Off Topic

[Rudie Radio Waves]

Hi Rudie, and welcome back! So what are you studying now?

Hiya Hunch!

I'm studying Computer Science; I'm very glad to be finally focusing on something I like.

[PluMGMK]

Hello Rudie! I remember changing your name just over a year ago. What a year it's been…

[Steo]

Ah, I hadn't even realised who it was. Welcome back, nice to hear from you again!

It's really nice that you got into computer science also, I'm really interested in technology myself.

[PluMGMK]

Btw, I just noticed you have an URL in your signature. You'll need to prepend "https://" to it to make it link properly.

[Hunchman801]

I'm studying Computer Science; I'm very glad to be finally focusing on something I like.

Glad to hear that, it's also a good line of work to be in.

[Elite Piranha]

The change in the front page caught me off guard, I always forget about April Fools' Day .

[Hunchman801]

Wait, April Fools' Day? What a coincidence, we are really migrating to the Apple Arcade!

[Steo]

Happy Easter everyone!

[Hunchman801]

Happy Easter to all!

[PluMGMK]

I found this article particularly interesting: https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-sty ... bled=false
It's about "languishing", which is a kind of state of "lack of well-being", without being depressed, and understandably it's quite prevalent at the moment…

[Hunchman801]

That's an interesting concept indeed! I can definitely feel a general sense of sluggishness among some people around me, which I suppose is a consequence of that.

[PluMGMK]

I've heard that apparently the WHO is recommending (or going to recommend) that women of child-bearing age should stay away from alcohol. Sounds like something out of the Handmaid's Tale

[Hunchman801]

Well, that's probably true for everyone, but why is it that it's always the good stuff that's bad for your health.

[PluMGMK]

I've spent some time pondering that question myself, and I think the answers are fairly straightforward in terms of evolutionary biology. Never really took to alcohol myself though!

In other news, apparently Windows 11 is a thing now

[Hunchman801]

One can only dream of it being as good as 7 (or even better, XP).

[PluMGMK]

It's been so long… What was so great about XP again? (Apart from the lack of spyware non-opt-out-able telemetry that is! )

[Hunchman801]

Well, for a start, it didn't take XP a few seconds to start registering inputs after opening the Start menu. And in general, it just felt efficient and responsive, and I don't remember running in a lot of OS-related bugs.

[PluMGMK]

The Start Menu didn't have a search function back then though, did it?

I'll admit that of all the Windows versions I've used, I've probably had the fewest BSODs per unit time on XP, but maybe that's because I was using it on the least dodgy hardware of any I've ever had – after all, it was before I started messing around with the insides of computers! Certainly didn't feel responsive when I had 256 MB of RAM in 2008 after four years of installing various stuff, but then that's hardly the OS's fault

But yeah, never underestimate the ability of dodgy hardware/firmware to screw around with OSes, well-written or otherwise. I'm reminded of this from a few weeks ago… https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page= ... st-1MB-RAM

[Hunchman801]

The Start Menu didn't have a search function back then though, did it?

Maybe that's why, then. I realize that it's been so long that my memories of it are indeed a bit vague.

[PluMGMK]

Oh ffs, it's 2021 and things like this are still happening: https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politic ... bled=false

UTF-8's backwards compatibility with ASCII is great and all that, but it can allow these errors to pop up when everything looked like it was going fine, and root-causing / fixing the problem can be a hair-wrenching experience – believe me, I know! I think Microsoft had the right idea trying to bring in UTF-16 for everything, but it didn't really catch on

EDIT: The Irish Times article translates "síneadh fada" as "aspiration" – wtf? A síneadh fada indicates a long vowel, not an aspiration!