I remember in the original 1990’s NASCAR Racing game, I discovered a glitch where if I managed hit an AI car into the outer wall a certain way while driving backwards, it would launch said AI car backwards at some incredible rate of speed which could make for some spectacular wrecks.

Anyhow, that’s what I spent most of time doing.

Does Encarta count as owning an encyclopedia?

I’d at least start them with something simple like Paint or Notepad. Once they have that down, then you can throw the disaster that is the MS Office file save dialog at them.

With the N64, it helps if you can hook it up to a TV from around that era too. Games like Goldeneye look terrible on a modern LCD. I had that experience myself - “Man, I know I’m used to modern games now, but I don’t remember these games looking this shitty”. Then I dragged out my old CRT and hooked it up, and instantly it was “Now this is how I remember these games looking like”.

At best, I’ve seen a small discount and whatever is traded in is junked to keep it off the second-hand market.

I remember my first game of Stellaris many years ago - I had bought some pack that included some of the DLC out at the time. The crisis was bugged so that even after I beat the crisis and wiped it from the galaxy, the game didn’t recognize that I had done so which left the game unbeatable. This was my first playthrough, no mods or anything like that, and I hit a game-breaking bug.

I played quite a bit of Stellaris as it was (still is?) a fun game, but I am more of a casual gamer and every time I picked the game up again they had changed at least one major mechanic, and there was yet another DLC out if you wanted the full experience. Encountering bugs in a play through was common, and game breaking ones would still pop up from time to time. Finally I just got fed up, especially for the cost of some of the pricier DLC you can buy a game like Factorio which is a much better value.

So at this point I’m done with Paradox. I suppose if I really had the urge to play Stellaris again I’d find something out on the high seas, but there’s enough other, better polished, games out there to keep me busy.

And for all the money you spend on a Paradox game, you end up with something that feels like a half-finished beta.

While we’re at it, let’s also vent about cars and trucks with loud modified exhausts.

I use BiglyBt on Debian. I use BiglyBt because I previously used Vuze, and I used Vuze because I previously used Azureus. I don’t really remember why I went with Azureus originally, but it may have just been because it was popular at that time.

I get the impression most people use other bittorrent clients nowadays, but BiglyBt does what I need it to do. I never really used any of the “advanced” features of Vuze myself, pretty much only using it for torrents.

The sad thing is back in the Windows XP days Microsoft had the focus stealing thing pretty much solved. Well okay - I remember you had to install some of the PowerToys or make some registry edits to get at some of the settings. But once setup pretty much nothing could steal focus away from the current window, which was a welcome change from where we had been. That started to break again in Windows 7, and has gotten worse with every release since then.

Admittedly XFCE isn’t perfect either, but it’s much better behaved than modern Windows.

Rock n’ Roll Racing.

I see enough weird behavior out of the Dells at work and their USB-C docks so I can believe it. Not detecting the dock, not charging from the dock, ports not working on the dock, randomly insisting the dock isn’t compatible. Even the machines that end up as folding desktops that never get disconnected from their dock end up doing this stuff. I really had no use for a laptop anyway so I finally convinced them to give me a desktop.

Generally, Google shows the appropriate name based upon where you are located. So for everyone outside of 'murica, it’s still the Gulf of Mexico.

Youtube was founded?

Well, it definitely looks to have backfired on US government. The politicians figured that they could force Bytedance to divest TikTok using a ban in the US as a threat, assuming that TikTok wouldn’t want to lose access to the US market and the 180 million or so (!) users. Instead of complying, ByteDance did nothing and the politicians and the US government were put into a position of actually enforcing a very unpopular ban.

The timing of course is interesting. This comes right at the end of Biden’s administration, allowing for Trump to swoop in and lift the ban and take all the credit for that. Of course ignoring that is was Trump who originally kicked this whole thing into motion back in 2020 with his executive order to ban TikTok.

Unfortunately, it’s the corporate standard. With that said, it’s actually kind of surprising how little I use the Office suite on my work computer (other than Outlook I guess). More and more things are becoming web based.

I’m expecting pretty decent software support for Windows 10 for another three years or so. Sure, there will be things here and there that won’t work, but most things will continue to work and many people who are on Windows 10 can just keep on using it for the next few years should they chose to do that. That’ll more or less match what happened with Windows 7, where it wasn’t until 2023 that I started to see support start to massively drop off. With that said, if Microsoft actually breaks Office on Windows 10 that’ll really change things.

Also, I’d offer up 2001-2014 as a period of time where it was entirely possible to stick with one OS (Windows XP) the entire time.

Demand might be low, but on the other hand the cost to develop and manufacture a run of the drives may not be too high either.

I do have to say the increase in flash memory prices haven’t helped. A year ago I bought the Samsung 8TB drive for $300 (US). If they had a 16TB model for $600-$700 I would have bought it.

That’s why I would say that cell phones are fine. It’s when they turned into smartphones where I would draw the line. I just get the feeling that we’d be a lot better off if mobile phone tech never advanced much further than the mid-2000’s flip phone.

What they need to do is take that mostly empty 2.5" drive, and cram it full of flash chips. Why have we been stuck with 8TB as the largest consumer drives for a few years now? I can understand it a bit for NVMe due to the physical form factor, but there’s no excuse for 2.5" drives. It doesn’t seem that complicated. For example, all Samsung would have to do is take the 2.5" 8TB 870 QVO, double the number of chips in it, then sell it for twice the price. I’d buy one.