It seems to me they could redirect the 10 figures a year they are spending on building a VR world no one wants or will use. Or did they cannibalize that already?

We get it. You don't like Beyonce. Neither do I, but I'm not making a scene over that fact.

Around 1990, I worked for a couple months on an embedded device that had an 80186 and a megabyte of RAM. At one point, I had access to a huge pile of 1MB SIMMs and took a stack home for the evening and using memory boards that allowed you to stack up to 8 of them into one SIMM slot in your computer to figure out just how little RAM Windows NT 3.5 really needed to boot. It booted successfully with 12MB of RAM. It really wasn't usable, but it did boot up. Nowadays, Windows is probably only marginally usable with 12GB of RAM.

does anyone (govt etc) have back-door access to it?

It seems that lately governments are "insisting" on back-doors into user-encryption, going so far as to bar sales of products to their citizens that they can't just look at anytime they feel like it.

We need to read your texts to stop Terrorism! and Think of the Children!

They work for Meta. I would expect them to be miserable.

The company has been dumping 10 figures a year into trying to build a VR world no one wants, with nothing to show for it after the better part of a decade. At some point, you expect morale to decrease.

They'll use the same excuse when AI perfects the Torment Nexus, I'm sure.

Oops. I thought I was responding to the story about the grossly insecure White House app.

Still, it's incompetence all the way down.

Although I'm not as big a fan of Hanlon's Razor as I used to be, I'd be willing to chalk this up to typical government incompetence, farming this work out to the cheapest bidder in a way where no one involved in any decision-making has any technical expertise whatsoever.

Nothing is going to get better as long as the U.S. education system is captured by ideologues whose priorities are _not_ an educated, literate and thinking populace.

It went to the same place that Winamp 4 went to.

I loved Hack 1.0.3. At some point between then and now NetHack got unreasonably difficult for me.

Multiple instances of a name with a non-ASCII character and of course /. can't display it. Is it still 1999?

I'm referring to Erdos, of course, but I replaced the non-ASCII o with a diacritical so it would be displayed in my message.

I rarely see _any_ subtitles that are not appallingly bad, including YouTube.

Yes a bit OT but I remember the one-liner contests the magazines would have. You had to not use any unnecessary spaces, single-letter variables, use any command shortening method (like "?" instead of "print") and other tricks to get as much function as possible out of the ~253 bytes of line space available. Amazing what some people could squeeze onto one line of BASIC! (games were the most popular, though graphics displays were frequently featured)

It was pretty normal for those "one-liners" to take up a third of the screen or more when LIST'ed

Back in the day most of the computer magazines had one of those. I think it was Nibble magazine that published several programs for the Apple ][.

IIRC you'd start the program in the background and it would watch what line your cursor was on and display a two digit checksum in the upper right corner of the screen that would update as you typed. Just make sure that number matched the check on the end of the line in the magazine and you were clear to hit Return to save the line.

A different magazine had a similar method, but I believe it provided line-by-line checksums after you were done entering the program, and would also generate a "program checksum" at the end that would match if all lines were correct.

I also remember several occasions where there was a printing problem in the magazine and everyone's checksum was wrong, they'd publish a correction in next month's edition and everyone would cry "THAT'S why I couldn't get it right!" (probably after receiving hundreds of letters in the mail complaining about hours of frustration trying to key it in!) This was frequently due to the magazine omitting a line of code. (all the line checksums matched, but not the total at the bottom)

ahh the good ol days of Human OCR....