Ditto. Primarily mine is used to “sweep” the shop and dry off motorcycles after washing.

This is in contrast with how pi is otherwise consistently expressed on the Disc, which is “three and a bit.”

Notably, Bloody Stupid Johnson is so skilled/inept that he actually does make pi equal to three within the machine… somehow… which breaks reality in a small amount of space inside it.

Apparently King David had this skill as well, since this is mentioned twice in the old testament:

1 Kings 7:23: And he made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one brim to the other: it was round all about, and his height was five cubits: and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about.

Everyone knows at least 3.14

And biblical authors.

There was also the Hasselblad camera back for the Moto Z series.

I approve of this message.

I have, but in general I find Inkscape to be superior overall. The last time I tried the LibreOffice component it did not handle multiple pages very well.

Yes, and PHP can even implicitly (or explicitly!) cast variables between different types. Dot (.) is for strings and + is for math. It’s one of the few things about PHP that makes sense.

Your workflow in the main Corel suite apps is completely customizable. It has a default layout and shortcut configuration as well as a preset that it comes with which allegedly apes Illustrator’s, but you can if you prefer redefine almost everything.

You can choose what tools go in your toolbars, which options show in your drop down menus, where those toolbars are located, and you can even reconfigure the keyboard shortcuts for literally every command, including adding shortcuts to commands which don’t have one by default. I think the only limitation is that they can’t conflict with inbuilt OS hotkeys, e.g. you can’t bind anything to Alt + F4.

You can also perform macros and script the main suite apps using VBA which is only mildly opaque, but opens up the possibility of a world of batch processing tricks if you feel like going down that rabbit hole. I prefer to use Imagemagick for that sort of thing, personally.

This could still be a UMRP situation, then. Most of our UMRP or at least MAP agreements have a stipulation where we’re allowed to round the price up or down some small amount, typically up to 49 cents, in order to make the final figure a round dollar amount or make the pennies the same as the other items in our catalog (XXX.99, XXX.97, XXX.49, etc.) ostensibly for aesthetic purposes. This would also cover your system making all clearance items end in 96 cents or whatever the hell.

This is surely a case of corporate stupidity, but whether or not it’s Apple’s stupidity or Best Buy’s stupidity I couldn’t tell you. Possibly both!

Typically these UMRP agreements are void once a product becomes discontinued. At that point it can be put on genuine clearance. I have to deal with that with several vendors at my business; none of them give a rat’s ass about the price once they’re no longer listing a product themselves.

It’s more likely a combination of the two in this case; some C-suite asshole somewhere is hyperventilating about how much they’ve “invested” in stock in this product and sees clearancing it as a “loss” rather than what it is, which is unloading dead stock that they’ve already paid for at a value that is still at least greater than nothing and making room for inventory they’ll hopefully have better luck with next time. I imagine subtracting the 4 cents from the price is automatic, and is the tell their system adds to the price of any clearance item. Flagging it at clearance probably also marks it nonreturnable.

I presume for similar reasons, one of my local Walmarts still had up until very recently a back aisle endcap full of “clearance” electronics goods which included some 32 and 64 megabyte USB 1 flash drives for, I believe, a whole three cents less than MSRP, 30 or 40 bucks each. So no wonder they’re still there.

I imagine this is hypothetically possible given correct and sufficient training data, but that’s besides the point I think needs to be made, here.

Basically nothing anyone is programming in user space these days produces machine code, and certainly none of it runs on the bare metal of the processor. Nothing outside of extremely low power embedded microcontroller applications, or dweebs deliberately producing for oldschool video game consoles, or similar anyway.

Everything happens through multiple layers of abstractions, libraries, hardware privilege levels, and APIs provided by your operating system. At the bottom of all of those is the machine code resulting in instructions happening on the processor. You can’t run plain machine code simultaneously with a modern OS, and even if you did it’d have to be in x86 protected mode so that you didn’t trample the memory and registers in use by the OS or other applications running on it, and you’d have a tough-to-impossible time using any hardware or peripherals including networking, sound, storage access, or probably even putting output on the screen.

So what you’re asking for is probably not an output anyone would actually want.

This is the truth, right here. GIMP’s user interface is an entire F5 tornado’s worth of bullshit and it always has been. I always put it forth as the poster child of precisely how not to do it with any open source productivity software of any stripe and it’s consistently never failed to serve as an example for nigh-on decades.

If the GIMP people would just suck it up and broadly copy the layout of… well, pretty much anything, even MS Paint, it’d be a massive improvement to usability and would probably confer a tenfold increase to the number of users willing to try it out. Or at least stick with it for more than five minutes.

I’m sure it’s a perfectly capable program that’s able to do many things. I just can’t be bothered to put up with it. And this is coming from somebody who willingly uses FreeCAD.

Somehow in the transition from the bunch-of-disparate-floating-toolbar-windows paradigm to the current all-in-one design they’ve managed to make it slightly worse. GIMP’s feature discoverability is basically nonexistent, and the uninitated have no hope of figuring out how to do anything with it other than doodle with the preset brushes without resorting to tutorials.

I can’t believe the dockers (“dockable dialogs”) still take up so much space yet somehow there isn’t room to put title bars on them describing what they do even when you have one of them open and not just tabbed with an inscrutable icon at the top, nor is there any discoverable way to dismiss any of them once you’re done with them because that option is buried in a flyout menu for some reason.

I could go on forever. Don’t get me started.

I am a FOSS nerd for sure but GIMP sucks and it’s awful. I’d rather individually plink pixels into a bitmap manually from the command line with Imagemagick than use GIMP.

No idea, unfortunately. I have not touched any of the professional Adobe products in any detail since abandoning Premiere Pro back in probably around 2009. I briefly dabbled with a pirated version of Illustrator when I first got my X1 Yoga and discovered that it did not work correctly with the inbuilt stylus, full stop, and I abandoned it on the spot. I haven’t looked back since.

I did not choose the Corel suite on purpose at the beginning but when I was starting out working professionally it’s what the company worked for used in house, and I’ve stuck with it ever since due to CorelDraw and PhotoPaint doing everything I need and my continued familiarity with it. From what I understand Illustrator is more complex and for that reason some people insist it’s more “powerful,” but I suspect that really just means it’s more byzantine and harder to use. I’ve never not been able to do anything I needed to do with the Corel suite, except:

CorelDraw is to this day useless for editing .pdfs. Which is pretty damn rich for a professional graphics editing suite that costs $400 for a full license. I mean, it can, insofar as the file open and import dialogs will let you choose and load one, but it basically never works right and tends to produce a broken mess. Somehow Inkscape always works for me. So I have a copy of it around on all my machines alongside Corel, for those instances where I need to tweak or extract something from a .pdf and whoever gave it to me won’t provide the source.

You can wind up in the same trap in VB/VBA as well. It baffles me that in this current century there are still languages where text concatenation symbols and mathematical operators are the same character.

It’s even worse in the case of VB because you can also use & explicitly to concatenate strings, whereas + can be either a mathematical operator or a string concatenator depending on context and the types of variables you’ve put it between, which VB may or may not decide to cast into strings depending on an arcane set of conditions that nobody understands or remembers. So the solution was right there all along, i.e. just make & the only concatenator and reserve + for math only. But that would be too much like right.

I am a Corel kind of bird myself, having used it both professionally (which is how I got started with it) and at home for a couple of decades now. I will say two things about that:

In its current version Inkscape is roughly on par with were CorelDraw was in its 4.0 state or thereabouts (which I still have a copy of, on like seventeen 3.5" floppy disks!) which sounds like damning with faint praise but it really isn’t considering that Inkscape costs nothing to use.

However, one factor that I think most people don’t think about is that Inkscape is currently the best software I’ve ever used, bar none, for ripping apart .pdf documents made by other software, for the purposes of monkeying with their contents. And that’s a ten story tall flaming middle finger to Adobe, and completely obviates the need for 99.9999999% of all users to ever have to pay for the “pro” version of Adobe Acrobat or whatever they’re calling it this week just to be able to made minor adjustments to a .pdf.

so ginormous

Tell me about it. The Cybertruck is an inch and some change longer and 8" wider than my ratty full size 1990’s pickup, yet somehow manages to have only slightly over half the usable cargo volume – 42.80 cubic feet vs. 70.7. And I’m being extremely charitable by treating the Cybertruck’s bed area as if it were cubic starting from its tallest point by the back glass, when in fact it’s wedge shaped.

It also weighs 3269 pounds more (in its lightest configuration) and as we all know by now the Cybertruck’s towing and trailer tongue weight ratings are outright lies. Whereas millions of people have successfully lugged a combined total of billions of tons worth of boats, bikes, lawn mowers, and RV’s with GM and Ford pickups over the decades.

Even for the use case for someone who “needs” a truck, the Wankpanzer is a moronic choice.

They couldn’t possibly make it any more garbage than it actually is.

In the middle of an audio book in any media player but you connect to your car? Too bad! Android Auto is its own separate little world and your playlist position is different in the car vs. out of it.

Someone sent you a text but ye gods forbid, they sent it before you started driving your car? Too bad! You can’t see past text messages, just the ones that were sent while you were driving. I guess if somebody texted you an address in advance you’ll have to fish your phone out of your pocket.

Somebody’s calling you who is already in your address book. Too bad! We’ll only show the phone number on the screen and not their contact name.

Etc., etc.

Android Auto is basically useless. My car stereo supports both, so I just screen mirror if I actually care about functionality. I only use Android Auto itself when all I want is a map.

A knife. And another knife.

It makes sense that they wouldn’t have anything to comment anyway. Google themselves don’t actually manufacture most Chromebooks, they only provide the OS. I imagine the majority of the mass of Chromebooks in the world by weight are actually designed and made by Lenovo, Asus, Dell, HP, etc. Even the Google branded ones are manufactured by someone else under contract.

It’d be like demanding Microsoft explain to the news why your Dell caught fire simply because it had Windows installed on it.

Yeah, like, first time?

The presentation has changed slightly but the content is much the same. Back in the good old days I was a moderator on Totse forums (the original, but its web bulletin board incarnation and not when it was a BBS) and we literally had an entire subforum just titled “Bad Ideas.” This was where things got launched, torched, smoked, blown up, stolen, scammed, or otherwise mutilated. Or at the very least all of the above talked about, at length. All of this with an strong implicit suggestion to try it yourself. Most of the kiddos did not actually have the means to pull of what they claimed they did but the ones who could and more importantly had the means to prove it were celebrities. Usually only for a short time, for various reasons.

The early Internet was basically just a repository for bickering about Star Trek, low grade porn, plans for how to build potato cannons, or schemes involving smoking dried banana peels. An immense amount of stupidity has always been there to be found, because the place was and is full of teenagers and teenagers are stupid.

I sure was, when I was one.