Consider the IoT Enterprise LTSC builds. These come premade from Microsoft with less bloat (or none, in the case of the Win10 IoT version), and don’t shove the consumer features down your throat on every update because they’re designed for mission critical embedded applications.

I have 10 IoT LTSC running on most of our machines at work because a significant chunk of our hardware is not Windows 11 “ready” and we use many vendor-specific things that don’t work in Linux or Wine, and I use 11 IoT LTSC at home (locked to 23H2 so my Mixed Reality VR headset remains working!) without incident.

http://massgrave.dev/

Without either of the above restrictions if I were you I would shop for a new mouse.

As far as video games go, an obvious answer is the Sims.

Perhaps only slightly less prominent is Shadow of the Colossus. Insofar as I know all of the spoken dialog is a nonsense fictional dialect that definitely isn’t Japanese, except possibly when calling your horse’s name. The language is based off of syllables and random bits from both Japanese and Latin with some of the syllables being spoken backwards, and with a kinda-sorta Japanese style cadence. But it’s utter gibberish, and only the subtitles make it intelligible.

Some clients go out of their way to mark posts by a moderator in some way, though. Alexandrite makes their username bright green an bold, for instance.

I wonder what portion of users are turned off by stepping into a community and discovering that basically every post is from its only moderator, and thus feel that whatever-it-is is probably just that individual’s personal hobby horse.

Not that I’d know, or anything…

Every rain fly on pretty much every modern tent has multiple zippers. Full coverage flies (flys?) are now the norm and these require some way to open them in order to let you in and out of the tent, which is inevitably a zipper. Even before this in the canvas tent era, closures may have been done with buttons rather than zippers but the opening points still had fold-over flaps to keep rainwater out, similar in construction to the ones on your pants.

I’ve only ever owned one tent in my life that did not have a full coverage fly and thus did not require any hardware on the fly itself. It still had folded over gusset flaps on it in various places, and that tent was also crap and was not designed to withstand weather.

If you are making your own “fly” out of a tarp or similar, that’s different.

I’ll bet you this also has something to do with the terminology for the rain fly on a tent, most of which have the same kind of flap covering the zippers and/or openings.

Yes, I imagine it would have to be externally connected not only for anyone to even bother to mess with it, but for it to even work with most computers. On my board the NVME slots are underneath a removable heat spreader plate which is itself underneath the area where the GPU overhangs its slot. There’s no way this would fit, and even if it did it’d require significant disassembly every time you wanted to touch it.

I imagine the majority of M.2 form factor SSDs are in space constrained locations where doing anything other than gluing a couple of millimeters thick heatsink to them is out of the question, and oftentimes not even that.

Yikes forever, on multiple fronts with this thing.

The coffee grinders hung on at several of the grocery stores near me, but got relocated to behind one of the checkout counters. They hung on there for a number of years but finally these got removed as well, along with the option to buy coffee beans loose and by weight. The majority of shoppers probably just bought pre-ground. For what it’s worth, myself and my parents were the only people I ever saw buying whole beans or using the grinders, over the span of decades.

One of the froofy high end grocery stores near me does still offer bulk beans (along with their other bulk products like dried fruit, lentils, trail mix, etc.) but there are no grinders in the store. They probably assume anyone who’s enough of a coffee nut these days would rather grind their own beans at home, and they’re probably right.

I literally did not. I am not the same poster who suggested Speed Queen to you.

If I wanted to talk about chips I would have attached my reply to your first comment, not the second one. I am discussing the notion that consumers say they would pay more for some attribute or level of quality, whereas in reality by and large they would not.

I used Speed Queen for the price comparison work in the comment I wrote in a different thread, seven days ago, because they’re the closest thing you can get to a true oldschool laundry machine anymore and are in fact occupying the same price bracket as those entry level or mid tier machines from 40 years ago.

Nothing in my comment is anything to do with computer chips, only higher quality expensive appliances vs. lower quality cheaper ones.

Anyway, the Speed Queen Classic Series DC5 dryers are still mechanically controlled, with mechanical sequence timers in the control panel.

https://docs.alliancelaundry.com/tech_pdf/PartsService/D518094.pdf

The MSRP of one of these is $1,649.

The matching TC5 washer is electronically controlled, in order to offer automatic load sensing/fill and comply with DOE requirements. That’s my understanding of the rationale, anyway.

Oh yeah? So I guess that’s why Jews take off their yarmulkes when they go indoors or are in prayer, right? Oh, they don’t? That’s strange…

Whole huge wide swathes of what people insist passes for modern Christianity are basically what amounts to fan fiction. Dumber people will fight you tooth and nail insisting that various culturally ingrained tropes and details really are in the book when in fact they’re not, but you’ll find that the religious apologists with a little more brainpower at their disposal have instead invented an array of tricks and deflections to downplay or just outright dismiss these discrepancies.

A few of my favorites:

The big one, of course, is that pretty much the entire modern interpretation of hell, including what it looks like and how it works, is taken entirely from the Divine Comedy. Particularly Dante’s Inferno, and to a lesser extent John Milton’s Paradise Lost. The bible itself is actually curiously silent on the location, mechanics, accessibility, and even temperature of hell. The Book of Revelation does make a reference to the “lake of fire” multiple times but it’s not actually outright stated that this is hell itself, merely where the devil, the beast, and the false prophet will be cast after their final judgement.

While we’re at it, it’s the Book of Revelation, not the book of “Revelations,” plural, no matter how many times you’ve watched the Matrix trilogy.

How many wise men visited Jesus in the manger? Wrong! The bible never actually specifies, not even once. Three gifts are mentioned, but the number of magi bearing them is never referenced. The only thing we know is that they were plural, so it must have been at minimum two. It’s only assumed that there were three, one per gift. Further, the now traditional names of Melchior, Gaspar, and Balthazar are extrabiblical fabrications that stem from the Excerpta Latina Barbari which was an 8th century Latin translation of a Greek compilation from some 200 years earlier, but still well after the heyday of Big J himself, not to mention anyone who could have been a living eyewitness. At least they managed to make some cameos in Chrono Trigger, though, so we got something out of the whole debacle.

Also, only the gospel of Matthew mentions the magi at all.

Infamously, in 1 Kings 7:23-26 as well as a reiteration in 2 Chronicles 4:2-5, the bible describes in some detail a presumably circular cauldron which, if we believe the dimensions as stated, would force pi to be equal to three. No mention is made as to the involvement of Bergholt Stuttley Johnson in all of this, but in light of that maybe we can’t rule it out. Either way, the notion that pi is in fact not equal to three is obviously thus an extrabiblical interpolation in and of itself, never mind the fact that it’s part of the math that makes the modern world work and, among other things, keeps satellites from falling out of the sky.

The notion that “Lucifer” is one of the names of the devil is also a modern-ish misunderstanding, and the story that “everyone knows” (possibly courtesy of the Spawn comics, or Jay and Silent Bob) about the devil being a rebellious angel who was cast out of heaven by god and cratered so hard he landed in hell is not really supported by the bible and is probably a myth absorbed from other nearby cultures. The name is only mentioned once in the entire bible, in Isaiah 14. It’s never actually said that whoever Lucifer may be was actually an angel, and in fact it’s understood that he is actually supposed to be the mortal king of Babylon at the time. Nor anything about how he might have became the devil after falling from heaven. Ezekiel 28 is also trotted out as allegedly being the other half of the Lucifer/casting out of Satan story, but the object of god’s ire here is the King of Tyre, also a mortal as explicitly mentioned by god twice. Halfway through god starts calling the dude a cherub and claiming he was present in the Garden of Eden, so suddenly mid sentence he’s talking about somebody else? This is god, right, an entity to famously direct he blows up entire cities because a couple of their residents piss him off? And on that note, god clearly burns whoever he’s talking about to a crisp and kills him very dead by the end of the passage so that doesn’t make any sense either, even if all the purple prose about cherubs and Eden and blamelessness and so forth weren’t just mockery for getting ideas above his station (which seems a bit more plausible). So even if said entity were the devil he’s not ruling in hell; god killed him.

Revelation is no help there, either. The devil is just there already by then, with no details given on where he came from.

We could go on like this forever.

Those warranties are parts only, not labor, and only on some specific component of the machine. It’s never a full 20 year parts and labor warranty, and certainly not a replacement warranty.

Samsung, LG, and even Maytag (Whirlpool) do this in the US also. They have their big “10 Year Warranty!” labels on the fronts of their machines, but if you peer at it with a magnifying glass it will reveal that it says ^{parts only on the motor} right below it.

Obviously this is basically worthless unless you have the wherewithal to replace that motor (or compressor!) yourself. But it lets them legally slap a big 10 on it, in the hopes the consumer will get a warm and fuzzy feeling on it and not notice the provisos until it’s too late.

It is, but it’s also the truth. I have direct experience with this, having worked in customer-facing roles in this very industry. Most consumers who say they would pay more for a higher quality/heavy duty/simpler/oldschool/whatever appliance actually won’t when it comes time to finally belly up to that checkout counter.

I actually had the opportunity to do the math on this not long ago, and the answers were quite illuminating. I outlined that in a recent comment here, and the takeaway is that adjusted for inflation modern appliances are actually around one third — 33% — of the cost that they were back in the “good old days,” or in the case I worked up 1985. So no wonder we feel they’re built so cheaply. It’s because they actually are.

The problem is, getting a current consumer to pay $1300 or $1400 USD on a washing machine or a dishwasher is a really tough sell.

That, and the current fascination is removing options and controls from the machine and putting them only in the app. Presumably this is to entice you to use the app rather than simply ignoring it, as most people would otherwise do. The issue is that on the inevitable day they turn the servers off, you lose access to those features. Plus, how do you like not e.g. having a delay start feature at all unless your dishwasher is connected to the internet?

It doesn’t take much of a leap to predict that step 2 will be locking features behind a subscription paywall. We all know damn well that’s coming soon.

Everybody thinks they have a plan to fight a squirrel until it’s time to fight a squirrel.

They are incredibly bitey. Remember that they chew through walnut shells with ease. Lots of people have underestimated a squirrel and gotten bit right down to the bone for their trouble. I’m not saying anybody couldn’t stomp a squirrel flat, but you’re going to lose some blood in the process.

Well, grab any file manager app (I use Root Explorer, or the free version thereof) and you could check the count of files in your photos folder (probably DCIM\Camera) and see if that number jives with the number of photos Google reckons you have in your gallery.

Root Explorer can only view local files and can’t hook up to Google’s cloud services at all. So by definition anything it’s showing is physically located somewhere on your phone.

This is the only correct answer in this entire thread.

A bug which was later fixed by Raymond Chen.

The pinball game itself was licensed from Cinematronics/Maxis Full Tilt! Pinball, which had two additional tables as well as a sequel, both of which I still have on CD somewhere because I am a gigantic nerd.

Just like how Hydrox are just knockoff Oreos!

I mean, that’s a valid assessment of the yard as well if you’re looking at it from a comedy perspective.

I had a client who wound up with one of those not realizing what it was, which caused him no end of problems until I ultimately figured it out confiscated it from him. He got a regular US inch one in exchange. I had to look it up at the time, too, because the notion of there being a Chinese knockoff inch that’s subtly inaccurate is one of those things that just seems so ridiculous on its face that it simply can’t be true, right? Except it totally is.