Blue Man Group: The Complex Rock Tour (favorite track: Rods and Cones)

Of course companies wanted people to share the free demo versions but some full games did have annoying protection schemes in the '80s. Obfuscated data and purposely “bad” sectors on floppy; cardboard decoder wheels; asking for word #x from line #y of page #z of the game’s manual, or, similarly, a page of codes printed in black ink on dark maroon paper to prevent photocopying… leading to folks distributing cracked versions and the cracking tools themselves!

To be fair, it was a pretty ridiculous time. Computer club meetings just turned into floppy-copy-fests.

The company that made my TV is engaged in copyright infringement, you say? Transmitting copyrighted images over the Internet for profit?

Huh.

You have packages held.

Debian user: shudders

https://www.npr.org/donations/support

I sounds like your window manager is telling the program to display with high-DPI scaling when it shouldn’t be. This is a common issue when running older software written for X11 on newer Linuxes that are using Wayland. fre:ac was originally written in 2001!

You might have a system display setting to control scaling of “legacy” (X11) applications. I know KDE Plasma does.

fre:ac is almost exactly like Exact Audio Copy.

I saw one Microsoft help page in which the customer service agent recommended to cut power to the PC during the Windows 8 or 10 boot process, three times! After three failed boots, newer Windows will bring up the UEFI boot options dialog.

My Sharp PC-7000 has a Setup key on the keyboard.

Sometimes this works. Sometimes it makes the PC speaker beep for two minutes straight while it slowly makes its way through the keyboard buffer.

Tim Sweeney traveled to Saudi Arabia with Donald Trump’s entourage this past week.

I’m thinking of old text adventure games where it would repeat your invalid command back to you.

>eat pussy

I can't "eat" a "pussy" right now!

>fuck yourself

I can't "fuck" a "yourself" right now!

There’s a self-perpetuating cycle of

1. Manufacturers only write drivers and support for Windows because that’s what most people are using.

2. “My device doesn’t work OOTB on Linux, so I’ll use Windows.” Leading to point 1.

I want to like Linux

Unfortunately, this is going to be more difficult for you. See above. Blame Nvidia and, let me guess, Broadcom?

Sorry, I was not trying to put words in your mouth. I just usually hear, “Linux not good for me because it doesn’t support my setup well enough” when it should be “Linux not good for me because the manufacturers of my hardware don’t support Linux well enough”. Trying to put blame where it belongs in hopes of raising awareness to both users and manufacturers.

I also mistakenly thought you mentioned a newer Nvidia card when you are considering AMD. 🤦‍♂️ Good luck in your computing future!

It’s not the fault of the creators of an operating system that Nvidia refuses to write comparable drivers. Nvidia are the only ones with the technical knowledge of the GPU’s internals that is necessary to write the 100% functional driver. Open-source Nouveau drivers exist but are less functional because of this, its programmers have to try to reverse-engineer and do a lot of guesswork and testing, and for free.

Basically: If you value FOSS software at all, buy from manufacturers that are friendlier to FOSS software, or you may unknowingly lock yourself out of it.

Edit: Buying newer (especially of Nvidia) is probably a bad idea if you intend to run Linux. Older cards have had more time for them to fix the inevitable bugs. I run a GTX980Ti 😅 with the closed-source drivers on an Arch-based system and I’m honestly surprised a video driver update hasn’t seriously broken anything yet.

I have several Android devices that work without signing into any account. I get my apps from F-Droid and some apks extracted from my phone that does have a Google account.

Samsungs are annoying, with their regular nagging, begging you to also make a Samsung account. I would never buy one but I’m on-call with a work-owned Samsung and there’s one notification that can’t be disabled. It goes off every once in a while and makes me think I have a service call.

Windows, eh, I switched to Linux long ago, but there’s always alphabet soup edition (IoT LTSC) that is far less bloated.

In the worst-case scenario, yes… but the wording on the Windows dialog literally says, “There is a problem with your device and you should scan it” and then when you do, “Your device is ready to use, no problems were found.” This, after it was ejected and got the safe removal notification. 🤷‍♂️

The “vulnerability” was only that F-Droid wasn’t keeping up with their builds, leaving everyone who installed it from F-Droid out-of-date, during a period of known Firefox bugs being exploited.

That goes without saying… another user here says the drive can’t be larger than 8GB but I’m fairly certain I tried that, too.

Edit: 4GB FAT32 worked. It may have a 4GB limit. On a brand new multifunction business printer/copier/scanner.

My Canon photo printer can be converted to a tank-style with a drill and a highly illegal cartridge resetter. 😂