The Blue Screen Legacy Fund

Content ferlatte 12 days ago The Second Life updater just downloaded the updater.exe from the website and ran it with no validation. One day, that returned a 404. Cool thing about Win32: if you try to run an EXE, Windows checks to see if it's a valid format (PE). If it's not, it assumes that it's a COM: 16 bit 86 instructions, no header, no validation. The 404 page, when interpreted as 86 bytecode, effectively opened the LPT DOS device and wrote garbage into it. Windows would map that into your actual printer driver in some cases if you had a printer connected directly to your computer. Cheap inkjet printers don't do any validation, so they would freak out, spew paper, and in one case, physically break.

The existential crisis of modern gaming: you've got 128GB of storage, 127GB of games you love, and a new 60GB title you desperately want to play. Suddenly you're Negan from The Walking Dead, forcing yourself to choose which beloved digital child gets sacrificed to the storage gods. "But I might play it again someday!" you whisper, as you reluctantly hover over the uninstall button for that RPG you haven't touched in 18 months. The psychological warfare between attachment and practicality is more brutal than any boss fight.

Content I work in IT, which is the reason our house has: - mechanical locks - mechanical windows - routers using OpenWRT - no smart home crap - no AlexaGoogle Assistant.. - no internet connected thermostats Tech Enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands via alexa! I love the future! Programmers Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise.

The classic "monkey puppet" meme perfectly captures the thousand-yard stare of veteran programmers when someone claims "you don't need to be a programmer to write software." That statement might sound innocent to the uninitiated, but anyone who survived Visual Basic, FrontPage, and Dreamweaver in the 90s knows the horror that follows. Sure, drag-and-drop interfaces made software "accessible" – right until you had to debug the absolute nightmare of auto-generated code that looked like it was written by a caffeinated toddler with a keyboard. The right panel showing ancient UI builder software is giving me flashbacks I didn't consent to.

Ah yes, the "Never Obsolete" computer with a blazing fast 566MHz processor and a whopping 64MB of RAM. Currently being used as a $2000 paperweight or a museum exhibit of technological hubris. That 56k modem is probably still faster than some hotel WiFi though. The real irony is that the sticker outlasted the computer's relevance by approximately 23 years and 364 days.

Ah, the legendary CrystalDiskInfo67.exe – that sketchy-looking executable with a CD icon that somehow ends up being more trustworthy than half your company's codebase. When your disk is making sounds like a blender full of paperclips, this is the hero you reluctantly download, hovering over the "Run Anyway" button while whispering "please don't steal my Bitcoin." The irony is that legitimate disk diagnostic tools often look more suspicious than actual malware. Trust issues? In this industry, we call that "experience."