It used AALib and SVGALib (screenshot). And that was on hundred-MHz Pentiums.

Depends on what your needs are. I was still rocking an i7-2600K/16GB/SATA SSD system until the beginning of this year. Was still getting the job done, except in modern games of course. Then I inherited some money, and now it's a 3950x/64GB/PCI4 M.2 machine. Might not last me eight years again, considering that there's actual CPU competition now... but it should be good for a while. Bump up the video card in a few years and I expect it'll still be fine for games. They're going to finally move to more multithreading, now that people will actually have more than four cores.

Bullshit. Verbose names are fine when you've got tooling support to find the stuff. APIs were small enough to fit in someone's head in the 80s and 90s. Nowadays the scope of things is way too broad.

That's not a dig on things like the POSIX API, BTW. I mean EMACS was called "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping", because the systems were fractions of the power we have now. (I just did a little mandelbrot set program in Go and C, just to check. They were almost identical in performance, but the C executable was 20KB and the Go one was 2.4MB.)

We can afford sprawling APIs with lots of little nooks now. And that means a big namespace.

...the American Community Survey. Theoretically, answers are required by law, but no one's been prosecuted in over 40 years. In fact, the legal theory argument that the survey is constitutional has never been tested in court.

We got it a couple years back and I refused any information beyond what the regular census requires. I got a phone call where I explained I didn't trust them to secure my information. So far, I haven't been prosecuted for it, nor have I heard back from them. Came down to it, I'd be okay with being the test case.

Well, okay, if the things you want aren't on Linux, that's just the way it is, I guess. Of course, it used to be that way for games in general, but now a lot of "AAA" stuff shows up on Linux, too. If not immediately, then a few months down the road. As I said, I have enough games on my plate right now, I can afford to wait a bit.

Steam is quite dirty to install though... No source, 32-bit only (same for the games), some UI bugs, etc.

Ah, an AC. No, the games can be 64-bit, I run The Talos Principle that way, for example. As to source, for operating systems and utilities and most software, I want source. Games are an area where open-source doesn't work quite as well. I'm fine with closed-source and actually paying money for games. If you want to be a purist, you go on with your bad self.

And for what's left, you have to sort the real and well-made native or ported games, from the clunky ports by people who are not GNU/Linux developers...

Not so far. They've all worked just fine. If I measure, there's a framerate drop on some games between Windows and Linux, but up to this point not so's it bothers me in actual gameplay. Of course, I have an Nvidia card. People with AMD have some legit issues there, but I bought my hardware with Linux in mind.

For example.

There have been at least two Windows 7 updates I've had to temporarily disable Grub for, otherwise they fail.

...it's really not a big deal. Yes, it's not as many as Windows. However, there's so many just on Steam that it's plenty to fill any rational amount of leisure time. I've been mucking with The Talos Principle, Antichamber, and QUBE recently, on a bit of a first-person puzzler kick. Of course, before that I was playing Shadow of Mordor, Alien: Isolation and Tomb Raider (2013), along with XCom Enemy Within. Mucked around with Saint's Row 3 and Dead Island, too. That's just "major studios". But there's plenty of others I've been dipping into - The Fall and The Swapper, Sublevel Zero, Monstrum, Metro 2033, Victor Vran, Stealth Bastard, Doorkickers, the new Day of the Tentacle Remastered. Haven't had a chance to muck with Sir You Are Being Hunted. And I think I'm going to be spending quite a bit of time in Duskers.

More games than I can handle, really. All full Linux ports. I do have Windows, but haven't booted it to play games in at least a couple months now.

I use FB on my phone... via a mobile browser. One that I only use for FB. I have a separate browser I use for websurfing. I don't let the FB browser post notifications or have access to my location. I lose a few features that way, but I can still participate in "social media" without giving FB total access to my phone and life.

...like, say, Ted Chiang's "Understand".

>Do you believe rehabilitation is impossible or do you want revenge?

I don't believe that someone who commits mass murder can be rehabilitated, no. It isn't about revenge; it's about public safety.

Someone once pointed out that hoping a rapist gets raped in prison isn't a victory for his victim(s), because it somehow gives him what he had coming to him, but it's actually a victory for rape and violence. I wish I could remember who said that, because they are right. The score doesn't go Rapist: 1 World: 1. It goes Rape: 2.

What this man did is unspeakable, and he absolutely deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison. If he needs to be kept away from other prisoners as a safety issue, there are ways to do that without keeping him in solitary confinement, which has been shown conclusively to be profoundly cruel and harmful.

Putting him in solitary confinement, as a punitive measure, is not a victory for the good people in the world. It's a victory for inhumane treatment of human beings. This ruling is, in my opinion, very good and very strong for human rights, *precisely* because it was brought by such a despicable and horrible person. It affirms that all of us have basic human rights, even the absolute worst of us on this planet.

This is precisely why I lost all interest in Oculus the instant I heard that it had been acquired by Facebook.

I've got some old webcams that I'd like to use Zeros for. Turn them into motion-sensitive security cameras with a FIFO buffer (on SD card). I've got some old Bluetooth dongles for networking purposes, and a powered hub or two. Should make a decent little setup after a little experimentation.

Lots of pictures of, and for, cakes.