I remember having a few of these for WordPerfect, MS Word for DOS and Lotus 1-2-3.

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/03/03/the-forbidden-fruit#

Right?!? There was this whole “real men don’t eat quiche” thing that I remember from the 90s. What is unmanly about putting an omelette in a pie crust? It makes it easier to eat on the go and keeps better in the fridge.

Pull through parking. You know, where there are two spaces so you drive through one into the next so you can pull out of the one you park in without having to back up? I got told that was for “girls and gays”.

I do love me some gridfinity! This looks awesome.

I dislike 5th edition for a lot of reasons, but this is extremely oversimplified binary thinking.

My girlfriend got that exact one.

The two types of semiconductors. N-types have a slight excess of electrons, allowing them to move freely and P-types have a slight lack of electrons, effectively making freely moving electron “holes”. By sandwiching them next to each other, you can create diodes and bi-polar junction transistors.

And as we all know, bi-trans is an important part of queerdom.

Source: has a degree in electrical engineering. And is bi.
Edit: not cool enough to be trans though.

A compiler. I mean, yeah, I guess I could go back to writing asm, but I really don’t want to.

I use the “short meetings” option in gcal, which shortens meetings by 5-10 minutes to give me a passing period between meetings. Twice this week people have had the audacity to try and schedule a meeting in that break. 😬

And… they’re basically all correct. Linux does run on all sort of machines, even really ancient ones. It has a solid command line environment, or rather lots of them. And it’s astounding powerful. Windows does still blue screen, is currently the best place for gaming, and wow is MS fucking you with Win11. Macs can have a cool setup, are really simplified for most users and expensive.

Fun fact: Leaded solder is still required in aircraft because it doesn’t grow whiskers like this, while pure tin solder does.

I just tried it and it actually works! 🤣

I prefer Oregon Trail generation.

MS DOS 2.11.

Oh, nothing about it sounds unrealistic, just kinda pointless. There absolutely are rugged laptops and gaming laptops and probably even some combination of the two out there somewhere. But they both tend to be quite expensive and nothing you mentioned seemed to indicate the need for portability. So, why a laptop and not a desktop? You’ll get a lot more bang for your buck and can have the exact keyboard, cooling system and whatever else you want, plus a much more repairable system.

With those requirements why bother with a laptop? Just build yourself a desktop and setup up ssh and/or Remote Desktop if you really need access on the go.

Oh look, it’s me.

Oh you’re in for a treat! The Baroque Cycle takes place much earlier, but has family ties to Cryptonomicon.

There was an interesting physics paper recently that suggested that time travel was possible, but you wouldn’t be able to travel to before when the machine was built. Of course, it also would require an impossibly huge amount on energy, but that’s a problem for the engineers.