Yes, and you’ve got to remember to download it as soon as you buy it. I’ve been stung a couple of times by companies going out of business or inventing rationales for removing “old” things.

I presume that the code was tested for various cases where there was at least one previous password on record, but everyone forgot about new users with no previous passwords. However I’m having trouble imagining what the code could actually be doing.

I can only imagine a dynamically typed language, and a “checkedPasswords” variable being declared but uninitialized, then a loop incrementing that variable for each non-similar password pulled from the records, and finally a check to see if checkedPasswords equals the number of stored previous passwords.

The execution environment could type and initialize the variable by default after the first increment, but in the case of the user having no previous passwords on record that wouldn’t happen, and the final equivalency check would be comparing an integer to some internal “NaN” state, thus failing.

I fixed it, but that is weird. I originally thought it had a double “r”, but I looked it up to check and I’d swear that the results spelled it with only one. Now I check again and it’s a double “r”.

Must be arrabbiata, 'cause it’s got quite a burn.

The original StarCraft and Brood War expansion didn’t require Internet for installation. And while the original boxed copies (I got the “Battle Chest” re-release which is the same) required the CD to be in the drive, the last one or two official update patches let you copy the .mpq (?) data files from the CDs into the installation directory so you can play without them.

Reading current discussion, it seems more like “You say that it’s impossible to dirty your house, yet nothing’s stopping anyone from dumping out this bucket of mud on your floor, curious!”

Sorry for not being clear; when I said “keep track automatically” I meant dynamic typing. Of course you’re right that “keeping track of your variables” could also be interpreted to refer to static typing.

I started programming in a time when the idea that the computer could keep track of your variable types for you automatically was a fever dream, so it’s wild for me to see some programmers now throwing shade at particular langages for “not implementing proper variable typing functionality”.

It feels like someone saying that low-fat milk producers are too cheap or lazy to put enough fat in their milk.

Fashion really does go in cycles.

It’s the first law that I’m aware of that legally requires an automated system that you own and operate to snitch on you at any time, to anyone who asks, without asking your permission.

For the moment, it only has to report a piece of data that you are free to lie about. For the moment.

You reminded me of a story I recently read, where the author highlighted just how much awesome programming someone had done by describing how their hands were cramping up.

It’s like estimating how well an artist paints by looking at how much paint is on their clothes, or judging how good a cook is by how many cuts and burns they have. The actions that cause those things are incidental to the process, not central, and an excessive amount points to incompetence, not hard and skillful work.

Frieren (Sousou no Furiren, "Frieren and the Funeral). It’s about what happens after the quest is finished. The elven mage Frieren was part of a band of adventurers that defeated the big bad many years ago. Before the party splits up and she goes off to travel the world studying magic, the group all agree to meet again in the future, after many years.

This is where the main story starts. Due to her elven heritage, Frieren has hardly aged at all. When she comes back, she’s just in time to see the human leader of the old party one last time before he dies, and she attends his funeral. She goes searching for the other old party members, and along the way she accidentally picks up some new friends and becomes the leader of a new party, having various adventures and run-ins with new bad guys.

Anyone who is already familiar with HSR, imagine seeing this video and having it be the first time you’ve even heard of Homestar Runner.

You’d probably feel like some kind of tapeleg.

I appreciate the touch of making this with generative AI. Unless someone went to the effort of deliberately writing “VIbc coam” on the spine.

People can hate on Microsoft all they want, but I use LibreOffice on a regular basis and it does the same thing, for exactly the same reason.

Cheers to the person who linked to the “font - hide” solution. I didn’t know that one and the equivalent works LO as well.

The problem I find with many games made for Win95/98/XP is that the game uses one or more third-party libraries that were only “valid” for a year or two. After that, updates to the OS closed loopholes that the poorly-written old versions of the libraries relied on, but the poorly-written newer versions of the libraries released to deal with those issues then break compatibility with the previously-released game, which was never updated or patched.

My first suspect is an incorrectly-terminated statement which looks like it should end on line 41. The compiler/interpreter probably read the newline and ticked over before uncovering the error, and didn’t recover properly due to some edge case.

I am stuck using an otherwise old but theoretically bearable PC at work running Windows 11 from a spinning HDD. But I’ll tell you, when I dug through the registry to turn off all the background indexing nonsense, it became damn near usable.

Seriously, the best option is whatever matches the brightness of your screen to its surroundings. I read about this decades ago and it eliminated screen fatigue for me.

If switching to dark mode works for you, great. When I worked on a PC in a well-lit office all day, I would open a program with a white background, hold up a blank white piece of paper next to the screen, and adjust the screen brightness until it looked about the same as the paper. I did this once or twice a week because I was near a set of picture windows and I was affected by weather and the seasons, but in a room with more artificial light it would be “set and forget”.

It seemed very dim at first, and several of my coworkers commented on it. It took a few days of resisting the urge to turn the brightness back up, but I got used to it and never went back.

My PC at home is currently set up in a partially shaded corner of a well-lit room, so I put a dim little light bar behind the screen to make the wall match the brightness of the screen and the rest of my desk/room.

A couple of other commenters have given excellent answers already.

But on the topic in general I think that the more you learn about the history of computing hardware and programming, the more you realise that each successive layer added between the relays/tubes/transistors and the programmer was mostly just to reduce boilerplate coding overhead. The microcode in integrated CPUs took care of routing your inputs and outputs to where they need to be, and triggering the various arithmetic operations as desired. Assemblers calculated addresses and relative jumps for you so you could use human-readable labels and worry less that a random edit to your code would break something because it was moved.

More complex low-level languages took care of the little dances that needed to be performed in order to do more involved operations with the limited number of CPU registers available, such as advanced conditional branching and maintaining the illusion of variables. Higher-level languages freed the programmer from having to keep such careful tabs on their own memory usage, and helped to improve maintainability by managing abstract data and code structures.

But ignoring the massive improvements in storage capacity and execution speed, today’s programming environments don’t really do anything that couldn’t have been implemented with those ancient systems, given enough effort and patience. It’s all still just moving numbers around and basic arithmetic and logic. But a whole lot of it, really, really fast.

The power of modern programming environments lies in how they allow us to properly implement and maintain a staggering amount of complex minutiae with relative ease. Such ease, in fact, that sometimes we even forget that the minutiae are there at all.

“rd” and “rmdir” only work on empty directories in MS-DOS (and I assume, by extension, in Windows shell). “deltree” is for nuking a complete tree including files, as the name suggests.