27, I dimly remember what Winamp was (never used it though) and extrapolated what Skins would be. I assume they’re essentially an archive of image files used to give a music player a custom look? Except they’re not technically restricted to image files and can apparently contain other files too, which I assume will make them invalid as skins, i.e. corrupted.
How far off am I?
Mind, I’m far from representative for my age group, given my IT expertise.
I believe Robustness was the term I learned years ago: the ability of a system to gracefully handle user error, make it easy to recover from or fix, clearly communicate what was wrong etc.
Of course, nothing is ever perfect and humans are very creative at fucking up, and a lot of companies don’t seem to take UX too seriously. Particularly when the devs get tunnel vision and forget about user error being a thing…
I used to sneer at the kids in my class that used it. Must have been fairly shortly after it launched, something like fourteen to fifteen years ago. I’m still grappling with a certain inertia when it comes to switching away from something I have relied on for so long, but I’m coming around to the idea of giving DDG a try at least (irrational as it is, I’ve been reluctant to even try - I suspect out of fear of liking it and having to change).
Past Me would be exasperated that Present Me is even toying with the idea. But then, Past Me had a lot of stupid takes anyway.
Bribe them with snacks. Source: Am IT. Have been bribed with snacks. You can bet that user got priority treatment from that day on.
If it’s real, I’m confident he had some competent assistant hire a competent crew for that photo-op. I’m guessing a competent PR consultant suggested a good photo-op in the first place, hit the right buttons to appeal to his wannabe cool image.
If it’s fake, some competent developer created a good tool, fed with competently selected data to create a rather convincing image.
What I’m trying to say is that there most certainly were several competent people involved in the making of this picture.
Just not the subject.
But someone that blatantly argues for Russia’s benefit probably has some ulterior motives. Doesn’t have to be deep throating Putin, money will probably do.
Both Medieval Europe and Antiquity were defined by wealthy landowners and poor workers. We don’t always see a whole lot of that in the writings that have survived until our time, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t exist.
Most of the ancient sources we have were written by people with the both leisure to learn, travel around and write stuff down and the connections to have their writings be considered worth duplicating and preserving. In a word: the elites.
The issue here is that the poor and destitute didn’t exist in a vacuum just because resources were scarce. Even in bad years for the peasantry, the elites generally did fine.
These ancient sources don’t always spell that out, because it isn’t worth spelling out to them: this is just how they and their peers live. Most of these elite members owned property or the workshop and tools with which their workers labored.
By and large, they were rich. Whether that richness is defined in numbers on some net worth estimate or just in the amount of things they owned, the result is the same.
And even in Ancient Greece, the rich had to make some contributions back to the community (except for Sparta, but they’re a whole different beast of exploitation). Philanthropy has its roots there, even if it is a far cry from what we would term Philantropy today: The wealthy either voluntarily or out of obligation funded buildings, artworks etc. for the general public.
What changed with Industrial Capitalism and later Globalisation was mostly the scale of exploitation. But the principle - an owner class exploiting a labour class - has been around forever.
Let’s hope - and try to achieve - that this is a shock to action, a wake-up call for “a-political” centrists (actual centrists, not the right-wing sock puppets pretending to be) and those left-of-centre that didn’t take matters too seriously up until now. The fight is on, but it’s far from lost.
When on the gallows, humour may be all you have left 😄
I’ve twice now gotten a position without prior knowledge of the tools in question. I think a lot is just taking a gamble on your ability to learn as you go - which clearly worked out in your case.
I had my start with Python, albeit as a kid and I didn’t actually understand too much about the principles at the time. Still, I think that was a good place to start learning about the concepts of instructions and variables.
I learned more about the ideas underpinning it all later, and most of my understanding came when actually working in software development on a live and in-development codebase. I think that’s a good progression: start small, then learn some theory just so you’ve heard the terms once, then try to make sense of actual code using that.
Edit: definitely work on some goal though. Don’t code in a vacuum, think of something small you want to achieve and learn to do that.
That would be rather pathetic then, to resort to anticompetitive practices and still not prevail.
I believe that is why people made such a fuss about the GDPR allowing courts to slap companies for up to 4% of their worldwide annual revenue. Whether or not that full extent is ever brought to bear against particularly megacorps is a different question, but at least medium-sized companies will probably avoid repeat offenses. I don’t know how Meta felt about the 1.2 billion ticket either, but I can’t imagine they just shrugged it off as normal business expenses.
Are they succeeding? I have no idea of the actual figures and the Internet tends to form echo chambers, so I don’t know if the sentiments I read that they’re still not much of a threat are actually representative.
Speak for yourself
I’m actually gaming on nvidia! Didn’t take any tinkering either. I got the Nvidia version of Nobara, which many steam games “just work” on.
That’s not to say I didn’t start tinkering anyway, but new games I install and just run work fine.
Is that latch on the inside or the outside?
Traitors against the people, so yeah
Why would you want backwards compatibility? To play games you already own and like instead of buying new ones? Now now, don’t be ridiculous.
Sarcasm aside, I do wonder how technically challenging it is to keep your system backwards-compatible. I understand console games are written for specific hardware specs, but I’d assume newer hardware still understands the old instructions. It could be an OS question, but again, I’d assume they would develop the newer version on top of their old, so I don’t know why it wouldn’t support the old features anymore.
I don’t want to cynically claim that it’s only done for profit reasons, and I’m certainly out of my depth on the topic of developing an entire console system, so I want to assume there’s something I just don’t know about, but I’m curious what that might be.