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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: March 20th, 2024

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  • El Torito:

    El Torito is an extension designed to allow booting a computer from a CD-ROM. It was announced in November 1994 and first issued in January 1995 as a joint proposal by IBM and BIOS manufacturer Phoenix Technologies. According to legend, the El Torito CD/DVD extension to ISO 9660 got its name because its design originated in an El Torito restaurant in Irvine, California.

    A 32-bit PC BIOS will search for boot code on an ISO 9660 CD-ROM. The standard allows for booting in two different modes. Either in hard disk emulation when the boot information can be accessed directly from the CD media, or in floppy emulation mode where the boot information is stored in an image file of a floppy disk, which is loaded from the CD and then behaves as a virtual floppy disk. This is useful for computers that were designed to boot only from a floppy drive. For modern computers the “no emulation” mode is generally the more reliable method.

    I vaguely remember fighting with getting burned OS install discs to reliably boot. Another fun thing from around that time is if you happened to plug in the floppy drive cable backwards any disks inserted would be erased. That’s a great way to accidentally nuke your boot disk and be screwed if you weren’t near another working machine with a floppy drive. Lots of little headaches like that really drilled in the concept of redundancies and lots of backups (as well as not mindlessly installing a floppy drive).


  • In what form do they hope to collect their $5M? Do they want a receipt declaring it was deposited into their magic secret account or does like a silver coin cover the whole debt or whatever?

    I trust that this packing slip with some upper-case song lyrics written at a 22° angle in green ink will settle our obligations of prima nocta.
    –Sincerely, THE GOVERNMENT




  • There’s a video by a designer talking about some of the symbolism of Ellie’s journey (Full talk video here – SPOILERS for the film in both).

    And also an insightful YouTube comment(!) someone made in response describing their interpretation:

    spoiler

    "This is one of the most thoughtful and insightful reviews on deeper film meanings I think I’ve ever seen. In keeping with the rebirth symbolism, I would offer the following possibilities.

    1. The transport pod symbolizes more of a womb, rather than a gas chamber.
    2. The chair may not be an electric chair but rather a means for Ellie to assume a modified fetal position while in the capsule. This would mimic the position of a baby of in a womb prior to its own birth.
    3. The wires plugged into Ellie represent an umbilical cord to sustain her, rather than a means to kill her.
    4. The periodic updates given by the mission control staff as to the status of the machine (10%, 20%, 30%, etc.) mirror the increasing dilation of women in labor (1 cm dilated, 2cm dilated, 3cm dilated, etc.).
    5. The wormhole sequence mirrors the new life traveling through a birth canal.
    6. The capsule takes on a liquid form to symbolizes the protective amniotic fluid to keep the new life safe.
    7. After Ellie’s “birth”, the first person she sees is her father.
    8. This rebirth scene is enhanced by considering Ellie’s mother died from complications of childbirth when Ellie was born. This backstory enhances Ellie’s natural reluctance to be reborn as her initial birth killed her mother, and permanently altered her life.

    There’s undeniably imagery of execution and rebirth simultaneously occurring within the same frames! The filmmakers did an outstanding of capturing some very compelling storytelling while inserting remarkable symbolism."


  • I’m not going to try to convince you otherwise but I just want you to recognize that your position is that you’re ok with “bad” people being killed as a form of punishment and mine is that ensuring that label is always appropriately applied is an impossibility.

    I don’t like the thought of terrible people getting to continue to live if they’ve done irreparable harm to others, but I’m also not ok with saying that we totally need to burn THAT WITCH because Goody Constance totally witnessed them communing with the devil.

    Osama/Hitler getting killed in military action - fine. An abused child/person killing their attacker - look the other way. Giving Edward Snowden lethal injection because he totally deserves it for endangering Americans - not acceptable.






  • The Piped bot pisses me off because it doesn’t seem to check if the triggering comment already includes the exact link it’s about to post. I used to preemptively include Piped links with any YouTube ones but since it would trigger the bot anyway I just stopped bothering.

    Aside from the clutter it adds, until I added the bot itself to my blocklist (instead of just relying on “Show bots” being unchecked in settings) it would also cause reply notifications that couldn’t be cleared in the default Lemmy web UI.