201–210 of 302 posts
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I almost shit myself the first time I saw X Screensaver.. It has to take the prize for worst UX ever.
do you mean the bsod screensaver sometimes people also complain about xscreensaver's lock screen because it doesn't use a widget library, but the alternative lock screens can often be crashed through bugs in the widget libraries they use
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do you mean the bsod screensaver sometimes people also complain about xscreensaver's lock screen because it doesn't use a widget library, but the alternative lock screens can often be crashed through bugs in the widget libraries they use
The one with the flaming screen and countdown timer. I had just installed the distro and though I had some malware installed.
the flaming screen is just the xscreensaver logo (it's supposed to save your screen from burnin, originally)
i hadn't ever heard of anyone thinking it was malware, that's pretty funny
jwz is a more brilliant troll than i gave him credit for
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There's the talk command on Unix. We used to do a 'who' to find out who're on the system and 'talk' to them.
I remember that one of the financial banking software we were using had an internal chat that was basically using "write"(?) underneath to send messages to another users terminal (it was running on Sun Solaris I think).
Talk wasn't available yet (pretty sure we were on 4.1 BSD), so we'd use write(1) to communicate to each other (e.g., to figure out where someone was sitting in the lab). To block someone from writing to you (often desired, because write(1) would just spew over whatever you were currently looking at), you'd use the "mesg" command, which our University set as default to 'y'. I figured out that running 'mesg y' effectively just gave open write permission to your tty.
With that knowledge in hand, I started a practical joke where I'd remap someone's keys by redirecting an stty command to their tty, e.g.:
% stty erase e > /dev/tty03
One of the most privileged processes on the system and no unit or functional tests need to be updated with this change. Sigh.
This always surprises me. How come there are seemingly zero tests for what’s essentially critical infrastructure? How do you make sure things keep working? How do you prevent regressions as team members change and tribal knowledge and intuition is lost? How do you ensure all future humans working on the project can make meaningful changes with confidence?
That's how 99% of these old timey tools work (coreutils, SSH, SSL, etc). They're getting better but you can definitely feel that they're managed by old hackers that predate CI/CD.
Social media communities really ought to observe a "leave no trace" rule with respect to GitHub and other such spaces. This commit from February 2022 is now as of today littered with a bunch of joke comments from being linked from here and previously somewhere else earlier (based on timestamps).
> Social media communities really ought to observe a [...] rule Oh honey....
I just saw an IG post from a collab between a prominently irreverent burger popup in my town, and one of the most progressive wine bars in the city. It had a security guard kicking out a rowdy woman from a bar.
The comments BLEW UP with people who had never had the burgers or been to the bar calling out the "cop culture" and the celebration of authoritarianism in the photo.
It's a joke at this point, how angry people get at things that have the barest tinge of something to be mad about.
Reminds me of using Win9x when programs crashed (as often happened then), prompting Windows to present those "This program has performed an illegal operation" dialogs. As a kid the only bit of that message that made any sense was "illegal operation" which made me wonder if I'd broken some law somehow.
> FATAL ERROR
and being like...uh...do I call the police?
Can't be done. That program is in the fossil record; change the error message and you're going to break a thousand unknown workflows that are relying on detecting that string (because string detection is the only solution they have to get nuanced information on the nature of the error). ETA: Oh wait it was actually committed? Color me surprised.
Yeah I relied on that over heating to occur when pressing Ctrl for too long :D (Hopefully someone understands the reference)
https://git.dawidpotocki.com/dawid/xkcd1172/about/
GH mirror: https://github.com/dawidpotocki/xkcd1172
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There's the talk command on Unix. We used to do a 'who' to find out who're on the system and 'talk' to them.
That was such a mind blowing experience coming from a DOS background. It would split your terminal horizontally and you could see each other type in real time. Before the days of SMS, and even before the days of instant messengers like ICQ and AIM, I taught the split-screen `talk` command to my girlfriend so we could chat while I was working. We've been married for 20 years now.
Reminds me of using Win9x when programs crashed (as often happened then), prompting Windows to present those "This program has performed an illegal operation" dialogs. As a kid the only bit of that message that made any sense was "illegal operation" which made me wonder if I'd broken some law somehow.
I remember seeing > FATAL ERROR and being like...uh...do I call the police?