Windows 10 users, I’ve been using kill-update.exe for years now to only update Windows when I damn well want to.
Disclaimer: before the inevitable dogpile, yes, this is bad practice. Yes there are many reasons why you might not want to do this. Yes, allowing your software to update itself whenever it wants is safer. No, I don’t care. If you don’t care either, this software might be for you.
Huh. Well, everybody I hung out with knew about it. IIRC moderation was tacked on after USENET had already taken off. If a newsgroup wasn’t proposed with moderation then it couldn’t be moderated, so most of them weren’t. It’s pretty wild that they didn’t understand how desperately necessary it would be. In order to get a group to be moderated you’d have to get a proposal for an entirely new group through the committee, which was nearly impossible. The process was so slow and bureaucratic that the web literally just showed up and stole it all in what seemed like overnight. I remember when I switched over… it was like 2002, 2003? I’ve never had as much fun on any web forum as I had on USENET though. Those were fun times. And don’t get me started on the web’s lack of threaded discussions. Drove me NUTS.
Yes pardon me I left off the word “largely” before “unmoderated.” We all knew it was possible, but it didn’t matter because, as you point out - nobody really did.
Google buying Dejanews, the largest archive of all messages, and merging it with the travesty that was (and still is) Google Groups just about killed the whole thing.
Well that and the fact that it was unmoderated which eventually led to it being populated almost exclusively with mentally ill troll savants. USENET by the end was the digital equivalent of a horror zoo of abused monkeys slinging shit all over everyone and themselves.
A concentrated effort by bad-faith actors who understand that the only thing Americans love more than being told they’re right is being able to feel smugly superior. Tap into that with the power of social media and voila.
“by now, we know that the vaccine was not safe or effective.”
Also yet another a dangerous moron who thinks they’re a fucking genius.
It was big in Dragon Age.
Now if only they could do the same with the stock market. But the conspiracy theorist in me believes that all this manipulation is being done hand in hand with certain arms of the government in order to maintain the government’s appearance of solvency and to control inflation in the face of what appears to be nearly unlimited spending. Just keep moving around fake money using a million different utterly opaque methods.
For those unfamiliar with the source.
I wasn’t really sold on the MCU from the beginning, as I wasn’t a fan of the Iron Man comics. I saw it anyway, at the behest of a good friend (who actually did like the comics) and I was blown away. After that, if a Marvel movie came out, I went and saw it, whether or not I cared for (or even knew) the source material. This got me to some great experiences I would have never imagined liking, ie: Guardians of the Galaxy and Ant-Man.
But for me I started looking a bit more critically after the release of Iron Man 3. I thought it sucked, so I realized then that although the MCU has a disproportionate number of real winners, it can still have losers, it’s not a given. So I would wait to see what public opinion was before I’d spend money to see it in a theater. I still saw a lot of them in the theater. Most of them. Right up until Avengers Age of Ultron. I hated that movie so much that I’ve never seen another Marvel movie in a theater since. I’ve seen most of them after their theatrical run, streaming - some have been quite good, most have not.
So yeah. Big fan of the comics when I was a kid. Reluctant fan of the MCU turned enthusiastic - then turned reluctant again. I still haven’t seen Deadpool and Wolverine yet, but it’s on the agenda.
Nice straw man. Nobody said the community was going to “Linux-sized” nor that it was going to be built in a “few days,” nor that it was going to have paid devs. It’s like you’re being intentionally obtuse.
There are already multiple supported forks of Firefox and while it doesn’t take much to maintain such forks when they are being fed a large part of the codebase by Mozilla, if you think such a project would not pick right the fuck up where Mozilla left off if Mozilla tried to pull a Google and get behind Manifest V3, you are, I believe, mistaken.
Mozilla itself owes its existence to Netscape’s failure in the face of unfair competition by Microsoft’s Explorer. Netscape released its source code, Mozilla was founded and the power of open-source created Firefox. Chrome’s halfhearted support of Mozilla is itself owed to the fact that they don’t want to get spanked over Chrome like Microsoft was over IE.
Ah thanks, I was about to call Peter.
As if installing and using something else means you can’t have Chrome lying around for that one stupid website.
Yes, and we will drop Mozilla when it drops uBlock as well. We will all get behind whatever open-source browser stops ads, and it will very quickly become the most widely used browser. Why? Because everybody despises fucking ads and you can’t curb-stomp them into liking ads, that’s why.
Google can spend all the money it likes trying to piss on users and tell them it’s raining but at the end of the day, a new king will be crowned and if it isn’t Chrome and it isn’t Firefox, then it will be something else.
And no, FOSS doesn’t need money behind it. FOSS needs a dedicated community behind it. Assertions to the contrary are FUD constantly being seeded by Google, Microsoft and their ilk to destroy competition. This is an existential necessity for Google, you can bet they are doing everything in their power to maintain the status quo.
I watch too much MST3K. I couldn’t understand why having a warm backside was the opposite of Kool-Aid.
How can $15 million be considered a lot of money in a month when Diablo 4 has made a billion dollars in just over a year? I mean, that’s a factor of 10.
I could also ask how it could be possible that Diablo could make a billion dollars despite pretty much everyone saying it sucks? And then what might the logic be in subsequently firing all the people who made it?
But I digress.
The delicious irony is that they now get to live in the world they helped create.
Well, I mean… not much better.