And HDMI port came back. And shitty butterfly keyboard went away. And physical escape key came back. And touchbar went away.

A whole load of mistakes that had to be fixed.

It’s an office though - not as if one person is sitting on all that RAM.

I agree.

See you there 🙂 <- slightly fake or sarcastic

See you there 😀 <- TOO excited

See you there :) <- Natural, relaxed, and just right

I’ve encountered a pretty annoying thing on Linux several times.

When copying a large file to a flash drive the transfer appears to complete very quickly, yet if you eject and remove the drive (which the graphical file manager will happily do without complaint) then on taking the flash drive where it needs to go you’ll find your file is frustratingly corrupt.

This happens because the write to the disk is cached in memory, and the file manager is apparently unaware of this cache.

You can avoid this by opening a terminal and executing the command ‘sync’ - this will ensure all cached file writes for all disks are fully written. When the command exits (which may be immediately or may take some minutes) the USB write is definitely done, and you can safely unmount it.

Not sure if this behaviour is distro-dependant in any way, or if other file managers deal with it better, but it’s definitely one of only a few times in modern Linux where I’ve had such an unintuitive experience and was super disappointed it didn’t do better. Normally if I shoot myself in the foot it was at least clearly my fault!

From the user perspective, if I copy the file and then ‘safely’ eject the disk and it lets me, I’ve done everything properly, right?

Non-technical users must get caught by this all the time, with the difference being that they can’t figure out why it is happening, or what they should do to prevent it.

Please name it and provide some information so we can check it out.

You shoud definitely build it soon, even if just to test it.

If you don’t, it will invariably be your bad luck that a component doesn’t work and you are then past the return window…

There is no way the Crucial brand was not profitable.

They aren’t leaving an unprofitable brand, rather they are killing a profitable brand in order to pump its resources into an even more profitable b2b segment.

That’s why people are annoyed. Micron didn’t have to leave the market at all, but they are doing, because they are greedy.

On your other Arch laptop, obviously. You need multiple pre-owned ThinkPads loaded with Arch at any given time to maintain workable redundancy, just like you need several clean pairs of programming socks.

Like, yes and no.

For people who are somewhat familiar with Linux, Ubuntu is certainty recognised as being about as mainstream as any distro is able to be, and a safe haven for Linux noobs for decades.

In recent years however it’s Mint which has for whatever reason been constantly recommended as a go-to distro for people fleeing the evils of Windows, ramping up especially with the discontinuation of Windows 10.

So right now, Mint might be more of a beginner distro than even Ubuntu.

I don’t think there’s any pride in it, they are just going after what is the most profitable at any given time.

That’s exactly why I suspect they will choose to resurrect the Crucial name later, because given a choice between launching a new name nobody knows, or a name people recognise (even if it’s been tarred a bit) then recognised will be the winning and more profitable option.

That is, if they haven’t sold the Crucial name to someone else first.

Probably just the same brand, honestly?

News two years from now: “Crucial back in business”

And yet ‘ship’ is masculine in French, despite even in genderless English being referred to by sailors throughout history as a ‘she’

Plap plap plap

That’s right. There’s an insightful blog article if you want to learn the full story.

You could get your PC upgraded for $99 if you also bought 24 months of dial-up Internet service through them. But you also had to pay shipping both ways, and be out the use of your computer while you did it! That seems so inconvenient I imagine almost nobody bothered. eMachines certainly expected people wouldn’t, making the whole thing little more than a carefully calculated marketing tactic. And it worked.

That said, their machines were very competitively priced even without the upgrade deal, and it really disrupted the incumbents, making them good value machines even if you didn’t take them up on the dubious “never obsolete” offer.

We can’t simply say minimalism is bad, though, because the truth is “it depends”.

The iPod Shuffle music player from the mid 2000s could be considered a minimalistic design. It had no screen, with only buttons for next, previous, play, pause, volume and (as the name suggests) shuffle. The player had far less functionality than its big brother iPods, but because it had less functions, the interface didn’t need many buttons.

It was, perhaps, “truly” minimal.

In software we do sometimes have true minimalism, but more often than not we actually have a lot of features, but have to choose to hide some amount of it and have a simpler interface, and the amount we choose to show or hide may determine how “minimalist” or not it appears.

So you can have minimalism via simply /not having/ functions, or you can have minimalism via hiding.

When you open a CAD program for the first time, you are likely immediately intimidated by the sheer number of buttons and toolbars, with no idea what to press. But a minimalist CAD program would be a nightmare because it ruins any discoverability of features. Showing the complexity is necessary.

On the other hand, an image viewer which is secretly also a featureful image editor - but hides all the edit controls behind an ‘edit’ button until you ask for them - is perhaps an appropriate time to hide it.

To look at mpv specifically, my personal opinion is that the lack of any option toolbars is ‘bad’ minimalism because it forces you to the wiki to find out how to do things with keybinds, but the main interface is ‘good’ minimalism because it shows you the controls you need probably 95% of the time, and nothing extra beyond that.

And the response of staff at the temple was to take a video and post it on Facebook? That’s kinda upsetting.

I mean, it is user-friendly in some ways, depending how you define that.

Double-click a video and it opens. You get a visually appealing, sleek and minimalistic UI that helpfully appears only when your mouse is over the video, and otherwise gets out of the way. You can seek, adjust volume, select audio language and subtitles, and that’s it. Very uncluttered, obvious and easy in the way that modern applications try to be.

For most usage, that’s enough. It’s when you find yourself needing to pan/scan, or change subtitle offset, or enable looping etc you discover there are no buttons or menus for those things and you have to go hit the docs to discover what the keybinds are.

“Want to sell a lot? Just brand it Star Wars!”

The motivation for making a new show should be “We want to tell an amazing new story set within the Star Wars universe” but it’s actually “We want to make loads of money, therefore our new thing is going to be Star Wars.”

Here you go fam

The headline is a little misleading.

As I understand it, they haven’t retroactively removed the HEVC capability from any devices that already shipped with it enabled.

Rather, they have stopped including it in new ones of the same model or in certain new models, even though those machines still have CPUs which have the capability built in for it.

This has resulted in e.g. businesses buying a laptop which works fine for conference calls and other stuff, then buying another laptop the “exact same” and suddenly it’s nerfed.