I thought that it became MANGA when it changed from FAANG?

It explains that it means “fan failure”.

And there was a link to a video of it happening.

The only other link to an MS support page did not work.

But you’re not allowed to proceed in life until you’ve pressed any key!

I remember an obscure one named “grommit” that was a dancing animated character and you’d click it to change arm and leg movements.

Bonzi buddy was over of the bad ones, maybe?

Drain.exe would say “water in drive a:, commencing spin cycle” then power up the drive and make a gurgling sound.

Sheep.exe … would create a sheep that would wander the desktop.

When I read it, it stirred a distant memory of hearing such a story before, so I knew that there was something behind it and looked it up.

You could just about play speech using one bit output using pulse-width-modulation. But it was almost unrecognizable. And would take a lot of memory for the time.

It was usual to have different numbers of beeps for POST errors.

But this was an age when a PC would say “Keyboard error. Press any key to continue”, so things were not thought out that well.

That probably wasn’t a virus.

https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/2bs41z/til_that_if_your_bios_was_made_by_awardunicore/

Physical? As in a medical exam with a doctor?

If so you should really have a check up with an eye doctor, there are lots of eye health tests that you should regularly get beyond checking that you can read a chart at a distance.

Yeah for interpreted BASIC.

But even after moving to writing assembly language on a separate PC devkit there was still the habit of using short names.

I think that some assemblers had limits on name size.

Leaning to program on 8-bit machines with 8k of RAM means that even today I abbreviate names.

Plus it was accepted wisdom that shorter variable names were faster for the BASIC interpreter.

Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it.

I think that this captures so much of the human condition.

Oh, one really cool thing, newsreader programs would usually show you which message threads had new messages, so it was easy to keep up with interesting conversations.

What it looked like was an email program with a list of subject names like mail folders, each containing subject lines of conversation threads. The threads were fully branched, replies under the correct messages, like Lemmy. Not a simple list, like email.

Also unlike email, the messages were posted publicly instead of to you.

There was a list of newsgroup names for different subjects, you’d pick which of those to get messages from to appear as the “mail folders”.

The names were in a hierarchy, so computer subjects were comp.something, hobbies/recreation were rec.something etc. a bit like website names, only back to front, general to more specific, e.g uk.rec.sheds, alt.startrek.fanfic , rec.humor, rec.humor.funny.

You’d download messages from (and upload your replies to) a server and it would share messages with other servers, like Lemmy federation. So each group would be a merge of all messages from all around the world. Effectively there would only be ONE alt.folklore.urban for instance.

Usually your isp would run a server and you’d use that.

At first it wasn’t mainly used as a way to share binary files encoded as text messages, but eventually that took over, isps dropped having servers and big paid ones took over.

Kitboga on YouTube baits “tech support” scammers who ask for gifs card codes as payment then he redeems them to himself (or fakes doing so with custom web sites), while they scream at him.

I’m comfortable using a terminal, but with my Linux machines s common pattern is:

Need to get some software working. Find how to fix it, edit some config files.

Months later I run a system update and it’s starts asking me about merging the changes I made to various files. What were they for again? Are they still even necessary with the update or are the values I changed no longer used?

Then sometimes, something I installed is no longer supported, or needs a manual update because of how I installed it.

So, another Cod War.

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

“False” is a slightly more accessible language, like Forth but using special characters instead of keywords.

https://esolangs.org/wiki/FALSE

One that sticks with me from chemistry classes: “Hot glass looks exactly the same as cold glass.”

I wonder if they’re more popular now. I took this in a Walmart in California. https://imgur.com/d5ae1Po Although about half of those are not electric!