Thank you.

I was introduced to it when it was still Hero’s Quest (and EGA)

This is the version I always play. There’s something just “right” about the EGA graphics and text parser. A clicky interface will never replicate:
Hut of brown, now sit down

There’s probably a lot of nostalgia in the choice, but my all time favorite game is Quest for Glory: So You Want to be a Hero. The game was just the right mix of fantasy, adventure and humor for a young me, and I still go back an play it about once a year. A close second is Valheim. It’s kinda my “cozy game”. I find building and exploring relaxing, and there’s enough fighting to keep the game from getting boring.

For indoor rock climbing (probably outdoor as well): you need, at least, two pairs of climbing shoes. One pair will be out for a re-sole and you can use the other. Though, don’t buy your own shoes until you are sure you’re going to stick with it for a while. No point ending up with used shoes you’ll never use again, because you finally decided the sport isn’t for you.

Sounds more like a feature than a bug.

I tried that, I ended up with this weird “Windows 11” adware installed and couldn’t get rid of it. There was also a problem with odd programs and advertising showing up in my Start Menu, even after I removed them. Also, my settings would occasionally just change, without my knowledge or permission.

It depends on the environment. I’ve been in a couple of places which use Linux for various professional purposes. At one site, all systems with a network connection were required to have A/V, on-access scanning and regular system scans. So, even the Linux systems had a full A/V agent and we were in the process of rolling out EDR to all Linux based hosts when I left. That was a site where security tended to be prioritized, though much of it was also “checkbox security”. At another site, A/V didn’t really exist on Linux systems and they were basically black boxes on the network, with zero security oversight. Last I heard, that was finally starting to change and Linux hosts were getting the full A/V and EDR treatment. Though, that’s always a long process. I also see a similar level of complacency in “the cloud”. Devs spin random shit up, give it a public IP, set the VPS to a default allow and act like it’s somehow secure because, “it’s in the cloud”. Some of that will be Linux based. And in six months to a year, it’s woefully out of date, probably running software with known vulnerabilities, fully exposed to the internet and the dev who spun it up may or may not be with the company anymore. Also, since they were “agile”, the documentation for the system is filed under “lol, wut?”

Overall, I think Linux systems are a mixed bag. For a long time, they just weren’t targeted with normal malware. And this led to a lot of complacency. Most sites I have been at have had a few Linux systems kicking about; but, because they were “one off” systems and from a certain sense of invulnerability they were poorly updated and often lacked a secure baseline configuration. The whole “Linux doesn’t get malware” mantra was used to avoid security scrutiny. At the same time, Linux system do tend to default to a more secure configuration. You’re not going to get a BlueKeep type vulnerability from a default config. Still, it’s not hard for someone who doesn’t know any better to end up with a vulnerable system. And things like ransomware, password stealers, RATs or other basic attacks often run just fine in a user context. It’s only when the attacker needs to get root that things get harder.

In a way, I’d actually appreciate a wide scale, well publicized ransomware attack on Linux systems. First off, it would show that Linux is finally big enough for attackers to care about. Second, it would provide concrete proof as to why Linux systems should be given as much attention and centrally managed/secured in the Enterprise. I know everyone hates dealing with IT for provisioning systems, and the security software sucks balls; but, given the constant barrage of attacks, those sorts of things really are needed.

It’s a good thing we have a stable government, which isn’t about to suffer a shutdown or has some self-important asshole who might get the NTSB shutdown before they can investigate what happened.

Ah, shit.

It was kinda thought of in the '50s. Ford’s concept the Nucleon was to use a fission reaction to heat water, which was used in a steam turbine engine. One of the issues folks worried about was, what happens in a crash? No, no one with a clue worried about a nuclear explosion, but the release of radioactive material would have been a real concern.

Some of this might change with the use of fusion. But, it’s going to be a long time before a fusion reactor would be small/light enough to slap in a car. At the moment, we haven’t really demonstrated a reactor which can commercially produce a net output of power. There has been some small scale experiments which technically produce more power than is used to initiate the fusion; but, that also relied a bit on an accounting trick (they only counted the energy of the lasers themselves, not the total energy used).

Also, when you get down to it, this is the ultimate goal of electric vehicles. Maybe someday, most of our electricity will come from grid scale fusion reactors. Those will charge the batteries which drive EVs. Moving the reactor into the car itself could happen some day. On the other hand, considering how poorly some folks maintain their cars now, would your really trust them to maintain a reactor? Again, not worried about explosions or anything silly. But, the release of radioactive material might still be a concern. It’s probably safe to just use batteries and keep the reactors locked up in large facilities.

We dun fucked up when we made tarring and feathering CEOs illegal.

This is exactly the problem, they have no accountability for bad updates causing hardware to become unusable. So, Q&A just becomes a needless expense and untested firmware is dropped on users. Sure, you could try and sue, or more likely get fucked by a binding arbitration clause. But, the cost would be far beyond what the device costs. So, it never makes sense. There need to be fines when this shit happens, which are significant percentages of worldwide revenue, to scare companies into actually testing updates before they are released.

In the end, all we can do is shake our heads and remind folks to never buy HP. They put out great products 30 years ago, but those days are long gone. Now, they just put out crap.

Hopefully, this will be another rousing mobile success for Microsoft. Right up there with the Windows Phone.

I’m torn between the beach house and the mountain house. I love the beach and would love to be able to wake up and wander out into the waves. Especially if the beach features tropical waters and soft, rock free, sand. Though, this home could easily be monkey pawed by placing the house on some rock strew nightmare of a beach with cold waters (or the opposite, for those folks into foot killing beaches). That said, such a beach house would invariably be overrun during the tourist season, and hell being other people, this would greatly reduce the joy of living there.

The mountain home, on the other hand, offers a wonderful sense of solitude. And skinny dipping with the wife in a hot tub is a fantastic way to start an autumn evening. Though, even in the mountains, you can find subdivisions where the houses are piled on top of each other and the “sense of solitude” has trouble being maintained with the neighbors plainly visible though the trees. And once you get into full blown winter, the cold can start to wear on you. So again, possibly a mixed bag, depending on the specific circumstances.

So ya, I guess I’d take the beach house and just take vacations to somewhere else during the high season. Maybe set it up as an AirBnB or the like for those times. Though, the idea of random strangers doing gods know what on my mattress kinda creeps me out. Guess I’d need a storage unit with rental furniture to swap out during those times as well.

Why do you expect to receive someone else’s work for free? Part of the reason the web has become so enshitified is that no one is willing to pay for anything anymore. We all expect everything to be “ad supported”, and then we act shocked when everything is covered in ads.

That said, there are usually open source alternatives for most software packages out there. They may not have complete feature parity or have quite the same slick UI as the commercial products. But, they do tend to be both free in terms of cost and ads. E.g for image editing, there is Gimp. It’s not going to replace Adobe Photoshop in professional spaces anytime soon. But, for a home user who isn’t willing to shell out the Adobe Tax, it’s a reasonable choice.

But, the reason so much is paywalled is because everything takes time and money to create. Someone has to pay that cost. Maybe it’s advertisers, maybe it’s a dedicated team of volunteers. But increasingly, creators are asking users to pay directly.

Decades ago, my father would have some fun with the receipt checkers at Costco. After a shopping trip, we’d commonly have lunch at the cafe in Costco. When leaving the store, he’d hand the receipt checker the receipt for lunch rather than the receipt for the items bought. More than half the time, the checker would just swipe the receipt with a highlighter (their way of marking it “checked”) without noticing that it was the wrong receipt. So ya, it’s complete security theater. Anyone with a modicum of thought can figure ways around it, and it only accomplishes inconveniencing the people who aren’t trying to get away with anything.

Wall Street questioned how much pain President Donald Trump will let the economy endure through tariffs and other policies in order to get what he wants.

Trump wants to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Great Depression with an even bigger one. It’ll be the Greatest Depression. With bigly unemployment! More economic pain than you can imagine. And Canada will pay for it!

I think the most surprising thing here is that 60% of networks don’t allow any/any. I swear, the number of devs I’ve had to convince that they don’t actually need to plop their MySQL backend on the open web, to allow their web front end to reach it, is way higher than it should be. Folks moved their workloads to “the cloud” and decided that we needed to internet like it was 1999.

Always look on the bright side of life

I’d be curious to see how they handle the problems which have cropped up with similar systems in the past. Player housing, for example, can be an absolute nightmare. I was actively playing UO back when they implemented player housing, and it was a clusterfuck. You couldn’t go three steps without slamming into someone’s house and most of them ended up being owned by a few big guilds, because space was at such a premium that no one else could afford one. And with the land so littered with houses, they had to create an alternate world to quest in, which specifically didn’t allow player houses. I can also see the systems they are designing becoming a playground rife for griefing. Look at that nice home you built. It would be a shame if someone diverted a river into it while you weren’t online.

MMO’s greatest strength can also be their greatest weakness: and that strength is other people. The more open and free-form a world is, the easier it is for the griefers to find and exploit edge cases.

If you were to draw a Venn Diagram of the skill sets of salespeople and politicians, it wouldn’t quite be a circle, but I suspect it’d be pretty close. Politicians exist to convince you that they are going to represent your interests in whatever level of government they are running for. Once there, they need to negotiate for their policy positions with the other elected representatives. The main difference is that the currency of politicians is votes, instead of money.

Sure, some of them might actually believe the bullshit coming out of their mouths. But, even then, they have to convince others to vote for them and then vote with them. That requires skills like negotiation, and persuasion, much the same as sales. Though, politicians probably have a greater emphasis on public speaking.