Yeah, that’s not how this kind of advertising works. Check this out.

Look at that ad for as long as it takes to read the article, then look away and immediately name the first three restaurant chains that come to mind.

Unless you’re coming from a place that is critical/cynical about the invasive nature of advertising, it’s possible you’ll just go along with “Chili’s” as one of a handful of options and not give it a second thought.

I appreciate the (icky) subtext that the reviewer is not only eating a good amount of food off of that, but is casually wearing it around town and also touching elevator buttons with it.

Or you’d get lucky and some other program you installed happens to have the right dependencies. Just copy them to the application install dir or to C:\windows\win32\ and off you go.

Yeah, stuff like that continues to be the best use-case for windows virtualization. Sounds a lot like trying to upgrade the BIOS or Firmware on an older PC; often the installer is some binary that only runs on Windows of the same vintage.

Backwards-compatibility with older web browsers so engineers can build websites for them, is another. I’ve also heard of industrial automation (e.g. CNC machines) being married to Win2k or WinXP, so being able to run an old OS on new hardware is crucial.

Windows, can I run this 25 year old software I just installed?

Exactly.

For medium sized rice, consider mochi or tteokbokki.

Works great on 300 baud; not many editors can boast that. Also, if your programs are all under 2000 lines long.

The only northern lights I’ve ever seen were in Iceland. Honestly, the conditions were less than ideal and what I did see was very dim to the naked eye.

What a lot of people don’t know is that a camera (like on your phone) picks up even the faintest aurora with ease. I have pictures that make the whole thing look many times more vibrant than what I could see.

Thank you for your service.

Oooh, rocking an HP? I too like to live dangerously.

But seriously, that’s good to know. Those are probably easier to come by out in the wild. It really looks like Thinkpads go from office deployments straight to refurb companies these days. I never see them at thrift stores, and I’m not brave enough to dumpster-dive at e-waste.

Sometimes, old machines are survivors. Beware of confirmation bias when trash/thrift-picking cheap systems though. IMO, Thinkpads can be tough as a coffin nail. Including work systems, I’m on number 8 at this point with no hardware failures in sight.

That said, I have a very lightweight Acer that’s about a decade old with the worst keyboard and trackpad ever manufactured. It also performs like a slug, even with Linux on it. Still, it refuses to break so I can get rid of it.

This essay is brought to you by Raid: Shadow Legends.

I mean, that happens with CloudWatch all the time. It’s the most plausible part about this.

The answer is: binary, sometimes with electrical switches.

As late as the very early 1980’s, the PDP-11 could be started by entering a small bootstrap program into memory, using the machine’s front panel:

You toggle the switches to make the binary pattern you want at a specific location in RAM, then hit another button to store it. Repeat until the bootstrap is in RAM, and then press start to run the program from that first address. Said start address is always some hardwired starting location.

And that’s a LATE example. Earlier (programmable) systems had other mechanisms for hard-wired or manual input like this. Go back far enough and you have systems that are so fixed-function in nature that it’s just wired to do one specific job.

Every time.

I have left this as an exercise for the reader.

Fixed:

I really don’t understand why.

Anti-Microsoft ideologues, mostly. Giving MS any quarter is antithetical to their chosen axe to grind. Pay them no mind.

But we do have a QA department. I’ll leave it to the reader to decide if that’s humane or not.