After his first game venture failed, Peter Molyneux started a baked bean export business. Commodore International mistakenly offered him ten free Amiga systems . . . .
Long-time space journalist Jim Oberg called it “a deluxe all-in-one weapon with three barrels and a folding stock that doubles as a shovel and contains a swing-out machete.”
I watched a video a couple years ago where they did an experiment with chimps. I thought they concluded that the “cantagious” yawning has to deal with the animals empathy and wanting to be like others, it was a social thing in pretty sure. I have no idea where to even find this video though so take that with a grain of salt
Mythbusters rated contagious yawns as plausible, I believe, because they observed multiple instances of yawns spreading throughout a building where the participants couldn’t see each other.
Btrfs FTW. EXT 4 is also pretty darn good. Windows is a joke not a good fit for my use cases and has privacy issues about many others. I just it very occasionally but mostly run Arch Linux for my needs. Windows Games are running better under WINE/Proton than native in Windows often now.
The only reason why I am running Linux and Windows in dual boot is because of Valorant and the Office 365 suite. Otherwise I would already be done with Windows. Linux is just amazing.
There were tons of issues with earlier DRM models. SecuROM not working with certain disc drives, SafeDisc driver vulnerabilities, StarForce allegedly bricking some hardware, Tages eating up online activations for simple hardware swaps. Everyone hated them, but the Sony rootkit was probably the biggest one at the time. From what I remember there was no mention of it anywhere on the CDs or in the EULA, and when they did get caught their "fix" basically just hid the files while collecting info on you and sending it back to Sony.
That’s it. All you had to have done to be infected was to have ever popped a disc into a PC drive. Was surprised at the time that the backlash seemed so limited.
Autorun was never a safe feature for Windows or any other system to include. It’s been a source of one attack after another over the years. Inserting media should never cause programs on that media to run.
I don’t disagree with this statement in general. That days, I don’t know how old you are and whether or not you were really around the home PC space when the auto run feature first came to be. I can sort of understand what Microsoft was trying to accomplish with it… the mid-90’s were a wild, lawless time with regard to personal computing. There was a lot of heartburn on the end user side because things were changing so rapidly. Getting them to understand that what a “drive letter” was, how to get there, and how to run an application from it (let alone what an application even was) proved challenging even under the best circumstances. The ability to insert a CD into the drive tray and have it “just work” (also a big theme in Win 95/98) was a godsend for a lot of publishers.
Of course, in today’s world, we look at that kind of feature and rightly say “yo, that’s fucking crazy, why would you do that?”, but in the old days it really did help. At the end of the day, it was a useful feature that, like a lot of windows legacy crap, was left in the OS after its usefulness had gone and just became another attack vector.
Thing is, security folks noticed autorun was a problem back then.
I can sort of understand what Microsoft was trying to accomplish with it… the mid-90’s were a wild, lawless time with regard to personal computing.
The “wild lawless time” was not the context in which Microsoft made those poor security designs; it was a consequence of those designs — which were noticed and criticized by security folks at the time.
Another entertaining example is the demythification of email viruses.
In the early 1990s, email viruses were a myth: the Good Times virus was a hoax that told people that they could get a virus by reading an email. At the time that hoax went around, this was not actually possible: email software just displayed text; unless you downloaded an attachment and ran it, you couldn’t get a virus in email. Certainly not just by opening and reading an email.
But then along came Microsoft with Outlook Express, and security vulnerabilities that allowed the action of rendering an email, even in a preview pane, to inject malicious code.
Suddenly email viruses were not a myth anymore; they were everywhere.
I kinda disagree with the context comment though. That era of computing was inherently wild - nobody had figured anything out yet beyond the most basic and general strokes, and security analysts (such as they were) had what would be considered a childish understanding of IT security by modern standards. Heck, Windows95 didn’t even have the TCP stack enabled by default, so when these features were being designed, planned, and coded at Microsoft, there was no context for security on that kind of feature. Wikipedia says that Win95 was in the planning stage in 1992 - I take that with a grain of salt, but the concept is valid. Microsoft was writing the core features of Windows 95 before WAN was even really a thing. Like I said, I don’t disagree with the idea that AutoRun was a terrible thing among many terrible things Microsoft is responsible for, but given the era in which AutoRun came out, it was a reasonable trade-off between security and functionality for the lowest common denominator of user. The whole thing should have been disabled (on 95 and 98) when Windows 98 came out since they should have known better at that point.
Really wish that each til title encapsulated a full thought or fact instead of just straight up linking to the Wikipedia page without giving me the cruz of the fact in the title. It’s a tease and I don’t like it.
Also the link goes to the Wikipedia page insert of the section on the page. So when I followed the link I could not find the relevant section before my interest wained.
You mean "…it took me to the part on sound-absorbing tiles, which made me wonder how much neoprene compresses underwater, so I had to look up the formula for…"<7 hours later, you wrote your above post>
As much as I want TiK ToK by Kesha to be a recognizable tune in half a millenia I know that’s not happening. Personal Jesus by Depeche Mode is one of the most covered songs of the past 50 years so that very well may become immortalized through diffusion alone. There’s a couple dozen jazz standards that could have that kind of staying power as well, especially considering their ubiquity in performance repitoires and books of sheet music.
Bored music teacher in 2200: “and here children, we find the most important contributions to late 20th centure music: a phonograph of Depeche Mode’s Violator.”
I would’ve said Songs Of Faith And Devotion, but a short name made a better gag, and I could not bring myself to say Ultra.
And seriously, 101 fucking rules. It’s an energetic best-of before they asked themselves what made them special and stripped back everything for the iconoclastic rose album everyone knows them for. Which is okay.
On reflection, far from sober, it is surprising the Deftones have never covered “In Your Room.”
Funny. Seems like you see Violator as the start of a new era for them, and I see it as the end of the classic era. There are isolated songs I like after Violator, but no whole albums. (For reference, SoFaD was their newest album when I started listening, and I got it as the same time as Violator.)
I agree with you. To me, Violator was the last album of the 2nd generation of their sound, the first being a lot more New Wave. Although, I do think the shift from New Wave to the more techno industrial 2nd era was more gradual.
Violator is a band asking themselves what they’re about and finding a crystal clear answer. The result is deliberately transitional. In going to the extremes, in excising everything that is not strictly necessary, they built a framework for a sound that is distinctly their own, without being more of what they’d already done.
Songs Of Faith And Devotion is bombastic, but all its power is built on that same crisp restraint. Especially in the 90s - it would have been easy to be louder and busier just by adding a little distortion, a little fuzz, a little taste of metal or grunge. Instead they stuck with clean synths and tasteful reverb, but made them fucking hit. (By contrast, see Playing The Angel. Or don’t.)
Ultra does the opposite trick, applying that sparse soundscape to more-general instrumentation. It kinda works. Exciter does a better job of it, but still stumbles on tracks like “Dead Of Night” and “Comatose.” Good demos! How long until they’re complete? Oh. (“Freelove” nearly makes up for all of it.)
Everything after that… look, I actually like Playing The Angel, but I’m the kind of mutant who sincerely argues that Violator was merely okay. And even I can’t find any love for Delta Machine.
All their work leading up to Violator was much more organic than how they made Violator. Their masterpiece, in the sense of getting their shit together and being taken seriously, was Construction Time Again, with “Everything Counts” as a tentpole. Some Great Reward was Gore going ‘oh we can get real weird with this, huh’ and leaning way the hell into the kink and the darkness, god bless him. Black Celebration was the peak of that arc.
Music For The Masses never rises to quite the same level, but in that album you can see the transition forming. “Behind The Wheel” is probably the crescendo of their old sound. Y’know, synthpop where someone’s credited for playing the trash can. And then immediately there’s “To Have And To Hold,” which is maybe one degree too loose for Violator. It is emblematic of the sound they wanted.
While not what one would think of when they think of songs that survive hundreds of years from now, the only song I can think of that’s not a folk song that’s both archived and hummable (and actually has a tune, so that excludes pop songs)… is the Pokémon theme song. Go up to anyone and say in tune that you wanna be the very best and someone’s gonna ask “like no one ever was”.
i have this thing where when i’m focused, but switching tasks, i’ll click my tongue but it’s always the tune of nick nick nick n’nick nick nick o lo dea onnn
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