I’ve found that the real problem is having a television to plug them in to. Still got my old NES and SNES from when I was a kid. But no modern TV has the RF input to connect them to, they’re all digital only. Emulation is much easier.

Yeah, also been using it for years. Am a month into a three-month prepurchase, after which I’m going elsewhere - IVPN looks like a possibility.

Has russia run out of tanks to destroy? Good, may it hasten their collapse. Been twos and threes for days now, but a ‘zero’ is quite unusual.

Are you the person at my work that keeps raising pull requests with all the code stuffed into AbstractWidgetReaderWriterManagerImplHelperV2 classes consisting purely of static methods with fourteen parameters each? :shakes fist angrily:

Aww, it’s got these as well:

Some dwarves like rats for their friendliness, their playfulness, their curiosity and their intelligence.

Bless. Used to have pet rats and couldn’t describe them better. We’ve got pet cats now, and I don’t think it would be a good idea to have both - cats might disagree, tho.

“So what first attracted you to the multi-billionaire Bill Gates?”

Illegal in the UK if you’ve not paid tax on it for road use. It would appear that you can make your own and then pay the tax on it - you can get a receipt for it if you ‘accidentally’ fill your car up with red diesel - but that’s going to invite a lot of scrutiny, which is what you don’t want when you’re tax dodging.

Yeah, my grandad ran his car off of kerosene for about twenty years, no problem at all. The important thing is to live somewhere really cold where you legitimately burn a lot of fuel oil for heating, otherwise the taxman will become suspicious of all your purchases.

The usual problem with running your car off of cooking oil is not that it doesn’t work - works just fine. The problem is that your car smells like a chip shop wherever you go, and you will get very stressed waiting at traffic lights in case someone notices. Maybe smoke a lot of weed in your car to cover up the aroma?

Don’t like the overpriced Steam Machine? Just build your own and put SteamOS in it

Seems a bit unreasonable to call it ‘overpriced’; it’s hard to get equally-specced parts any cheaper at the moment, and it’s all wrapped up in a neat, small, integrated package.

Being able to run SteamOS elsewhere might help convert more people to Linux, but the obstacle identified here is NVidia driver support, as usual. Steam has been very easy to install on every Linux distro I’ve ever used if you’re still wanting to use it as a general purpose machine, but having it all wrapped up would be nice too.

Not arguing that you can get slightly better performance for a slightly lower price, but that’s a substantially larger machine. The Steam Machine is little bigger than its controller in any dimension and easy to hide on a shelf; that Q300L is definitely a small desktop. It has niceties like HDMI CEC, so that it can wake your TV when you start it up from its controller. And it’s whisper-quiet.

$70 extra for a really living-room ready games machine does not seem at all unreasonable to me, plus it turns up ready-assembled. If I had to replace my gaming desktop, it doesn’t seem unreasonable. Replacing my gaming desktop would cost about twice what I originally paid for the damned thing as well, but that’s a different matter.

Oh, absolutely. We were a bit obsessive about operability and maintainability - ensure that all valves can be operated without bending down, make sure that there’s space and lifting gear available wherever it’s needed for maintenance and removal. I could have told you the properties of ten different kinds of valves and when you’d use each one, I just couldn’t have recognised them on site.

One of the stumbling blocks we had is that the operators would look at our layout drawings, and be unable to visualise how that would look once we’d built it. We’d started to do 3D models; wander through the treatment plant like it was Quake. The helmets always made me want to vom. But that helped in sorting out additional issues while they were still “the stroke of a pen” to fix.

I suspect that the laboratory design issues are caused by the people spending the money either not appreciating that it’s even an issue, or not caring that they would cause issues. Bit like a kitchen, I’d guess - certain things want to be kept together because you move between them? But if the installation team can’t even take half an hour to check with you that [fancy gadget A] is suitable in the easiest spot to power and plumb it, then that’s a problem right there.

Engineering degree are very heavy on theory and light on practice; my degree is chemical engineering, and while I had four years of concepts and equations stuffed in my head by the time I graduated, they hadn’t taught us which way round valves open and close. That does make new graduates look kind of bad on site! But the intention is that you’ll be designing or managing chemical plants, not operating them.

I can completely see that an electrical engineering course wouldn’t include how plugs are wired; that’s a job for an electrician.

Certainly hit a few fuel tanks yesterday. Слава Україні!

PC version is incredibly hard to get working on modern computers, fwiw. SecuROM servers are all closed down; I’ve got the SKIDROW patches but have never managed to get them to start up. Emulating the 360 or PS3 might be easier…?

Zero remote exploits since it was released. That’s what divinely-inspired coding looks like, everyone.

Chiles is married to the editor, Katherine Viner, which can be the only explanation for his crappy column.

No idea about Dowling, think he just posts shit for the love of the game.

Fill up a jerry can or two with petrol next time you fill up your car, and save the vodka for making martinis.

He dereferenced a pointer to the 1970s and retrieved the shirt that way.

I had Kodi installed for a few weeks as my television media front-end, but it has:

• the worst UX that you could possibly imagine, with menu after menu arranged seemingly at random, and buttons doing different things at every level
• functionality delivered via plugins, at least half of which do not work
• directory scans failing seemingly at random, with the errors hidden away in log files that you have to shell in to retrieve
• terrible documentation, inevitably consisting of forum pages about how it used to work a decade ago

It may well have a huge amount of functionality, but configuring and using it is the exact opposite of slick. Have uninstalled in favour of KDE with VLC installed, and manipulated via the KDE Connect mobile app, which is somehow a much better big-screen experience.

The RAM is the HBM kind that won’t fit in your motherboard at home. The GPUs tend not to have video outputs, require power supplies around a kilowatt, and powered external cooling. The whole lot of going to landfill when the bubble bursts.

The storage is reusable, I think. You might get a deal on SSDs and hard disks.