I’d say their search results have been in decline for some time now, though quality has taken a particularly big hit the past year or so. I’d switch to someone else, but I haven’t found a decent alternative yet. As poor as DDG’s results are, they are still a few rungs above the rubbish Google spits out.

I suppose the space battles could sort of some sense given the technology in the Star Wars universe.

Your spaceships have two engines/drives. You have the hyperspace engines which are fast but you can’t engage in fight in hyperspace (well…mostly), then you have the regular ion engines for use out of hyperspace which are slow as shit. Capital ships can barely get out of their own way, and even the Millennial Falcon isn’t terribly quick when not in hyperspace. Now combined with weapons like blasters which have the problem that blaster bolts are also slow as shit. As in considerably slower than bullet fired from a conventional firearm. So if you fire them from a distance from a target, they can see the blaster bolt coming and move out of the way (or jump into hyperspace) long before it gets there. Crappy, slow engines combined with crappy, slow space weapons means capital ship battles might involve the ships having to get close to each other and just slugging it out. That can also sort of explain the small fighters since they can get in really close and hit the ships at basically point-blank range. Though the lack of hit-and-run tactics involving jumping in and out of hyperspace is a bit curious.

The rareness of the hyperspace-suicide maneuver might be rare as the rebels don’t have a lot of ships, and if they start plowing them into Empire ships, they’ll quickly run of ships and no matter how many Empire ships they take out in a battle, the Empire will always have another Star Destroyer. Though the big problem with introducing the possibility of this sort of maneuver in the later movies is the rebels would have absolutely plowed a ship into the Death Star with completely devastating results in the first movie. And anyone building a Death Star would have been well aware of an attack like that and would have known it would be almost impossible to defend against when you’re building a moon-sized target for it.

That’s more or less my take too. The world of the Star Wars universe feels huge and expansive, but in reality by the end of the original trilogy they had basically told all the interesting stories that were to be had about it. And even then, they were starting to run out of material for Return of the Jedi. They tried with the prequels, but as you say it mostly fell flat and ended up boring. The sequels started off more or less rehashing the original trilogy so they were at least entertaining, but that wasn’t enough for three movies and it turned into an absolute mess by the end.

Search your feelings, you know it to be true.

Internet Explorer was originally based upon the Mosaic browser. Like a lot of Microsoft’s tech, it’s something they acquired.

Up to IE4, it was a standalone browser. It’s IE4 where Microsoft integrated it into the OS and made do double duty as Windows Explorer, which is what you’re thinking of.

Juno is still around and still offers dialup internet plans. Earthlink was still offering dialup until last year.

As someone who also likes VFDs, I’ve fully expected that they’d be extinct in new products by now thanks to cheap LCDs and OLED. But I find it awesome that they’re still hanging in there.

That was revised in slightly newer cars, where the vacuum lines from the engine were required to hold the headlights closed. So when the mechanism inevitably failed, you had permanently deployed headlights until/if it was repaired.

Along the same lines,

slackware.com today:

http://www.slackware.com/

slackware.com in 2001:

http://web.archive.org/web/20010404232132/http://www.slackware.com/

You’re not getting anymore security patches, but as long as you keep your browser up to date and generally be careful about what you download and run (as you should already be doing) you’ll likely be just fine.

I’d estimate sometime around 2029 or so the major browsers as well as security software will start dropping support for Windows 10 and at that point you may need to start thinking about moving to something else if you haven’t already done so.

Essentially, no. If you don’t care about the cost, maybe with a MSDN subscription.

The main thing is to find a good external speaker though that doesn’t auto-sleep in the middle of one’s show…

That’s a thing now? It’s been a while since I’ve shopped for speakers, but other than those Google/Alexa jobs they seemed to be about as dumb as rocks. Which is exactly they way I want them.

The video player in Winamp is also completely non-functional in Wine the last time I tried it, as it relies on DirectShow in Windows which has very iffy Wine support. That may also be why it’s marked as silver.

It’s too bad as I really liked using Winamp as a video player in Windows, despite it’s quirks.

DDG has also really gone downhill for me. It’s still noticeably better than Google, but DDG nows does a lot of the same shit that originally made me give up on Google years ago. I’m assuming a big part of this is because DDG heavily sources their results from Bing, and while Bing does manage to be better than Google, it’s not much better.

I really need to put some effort into trying out a few more search engines and seeing if they are any better. Last time I looked, many of them were also pulling results from Bing so they all had similar issues.

Other than hoarding up the houses, everything is pretty general Monopoly strategy I figured out a long time ago. Basically try to get a monopoly ASAP and then develop it ASAP. I’ve found that strategy to be good, but it depends a lot on luck. Sometimes despite everything you try, the only monopoly you can get are those horrid green properties and you’re pretty much doomed.

What they are doing is comparing your answer and seeing if it is consistent with how it has been answered previously. They realize that not everyone is going to give the exact same answer, so as long as you answer it in a way that enough other people have answered it, it should let you in.

I’ll usually go with the minimum number of clicks that I think will get me through, since I’m lazy and it’ll also at times slow down how fast you can click which is annoying.

I’ll also answer them wrong if I think it’s a mistake that enough other people will make. “Yes… that RV over there is a bus…”

My favorite are some of the work systems that I need to access, but only infrequently, yet still have ridiculous password expiration rules. Nearly every time I log in, before I can access the system I have to change my password because of course it’s expired again. So I change the password, write it down because I’ll never remember it months from now when I need to use that password exactly once to login and change my password yet again.

I’ve often wondered if Atlassian even uses the products they sell. There’s just so many stupid bugs that I would assume no one at Atlassian would put up with if they had to eat their own dog food. Instead, those bugs don’t seem to get fixed and seem to linger in their products forever.

Maybe the old, discontinued on-premise version. The cloud version of JIRA is a huge step back.

With that said, Teams is not a good product either.

That’s also what my upper level math courses were like in college. In high school and the first couple of years of college I got good use out of my graphing calculator, but after that I reached the point where all of its advanced features were no longer useful. I just ended up leaving it at home and brought my old TI-30 Solar for class for the occasional time I had to crunch some actual numbers.