palordrolap

“I’ve said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that." – an actual Bill Gates quote referring to the 640k quote that won’t die.

But yes, it was probably satirically ascribed to him because of MS-DOS not having the capability to deal with any more than that amount of RAM for a lot longer than it probably should have.

The “temporary” solution of requiring an extra driver to be able to do so (EMM386.SYS or similar) remained in place right up until DOS-based Windows was allowed to die.

(The underlying reason was almost certainly ancient IBM PC memory-mapped IO standards, so maybe we could ascribe the original quote an engineer working there some time around 1980.)

(FWIW the downvote wasn’t me)

That sounds like you’re suggesting that Microsoft wouldn’t care what was installed locally to be able to net-boot / run the rest of Windows.

I think it’s all but certain that they’d want user’s computers to to boot into something they made, or at the very least, slapped their branding all over, even if that was only a wrapper for their web browser.

I can definitely see them going down the line of saying that their online apps aren’t guaranteed to work under any other system, going so far as to throw in a few deliberate stumbling hazards for anything that isn’t theirs. (Until anti-trust, etc.)

And thus, dual booting will still be something that people do. Even if - as you clarified - they’re not going to cripple that as well.

The only way to prevent dual booting would require a UEFI/BIOS that pulls the OS straight over a network, bypassing local storage entirely.

Even if that didn’t already rule it out, the size that OSes are these days makes it even less likely. At least not unless Microsoft (or whoever) are planning to ditch absolutely everyone who doesn’t have gigabit internet. (It would be kind of funny for an OS to go back to being 1990s-sized to mitigate that though. And funnier still when someone inevitably captures it onto a hard disk anyway.)

A more likely vector would be to deliberately break third party bootloaders every time Windows boots. And that would last until the next anti-trust / monopoly lawsuit and they’d roll it back to the current behaviour of only breaking third party bootloaders on installation.

And even if somehow that didn’t get rolled back, just wait until hardware vendors introduce this thing called a “switch” that can be added just before the power connector on an SSD. Can’t boot from a drive that has no power. BIOS defaults to the next SATA channel. And now you’re booting into Linux.

Doing the same for a mobo-mounted NVMe drive is harder but not impossible.

PCX or nothin’

Apparently, The joe editor has a jstar mode, so says this old Stackexchange thread. I can’t verify because I’ve never used Wordstar, but joe’s available in my distro’s repository.

No idea if it can read old WordStar files, but maybe you don’t need that.

For the GUI version - and some old file capability, the same page and other searches turn up WordTsar which is in progress. The dev says they’ll be picking up development again next month.

Deleting snapshots shouldn’t destroy the system as far as I know. It might confuse Timeshift later down the line if that deletion was done outside of Timeshift’s interface, but they’re supposed to be entirely separate.

Timeshift creates a directory called “timeshift” in the root of whatever partition it’s configured to use. It should create at least one copy of every file, but it does then create hard links to save space between snapshots where files would otherwise be identical. Those links shouldn’t be to (or from) live system files though.

Now, if someone was to bypass Timeshift and manually move files of the timeshift directory back into a live system or manually link live system locations into a snapshot, that might lead to the problem you experienced. Not sure if that’s what’s happened.

It’s worth noting that I have Timeshift set to create its directory in a separate partition on a different physical drive, so if it was broken in some way, it would struggle to mess up. Hard links across partition boundaries are a lot harder to achieve if not impossible, so it would stop someone (or something) trying to bypass Timeshift, or at the very least give them pause for thought. And it would provide some protection against Timeshift doing something silly as well.

Another way I suspect this could happen is if Timeshift’s own copy as well as all hard links to it in all snapshots were manually deleted before a restore was attempted. Can’t restore from what doesn’t exist, and so the system would remain broken.

Mint definitely keeps a couple of previous kernels around, so that might be a Debian and Ubuntu thing too.

That said, there’s always going to be a critical point of failure that a power loss could cause things to break, no matter your OS or distro.

Writing the bootloader or updating a partition table for example.

A wild Elon appeared!

Twitter has evolved into X!

X attacks Twitter!

X has hurt itself in its confusion!

X has hurt itself in its confusion!

X has hurt itself in its confusion!

I’m not sure there’s a way to answer that without being unnecessarily mean.

Timeshift has got me out of an uncomfortable situation at least twice at this point, and since I’m running a mostly LMDE frankenDebian right now (drivers tho, amirite?), it’s nice to know that this potentially delicate working state is backed up in some way should it decide to shatter into a thousand tiny pieces.

Save your effort. What’s already there is there forever. They can just roll back your comments, or even, if they’re in the mood for it, make it appear under an entirely different username.

The only way to win is not give them any more. And that fight is already under way. They’ve already started recommending old comments after new ones because the quality isn’t as high any more.

Think about it: The only people who contribute to Reddit now are the clueless and the sort of people who have willingly stayed.

I like to imagine Spez stomping around saying “Hmph! Hmph! It’s not fair! Why did they all leave?! They’re stealing my revenue by not giving me anything for free!”. I mean, he’s probably not doing that, but I do like to imagine it.

To stick with the analogy, this is like putting a small CPU inside the bottle, so the main CPU<->RAM bottleneck isn’t used as often. That said, any CPU, within RAM silicon or not, is still going to have to shift data around, so there will still be choke points, they’ll just be quicker. Theoretically.

Thinking about it, this is kind of the counterpart to CPUs having an on-chip cache of memory.

Edit: counterpoint to counterpart

I guess an assumption that no-one would do both blinded me to that fact.

See also: How a remote Kansas location keeps getting visited by the FBI

Disclaimer - the above is an 8-year-old story. No idea if the three-letter agencies are still turning up there, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

No, but SearX does similar things. I’ve been learning about Kagi recently, and as far as I can tell, they don’t index pages on their own, they just use APIs provided by the real search engines.

Kagi is a search aggregator, so those results are from Google.

Hopefully archive.org have measures in place to stop people from yanking all their data too quickly. As least not without a hefty donation or something. As a user it can chug a bit, and I’m hoping that’s the rate-limiting I’m talking about and not that they’re swamped.

I’d suggest “Spicious Linux”, but it’s a 5/10 pun at best, and too similar to “specious” which means “sounds legit but isn’t”; not necessarily a good look.

“Opus” borrows letters and sounds good, but speaking of sounds, it’s the name of a sound codec, so maybe not a good choice.

“Abstruse” has similar problems to “specious”…

“ChameleOS” is the name of a dragon in a game.

I figure if I run through all the bad ideas here, only good ones will be left… but that might well be specious.

Yep. I remember - despite the fact it was old even then - building and connecting a Win 3.11 machine to a TCP/IP office network as a proof of concept back in 2000 or so. I might have even installed Netscape on it. I don’t remember clearly now, but I assume the parts for the computer came out of the spares pile, and were soon recycled back into other machines.

It’s a bit easier to not use a website than it is to leave a country.