the day is vastly harder - both mentally and physically - than working two jobs. As they say, it takes a village to raise a child, and I don't think many people have that village anymore. As a result, a lot of kids are being raised by TV or the internet, and if you don't want that, you'll find yourself occupied with them almost 100% of the time.

Another issue is that the spouse who stays home can effectively kiss their career goodbye if they spend seven or eight years out of the workforce. Given current divorce rates, that's not a trivial risk.

I wish I had grandparents living nearby, but that's not the case either.

I'm not saying it's impossible - I have two children myself and would probably have had more if I'd started earlier - but it's not easy. And, judging from my admittedly small sample size, it seems to be getting harder.
vasac
·geçen ay·discuss
[dead]
vasac
·2 ay önce·discuss
And there was Wham! The Music Box if you wanted to compose music :).

Here’s how it sounded on the original ZX Spectrum, equipped with only the beeper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNDVJLma-W4
vasac
·2 ay önce·discuss
> It's an advantage, but I don't see that changing for a very long time:

It’s an interesting question: for how long will it remain important to know multiple languages in the age of LLMs? Of course, it’s better to know foreign language(s) — no doubt about that — but for day-to-day work, unless you’re living abroad, it seems that their practical utility will slowly decrease. And speech-to-speech translation will likely continue to improve as well.
vasac
·2 ay önce·discuss
Ah, Clipper was a major force in the late ’80s in Yugoslavia, as economic reforms enabled the widespread establishment of private companies that needed accounting software, and PCs became cheap enough for one-person shops to develop custom accounting solutions. It was the Wild West for a few years, with a zillion different applications, until some bigger players emerged.

IIRC, it needed one or two 360K floppies for a full install (a pirated copy; maybe the legal distribution was larger - at that time, all software was pirated). Compiling was fast (on a computer where you type dir and can read the filenames appearing on the screen faster than the computer can print them), but linking was slow, so everyone replaced MS Link with Borland’s TurboLink, which was an order of magnitude faster. It didn’t support overlays, but there were ways to work around that.

There was also documentation available in some third-party TSR app.

Later, another linker became popular: Blinker, which had a bunch of interesting features, such as loading overlays into EMS memory and providing various security functions to help protect your software. But by that time, the writing was already on the wall for DOS.

Funnily enough, many customers actually preferred DOS, since navigating with the keyboard was far faster than using a mouse, and Windows apps generally weren’t designed with keyboard navigation in mind.
vasac
·2 ay önce·discuss
A few years ago, I bought a bunch of magnetic cables (with both Lightning and USB-C connectors - the cables are the same; only the connectors differ). I haven’t had any issues so far.
vasac
·3 ay önce·discuss
I’ve heard that lower and middle education aren’t exactly the US’s strong suits, but still? The US organized a coup in Iran over 70 years ago and has never really stopped meddling in Iran’s internal affairs. The US runs proxy wars around the world on a daily basis, and when we’re talking about barbarians, they’re certainly near the top - almost a GOAT.
vasac
·3 ay önce·discuss
Acquired taste. Ten years ago, I switched from a sugar-based soft drink to one with Aspartame - it didn’t taste great at first. Now the sugary one tastes awful, while the Aspartame one tastes great ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
vasac
·3 ay önce·discuss
> Iran's situation is obviously very different.

Yes, very different as in 'Our blessed homeland vs their barbarous wastes' meme.

We (and our allies) should have nukes because we want to prevent wars. But no one else should have them, since the situation is obviously very different (we wouldn’t want them to be able to prevent wars).

And I used to think that Little Rocketman was a crazy bastard, but it looks like I was wrong.
vasac
·3 ay önce·discuss
> Germany would have to quickly get nukes

No shit? Why would they have to? Is someone ready to nuke them if it turns out they’re no longer under the U.S. nuclear umbrella, or are they some special snowflakes who should have them while Iran (and most other countries) shouldn’t?
vasac
·3 ay önce·discuss
I would guess that there's a big difference between assembling a drone (which can easily be done in a kitchen) and mass-producing parts such as batteries and gas engines for drones that have to fly more than a few dozen kilometers.
vasac
·3 ay önce·discuss
The OP probably thought of defense in the narrow sense as "the action of defending against or resisting an attack", and not in the broader sense defined as "we’re going to travel halfway around the world to kill a million people because that’s who we are". A common mistake.
vasac
·3 ay önce·discuss
I’m implying they aren’t getting ready because they think Russians are going to march on Berlin.
vasac
·3 ay önce·discuss
So while many of the reasons are questionable (understatement of the year), let’s focus on the last one. After America lost the war in Vietnam, what happened to those neighboring nations? Did they suffer from Vietnamese communists? The only Vietnamese intervention was in Cambodia, and hardly anyone thinks that wasn’t the right thing to do.
vasac
·3 ay önce·discuss
Yes, the previous time they were getting ready it was because those pesky Poles being an inch away from invading the Third Reich.
vasac
·3 ay önce·discuss
The Turbo button worked wonders for Tetris. You start it with turbo turned on, so Tetris adjusts to the computer’s speed - but it only does this once, at startup. As soon as the blocks start falling, you turn the turbo off, and now your Tetris runs at half speed. I even managed, a few times, to roll over a score of 32,768 (ah, those signed integers).
vasac
·4 ay önce·discuss
Both scripts have been taught in the early years of elementary school in Serbia for the past 80 years.
vasac
·4 ay önce·discuss
So Croats and Muslims fought each other bloodily because all Serbs wanted to live in one state? Funnily enough, they were already living in one state - Yugoslavia - so they certainly had no reason to start the war.