Some middle-aged guy on the Internet. Seen a lot of it, occasionally regurgitates it, trying to be amusing and informative.

Lurked Digg until v4. Commented on Reddit (same username) until it went full Musk.

Was on kbin.social but created this profile on kbin.run during the first week-long outage.

Other Adjectives: Neurodivergent; Nerd; Broken; British; Ally; Leftish

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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2024

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  • “I’ve said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that." – an actual Bill Gates quote referring to the 640k quote that won’t die.

    But yes, it was probably satirically ascribed to him because of MS-DOS not having the capability to deal with any more than that amount of RAM for a lot longer than it probably should have.

    The “temporary” solution of requiring an extra driver to be able to do so (EMM386.SYS or similar) remained in place right up until DOS-based Windows was allowed to die.

    (The underlying reason was almost certainly ancient IBM PC memory-mapped IO standards, so maybe we could ascribe the original quote an engineer working there some time around 1980.)


  • The last thing I messed around with choked on some wide characters that weren’t in the current locale, so I guess picture the top half of the burger bun, about two thirds of the top part of the patty, a small pile of raw ingredients off to the side and some inexplicable six-inch nails through the raw meat, maybe.

    Most of the rest of the stuff I do could be compared to those nouvelle cuisine jokes that have been running since the 1980s. Large plate, inexplicably small serving of something allegedly gourmet but is probably a cube of the cheapest pâté from the closest supermarket that was flash frozen and then stylishly drizzled in jus de menthe or something.

    Bon appetit



  • (FWIW the downvote wasn’t me)

    That sounds like you’re suggesting that Microsoft wouldn’t care what was installed locally to be able to net-boot / run the rest of Windows.

    I think it’s all but certain that they’d want user’s computers to to boot into something they made, or at the very least, slapped their branding all over, even if that was only a wrapper for their web browser.

    I can definitely see them going down the line of saying that their online apps aren’t guaranteed to work under any other system, going so far as to throw in a few deliberate stumbling hazards for anything that isn’t theirs. (Until anti-trust, etc.)

    And thus, dual booting will still be something that people do. Even if - as you clarified - they’re not going to cripple that as well.


  • Check system settings for a keyboard entry / applet. I’m on LMDE Cinnamon and have no idea what the equivalents are on Kubuntu, but over here it’s definitely possible to change/remove the default keyboard assignments and set up custom ones instead.

    For example, I have Shift+WWW (the multimedia key that starts a web browser by default) set to start the browser with an alternate profile. I could just as easily set plain old WWW to, say, start a terminal instead, or run that custom command.

    The hardest part is knowing what custom command to run to get the desired effect.


  • The only way to prevent dual booting would require a UEFI/BIOS that pulls the OS straight over a network, bypassing local storage entirely.

    Even if that didn’t already rule it out, the size that OSes are these days makes it even less likely. At least not unless Microsoft (or whoever) are planning to ditch absolutely everyone who doesn’t have gigabit internet. (It would be kind of funny for an OS to go back to being 1990s-sized to mitigate that though. And funnier still when someone inevitably captures it onto a hard disk anyway.)

    A more likely vector would be to deliberately break third party bootloaders every time Windows boots. And that would last until the next anti-trust / monopoly lawsuit and they’d roll it back to the current behaviour of only breaking third party bootloaders on installation.

    And even if somehow that didn’t get rolled back, just wait until hardware vendors introduce this thing called a “switch” that can be added just before the power connector on an SSD. Can’t boot from a drive that has no power. BIOS defaults to the next SATA channel. And now you’re booting into Linux.

    Doing the same for a mobo-mounted NVMe drive is harder but not impossible.







  • “Just a heads up that we’ll be shipping your machine to the client, since it’s the only machine on Earth known to support the software. You’re getting the spare machine out of the basement. Super fast Cyrix processor. Looks like it boots to Windows 11 release 3, but they’ve written it 3.11 for some reason.”






  • Haven’t seen this in the other comments: Coolness factor. If you’re a successfully popular teacher, i.e. “cool”, then your students will likely want to participate in whatever it is you suggest.

    However, if they don’t see you as cool, you might have difficulty, and might even put them off the platform. This is not something that can be fixed easily, and trying to be cool is about as uncool as you can get.

    (Making it mandatory will work, of course, but how you go about that could determine whether they choose to stay on the platform once you’re done. This was kind of covered by OP talking about Matrix in another comment here.)