Pentium100

Maybe a year ago, someone said I should try the bing bot in Skype, so I did ask it a few questions, that was it. When I search something on Google, it also gives me "AI result" that's usually nonsense, so I don't really pay attention to it.

A knockoff NES. It looked similar to this: But it was not this, I do not remember what the model was, but I remember that it had some numbers. Also, the controllers did not have the red buttons, though IIRC the controllers themselves were red. I only had a few cartridges, of the type "9999 in 1" where it pretends to have thousands of games, but they are modifications of a few real games. I played with it, but IIRC I preferred the PC when my parents finally bought one. It was fun using the two antennas that came with it to have a wireless connection to the TV and to turn on a TV in a different room and see the game.

Alicorn, if that's not possible then unicorn. Magic seems cool and can compensate for lack of hands.

I hate this as well, in fact I use a lot of old stuff. However, I can also understand the ISP. If they are upgrading the system to something incompatible, they cannot just leave you on the old one. If they wanted to, they would probably not only have to keep the old system online, but also keep your whole apartment building (or neighborhood) on the old system and some of your neighbors may want the faster speeds. Also, it sounds like the equipment is considered property of the ISP, so you don't have to pay for the upgrade anyway. I am more annoyed by various forced upgrades of things that do not force others to comply. The government would very much like me to get a newr car, even though my current car can use the exact same roads and exact same fuel as the newer ones. It's not like they have to maintain special roads or provide special fuel just for me. Other customers demanding higher speeds (just because you don't need a faster connection does not mean that nobody wants it) or the aggregte capacity (your and your neighbors use combined) was not enough anymore because of increated usage, more customers or both.

When I was a kid, we had a VHS player (not a recorder) and some tapes, some movies and some cartoons, though they were pirated copies and not factory made. They all were in Russian (the Western ones had Russian voiceovers) and I do not understand Russian, though for something like Nu Pgodi or Tom & Jerry it did not matter as there is very little talking in those cartoons. Later I got a TV tuner card for my PC, but had reliability issues where the recording would get corrupted or randomly stop or some other problem, so I bought a VHS VCR in 2006 or 2007 and started using it - video quality was somewhat lower, but it was way more reliable. Now I have multiple VCRs and still record VHS or SVHS tapes from time to time. Most of the tapes I have I recorded myself from TV and most of those are various concerts or music TV shows. A year ago I bought some tapes about steam locomotives and trains in general. While I am not using my VCRs as much as before, that is more due to the fact that I have a way to record/download from IPTV, so now I use a VCR to record from a channel I cannot get the other way or as a backup. If the provider ever stops me from doing it, I'll go back to using the VCRs more. My tape collection is not that big though, only a bit over 100.

Mainly it's the popularity of the platform. If you need to spend effort to make sure the game works on an OS, would you rather do it for a popular OS or one that only a few people use? I dislike Windows 10 and 11. As for optimized APIs, IIRC, recently the Linu kernel got a patch that adds some functions to have Windows-style locking or something (called NTSYNC), this was done mainly to improe the performance of Windows games on Linux. Linux caches stuff all the time, by default it even puts some programs into the swap file to free up memory for cache (you can disable that by setting vm.swappiness=1 in sysctl.conf).

I quite liked it, it was worth the money I paid for the bluray. Then nothing changes. Nobody is taking the original from my file server and I can ignore the new one if it sucks.

I quite liked the animated movie. I hope the reboot happens. If it sucks, I can just ignore it and rewatch the original again, but there is a chance it may be good.

For anything DOS related, I use an actual old PC with DOS (and Windows 3.11). More fun that way. Similar for games that run on Windows 98 or XP - an old PC with that OS. If a game is coded for Windows, then it makes sense that it would run worse on Linux, because the API calls are not the same, something that may be optimized on Windows may not be on Linux. I remember, at least in the past, there was a problem with Linux async file IO. There were multiple APIs to choose from and none of them worked very well, but the only async API on Windows worked better. I found out about that in relation to torrents and why a torrent client uses sync IO for disk, but that was a while ago, maybe it is fixed now.

I am not really interested in superheros, so I do not know much about them. Still, the only reason they would show the main character dying is if they can somehow resurrect him, otherwise the series would just end and nobody wants to end a popular series. Just like how Arthur Conan Doyle had to bring back Sherlock Holmes because fans asked for it (even though AFAIK, he really intended to end the series and write about something else, even if it meant less money for him). I guess if there are a lot of reboots of the same thing, it could get confusing, but I am reading about the attempts to reboot Babylon 5 (one of my favorite series) and if the reboot happens and it is great, awesome, if it sucks, well, I can still watch the original.

I don't particularly care. If the reboot is good, I'll watch it, if it's bad, then I won't. A bad reboot or sequel would not ruin the original show for me. I can still watch the original, nobody is going to take it away from me.

It was not 8%, I would not care about that. With a GTX970, Derail Valley on Windows 8.1 got about 40-50fps and on Linux it got about 15fps on the same PC. With a RTX3090 the framerates are higher (obviously), but they are also more similar between Windows and Linux. Yeah, I think I read something about Vulkan that may be the cause of this. I do not like "bleeding edge", I use Ubuntu LTS or Debian and dislike it when I have to use something else like CentOS and now I have to look for the equivalent of /etc/network/interfaces or some other config file. I also dislike updating anything and like seeing long uptimes.

I use Debian on my servers and Ubuntu (with KDE) for some PCs, though if I wanted to install an new PC now, I would probably use Debian on the desktop as well. Linux is what I would say programmer-friendly, but not neccesarily user-friendly. It does have the "self-made" or "designed by programmers" feeling, similar to the devices I build for myselt. Windows (at least the older versions) is different in that more setting are easier to access without editing text files or using the command line. Creating a custom resolution with an nVidia card is easier on Windows for example. Linux has the drivers for most stuff built-in, so usually most of everythign works immediately after installing. OTOH, if there is no built-in driver for some device (but there is one published by the manufacturer), you may have lots of "fun" trying to make it work. Or it may be easy. Games on Linux run quite well (at least the ones I play), but if you have an older card (for me it was a GTX970) some games have way worse performance on Linux than on Windows on the exact same PC. Apparently there is some kind of compatibility problem and you need at least a RTX20 series card to overcome it.

Twice, both times at night. Once I made a small mistake when driving though an empty and dark intersection, so I had to blow to the breathalyzer (got zero). The other time cops were bored, saw my car that's not common anymore and wanted to chat. This time they did not check if I was drunk.

Yes, I buy CDs, records, reel to reel tapes and cassettes. The reel to reel tapes I buy are usually ones recorded by the previous owner, not an official release (as far as I know, there were almost no official R2R releases in the USSR). I also download some music from torrents, youtube or other places, sometimes I record a concert from TV (to a VHS tape or to my file server, depending on the source). Sometimes I buy a cassette of the music I have downloaded if I can find it. If I buy a brand new record, I usually record it to a R2R tape on the first or second tme I play it, so that I then can play the tape and not wear out my record. If I buy a used record, I usually do not bother with that, unless I think I will want to play it a lot.

It would depend on the circumstances, but maybe Poland or the US. If I was going to the US (the advantage here would be that I can speak the language, even if not that well), I would prefer to go to some state where it's not too hot. Alaska maybe?

hard drives are not good for archival storage like this. A lot of things can go wrong with them - bearings can seize etc. Better to use magnetic tape or magneto-optical disks (kind-of old technology so the capacity is not that great) for this. Choose a popular format so that it would be possible to find a drive to read it. Minidiscs are magneto-optical so I would probably use them. Or LTO tape if I wanted terabytes. The 3.5" or 5.25" MO drives are kind-of hard to find. Flash memory can also be used, weirdly enough to make it retain the data for longer, you need to write it when the memory chip is hot and then store it in a cold place. Use lower density technology lik SLC or MLC instead of TLC. However, some SSDs (especially enterprise IIRC) have very short data retention, they are not designed for being unplugged for long periods of time. I am not planning on doing this, but if I was, I would probably just use analog reel-to-reel tape and maybe film. Stored sealed they can last a long time and even if they get damaged, usually it is still possible to recover some of the information. I may be tempted to include a LTO-1 or SDLT tape (lower density, hopefully bettter reliability compared to something like LTO-6) or a minidisc.

The universe is very big. Seriously. So, IMO there are multiple reasons why we have not seen any indications of other intelligent life, though both come down to "the universe is big". 1. It may really be impossible to go faster than light. That means it would take hundreds or thousands of years for some aliens to travel to Earth. It may not be possible to do that or even if they can figure out the technology, it may be too expensive for them and not worth it. If we had such technology, how many volunteers would there be to travel 1000 years to some planet that MAY have life. How many would trust the spaceship to last 1000 years with only what spare parts you could take? Also, 1000 light years is "very close". Our galaxy is 100000 lightyars across and the closes other galaxy is 2.5 million lightyears. Anyone up for a three million year trip (in one direction)? Nobody? How about a 50000 year trip? And the three million is the closest galaxy. 2. Even i it is possible to travel faster than light, but not instantly (let's say a 1000 light year distance takes 10 years), it still would be impractical, but less so. However, who's to say that someone would notice Earth? Our radio signals reach, at best, 110 light years and in that distance they are so weak that it is likely impossible to receive them. So, from distance, our planet looks like it may have life on it, but no real evidence for it. Anyne up for a long trip to see if there's anything there? 3. The radio signal problem works in reverse too. We may not be able to receive any radio signals from some far away planet because they either have not reached us yet or because they are so weak, it is impossible to receive them. That's assuming we would be able to recognize them and decode them even if they were strong enough. Imagine being on a small island in the middle of the ocean 500 years ago. You may not even know that there are other people somewhere. After all, maybe no ship came close to your island and all you see is water in all directions. Maybe the whole planet is water and your island is the only land there is? Maybe there's life somewhere on the continent, but you have no way of going there and they are not bothering with you and your island?

Yeah, I listen to albums. I usually can't be bothered to make mixtapes, so I either listen to an album or a mixtape (as in, a used audio tape) that I bought. When listening to audio files, I also usually listen to the entire album as I usually can't be bothered to make a playlist and do not want to choose the next song after every song. Sometimes I'm in the mood to listen to a particular song, then I'll play that.

Yes, I mean what's the difference? However, usually I set the volume on the PC to maximum and then control the volume with the volume knob on the amplifier. It's an analog potentiometer and does not have numbers on it. The tape deck in my car has digital volume control and I set the volume to what I want, I usually do not even look at what the number is. Most of the time the numbers are arbitrary 0-100 or whatever. Some ampifiers show the volume as dB (with 0 being maximum) though. Still, I just set the volume where I want it not paying attention to the numbers.

There are some long-running threads in a style of "Who is your favorite pony?". I may want to post in such a thread, but I do not want to repeat myself every month or year. However, so far, the only wa of knowing if I posted in this thread before that I know of is to go through all the pages and search for my name. Is there any faster way to find out if I posted in a thread before (let's assume that my memory is not perfect and that I am too lazy to keep notes)? If not, I think there should be.