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Posted by tomman
Raymoo learns that error money IS serious money.

(Touhou + numismatics?! Hell, why not?!)

Posted by funkyass
do people not know what a head spreader does?

Posted by sureanem
I think there's a far simpler explanation, Occam's razor and all.

An ambitious program of cost-cutting, outsourcing, and digitalization had already begun.

What's the expression in English? Wise for a penny, stupid for a pound?

Posted by kode54
Which sort of explains my dad's situation with the iMac I gave him for Christmas a few years ago. He prefers the shitty corded Dell mouse that came with the shitty Dell minitower he bought before I gave him that machine, to the slightly annoying and terribly not ergonomic Apple Magic Mouse that came with the iMac.

Posted by kode54
WizTree is like the best of WinDirStat and Everything, a disk space usage analyzer that uses the MFT directly. Of course, that optimization only works with NTFS volumes, but most Windows users are on that, right?

Posted by kode54
But I absolutely love the touch scrolling, and some of the gestures.

Posted by sureanem

It has one physical button. How am I supposed to right click with it?

And why would I want to use it with Linux?

Posted by sureanem

While we're at Stupidville, here is your daily reminder to get your shit fixed for Y2K+:
https://it.slashdot.org/story/20/01/12/0221226/this-years-y2k20-bug-came-directly-from-a-lazy-fix-to-the-y2k-bug

Don't see what's so wrong with it. Surely they can just expand it again? Not too much work to re-window to say 2060, when all of the people working on it will have retired.

I don't like how all the stuff has to be Unicode and 4-digit dates and ISO god-knows-what compliant. There's a beauty to keeping it simple: 7-bit text (for international users, ISO-8859 or classic 16-bit Unicode), 2-digit years, and 1 pixel = 1 pixel (no god-damned "virtual pixel" nonsense). Localization is UB.

In a few short years, we won't have too much stuff left from the 1990s, so we can return to using 6-digit dates, as one should. Will be really beautiful and I look forward to it.

Posted by funkyass
Windowing is a good solution, because it means you don't need to touch the data in the archives, but would need re-assessing the fix yearly - which no one ever did. Fixing it now means either moving the window, or maintaining three systems - one for pre y2k data, one for the windowed dates, and the system that uses a 64-bit integer timestamp that handles time-zones and leap-seconds.

the WWE2K20 game is a code base from the PS1 era, if anyone was wondering why it happened.

Posted by sureanem

Posted by CaptainJistuce
The problem is obvious. You're saying what they said in 2000. And, well, what they said when the original programmers wrote this stuff in the 1960s.

And was there a problem in 2000? No, because they fixed it. And they did so without making everything ugly.

It's disgusting. Instead of YYMMDD, a nice compact number, you get yyYY-MM-DD, where the first 2 digits are just pointless decoration.

2-digit years were a memory-saving hack that was relevant when we measured memory available in bytes, and has no place in the modern world.

They have a place in my mind: 20200113 is hard to parse, why you need dashes, 2020-01-13, and suddenly you've almost doubled the size from a nice, clean, 200113.

Here's how serious and respectable countries with well-established traditions of record-keeping handle dates:
Iceland: The number is composed of 10 digits, of which the first six are the individual's birth date or corporation's founding date in the format DDMMYY. The next two digits are chosen at random when the identification number is allocated, the ninth digit is a check digit, and the last digit indicates the century in which the individual was born (for instance, '9' for the period 1900–1999, or '0' for the period 2000–2099). An example would be 120174-3399, the person being born on the twelfth day of January 1974.

As you can see, a lot of different solutions can be used, none of which involve appending on extra junk.

The thinking man, I think, would in legacy systems use the excess space in the day field to encode the century. 01-32 1950-2049, 33-64 2050-2149, 65-96 2150-2249. After that, the months field can be used.

Nope. These databases still contain data reaching back to 1960, sometimes for regulatory purposes.

That does seem to be a problem, but presenting stuff with 4-digit years is still unacceptable. A hidden single-bit field "centuryLSB" set to 1 for the third millennium seems like a more sensible solution.

On the topic of Unix time, leap seconds are disgusting. They should have went with GPS time and had the timestamp been the amount of second-sized time intervals since the epoch. It's not like they subtract 3600 each time DST hits, right?

and every computer program going forward needs to be able to handle dates from any point in computing history AT A MINIMUM.

No. The applications here are games, they certainly don't. Mission-critical software shouldn't be relying on string representations of dates.

Also, two-digit years will break again in 2100, which is a single lifetime away. Three-digit years is a minimum requirement for any new software development.

Three-digit years is the worst of both worlds. Then I would rather have four, which at least encodes a legitimate concept. This is an absurd conversation anyway. What about the year 10K problem? What then, huh? Meanwhile, 253402300800 is a perfectly legitimate 64-bit integer.

Posted by kode54
I don't care if this is painful, you can't expect every single user to have identical hardware.

You can, you should, and it's regrettable they don't.
Terry Davis had the right idea, but he was too extreme. I think 24-bit 1920x1080 / Windows 7 / Stereo / 100 Mbit would be a good default. Enthusiasts can use IPS panels or homemade scaling solutions.

Posted by kode54
Also, since Jistuce made me read it...

Fuck you, Windows 7 dies in less than two days. Good riddance, it was already replaced years ago. There are many choices for alternatives that continue to receive updates. Not the least of which is Windows 10.

Posted by creaothceann

Posted by sureanem
Isn't anything serious stored with Unix time anyway?

Yeah, about that...

Posted by CaptainJistuce
And if you don't want patches, Windows 2000 is better than Windows 7... or really, any other Windows. It is objectively the best Windows.

But what about my DOS games?! Also, Windows 95 had that sweet extra 3D shading.

Posted by tomman
First MS ruined the calculator, by replacing it with some Metro UWP webshit.

Now MS also is in the works to ensure your base OS install will ship with absolutely no usable applications:
https://news.slashdot.org/story/20/01/21/1614225/microsoft-is-testing-ads-in-wordpad-in-windows-10

Not that I care about Wordpad - if you need a texteditor for large files, there are plenty of them available, at several price tags. For Win32/64, portable editions included! And if you need to edit actual documents, LibreOffice is still free, if you don't want to contract herpes pirate pay for Office.
But still, why bother injecting ads in base OS accessories!?

I didn't knew Redmond, WA got relocated to Silly Valley, CA...

Posted by sureanem

I'm not going to dignify the other millennial's brash personal attacks with a response.