At best, I’ve seen a small discount and whatever is traded in is junked to keep it off the second-hand market.

That’s interesting. I always felt the newer Bond films were taking themselves a bit too seriously. I suppose this might be why.

I remember my first game of Stellaris many years ago - I had bought some pack that included some of the DLC out at the time. The crisis was bugged so that even after I beat the crisis and wiped it from the galaxy, the game didn’t recognize that I had done so which left the game unbeatable. This was my first playthrough, no mods or anything like that, and I hit a game-breaking bug.

I played quite a bit of Stellaris as it was (still is?) a fun game, but I am more of a casual gamer and every time I picked the game up again they had changed at least one major mechanic, and there was yet another DLC out if you wanted the full experience. Encountering bugs in a play through was common, and game breaking ones would still pop up from time to time. Finally I just got fed up, especially for the cost of some of the pricier DLC you can buy a game like Factorio which is a much better value.

So at this point I’m done with Paradox. I suppose if I really had the urge to play Stellaris again I’d find something out on the high seas, but there’s enough other, better polished, games out there to keep me busy.

When I was at college us physicists would joke about the biologists and the chemists and the mathematicians and the engineers, and in turn they’d joke about us, and we’d all have a good laugh over it.

I suppose it would come down to the context and how it was said.

And for all the money you spend on a Paradox game, you end up with something that feels like a half-finished beta.

While we’re at it, let’s also vent about cars and trucks with loud modified exhausts.

Challenger had a fleck of paint damage one of its windows on an early mission.

Why not use gvim on Windows? That’s my “IDE” on Windows. Though with modern versions of Windows, trying to run vim in the Command Prompt isn’t a complete disaster like it was in the past.

“IDE” in quotes because I consider vim a text editor, and I don’t try to make it an IDE with a bunch of plugins.

Generally, Google shows the appropriate name based upon where you are located. So for everyone outside of 'murica, it’s still the Gulf of Mexico.

I managed to get this: How to Fire a Gun.

So it’s at least plausible.

Well, it definitely looks to have backfired on US government. The politicians figured that they could force Bytedance to divest TikTok using a ban in the US as a threat, assuming that TikTok wouldn’t want to lose access to the US market and the 180 million or so (!) users. Instead of complying, ByteDance did nothing and the politicians and the US government were put into a position of actually enforcing a very unpopular ban.

The timing of course is interesting. This comes right at the end of Biden’s administration, allowing for Trump to swoop in and lift the ban and take all the credit for that. Of course ignoring that is was Trump who originally kicked this whole thing into motion back in 2020 with his executive order to ban TikTok.

Unfortunately, it’s the corporate standard. With that said, it’s actually kind of surprising how little I use the Office suite on my work computer (other than Outlook I guess). More and more things are becoming web based.

I’m expecting pretty decent software support for Windows 10 for another three years or so. Sure, there will be things here and there that won’t work, but most things will continue to work and many people who are on Windows 10 can just keep on using it for the next few years should they chose to do that. That’ll more or less match what happened with Windows 7, where it wasn’t until 2023 that I started to see support start to massively drop off. With that said, if Microsoft actually breaks Office on Windows 10 that’ll really change things.

Also, I’d offer up 2001-2014 as a period of time where it was entirely possible to stick with one OS (Windows XP) the entire time.

That’s impressive. Even the IT-managed corporate Windows 11 Enterprise installs at work have ads in it. Nothing like what you’d find buying a cheap Windows laptop from someplace like Best Buy with the Windows Home edition, but there’s still ads in places like the start menu. I can get rid of some of them, at least temporarily, but not being an admin on the machine I can’t seem to squash them entirely.

It didn’t help that Netflix was also one of the big users of pop-up ads back when that was a thing. I’ve never forgiven them for that either.

I guess it’s the difference between the TV turning on and immediately doing TV things vs. having to boot up the TV, then after a wait getting dumped into some terrible smart TV interface.

I’d say traditional (linear) television. Still common enough, though even today it’s clearly on the way out.

Unless something drastic happens, there will be a decent number of cars on the road in 20 years that are already on the road today.

“I’ll show you the photos once I get them developed.”

Demand might be low, but on the other hand the cost to develop and manufacture a run of the drives may not be too high either.

I do have to say the increase in flash memory prices haven’t helped. A year ago I bought the Samsung 8TB drive for $300 (US). If they had a 16TB model for $600-$700 I would have bought it.