horsebatteryhealth @horsebatteryhealth@mastodon.online

This Is the Data Facebook Gave Police to Prosecute a Teenager for Abortion https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7zevd/this-is-the-data-facebook-gave-police-to-prosecute-a-teenager-for-abortion

Cancel it. Delete your account. Help your friends delete theirs. Abandon that dumpster fire.

yup, a windows user definitely made this meme

@ifixcoinops The other big effect is computer software being copyrightable. In the 1970s, no one knew if computer code could be copyrighted, but in the 1980s that became an issue. The courts looked back at the player piano situation: a player piano roll isn't that different than punch cards for a computer, a set of instructions for a machine to follow. And if a player piano roll falls under the 1909 copyright law, so does computer code.

So all software licensing also comes out of player pianos.

Had a dream that me, Nyx, and Arcana went to an "/lgbt/ Pride Fair" together to make fun of it and we were laughing at the fact that they were hosting booths promoting homophobia, at their own pride event

When I realize I’m about to be completely wrong.

It's really unfortunate that a ton of the new GUI libraries out there for newer programming languages like Rust or Zig have left accessibility as a long-term goal instead of something core to the project.

This man is a chad honestly

-pronouns in bio
-hates NFTs
-won't spell slurs
-thinks admins shouldn't do sui threats to stay in good faith
-bans bitches
-handles dogpiling like its funny to him
-and is on FSE where none of this is normal except maybe the last point?

Unless you were there, you really cannot appreciate how much damage Intel did to the PC ecosystem with the 286.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_80286

The 286 was the successor to the 8086 and 8088 CPUs that powered the original IBM PCs. It offered a huge step forward from them.

Those older chips always ran in "real mode," where memory locations had fixed addresses, and any running program could modify the contents of any address. This meant that you couldn't have two programs running at once, because one might try to use a bit of memory the other was already using, and blammo!

The 286 introduced "protected mode," which prevented programs from being able to mess with memory allocated to other programs. Instead of addresses corresponding directly to blocks of memory, in protected mode they were treated as "virtual" addresses, and mapped to memory allocated just for that program.

Protected mode meant the days when one program could reach into another one and mess with its memory would be over. And that opened up all sorts of possibilities. You could have real multitasking! A whole range of crash bugs would be instantly eliminated! Suddenly the PC began to look like a machine that you could put against a UNIX workstation with a straight face.

But there was a problem. To maintain backwards compatibility with the old chips, the 286 had to boot into real mode. It could then shift into protected mode on demand. But -- and this is a big BUT -- once it was shifted into protected mode, IT COULD NOT SHIFT BACK. The only way to get back into real mode was to reboot the PC.

Which was a problem, because every PC user owned a huge library of DOS software, much of which could only run in real mode. So the 286 gave you multitasking -- but if you ever needed to run a real-mode program, you had to reboot your PC (and lose all the other running programs) to run it.

This was, as you may imagine, not ideal.