Apparently it’s not that the software is broken, it’s that the software being installed breaks Windows Update. There are reports from people that uninstalling StartAllBack, updating the OS, then reinstalling it back (renaming the install executable first) works fine.

As much as being affected by this is frustrating to me (though this is all happening still on the dev channel, so for me it’ll be a problem for the future), I understand Microsoft’s rationale here. They can’t be expected to support every third-party tool that can break the OS, and it’s known that both ExplorerPatcher and StartAllBack relies on many hacks using undocumented APIs to work.

In the last few decades that I’ve been using Windows, I never felt compelled to use shell replacements or customizations - the default experience always worked fine for me with a few tweaks. So, if anything I’m more frustrated at Microsoft that I’m forced to use StartAllBack, because MS went and removed options from the shell that existed forever and always took for granted, and then some.

Thank you for digging this out. Turns out it’s even worse than what I gleaned from my surface-level take.

This sounds like dev sour grapes but what the company was asking them to do seems better from the customer pov and for cyber security I’m general.

As a developer myself (though not on the level of these guys): sorry, but just, no.

The key point is this:

[…] we did not issue CVEs for experimental features and instead would patch the relevant code and release it as part of a standard release.

Emphasis mine. In software, features marked as “experimental” usually are not meant to be used in a production environment, and if they are, it’s in a “do it at your own risk” understanding. Software features in an experimental state are expected to be less tested and have bugs - it’s essentially a “beta” feature. It has a security bug? Though - you weren’t supposed to be using it in a security-sensitive environment in the first place, it sounds perfectly reasonable to me that it should be addressed in a normal release as opposed to an out-of-band one.

We can argue if forking the project is or isn’t extreme, but the devs absolutely have good reason to be pissed. This is typical management making decisions without understanding technical nuances and - from what is being told by the devs - not talking it through before doing it.

Doesn’t PS2 use a PowerPC architecture?

No, it uses a custom architecture around a custom CPU, the “Emotion Engine”, a MIPS-based CPU. You must be thinking of the Wii or XBox360 that came after it.

Look, I despise Google as much as anyone these days, and I’m glad they’re taking a beating this time around, but at the same time, it’s also kind of bullshit. And it’s not even because you can sideload apps, or have alternate appstores on Android, but because we have yet to see the same standards being applied to Apple.

Ah yes, the Bobby Tables approach.

Or… you know, maybe because of that little gadget that Valve has been selling like hotcakes?

I think there’s more to the coin ship, that unfortunately isn’t covered in the article. I know for a fact that the hammer bro on the World 1 map turns into a coin ship if you finish 1-1 with 55 coins AND end the level with time remaining being an odd number.

I don’t think this qualifies. That moment you’re referring to is more a “breaking the 4th wall” situation for a sort of comic effect, which is a staple on most of the entries on the series, not an actual reversal of a failure state. Something similar happens on MGS1 on the fight with Psycho Mantis, for example.

Same here. In fact, I bought my Legion (which btw I feel like it was a good choice on OPs part because I believe Lenovo’s laptops tend to have better cooling engineering in general, for whatever laptop category, compared to other brands) to serve first as a work laptop, and then some gaming on the side, which I’m not too picky about because I don’t really play on PC that often anyway. My reasoning for that is that the business laptops I had been looking before going with the Legion were frankly overpriced crap with limited expandability, shoddy components and build, and full of built-in bloatware pre-installed. I find that gaming laptops tend to have higher quality components and slightly better expandability, so it was a win all around.

Because this looks and feels pretty much identical to the arcade.

Probably because it shares a lot of the hardware of the original arcade, so the porting probably was straightforward.

Chromium-based browsers still trounces Firefox on the Jetstream benchmark. I mean, I realize the Speedometer benchmark is supposed to test real-world scenarios, while Jetstream is more synthetic, but whatever work mozilla did to improve performance I’d expect to scale in other benchmarks too, so I’d expect Firefox to at least be bit closer to Chromium, even if losing a little.

Fair enough! FWIW, I also think your stance on the matter is fairly level-headed and well thought out, even if I’m more or less on the other side of the fence.

While I personally do not think that all Chromium browsers (especially since there are projects like ungoogled-chromium) transmit your personal data, I can’t verify this myself because the Chromium codebase is far too much of an undertaking for myself to review.

Don’t you think that, with so many contributors and projects having eyes on it (arguably more so than on gecko), if there was foul play wouldn’t anyone have sounded the alarm?

The closest thing to an explanation I could find online just said “legal issues”, but didn’t go into details.

I don’t think that makes sense, or at least it doesn’t properly qualify the problem. BIOS is a set of baked-in software routines that mediate certain operations between software and hardware. In theory it could be reverse-enginereed and thus emulated just like the rest of the hardware is. In fact, many of the more simple systems (like 8 or 16-bit consoles) have their BIOS emulated. But for more advanced or poorer documented systems, there are, in my view, two problems with that:

• If your reversed engineered version of the BIOS has bugs (and during early stages of development, it would have a lot), the ways in which these bugs could present themselves makes the situation ambiguous, because it may be hard to know, from the symptoms, whether the bug is on the BIOS or on the hardware emulation. So developers just use the official BIOS because then if you see bugs, you know for sure the problem is on the hardware emulation. And also, reverse engineering the BIOS would require a lot of effort that developers would probably rate as low priority given they could use a perfectly functional BIOS and avoid a whole lot of other technical problems as per above. I mean, for many systems, hardware emulation is a problem already complex enough;
• Depending on the system, the BIOS code could be so simple that a reverse engineered version of it could conceivably be so close to the actual official code that it could, yes, trigger a copyright suit from the creator.

Huh, interesting. I guess now I know where BeOS / Haiku got its inspiration for how their windows look.

Journey, Spiritfarer, Shadow of the Colossus, The Last of Us.

Wikipedia and other places says 1984 - I think 1983 is when development started. I wasn’t quite sure how much RAM the BBC Micro had, so I played safe and went with the ZX Spectrum’s configuration, which I had, although thinking about it now, the way the Speccy mapped memory meant that it actually had about 32Kb useable RAM as well. I don’t know how the BBCM mapped memory, so I’m not sure if a similar situation applied (less actual available memory).

To properly qualify how groundbreaking Elite was for the time, for those who don’t know it: it was a space sim that simulated 8 galaxies with 256 star systems each, each system with a star, a planet, and a space station. All of that was wireframe-3D rendered, had a lot of complexities like different ship and enemy types, different playloops like trading, mining and combat, and it was one of the few games of that time that pioneered open-world gameplay.

This was initially released on the mid-80’s for 8bit computers of the time, which had anything between 48Kb to 128Kb of RAM, and thus, the game binaries was also that small - they accomplished that by also being one of the few games of the time that pioneered procedurally generated content.

Fortnite? ducks