But first they’ll buy Discord and force everyone to abandon their exiting usernames to use a Microsoft account with it instead.

When it’s all the same you can ask for it by name.

Cripes. Does that mean we’re bringing back the “3D Scan Of My Friend’s Ass” phenomenon?

You get those, too? I guess it’s nice to know sometimes that whatever you’re doing has pissed off the gibbering hordes of the damned; it means you are annoying the right people.

Never mind recent motherboards, I’m still salty about the era of boards from 2004-2010 or so which had USB ports but the BIOS would refuse to accept inputs from them until after POST so you’d have to dredge up a separate PS/2 keyboard and jack it in to be able to configure the damn thing or use the boot menu.

And I had at least one board from that time period which has this same flaw, but with the added layer of joy and excitement that they’ve removed the PS/2 port block in order to appear “modern.” It’s still there, of course, but only as a pin header that you need to access from inside the case and plug a breakout board into. If you lose that board the gods themselves couldn’t even help you. I used to keep it stuck with painters tape to the inside of the case side panel.

Yes, but they can still see your content and comment on it within their own pits/burning lakes/etc., so they spend all day long mocking you and talking about you behind your back where you can’t see but you still know they’re doing it.

That’s part of what makes them hell.

The old pull-through. Some places insist on putting those damn concrete Toblerone blocks in front of you to prevent that sort of thing.

Keep a watchful eye when doing so, because I have seen many an argument break out in a parking lot when someone was trying to pull through at the same time someone else who couldn’t see them was trying to pull in to the same space from the outer side. Bonus points if they boop noses in the process. Somehow nobody ever seems to arrive at the simple conclusion, in such cases, of party A just reversing a couple of feet back into the first space to let party B take the second one.

My boss apparently backs his truck into his parking space every morning out of a combination of overabundance of a caution and the reduced turning radius while in reverse. Well, he did he did up until I pointed out to him that mostly what this accomplishes for him is making it irritating to load anything into his truck… Which is, not to put too fine a point on it, what we do all day around here.

Our parking lot is very quiet, private only us and the other tenants in our building, has no random pedestrians, and cross-traffic isn’t an issue.

Some people think, but for the wrong reasons.

The parking space is ideally a controlled area, i.e. you can readily assume it is free of other vehicular traffic. The same cannot be said for backing out of a space into the travel lanes through the parking lot.

Can confirm; I used to manage a hardware store with an attached small engine repair shop. There’s a reason Briggs and Stratton abbreviates so readily to “BS.”

They’ve been trying to do the absolute bare minimum possible to maximize profits and making their machines flimsy and deliberately uneconomical to repair for several decades, now. All I can say is that we ought to be thankful for aftermarket parts.

Gee, there was that other guy back when who had an obsessive fascination with wunderwaffen, too. Little mustache. His name’s on the tip of my tongue. How did that all work out in the end, again?

I think we can all safely assume that EV’s are not relevant to this discussion.

It was the same story with DVD and the PS2, which was in no small part a major reason for its early success.

Sony also sold the PS3 itself at a loss at launch in order to get a bigger install base, and hoped to make their money back on software sales.

I’m pretty sure the Wii won that battle. 101-some-odd million units of that were sold, 87ish for the PS3 and 84ish for the 360. The PS2 still blows everything else out of the water, still being the best selling console of all time at 160 million or so.

People had a big time hate-on for the PS3 in its initial years. At launch the PS3 was the most expensive of the current gen options and Sony didn’t have much of anything very compelling to run on it. The mantra at the time was “going Wii60,” i.e. getting an Xbox 360 for all the big name AAA titles and a Wii for all the niche Nintendo stuff and pointedly ignoring the PS3 entirely, because the notion was you could buy a base 360 and a Wii for about the same as the cost of a PS3. All that took a few years to get turned around.

?

You can just right click on it and hit “remove from toolbar.” That’s all it takes.

Putting it back in my toolbar for the purposes of taking this screenshot was actually more clicks.

You can actually do this with most, but not all, of the toolbar items. You can even 86 the refresh button that way if you’re feeling truly perverse.

New cars absolutely do have dipsticks; they’re the ones designing them.

Notwithstanding the potential for software bugs or other issues inherent with monitoring oil levels only digitally, monitoring just the oil level is not the sole purpose of the dipstick. Being able to physically see a sample of the engine oil is a vital diagnostic tool and can alert an owner or mechanic to a head gasket problem or other oil contamination issue, or if something is grinding metal shavings into the oil, etc.

For what it’s worth I have yet to actually physically see a new vehicle without an oil dipstick. I guess they’re out there, but so far I’ve been lucky. But I have already had quite a few automatic transmission equipped cars without a transmission dipstick cross my path, and that’s already enough of a pain in the ass. If you’re lucky there’s a side plug in the transmission case you can use to check the fluid condition and level (after crawling under the vehicle…) but in a lot of cases there isn’t even that – your only recourse is to drop the transmission pan off entirely, which causes you to lose all the fluid in the process. And you’ll probably also have to replace the gasket while you’re at it. Needless to say, this is an incredibly moronic design decision.

Regardless of whatever it did or however it did it, the way Pocket was suddenly shoved in everyone’s faces by default definitely left a bad taste in a lot of mouths (including mine) and everybody just considered it more unasked-for adware. Especially since in its default configuration about a quarter of what it serves you is indeed flat out ads, when most of us are using Firefox with uBlock or similar specifically not to see ads.

Pocket provided a feature I suspect few people actually used, and in the process had an obnoxious presentation that a lot of people actively disliked. Add me to the list of people who won’t be sad to see it go.

I want my browser developer developing browsers, not other ancillary side projects and certainly not “curating content” or whatever the fuck.

I would not be at all surprised to learn that Pocket costs Mozilla a nontrivial amount of money and manpower to maintain, what with doing all that curation and all, and provides them bupkis in return.

Pocket absolutely would suggest you articles (and ads) by default unless you explicitly told it not to in your settings. This is separate from the tiles of frequently visited pages from your history.

The second slider down is your history/pinned shortcuts on the home screen. The third one is recommended junk, “Powered by Pocket.”

More info on that here, for however long this will do anyone any good:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/pocket-recommendations-firefox-new-tab

It was redundant anyway, since it was just bookmarks with extra steps. But you can sync bookmarks between devices with Firefox anyway and you’ve been able to for years, so I have no idea why they kept it around other than to use it as a vehicle to push ads (because it seemed like roughly 25% of the “articles” it suggested to you were actually ads). I can’t say as I’m too sad to see it go.

Fakespot could arguably have been useful on paper, but I have to admit I never used it because I treat most online reviews as if they’re bullshit anyway.

Sort of. Polymer, actually. It’s a common end-run around calling something “plastic” outright because that in and of itself is typically a shorthand for “cheap” or “flimsy.”

Anyway, the plastic cutting boards in commercial use (i.e. the ones I use because I am that kind of nerd) are made of high density polyethylene.