palordrolap

⊃))⁠・⁠▽⁠・(⁠(⊂

Yes it does bother me a little that the letters in the latter half of my username can’t be written backwards. (Well, some can, and the p can become a q, but then it’s not a p any more.)

“I’ve said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that." – an actual Bill Gates quote referring to the 640k quote that won’t die.

But yes, it was probably satirically ascribed to him because of MS-DOS not having the capability to deal with any more than that amount of RAM for a lot longer than it probably should have.

The “temporary” solution of requiring an extra driver to be able to do so (EMM386.SYS or similar) remained in place right up until DOS-based Windows was allowed to die.

(The underlying reason was almost certainly ancient IBM PC memory-mapped IO standards, so maybe we could ascribe the original quote an engineer working there some time around 1980.)

The last thing I messed around with choked on some wide characters that weren’t in the current locale, so I guess picture the top half of the burger bun, about two thirds of the top part of the patty, a small pile of raw ingredients off to the side and some inexplicable six-inch nails through the raw meat, maybe.

Most of the rest of the stuff I do could be compared to those nouvelle cuisine jokes that have been running since the 1980s. Large plate, inexplicably small serving of something allegedly gourmet but is probably a cube of the cheapest pâté from the closest supermarket that was flash frozen and then stylishly drizzled in jus de menthe or something.

Bon appetit

There’s the idea that he believes he’s entitled to a second term. And there’s so much he wants to do and it must be done as soon as possible. If any of that is even vaguely true, he won’t drop out.

(The fact he’s not getting any younger might be in there somewhere, but he probably doesn’t think about that at all if he can help it.)

The genie grants your wish. Everyone on Earth at the moment of the wish emerges from cryosleep 50 years from now with no memory of how they got into the cryosleep pod, nor how they got to it, and worse, as well rested as they were right before the event happened. Important parts of infrastructure have crumbled in our absence. Nature has taken back over.

Mankind finds itself with different problems, but are they any better?

There are people of all genders who enjoy being kicked repeatedly in the crotch.

Would you like to volunteer to see if you are one of those people? How about we do it a few times to see if you get addicted?

PCX or nothin’

Apparently, The joe editor has a jstar mode, so says this old Stackexchange thread. I can’t verify because I’ve never used Wordstar, but joe’s available in my distro’s repository.

No idea if it can read old WordStar files, but maybe you don’t need that.

For the GUI version - and some old file capability, the same page and other searches turn up WordTsar which is in progress. The dev says they’ll be picking up development again next month.

“Uh, Boss, our customers are sending us the invoices for their RAM purchases.”

He must be scared of his parents - or scared of losing an inheritance - because he hasn’t changed his own name to have an X in it yet.

Ex-lax Mux certainly has a ring to it, don’t you think?

“Just a heads up that we’ll be shipping your machine to the client, since it’s the only machine on Earth known to support the software. You’re getting the spare machine out of the basement. Super fast Cyrix processor. Looks like it boots to Windows 11 release 3, but they’ve written it 3.11 for some reason.”

[…] two more Chinese swimmers had tested positive […] but were cleared by Chinese officials

Ah, the old “we’ve investigated ourselves and found no wrong-doing”

At least try “we hired an outside agency, totally didn’t bribe them, and they found no wrong-doing”, or better yet “we totally didn’t bribe the independent third party hired by someone else, and they found no wrong-doing”.

But I suppose I should be glad it wasn’t “we totally didn’t aim veiled threats at someone’s family and livelihood, etc.”

O((2⁽ⁿ2))!) or bust.

A wild Elon appeared!

Twitter has evolved into X!

X attacks Twitter!

X has hurt itself in its confusion!

X has hurt itself in its confusion!

X has hurt itself in its confusion!

Not all con states want to secede from the union, but then again they’re not islands, so that one’s hard to gauge.

Also, most con politicians here were very invested in remaining in Europe right up until we weren’t. The promise of a referendum was a hail Mary to try to win the votes of a particular contingent of voters. They got the votes, but never expected the referendum to go the way it did. Leopard, meet face.

Now they’re having to pretend it was the intention all along. Make the best of it, etc.

There’s also an argument to be made that her stance on climate change was entirely because of the desire to hurt the workers of the fossil fuel industry, especially one in particular, which outweighed all other priorities.

The Israel thing I don’t know too much about, but I can be virtually certain it wasn’t about protecting the people of Lebanon from a bully.

Dude needs to look into who Margaret Thatcher was and her politics. See how much that gums up his brain gears, because, even outside the fact she was a woman, she was a conservative’s ultimate fantasy.

It only needs to happen once. One bad day. One day when the brain isn’t operating at full capacity, but absolutely has to. One day out of a couple of thousand at a deeply critical time. And something gives.

Are you the sort of person who falls asleep in front of the TV? There are millions of people like that. There might even be a billion. Sure, some will think “I’ll just close my eyes a sec”, but there are others who don’t make a conscious choice about anything and find themselves waking up, unaware of when they fell asleep.

Forgetting something - even a baby - is a lapse like that. That’s all it is. Just one tiny little lapse. We are not 100% in control of what goes on in our own heads.

“It won’t happen to me” / “It couldn’t possibly have happened to me.” is the height of hubris.

As for making decisions like “Some people should not be allowed to be parents.”, who’s doing the allowing there? Because that’s a horribly slippery slope. And frankly if Darwinism hasn’t got it out of the gene pool at this point, it might well be all of us with the same fatal flaw… which I think is the point I was making earlier.

Save your effort. What’s already there is there forever. They can just roll back your comments, or even, if they’re in the mood for it, make it appear under an entirely different username.

The only way to win is not give them any more. And that fight is already under way. They’ve already started recommending old comments after new ones because the quality isn’t as high any more.

Think about it: The only people who contribute to Reddit now are the clueless and the sort of people who have willingly stayed.

I like to imagine Spez stomping around saying “Hmph! Hmph! It’s not fair! Why did they all leave?! They’re stealing my revenue by not giving me anything for free!”. I mean, he’s probably not doing that, but I do like to imagine it.

Coming in out of nowhere here, but if it was anything like my school, probably turning on a bench-mounted gas tap without a Bunsen burner attached, pulling out a lighter and creating a horizontal roaring blade of flame that was difficult to turn off.

This sort of thing fills the child in me with glee, but it’s incredibly stupid and dangerous and definitely worthy of a “corrective” exclamation.