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Comment 486 seemed magically advanced in the mid 1990s. (Score 2) 128

My first Linux installation was Redhat 3.03 on a 16MHz 386/SX system in mid-1995. For those of you without an AARP card, that's a 32 bit CPU with a 16 bit bus, which Intel released to cannibalize the market for the 286, which did not have a memory management unit. That means no swapping, you run out of ram, it was game over.

I think the 486/25 that replaced the 386/SX arrived in ... 1996 ... and it had an astonishing *eight megabytes* of memory. I had kept a one megabyte LIM/EMS 4.0 physical memory card from my 286 when I got the 386/SX, and that actually mattered with Windows 3.x. I put it in the 486, but given that vast eight megabyte expanse of dram it didn't last long.

Then in late 1997 my employer went bankrupt and as part of the dissolution I brought home the dual Pentium 133 system with 32 megabytes of ram. I remember all my IRC friends were so jealous of that monster ...

Comment Tap or click to view article (Score 1) 43

No video (or animated image) should ever load/autoplay unless the user interacts with that element, indicating he/she wants to play it.

How granular would the permission be? If web browsers start blocking all animation and post-load layout shifting by default, including CSS transitions and animations, this would encourage website operators to structure the page to coerce permission to animate in each document. For example, a website operator could make each page load blank other than a notice to the effect "Tap or click to view 'Title of Article' on Name of Site."

Comment Re:I run Debian and i3 / Sway (Score 2) 111

I mostly run application fullscreen and switch between them. The only exception is when I'm comparing the content of two windows (in which case I tile horizontally or vertically) and file selection (floating).

When an application uses the entire screen without the window decorations needed in a regular window manager, a screen's limited real estate is in fact better used in a tiled window manager.

Comment Re:New religion (Score 1) 136

But you've got to do both. Doubting oneself is "critical thinking". Doubting other sources of authority is "independent thinking".

The thing is, nobody has enough expertise to be an independent thinker in every area. So you essentially MUST delegate your ideas in some areas (variable between people) to external authorities. At which point what you "believe" depends on which authorities you choose.

A related question is "how firm is that belief?". This also tends to vary wildly with little apparent (to me) reason behind it. This is one feature that *can* be related to IQ, but isn't always.

Comment I run Debian and i3 / Sway (Score 4, Interesting) 111

on all my machines. Once you get past the tiled window manager paradigm - if you've never used one before - you realize how fast and seamless it is, and it truly is the least common denominator in terms of memory usage.

I left Mint (which is really a Ubuntu derivative) years ago, and now i3 / Sway let I have the same unified desktop on all my machines, fast or slow, new or old, and they all feel perfectly usable.

I highly recommend spending the time to create a i3 or Sway config file. It's well worth the effort and it's a one-off.

And if you just want to try i3 or Sway on your existing distro, install it and simply change the Window manager for your user in the display manager: it lives totally independently of whatever your currently use, so it's risk-free.

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