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.

None of the above is true, or at least isn’t the full answer for why today a “2x4” is missing an entire half an inch all the way around. The shrinkage due to drying is around 5% (and the real math there is more complicated, as wood shrinks different amounts in different directions relative to the grain), which would only account for 1/10" of difference in the thickness of a 2x4. With some species of pine it’s as low as 2%.

No, the lumber industry has consistently shaved boards in order to fit more into rail cars for transport and make more money and spend less per plank on transportation costs. Various lumber consortiums determined via internal testing that the smaller board sizes are still “sufficient” for their intended purpose vis-a-vis structural integrity of stick framed residential buildings.

You can also just use Edge Blocker:

https://www.sordum.org/9312/edge-blocker-v2-0/

…And if you do any of those things that would launch Edge in your face (like ye gods forbid, press F1 in a File Explorer window) it simply won’t work. Depending on the object in question either nothing happens at all, or you get a sad easily dismissable dialog box complaining that Windows couldn’t open Edge. This is also immensely helpful for anyone who has users in their life who kick and scream and tantrum whenever you change their browser for some reason and keep totally “accidentally” pivoting back to Edge in your absence.

You can also block the Edge webview component if e.g. you would like Steam not to work.

…And have them able to run on zero consumer devices if the bootloaders are locked, and the manufacturers refuse to sign their ROMs for them. (Hint: they will refuse to sign their ROMs for them.)

Re: Lemmings.

How about Magpies?

For a web store you probably only need Javascript for payment processing. Insofar as I’ve seen pretty much all of the widgets provided by the card processors outright require Javascript (and most of them are also exceedingly janky, regardless of what they look like on the outside to the user).

You definitely don’t need Javascript just for a shopping cart, though. That can all be done server side.

I said it in the last thread and I’ll say it again here: I do not give a single flying fuck about any political motivation behind the changing nor changing back of the Cracker Barrel logo, either real or simply perceived, but their new logo was objectively terrible. It was so bland and unmemorable that whoever designed it should have their Macbook confiscated and be catapulted into the ocean. That is, the both of them. But preferably one each into different oceans. I don’t know how much that braindead rebrand cost them in consultancy fees but I hope they can ask for a refund.

Fortunately Del Taco have kept themselves off of my naughty list thanks to their highly recognizable sawblade sun logo, which they even managed to retain in their most recent rebranding. Ditto with Taco Time and their cactus.

It is. Dial-up nerds have been calling Microsoft exactly that online for literal decades at this point. He’s not even original.

Hardees/Carl’s Jr. (The very same “brought to you by…” from Idiocracy!)

While we’re at it, here’s the key for my second round of blacked out logos which ought to be far enough down the comment chain to not instantly spoil it for anyone puzzling over them:

Hands up everyone who thought the one on the bottom left was Wendy’s? Yeah, good try.

Tell that to all the brands who have both a logo and a mascot, especially those whose mascot does not appear as part of the logo or only selectively appears alongside it. Geico, Progressive, Pillsbury, Planters, M&Ms, Ronald before he was discontinued, etc. And somehow Adidas has like four logos (all with recognizable silhouettes and with good use of negative space!) and they haven’t tanked yet.

I’d doubt that’s it. Practically everything is digitally printed these days, so the complexity really doesn’t matter. In some specific processes the number of colors used may be a factor, but the original design was already only two colors to begin with (or three if you count the transparent bits). The shape would matter if they were trying to make illuminated signage with the same outline as the logo which Cracker Barrel already don’t do. Their pole signs at present are just rectangular with rounded corners to begin with. I’ll grant there may be a minor complexity advantage to having machine embroidery done of it, but the last time I was in one of their restaurants their employees all had logo and name tag pins and their uniform shirts were sans logos, so that’s a moot point anyhow.

I’ll certainly concede that some C-suite idiot may think this is going to save them on uniform and printing costs but in reality it actually won’t. If that’s why they really did it they’re even dumber than we’re giving them credit for. (And another commenter below pointed out that rebrands cost money to pull off. Not just whatever seven figure consultancy fee you just paid to some twerp with a Macbook to render your logo unreadable, but also all the materials and signage you then have to get made, printed, have somebody install.)

Herewith I will prattle on about the topic because Design Is My Passion (well, okay, at least part of my job) and this whole trend obviously honks me off and I’m starting to feel like the only sane man left standing.

The rationale for dumbshit logo oversimplification I usually see bandied about is “increasing brand recognition,” with the notion that a simpler logo is more readily and quickly recognizable. This has a kernel of truth to it, however only those with the pointiest of spectacles with the beadiest of chains know the secret. And that is mostly what drives this is the logo’s silhouette, not the words inside it. (And to a lesser extent, its colors. But tell that to all the fast food chains who insist on using red and yellow for their branding, so that’s already on the way out.) This is especially so if the logo will be seen only briefly or at a distance, for purest sake of example and for no particular reason at all, let’s say at the top of a pole next to an interstate highway 200 yards away while hurtling past at 75+ MPH.

People don’t read. Even so, a large portion of them probably don’t have great eyesight. If your logo is going to be a wordmark, it had better have its own very distinct silhouette, and preferably it ought to be short. The frillier and less sans-serify you make it the less likely anyone is to be to comprehend it, let alone bother to process it. If your design vision absolutely cannot accommodate that for whatever reason, its surrounding geometry had better have a recognizable silhouette. And for fuck’s sake, make sure it’s high contrast against whatever’s inside it.

I’ll throw out some examples. Here are four brands who, apart from any other shortcomings and even after going through various rounds of logo simplification, still get it:

I’ve brutally reduced these to only their silhouettes and in the case of any that also included wordmarks and haven’t already removed them from their official logo, I’ve also stripped them of these.

I’ll bet you can name three out of four of those without even thinking about it, and third from the left will only slow down some people for a second or two.

(This is also why so many traffic signs are shaped such as they are, and the important ones don’t share shapes, and also why it feels so unnervingly wrong in a Mandela effect kind of way when you visit a country whose highway authority hasn’t quite figured that out.)

Meanwhile, here’s a lineup of a few who fail the test:

Yes, I deliberately cherry-picked these to form a lineup of options that all suck. But in my defense, there are ever so many to choose from. Go on, whose are those? No cheating and using Google image search to try to match up the minutiae of the aspect ratios. You have to do this right off the top of your head. Remember, these are flying by on an interstate sign.

It’s the same deal with app icons, which these days all seem to be devolving into “some circular swirly thing, possibly multicolored, that doesn’t tell you anything about what our app does.” It’s even worse now that everyone’s launchers seem to want to automatically badger any icons that still do manage to have a recognizable silhouette into solid colored circular backgrounds.

I oppose this logo change not for a political reason or anything of that ilk, but only because it’s yet another senseless and uninspired simplification of a brand that eliminates the distinctiveness of its silhouette and turns it into another bland and uninspired sponge cake with no flavor. Say what you like about Cracker Barrel and their food (and I’m sure many will), but at least when you saw one of their signs on a pole from the interstate you knew damn well what it was.

Compare it now to the Denny’s logo:

Bojangles:

Or Golden Corral:

Etc.

Wow, some text in a yellow ovoid diamondy blob. How original. No iconography whatsoever. It’s barely even a wordmark. I wonder how much some asshole got paid to come up with this and how I can get in on that game.

Yes, it still exists as the “except as punishment for a crime” loophole in the 13th amendment. And when fascists are in power, they love to make any arbitrary thing a crime so they have a justification to imprison anybody.

Once they run out of farm workers due to having deported them all, expect Trump and his cronies to be super keen to staff those same farms using slave labor – for profit, of course – via just rounding up whoever else they don’t like on phony charges.

Conservative idiots like Trump want to white (heh) wash slavery because they want to bring slavery back. Not just for black people, but of course especially for black people first, but also for all the other poors they think they can exploit to make themselves richer. Somehow they think everyone should be on board with this, and alas probably some subset of idiots will be even after they’re already wearing the manacles themselves.

Taken as a whole from a historical standpoint this is certainly so, current events notwithstanding. I predict a lot of salty people reading your comment are going to studiously ignore the fact that Europe as it stands now has been shaped pretty much purely by thousands of years worth of wars, which required the invention of all kinds of weapons and warfare tactics. And that’s before the European powers took all that on the road in the colonial era.

Account sharing. It’s very widespread with these types of gig work apps.

Somebody who is able to get cleared sells or rents access to their account, presumably to people who wouldn’t be able to pass even the bare minimum vetting these companies perform on their contractors/employees. I.e. they’ll share their account with someone who doesn’t have a driver’s license or insurance, or is not able to work legally in the country for whatever reason. There may or may not be some exploitation factor involved as well. It’s the most dinkum, low-rent form of organize crime you can imagine. The account owner takes a cut of the proceeds and the net result is you wind up as some complete rando as your delivery driver.