Heh, this song cracks me up every time.

Windows 10 has really helpful error messages.

</sarcasm>

I know how to solve this : delete \Windows\system32 folder

Well, it looks like an accurate error.

@Serg You can't.

Windows won't let you delete that folder.

I think it's called SFP - System File Protection?

Yup.

@NathanOsman by the way, how many ports you'd recommend for sata controller in virtualbox ?

Hmm.. not sure. As you can see above, I'm on Windows at the moment.

So I'm afraid I can't check.

And Ethel was a tree on his shoulder!

Heh... I luff this song.

Anyhow @Serg the answer is always 42.

@KGIII good answer

but max count is 30

Then, obviously, it's broken.

How many strips of bacon should I eat? 42. Sounds legit.

See? It works. The system works!

\o/

I blame Frank Zappa.

How many wives should I have ? 42 . . . .paying bills for the rest of your life . . . .

Whoooooooooah.

K. That does not work.

You're paying them anyhow. You might as well go for broke @Serg.

I'm already broke . . .kinda . . . I'm a poor college student with workstudy that probably wont even pay for my next semester

oh virtual box, how i love your laggggg

I used the GI Bill and scholarships and kept a job. I had a wife and child while in school.

I understand broke. :|

notbad.png

I went for four years, re-enlisted, and went back. It worked. It sucks but it was worth it.

I'm barely 25. But thankfully not broke.

I wonder what the definition of "broke" is.

Owing money... I guess.

Being broke kind of sucked but it was worth it. I'm happily retired now. Heck, I retired eight years ago.

Retired? Wow... not bad.

I owe money. But then again, I figure most people in the US do.

I'm not in the US :)

I already figured that out from your definition of "broke" :)

Yeah, I owned my own company. We did traffic modeling, vehicular and then expanded into pedestrian traffic. I sold and retired almost eight years ago - as of this week.

Congrats @KGIII ... how's retirement been going?

Boring but I manage to amuse myself. ;)

So I discovered this week that the training modules that come with the company's developer toolkit has a playable version of Doom. It's much more pixelated than I remember :)

Everything from the 90s is much more pixelated than we remember. Resident Evil was the thing in my middle school and now it's . . . .classic :(

I'd love to retire and do open-source development all day :)

You shoulda seen the .gif pr0n in the 80s.

^ seen that, bless google

@NathanOsman I can only donate and maybe help a little. My code leaves a little something to be desired. I'm a mathematician, not a programmer. Eventually, as the company grew, we were able to hire professionals - thankfully.

My code will work but I recall one specific quote from a dev...

speaking of old tech

"Code comments go in the code not on coffee soaked index cards on your desk, a******!"

yep, sounds like a professional developer alright

So no, you probably don't want my "help."

I was eventually kicked out of my own server room. I listened. 'Twas why I hired them.

Can I do it? Yeah, probably. I'm probably "pretty good." I guess. It has been a while. I'm nowhere near as good as the actual professionals who are properly trained and have the ability. So, I donate. It works for me.

AltaVista and Usenet saved my bacon more times than I can count. :)

@Serg cute video ... the kids seem to be trying too hard though

hehe, probably because they're used to touch devices

no, I mean they are trying to act more confused than they really are

i'd love to have one of them old PCs with MS-DOS or like early Unix installed

I doubt they're acting

perhaps, although some lines are giveaways IMO

for example ?

Back home, in my basement, I have an old TRS-80 that gets booted once in a while to play Zork.

I haven't found old computers to be that confusing to young people ... they are constantly exposed to old technology like that in old movies and TV shows

I've a VIC-20 too but that keeps burning out power supplies over the years. :( It's even got the tape drive.

the only thing I have to complain about Ubuntu 15.10 : add some new freaking THEMES ! 3 default ones - Adwata, high contrast and radiance are getting on my nerves by now

TRS-80 comes from late 70s . . . .you still have it ? How ?

@KGIII

I do, I have a TRS-80 model 2.

Dude, you're awesome !

I had to add memory chips to it to be able to type in lower case letters as I recall. :/ That was a long time ago.

as an example, "You have to give some sort of command and then type in what you want it to do?" (3:40) <-- I didn't find her portrayal of confusion while stating this to be convincing. Another kid also references Timothy Berners-Lee. While I'd like to believe he's very famous amongst typical kids nowadays, I kind of doubt it.

10 ? "Hello World"

OK disabling animations helps a bit , but come on, virtualbox ! Or should i say, come on Unity

smoke time

Perhaps more disturbing to me is that I remember thinking Doom was very violent, but it seems like nothing now. It'd be interesting to show it to the kids and see how they react to its violence (or lack of).

I have a 486 sitting here.

Does that count as old?

._.

I have an...

erm...

core solo.

how many MHz is it?

I believe your PCs are telling it to get off their lawn.

33 MHz... and it has the "turbo" button.

yeah I think that's old

just barely

It has Windows 95 installed.

And it's slower than watching paint dry.

Because someone enabled DriveSpace. (Remember that?)

you don't need Mo'Slo to slow it down for games

It has (IIRC) 12 MB of RAM, a 5&1/4" floppy drive (that doesn't work) and a 3&1/2" floppy drive. And I think the CD-ROM drive is 4x.

IIRC the Turbo button actually slowed it down. :/

it actually did something?

I think so.

Heh... You kids and your newfangled 3.5" drives. 5.25" and uphill in both ways!

It has an LED panel on the front that says 33 MHz when turbo is enabled and 16 MHz when it's not.

aha

@KGIII But those were so unreliable!

@KGIII: 5.25 inches? You call that a drive?

I remember many sad moments trying to get my Commodore 128 to read the floppy disk...

LOL I did have (not mine) a magnetic drum drive in the mainframe room that we had access to remotely.

@JourneymanGeek what is that??

The computer we had before the 486 didn't even have a hard drive.

You need Qwill brand floppies.

It came with two floppy drives.

One for the OS, one for documents.

@Chan-HoSuh - That's a hard drive I believe. I think it's one from IBM.

And it looks like a PanAm DC-9?

Somewhere here, I have a 5&1/4" floppy for MS-DOS 3 or something.

Must be worth a lot as an antique.

@NathanOsman lol, nah

No, nobody wants your floppy Nathan.

have you guys heard of woman who turned old Apple II that is worth like 200k USD to pawnshop ?

I have GW-BASIC too :P

Id wanna @NathanOsman

really is an Apple ][ really going for that much?

Some lady did that in California but it was a recycling place I thought?

I'm hoping to sell the 486 for at least a few hundred.

freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3295250/posts

It still works (except for the 5&1/4" floppy drive).

If so then I have an Apple ][c somewhere around my house too.

@Chan-HoSuh Link

@Chan-HoSuh: 70s (60s?) (50s?) eta hard drive

It has (IIRC) a Hitachi and Quantum hard drive, both less than 300 MB and both still working.

Apple 1 actually

businessinsider.sg/picture-of-ibm-hard-drive-on-airplane-2014-1

Nice. I have food being delivered. Gotta give 'em some money in a moment.

yeah the first Apple ... 200K I can believe

I should fire it up again for fun and get some screenshots. The problem is that the only way I can get data off of it is with the 3&1/4" drive and then I have to use another old machine (a Pentium MMX) to copy them from the 3&1/4" floppy to either a USB stick or to a network drive.

say Nathan, why do you have so much old gear?

We keep upgrading and just keep the old stuff.

ebay.com/sch/…

you must have started pretty young

Well, sort of.

That and the fact that in the early years, we were quite behind in technology.

We were using Windows 98 when everyone was using XP :P

I was thinking about getting some old hardware and refurbishing it with new parts on the inside

@Chan-HoSuh: ATX cases haven't changed that much

but if you could get a dead exotic machine that would be cool

My current case is like from 2003 I think.

@JourneymanGeek ebay . . . .plenty of dead exotic machines

Hey, but mine still works!

@Serg: If my SGI octane dosen't boot up some day, I'd probably build a nice system in it.

It still boots, I'm locked out tho, but I'll fix it eevntually

Granted, the CMOS battery died and I have to program the hard drive parameters into the BIOS at boot.

By the way, how do i make dash window smaller ?

Back home, I have a Street Fighter II Turbo stand up - I want to build a MAME machine out of it but I'm way too lazy. :(

I should add, I used to drink - heavily. And eBay... Drunk... sighs I have all sorts of useless stuff.

dont drink and shop, bro

Too late. I did, however, quit drinking. I drank for like forty years. It sucked to quit but I managed. I was a professional, by that time. I'd quit lots of times so I was good at it. ;-)

@fossfreedom may I use my newly acquired ability to protect questions on this one ? askubuntu.com/q/354278/295286

seems legit

Heh... That looks like something I'd write and why I don't code very much. I have seen that comic before. I don't think it's XKCD but it might be?

@KGIII definitelly xkcd i dont remember which tho

That comic cracks me up once in a while. I miss User Friendly.

xkcd is nice if you can get the references. If it's related to physics or biology, i dont get it

I usually do but that's mostly because I've a layman's interest in both. My degree is in Applied Mathematics and so I get a lot of the physics simply because I'm interested. Biology fascinates me as does history.

<.< how do you people do it ?

@Serg there's a forum with threads for each comic, if you get interested in following up on those science/math references

@Chan-HoSuh Wait, what? There is?

yep, forums.xkcd.com

well that's nice to know

I did not know that. I was just commenting on Slashdot, like two days ago, that XKCD needed a forum. :|

they probably figured you were trolling and avoided the "bait"

@Serg Oh, there's lots I don't know which is why I find those subjects fascinating. I like to learn new things. Even if they're "pointless" or even if I don't fully understand or retain everything.

Yeah, that might be it. I really had no idea. Heh... I'm going to have to read some. Thanks @Chan-HoSuh.

I think as I've gotten older, I've spread my interests wider ...

One of the things I miss most about academia was being surrounded by smart people who were always willing to share knowledge. The internet is nice but less random and, in some ways, less easily accessed. A person can read your body language and tell when you're not understanding and fill that information in.

yeah, definitely ... taking courses online isn't yet a replacement for that experience

Another source is documentaries. I love them - they're pretty much all that I watch. They're passive entertainment for me. I don't always retain things, certainly not specifics. I do, however, get some via osmosis.

And an online course isn't nearly a replacement for a conversation with a grad student in the quad.

the Internet is great though ... I remember trying to learn about blackjack card counting as a kid ... had to do some convoluted inter-library loan that took months

and after receiving the book, I realized it wasn't what I needed

I went to MIT and was exposed to so many great minds. It was almost like a whole other type of culture there. I'm not really sure how to explain it, but, yeah...

Heh... Yeah, the internet is great if you know what you want or if you don't want anything in particular.

well, definitely StackOverflow is great :)

helps me earn a paycheck :D

Then, there's that. I had Usenet and Altavista when I needed it. I guess the people haven't really changed much.

hehe, Usenet

That and, well, being in Cambridge there were a lot of BBSes to dial in before that.

You'll pry my 300 baud acoustic coupler from my cold dead hands!!! sighs

hmm just had an idea ... old modem sound would make a great ringtone

Heh. I've done that. I can kind of mimic them in the real world.

you must be a hoot at parties :)

Sometimes, we'd call and mistakenly get a modem or a fax machine. I'd talk back to it. I had no idea what I was saying but I hoped it was doing something.

Heh... No. Well, not the kind of parties you're thinking of. :(

how do you know what kind of parties I'm thinking of?

I'm assuming they're involving regular people.

If not then, yes, yes I'm probably a hoot.

You can't have regular parties with the number of regular people I know

That sounds about right.

you might be the hit of my party :D

I throw a regular party back home every Memorial Day. It's got regular people and a bunch of them stay the weekend. I act normal then. I don't think they'd want to here my modem impersonation.

hear*

personally, acting normal isn't an issue for me ... it's not getting bored

there are conversations where people are literally discussing the differences in baking caused by changing types of flours

while I am sure, that's an interesting topic in its own right, I need to leave when that happens

Heh... That matters when you're baking bread.

I guess it's not actually the discussion of the baking that's offputting. It's how you're supposed to engage in the discussion

Oh, I can't adhere to constraints like that. ;-) Rules for conversation directions? No, I can barely remain on topic.

It's kind of like when some people were discussing that gigantic mass of garbage floating in the Pacific Ocean

saying stuff like "oh how horrible" etc

I wanted to know how big it really was

It's kind of neat how the Pacific gyre formed.

It's huge. And the plastic is frequently measured in microns - it's not large by any means - much of it.

yeah I guess it's rather involved to estimate its size

I forget the estimates but they were huge. I've seen a number of documentaries about it.

This is such a close baseball game.

Nathan, your attempt at normalcy is utterly transparent

:)

For some, baseball is about statistics and improbabilities.

actually baseball happens to be my favorite sport

I dont get it

It's Toronto's last chance to stay in the playoffs.

And they're down by one.

I understand american football , but baseball's point evades me

@Serg get what?

@Serg The point of baseball is to score more runs than the other team.

I haven't watched baseball since Fred McGriff was playing for the Blue Jays.

A run is counted when a player gets to all four bases.

There's much more to it but that's the short summary.

@Serg that's interesting, for me it's the other way around ... I keep trying to understand football strategy on and off

They both involve scratching your testicles and spitting.

yeah, but . . . . it's just a dude hitting ball that another dude throws . . . . so like why do you need a whole team ?

@KGIII ROFL

nice description

@Serg Because the one dude is throwing the balls at close to 100 MPH.

That makes his arm sore after a while :P

And you need a whole team 'cause the outfield's too big to be covered by one person unless he's REALLY fast.

insert a joke about fapping with sore hands here

That and the fact that the dudes hitting the ball run the bases.

I guess baseball strategy can be confusing since there doesn't seem to be much going on

I'll give baseball a shot sometime again, thanks to Nathan's explanation, but I doubt it can excite me that much

I find basketball bores me. Oddly, I can watch golf.

@NathanOsman I tend to like the pitchers that throw much more slowly

But when it comes to Canada, our sport is hockey.

You haven't seen crazy fans until you go to a Canadian hockey game.

And the action is constant, not like baseball.

@NathanOsman how has R.A. Dickey been pitching?

I have a hard time following that puck

It's a fairly simple game compared to baseball though. Just put the puck in the net.

@NathanOsman You don't necessarily have this, but don't they let you cross these days with one of those advanced drivers licenses too? The ones with the chip in them? (not really related, I was just thinking about it earlier today for a completely different matter)

@NathanOsman using a stick, and gliding around on the ice with blades attached to your shoes

@Seth They do but those cost extra and I'm not sure they're available for a class 7 driver like me.

@NathanOsman You forgot that in hockey you need to be a good fist fighter too! =)

@Terrance Only the "enforcers" on the team.

I'm a fan of non-violent sports.

@NathanOsman Yeah, good point, but it still helps! Also maybe missing a few teeth to begin with as well. =)

@Seth Is it just me or is main always a mess right after a release...

Like NERF wars.

those are non-violent.

@chaskes not just you. I believe there is a graph somewhere..

I just used my passport when I crossed. I cross all the time. I'm right next to the border in Maine and I'm a dual citizen so I never have problems. I've also crossed a few times here in Buffalo.

@jrg I don't know... NERF can get pretty violent

That was my sarcasm.

NERF wars are awesome, as long as you're playing with non violent people (as @Chan-HoSuh points out)

I've got the NERF supply at work.

@jrg oh -.-

I am the keeper of the nerf.

Dem USB NERF launchers tho...

@Seth Well, I have a headache from it now...and yet I can't tear myself away...

Especially with the cameras for aiming.

Does --disable-gpu-compositing work in Chrome?

so I was surprised to see the other day they are making another Star Wars movie

Episode VII: The Force Awakens

huh, is that a spot where you can hunker down and nail everyone?

They're foam.

Yes.

So nobody is likely to sustain fatal injuries.

It looks more like his hiding hole to keep people from finding them so he can actually get some work done. :D

Actually, I spent $30 on all that.

or is that where he holes up and uses those guns to keep people away so he can work?

I found some coupons and a gift certificates.

@jrg wat. LIES!

;p

went and cleared out a walmart, and made a dent in a targets supply.

That's a pretty good stash for $30.

Target just went out of business up here.

total would have been like 80-90$

Nice score!

In fact, the local Target store is now becoming a Wal-Mart :P

so i armed the office.

@KGIII The home run?

@NathanOsman Looks like your Blue Jays might survive another night.

and now i can't get any work done.

:(

No, the NERF guns for $30 Nate.

@jrg Did I ever tell you about the time I had the door to my office closed and the last guy leaving didn't see me and enabled the motion alarm?

@NathanOsman yes!

The missus, she who must be obeyed, has told me that I have until 11:00 before she takes my toys away. :(

Ah.

We narrowly avoided that.

Better do what she says.

(today actually)

I usually do @NathanOsman. She's mostly harmless.

@jrg Does your alarm immediately involve the police?

Or does someone else confirm it's not a false alarm?

@NathanOsman depends.

(And is it loud enough to wake the dead?)

before a certain time, it will call someone (CEO, COO) to verify it.

Ah.

@Ravan o/

@Ravan o/

@NathanOsman @Terrance o/

after the cutoff (or a set time), it goes to the police.

I triggered it accidentially

Our alarms bring out the hazmat teams

had my hands full, other person didn't have a code

didn't get to it fast enough.

darn thing is stupid loud.

scared the $*#&#$ out of me.

Alrighty. I'm out. \o @everyone. (I hope there's no 'everyone' to get my message.)

You can clearly see where the spikes are.

Indeed.

@KGIII Night!

@Seth are we supposed to post that with the axis?

Good news, I was able to download the ISO while I was out today.

@jrg shrug that's the 25k page, not the mod one.

@Seth ah, ok.

(new priv, dunno if you know)

It actually took me less than 1 hour to download the Mini CD of 15.10 and install GNOME Desktop on it today. =)

Yeah, mods are not supposed to publish stats from the analytics tab.

But the other stats are fine.

I haven't read that much from meta lately, no.

They're starting teams...

@Seth yeah, thx. but what gets me here is not the volume, but the massive amounts of non-answers, comments as answers, and questions like "explain all linux".

@chaskes I'm tempted to star that for "explain all linux".

;)

@chaskes Yes.

there are lots of those after every release.