And I absolutely would not be able to resist labeling these as:

• English, U
• English, No U

Wow, the actual English flag, not the Union Jack?

I imagine that would trip up quite a few people even though there is a cheeky aspect of technical correctness to it.

I have a Dell Axim X50v in a box somewhere. I imagine the battery is toast and I’ll probably have to keep it in its cradle to remain powered. It was a hell of a machine for it’s day.

I went through a succession Windows CE/PocketPC machines back in the day, starting with a Casio Cassiopeia E-115, then an Audiovox Maestro which was a rebadged Toshiba, then an HP iPAQ 2215, and finally the Axim.

The displays on the Maestro and the Axim were really something, and I wish someone would bring these back for a modern smartphone. They were rotten at color accuracy, but both had transflective displays that were fully readable even in direct sunlight. The Axim X50v also had a full 480x640 screen resolution which blew the first few iPhones out of the water on pixel density and even gave the iPhone 4 a run for its money. “Retina” display, my ass.

I had a Microdrive bunged into the CompactFlash slot on my Axim which was… several gigabytes, I don’t remember how many. I kept it packed with MP3’s, and I had a custom wallpaper with a white-on-chartreuse silhouette of a pacifier on it with the legend, “All 10,000 Songs On Your iPod Suck.”

But then the entire PDA market got swallowed in one gulp by smartphones.

I’ll bet you a shiny penny that’s what it is. The backend recompresses things to some other format, probably a low bitrate JPEG, in order to save space and/or in case some joker uploads a 90 megabyte uncompressed TIFF image to use as a profile pic, or something.

Those are displayed in browser, right? The only reason that would be happening is if Piefeed is recompressing images and their code is not smart enough to identify an animated .gif and act accordingly.

I mean, that’s already how animated .gifs work. If somehow you manage to load one into a viewer that doesn’t support the animation functionality it will at least dutifully display the first frame.

How the hell you would manage to do that in this day and age escapes me, but there were a fair few years in the early '90s where you might run into that sort of thing.

Yes, the iPhone did not and never has supported Flash. At least not officially from Apple. There was support, albeit not quite 100% complete, on Windows CE/PocketPC at the time, though. That was one of the things that let me lord it over early iPhone adopters back in the day — my pocket nerd computer could play Homestar Runner videos, and their stupid expensive bauble couldn’t. So there.

So all that breathless reporting I’ve been reading lately about how the AI boom is causing a hard drive shortage is bullshit just like the AIs themselves? Can’t say as I’m surprised one way or the other.

And by “rats,” you mean me. Me and my crowbar are ready and waiting to get our hands on a bunch of abandoned server hardware, especially those racks and racks of hard drives.

Think of how much pirated anime you could fit a couple of those arrays!

It sure does. But America is the center of the world, right…?

People here in the US will say “in the South” and mean, like, Alabama. Not Tierra del Fuego.

Old people are actively using tablets. Lots and lots of them. A significant cross-section of my Boomer-and-up client base uses an iPad to do absolutely everything. It’s broadly the same experience as what they have on their phone, so I guess it’s familiar, but the screen is giant so they can actually see it. They seem to like that.

Bull. I don’t even get to have a double jump implant installed but I still have to deal with corpofascism. This is all a total rip-off.

Especially since the majority of computer users worldwide now no longer use a PC to do their computing. The average consumer now uses Windows only at work. Their personal device, whatever it is, runs Android or is some manner of iDevice, two platforms which have thoroughly eaten Microsoft’s lunch.

It’s too bad for Microsoft that their mobile platform – Windows Mobile, er, I mean Windows 8 RT, er, actually it was Pocket PC, um, no wait, it was Windows CE, et. cetera – all bombed so spectacularly, and the most recent one mere moments before Google took over the world.

I imagine Microsoft is no longer eyeing private users as a cash cow except purely as advertising targets.

It’s only a matter of time before some brilliant dipshit over there manages to envision Windows as a subscription service aimed solely at businesses, and the days of Windows as a standalone OS will be over.

The original Legend of Zelda. I still have it on cartridge and every once in a while I’ll just steamroll the entire game and whoop Ganon’s ass. I can usually do it in about 4 hours.

I don’t use any glitches or speedrun optimizations, I just know where everything is and what order to do things in.

One of the things I learned as a wee waddler on my path to being a fully-fledged computer nerd (that was two bird puns in one sentence, I don’t know if you noticed) was that keeping a spare power supply or two around is always a good idea.

A blown power supply can bring your day’s Unreal Tournament matches productivity to a halt instantly, and inevitably on a Sunday when all the stores are closed, too. To make matters more interesting, a partially failed power supply can cause all manner of strange and otherwise undiagnosable mystery issues. E.g. you’re telling me two of your hard drives, your RAM, and your video card all started acting flaky at once? More likely is your PSU’s +12v rail is wonky, or something. Swap in a known good one and see. A power supply is also the first in line of all your PC components that can be killed by external forces, e.g. dirty power or nearby lightning strikes, or maybe your dad just deciding to plug his 1970s vintage arc welder into the same circuit in the house, etc.

To this day I have a generic 750w PSU sealed in its shrink wrap on the parts shelf in my basement, because you never know when it’ll get you or someone you know out of a jam. And eventually it probably will.

That decent percent is in fact roughly 60%, in my industry. At least according to what my vendor reps tell me.

Only 4 in 10 people even bother to attempt to do their rebates. The manufacturers love that, because it allows them to put a giant "$2000 OFF!!! ^{viamailinrebate}" on their marketing literature and that gets eyeballs on the ad and feet in the door, but they know damn well they won’t actually have to pay out on the majority of those promos and in fact they don’t even budget with the expectation that they will.

Amazon stuff sometimes arrives. For instance, it’s going on 7 months by now I think and they still haven’t found my camera.

This is the sad reality of every company everywhere trying to turn their delivery operation into a “gig” position. Amazon does it, too. Their delivery contractors-who-are-totally-not-employees steal valuable items from deliveries all the time.

Anyway, you are certain to win your chargeback. Banks side with their cardholders more often than not, and Best Buy is going to have to provide proof positive that you received your item. “We handed it off to Doordash and then washed our hands of it” is not going to cut the mustard, there.

(We have to deal with chargebacks in my business, too. Defending ourselves is a pain in the ass because we have to provide indisputable documentation that the client’s order was fulfilled. The issuing bank always starts from the default position of their cardholder being a saint and all retail businesses automatically being scammers. A small subset of people will fraudulently dispute a charge for a big ticket purchase just because they feel this is a way to weasel out of paying for it, and usually they’ve been emboldened by the fact that they’ve tried it before and gotten away with it.)

I tend to upvote any display of anyone’s creative pursuit if I happen to scroll by it. Even if it’s not something I’m into. The marker-on-photo-paper guy whose name escapes me, people’s photographs in any of the photography related communities, any of the ink doodles, hand made stuff, or comics posted by their original creators.

We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. The average piece of junk is more meaningful than our criticism designating it so.

I’m calling this now: It’ll be even worse than you think, because “investigating” everyone this way would require a completely unrealistic amount of effort, because you’d have to review possibly decades worth of social media activity right then and there when the prospective entrant is standing at the customs desk. Nobody could possibly do that.

So these idiots will just use AI to do it for them, and as we all know full well the AI will return Earth-shatteringly wrong results pretty much all the time.