Some middle-aged guy on the Internet. Seen a lot of it, occasionally regurgitates it, trying to be amusing and informative.

Lurked Digg until v4. Commented on Reddit (same username) until it went full Musk.

Was on kbin.social but created this profile on kbin.run during the first week-long outage.

Other Adjectives: Neurodivergent; Nerd; Broken; British; Ally; Leftish

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Joined 6 个月前
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Cake day: 2024年6月4日

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  • I think a cross-party Mastodon instance or something like it could actually be a good idea. The hard part would be deciding who’s allowed to create accounts and when (or whether) to deactivate an account after a person stops fitting whatever qualification got them an account in the first place.

    Being an MP, sure, that’s a given. What about people running to be MP? What about people setting up fake parties / independently standing in order to get a place on there? Consider Count Binface. Clearly he should have an account on such a platform, but how the heck would he qualify without letting someone less sane on under the same criteria?

    And then there’s the fact it would need to be run by incorruptible third parties.

    And the fact that fascist-leaning politicians would need to be allowed on there so they can’t cry foul, despite the fact they’ll all only ever post on X anyway.

    But then, only a handful of MPs would use it even if it was the only platform available, so it being a potentially good idea is probably all it’ll ever be.




  • “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


  • Being trans does not give extra dress-code rights, and nor should it. None of the other women are allowed to dress that way, so why should she?

    Now, if she wants to challenge the dress code for more esoteric modes to be allowed, that should be taken under consideration by whoever is in charge of that, but in the meantime, she should at least try to conform. Then if the decision was to go against her, she’d have the requisite conforming clothing already.

    (Tangentially, there’s an argument that gender non-conforming people might want to define other professional dress codes that don’t strictly fit with male and female norms, but that’s doesn’t seem to be what’s happening here.)

    I understand that it’s difficult for trans folk who deal with transphobics everywhere they turn and thus every discrimination could be transphobia, but this one seems pretty easy to test.

    And I have to wonder how she’d react if she won the dress code change and other people, cis people, started dressing more like her.








  • (FWIW the downvote wasn’t me)

    That sounds like you’re suggesting that Microsoft wouldn’t care what was installed locally to be able to net-boot / run the rest of Windows.

    I think it’s all but certain that they’d want user’s computers to to boot into something they made, or at the very least, slapped their branding all over, even if that was only a wrapper for their web browser.

    I can definitely see them going down the line of saying that their online apps aren’t guaranteed to work under any other system, going so far as to throw in a few deliberate stumbling hazards for anything that isn’t theirs. (Until anti-trust, etc.)

    And thus, dual booting will still be something that people do. Even if - as you clarified - they’re not going to cripple that as well.



  • Check system settings for a keyboard entry / applet. I’m on LMDE Cinnamon and have no idea what the equivalents are on Kubuntu, but over here it’s definitely possible to change/remove the default keyboard assignments and set up custom ones instead.

    For example, I have Shift+WWW (the multimedia key that starts a web browser by default) set to start the browser with an alternate profile. I could just as easily set plain old WWW to, say, start a terminal instead, or run that custom command.

    The hardest part is knowing what custom command to run to get the desired effect.


  • The only way to prevent dual booting would require a UEFI/BIOS that pulls the OS straight over a network, bypassing local storage entirely.

    Even if that didn’t already rule it out, the size that OSes are these days makes it even less likely. At least not unless Microsoft (or whoever) are planning to ditch absolutely everyone who doesn’t have gigabit internet. (It would be kind of funny for an OS to go back to being 1990s-sized to mitigate that though. And funnier still when someone inevitably captures it onto a hard disk anyway.)

    A more likely vector would be to deliberately break third party bootloaders every time Windows boots. And that would last until the next anti-trust / monopoly lawsuit and they’d roll it back to the current behaviour of only breaking third party bootloaders on installation.

    And even if somehow that didn’t get rolled back, just wait until hardware vendors introduce this thing called a “switch” that can be added just before the power connector on an SSD. Can’t boot from a drive that has no power. BIOS defaults to the next SATA channel. And now you’re booting into Linux.

    Doing the same for a mobo-mounted NVMe drive is harder but not impossible.