palordrolap

You know what they say about stopped clocks.

Linux Musk sounds like the evil counterpart to Mint. A fork of Red Star OS, etc.

Gonna guess people who missed the memo about Mint until well after they installed Ubuntu. They haven’t had the time or energy to switch distros yet, but did manage the time and/or energy to install Cinnamon.

Maybe a couple of others who have unknown reasons for avoiding Mint. No idea what those reasons are, but there’s always someone with a different take.

Probably closed the terminal emulator it was running in and opened a new one before trying to find documentation at my leisure. One of the luxuries of learning Unix commands in a graphical environment.

For a more drastic noob story, I once rebooted a computer because I couldn’t get out of GWBASIC. I was familiar with QBASIC at the time and that was a lot easier to get out of if you didn’t know what you were doing.

Obligatory note that /etc/profile and ~/.profile are only run by login shells, and many terminal emulators do not execute a login shell by default.

Unfortunately, there is no standard secondary place* that all shells execute, so check your chosen shell’s manual for what it does run on startup and put your functions into one of those. Preferably one that goes in your homedir.

Alternatively have that file source ~/.profile assuming that won’t cause an infinite loop.

* And not even a primary if you count *csh, but if you use those you have other problems.

Dinosaur here.

Windows Paint, as it was back in 9x? Totally my jam. Between that and Irfanview for access to resizing and filter features Paint didn’t have, I could get a surprising amount done.

But then they updated Paint to have more advanced abilities and I had no idea how to do things any more.

I’ve tried Krita recently, but I felt lost. I think I need to attend a course or watch some videos on layers and the brushes and everything like that. It isn’t intuitive at all. None of the advanced graphics programs are.

Old Paint? You didn’t need a how-to or a course. It was one layer. No overwhelming number of tools and options. You wanted another layer? You opened another Paint window.

You wanted anti-aliasing? You drew things two or four times the size then used something like Irfanview to shrink it down when you were done.

Damn kids get off my etc.

One of Perl’s design principles was the Robustness principle, though it probably wasn’t known by that name at the time. (The name came about around the same time Perl was becoming a thing, something something zeitgeist something.)

Perl can be locked down and made to complain (with at least a couple of levels of pedantry) when things are wrong, but unlike most other languages, it doesn’t do so by default.

“Socky”

“Socky Junior”

“Socky Sock Sock”

“The guy who wrote this implementation was suffering from burn-out, wasn’t he.”

Ha. No, I don’t think it was Linus, but it might have been someone else European. Really hard to be sure at this point. SATA has been around for a while.

And I’ve unearthed a memory of the other, other pronunciation that I know I’ve heard: “serial ay-tee-ay”. Why make it an acronym when you can say one of the words and then the initials of the others!

I must have heard “saata” somewhere because that’s my head-pronunciation, and it doesn’t match how I say data (dayta). Not sure I’ve ever said it out loud.

Could be an “avoiding saying anything like ‘Satan’” kind of thing, not because of religion, but more to avoid lame jokes.

@Toes @snownyte @otter

There are two mods currently, Ernest, admin of kbin as well as owner of /m/tech, and @artillect, who hasn’t been seen (except for votes maybe?) for 8 months.

The word is that Ernest has real-life problems and can’t maintain kbin at the moment.

I’ve applied here and a bunch of other places but hopefully better-qualified, more active people have also applied; Even if I get it, I can’t be here all the time.

… but it needs the owner of the magazine, Ernest, who isn’t around, to accept the applications.

Unforchunetly, Ingglish speling duzn’t laiyn up with saowndz wun-tuh-wun.

Spelling things how you say them can lead to people misunderstanding or causing unintended(?) pain.

dude

Thanks! I wanted something hard to hit by accident but with a nice mnemonic in it.

A cat-on-keyboard situation could just about manage it, but I don’t have a cat.

Weaksauce. Everyone knows you configure at least one Vulcan-nerve-pinch dead-key chord that primes the following key chord to switch the layout.

Only half joking. I’m the guy with Ctrl-Super-Alt-Shift-Pause set to put the PC into Suspend mode.

Unrelatedly, I hope the meme name isn’t a dog-whistle of some sort, because that really would be weaksauce.

Debian has a .deb that does the job.

Unless you have a really old graphics card anyway and then you have to use the .run installer from Nvidia. Pain in the a– sure, but still not Joker level hurt-the-world madness.

Nah. Notepad in Windows. Definitely.

Yep. The phrase “Personal Computer” is fairly old at this point. Everyone and their dog called their computer product a “Personal Computer” back in the 80s. The id-plate on the Commodore 128 and 64C computers had that exact phrase under the computer name.

“IBM-compatible personal computer” is a wordy phrase, and even before the “IBM-compatible” part became somewhat anachronistic, it was being abbreviated to just “PC”, heralding the death-knell for most other systems that otherwise had every right to use the name.

Someone else already said WSL, but before WSL there was Cygwin, and before Cygwin it was probably the DOS era tbh, but you could definitely get pdksh as a DOS executable back then. (I was never quite brave enough to make pdksh the SHELL in CONFIG.SYS, but I could have.)

As for Windows’ WM being Explorer, yeah, that’s basically been the case since Windows 95. The desktop itself is a special instance of a folder and the taskbar, at least up to Windows 7 (I’ve been out of touch since then) was a heavily modified partially-floating menu bar.

Prior to that, Windows 3.x had something called Program Manager which Windows 8 kind of, sort of, went back to (but not really) and everyone hated it. The original Program Manager would have been better, honestly.

Makes me wonder if the setting is still there in modern Windows to change the WM to something else. It used to be in WIN.INI, so it’s probably a registry key now. No doubt deep instability will result if it’s set to anything other than explorer.exe because of the deep integration that explorer.exe has with literally everything, so probably not worth trying. Also, if you start Explorer when it isn’t the WM, it’ll probably try to do WM things anyway and break whatever else is running.

Any self-respecting malware writer will download and decompile the Powertools to find out what API calls are being used. Especially if they’re calls to an undocumented API.

Having Powertools on your computer is thus not the security hole it might appear to be.

The fact they exist at all - well that’s not really a security hole either. Their existence just more quickly dissolves any security-by-obscurity that might have existed. Someone would have found those calls another way.

One might suppose that they contain something special that’s not in the stock OS, but then we’re back to the malware writer’s reverse engineering which would lead them to learn and implement their own versions of whatever it is that Powertools does.