GNOME is the default desktop for a bunch of major distros. From a typical user's point of view, it is Linux. But this kind of "fuck usability" attitude is pretty much pervasive in desktop Linux. In my experience, Linux as a graphical desktop was OK in about 2005, but has just gone downhill ever since. Stuff constantly changes, stuff that worked previously broke, things are done in a user-hostile way. GNOME is the worst, but KDE isn't getting better in my experience, either. Saying "it's a GNOME problem" doesn't make it any better for someone who just wants to use their computer.

TIMS nonsense? TIMI is great! It allowed multiple CPU architecture changes without breaking any software.

Does Mr Dick Pick send unsolicited images of his OS?

Sadly he died in 1994 at the age of 56 (complications following a stroke). He didn't live to see camera phones usher in the dick pick revolution.

The Pick Operating System (developed by Dick Pick) was a database running straight on the metal. In some cases, the host system had customised microcode to run the Pick system bytecode natively.

Pretty racist to assume any Hong Kong company is a sweatshop. VTech has a pretty interesting history in the story of 8-bit home computers. Besides their Apple II clones, they had their Z80-based Laser 200, which was sold under various local brand names in different countries. They also spearheaded the "electronic edutainment" market, starting with the Socrates console. They're still one of the biggest names in those kinds of electronic toys.

Considering AI's "understanding" of human anatomy, you'd probably injure yourself attempting to pull off AI-generated sex positions.

Red cameras crash frequently and aren't physically tough. They were first to market with digital cinema cameras, but Arri is better in just about every way now.

A train trip from LA to NY is a trip that'd take about 10 days with multiple stops and car changes. A bus makes more sense, generally: cheaper, and shorter trip.

No it doesn't. It typically takes 83 hours 9 minutes on Amtrack - less than four days (if you choose the right time, you can do it in 68 hours 47 minutes on Amtrak, less than three days). That's less than half the time you claimed. And that's with US rail infrastructure that's stuck in the 19th century with freight having priority over passenger services. If the US had invested in the rail network it would be even faster.

Not only did MCAS have no redundancy, it didn't even have a way to manually disable it without losing the ability to trim the control surfaces.

That isn't quite true. Disabling the MCAS and auto trim also disabled power trim. You could still use the manual trim wheels that move the control surfaces using cables. However under high aerodynamic loads (e.g. steep angle of attack), you're unlikely to be able to physically turn the manual trim wheels. It's hypothesised that this was the situation on the Ethiopian Airlines plane that crashed.

I do wonder what would happen if you turned on power trim and MCAS, quickly tried to use the power trim control to correct the trim, then immediately turned power trim and MCAS off again. Would the manual trim control override what the MCAS wanted to do, or would the command from the MCAS take priority?

The 737NG series allow you to disable auto trim without disabling power trim altogether. However, no checklist procedures called for disabling auto trim without also disabling power trim, so they removed this from the 737 MAX series.

My new Android phone has a nasty habit of pressuring me to agree to an obnoxious Google "privacy policy" and enable RCS. I wish it would just stop. If I root my phone, will it stop bothering me? Sounds like a reason to root my phone.

You can require forks to have a "readme", but people can lie. They'll spin their fork in as positive a light as possible. They could also be incompetent. Their "readme" could claim their fork fixes numerous issues, where all the "fixes" are misguided, based on a flawed understanding of the software.

Jokes are supposed to be funny.

There's a certain class of Sega arcade games that have the code in ROMs encrypted using an 8KiB (yes, 8192 byte) key. The key is stored in battery-backed RAM inside the CPU, with anti-tamper measures that will erase it if you try to exfiltrate it.

That would be virtually impossible to crack. However, they generated the keys with a linear pseudo-random number generator with a 24-bit seed. If that isn't bad enough by itself, they usually used the build date in YYMMDD binary coded decimal as the seed.

Since you know that the first few instructions at the reset vector are going to disable interrupts and start initialising hardware, you can just try decrypting the first 16 bytes of ROM code with every possible 24-bit seed, and print candidates that give plausible sequences of instructions. Then you look for candidates that look like dates around the right time and try them first.

What should have been almost unbreakable security became trivially cracked due to flawed key generation.

It basically works by calling a linked list of functions. There are no hash tables involved.

• The "t = now()" creates an empty linked list, assigns it to the variable "t", and adds code to call all the functions in the list.
• A function pointer to each "at t:" block is appended to the linked list referenced by "t".

It's pretty simple. The structure can be flattened as an optimisation to get rid of the linked lists. There are no hash tables needed. It's just a way to make code behave unintuitively.

I mean, there are analogous features in other languages. You could argue that constructors and destructors are a case of the same kind of non-intuitive flow control. The "On Error" statement in VBA is another similar thing.

I have about 15 Dutch language cookbooks including one full of just Dutch recipes and I call bullshit.

All my Dutch relatives from my parents' generation use the "pond" (500g) and "ons" (100g) when speaking. Now that I think about it, I don't think I've heard younger Dutch people using them as much. How old are the recipe books? I guess the "pond" and "ons" could have fallen out of use.