AnyOldName3

If it’s the problem that I’ve seen people complain about in the past, it’s effectively the same as HTTPS ‘not supporting’ end to end encryption because it runs over IP and IP packets contain the IP address of where they need to go, so someone can see that two IP addresses are communicating, which is unavoidable as otherwise there’s nothing to say where the data needs to go, so no way for it to get there. Someone did a blog post a couple of years ago claiming Matrix was unsecure as encrypted messages had their destination homeserver in plaintext, but that doesn’t carry any information that isn’t implied by the fact that the message is being sent to that homeserver’s IP.

It’s a federated Twitter alternative. It’s existed for a while - the initial release was in 2016, but obviously with all the Musk-related nonsense in the past few years, it’s grown a lot.

There are situations they don’t cover, e.g. if you choose a sender address from the same domain as the real address. Obviously, lots of email services check for that, but it’s not universal - it was a great tool for pranks at university for me.

The from field in an email is something that the sender sets, and they don’t have to set it to anything in particular. Unless your email client stops you (which is pretty common these days) you can just enter a made up address, another address that you’d rather receive replies through, or someone else’s address. It’s one of the reasons why phishing emails work - there’s nothing stopping a scammer impersonating anyone they want to.

I reckon it depends on how warm someone’s home is and how good their circulation is. If I don’t have shoes on indoors, then for half the year it feels like my feet have been stabbed because they get so cold (slippers are not enough), but I don’t wear the same shoes indoors as outdoors. I suspect that if we set the heating higher and the house wasn’t constructed in a way that makes the floor always much colder than a few inches above the floor, this wouldn’t be a problem.

Investors managed to pour billions into making the metaverse bubble, even though that was just video games being invented a second time by people so uninterested in them that they hadn’t noticed they’d already been around for decades. There’s no reason to think that investors know what they are beyond something on a computer, so obviously they’d see something else on the computer as a viable competitor.

With energy prices in the UK being what they are, it’s only raw potatoes that are cheaper than bread. At least toast toasts quickly, so isn’t that energy-intensive compared with boiling a pan of water.

I dug up a manual for the Windows 3.1 SDK, and it turns out that it had the same GetVersion function with the same return value as the Windows 2000 SDK, and it’s just that the live MSDN docs pretend that Windows 2000 was the first version of Windows, so show that as the earliest version that every function that came from an older version of Windows. http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/microsoft/windows_3.1/Microsoft_Windows_3.1_SDK_1992/PC28914-0492_Windows_3.1_SDK_Getting_Started_199204.pdf page 31.

I then looked at a manual for the Windows 1.03 SDK, and it, too, has a matching GetVersion function.

The only change to GetVersion over the entire history of Windows is that at some point it switched from returning a sixteen bit value with eight bits for the major version and eight bits for the minor version to a 32-bit value with bits split between major, build number and minor versions, and then later on, GetVersionEx was added to return those numbers as members of a struct instead. There has never been a version of Windows where string comparisons of the display name were appropriate or recommended by Microsoft.

If you’re checking for Windows 9 in order to disable features, which is what the jump straight to ten was supposed to protect against (when running a 16-bit binary for 3.1/95 on 32-bit Windows 10, it lies and says it’s Windows 98), then you’re using at least the Windows 2000 SDK, which provided GetVersion, which includes the build and revision numbers in its return value, and the revision number was increased over 7000 times by updates to Windows 2000.

There was a function that would give you a monotonically-increasing build number that you could compare against the build that any given feature was added in that people should have used, but there was also a function that gave you the name of the OS, and lots of people just checked if that contained a 9. The documentation explicitly said not to do that because it might stop working, but the documentation has never stopped people using the wrong function.

In the 40s there was a lot more polar ice stopping ships getting there, and far fewer long-range bombers, ballistic missiles and cruise missiles. If the US went to war against Russia or China (instead of siding with them against Europe), Greenland would see a lot more action in its immediate vicinity. That’s why the preexisting deal lets the US station effectively as much of their military there as they’d like.

It’s not exactly a rootkit - if you just don’t agree to the UAC prompt while it’s installing, it’ll refuse to install rather than doing the thing that makes it definitionally a rootkit and managing to gain admin access without the user’s permission - but the game does still require kernel-level anti-cheat.

It never went away. They just figured out how to make it subtle so it could be active all the time instead of just when the computer wasn’t working properly. Do you really feel like you’re using trauma-free software day-to-day?

Generally when you see people advocate for not having to pay for things like that, it’s because they want to do away with currency and the concept that a living is something that needs to be earned rather than something everyone gets as a basic right. Plenty of people make art, including games, without a profit motive, so it’s not unreasonable to think that enough games would be made if everyone had way more free time and games were all made for free.

It’s not so much about time (although I have played a couple of things that would take a ridiculously long time to save or load), it’s about the number of chances to make a mistake. If you only save ten values, it’s really easy for a programmer to verify that they’ve got everything right, but if they save ten million, there are a million times more opportunities for mistakes to sneak in and it’s much harder to notice each mistake, let alone fix it.

Fallout 4 is a bit of an odd duck here as the save format for the BGS games is basically just another ESM file, so reuses all the same serialisation and deserialisation mechanisms. Most games don’t have multiple places the game data can come from and a way to combine them as they’ve not got an engine designed with this kind of modding in mind, so there’s nothing to reuse in this way for saves. Given the general standards of engineering from that studio, if they didn’t have this as a core feature of their custom engine for nearly three decades, and instead had to come up with something from scratch, they’d absolutely mess it up or have to simplify the saving system.

Sometimes, political ideologies aren’t the same thing as the word used to name them would suggest.

It’s not the ‘Linux on’ subsystem, it’s the ‘Linux on Windows’ subsystem, so it’d have to be Linux on Windows Windows Subsystem, which would be silly. It can’t have a colon in it as some command-line tools take a subsystem as an argument, and traditionally, Windows command-line tools have used colons the same way Unix has used equals, i.e. to separate an argument name from its value, and parsing that gets harder when you’re expecting colons in the value, too.

Windows has subsystems. They’re called Windows Subsystems. This one’s for Linux. However you slice it, the initialism has to have WS in it.

The kids name the monsters after things they’ve recently encountered in D&D, and coincidentally, the monsters tend to have some powers in common with the D&D enemies even if their physical form is way off.

Downstream packagers are under no obligation not to do dumb things that break things for users and make the users blame the upstream developers.