That’s similar to my timing. I never made a decision to stop watching TV, but when I was in college between studying, playing around on the internet, computer games, reading books, and everything else that goes on in college I had better things to do so my TV watching time eventually dwindled down to pretty much nothing. When I left home in 2005, I didn’t have a TV to bring with me and I soon realized that I didn’t even care.

With not having a TV habit, when the streaming services came to be I never became interested in them.

Now whenever I end up seeing traditional television at a friends house or whatever, I don’t know how anyone can stand it.

I’ve been curious about that myself. On one hand, it still seems far away. On the other hand, it’s a bit over 13 years away now and I have gear actively in use that’s older than that today.

I’ve been wanting to play that. Considering it already takes me something like 30-40 hours to launch a rocket in base game, I’m anticipating that getting through the DLC is going to keep me busy a while.

I’d say their search results have been in decline for some time now, though quality has taken a particularly big hit the past year or so. I’d switch to someone else, but I haven’t found a decent alternative yet. As poor as DDG’s results are, they are still a few rungs above the rubbish Google spits out.

I suppose the space battles could sort of some sense given the technology in the Star Wars universe.

Your spaceships have two engines/drives. You have the hyperspace engines which are fast but you can’t engage in fight in hyperspace (well…mostly), then you have the regular ion engines for use out of hyperspace which are slow as shit. Capital ships can barely get out of their own way, and even the Millennial Falcon isn’t terribly quick when not in hyperspace. Now combined with weapons like blasters which have the problem that blaster bolts are also slow as shit. As in considerably slower than bullet fired from a conventional firearm. So if you fire them from a distance from a target, they can see the blaster bolt coming and move out of the way (or jump into hyperspace) long before it gets there. Crappy, slow engines combined with crappy, slow space weapons means capital ship battles might involve the ships having to get close to each other and just slugging it out. That can also sort of explain the small fighters since they can get in really close and hit the ships at basically point-blank range. Though the lack of hit-and-run tactics involving jumping in and out of hyperspace is a bit curious.

The rareness of the hyperspace-suicide maneuver might be rare as the rebels don’t have a lot of ships, and if they start plowing them into Empire ships, they’ll quickly run of ships and no matter how many Empire ships they take out in a battle, the Empire will always have another Star Destroyer. Though the big problem with introducing the possibility of this sort of maneuver in the later movies is the rebels would have absolutely plowed a ship into the Death Star with completely devastating results in the first movie. And anyone building a Death Star would have been well aware of an attack like that and would have known it would be almost impossible to defend against when you’re building a moon-sized target for it.

That’s more or less my take too. The world of the Star Wars universe feels huge and expansive, but in reality by the end of the original trilogy they had basically told all the interesting stories that were to be had about it. And even then, they were starting to run out of material for Return of the Jedi. They tried with the prequels, but as you say it mostly fell flat and ended up boring. The sequels started off more or less rehashing the original trilogy so they were at least entertaining, but that wasn’t enough for three movies and it turned into an absolute mess by the end.

Search your feelings, you know it to be true.

Chevrolet is in the list. Looks like it’s by brand, hence the reason that Audi is also broken out from Volkswagon.

Internet Explorer was originally based upon the Mosaic browser. Like a lot of Microsoft’s tech, it’s something they acquired.

Up to IE4, it was a standalone browser. It’s IE4 where Microsoft integrated it into the OS and made do double duty as Windows Explorer, which is what you’re thinking of.

I did the same thing, but mostly because my computer worked, did what I needed it to do, and I was too lazy to replace it until I was basically forced to.

After building a new PC and switching over to Linux I was like “why didn’t I do this a long time ago?”

Valve pulled support for Steam at the start of January 2024 for Windows 7/8. I thought that was the end, but apparently it actually just meant “Steam may still run but we don’t support it in any way”. Which surprised me when I booted up the old Windows 7 PC a few months ago and discovered that Steam still ran and seemed to work.

Apparently this update is actually incompatible and now Steam won’t run at all.

Juno is still around and still offers dialup internet plans. Earthlink was still offering dialup until last year.

It’s also an edition thing. The Home version is the worst, the Pro version is much the same, but the corporate Enterprise version cuts out a lot of the crap.

And what, have twice the fridge space for slightly less than twice the energy cost?

As someone who’s grown up in the Midwest, Menards used to be just a hardware store/lumber yard but in the last 15-20 years really has branched out to more than just a hardware store. Hence the home goods, pet supplies, clothing, groceries, appliances, etc in addition to the hardware store/lumber yard bit. In some ways it’s a lot more like Fleet Farm than it is like Home Depot, though Menard’s doesn’t have the farming supplies and tractor parts and stuff like that which can be found at a Fleet Farm.

Since they made this change, the newer and remodeled stores are the ones with the multiple floors since they need all the floor space. But I remember some of the original and smaller stores were also multiple floors (electrical was typically upstairs), but those might be all gone by now. The one we went to when I was a kid wouldn’t be anyway close to being ADA compliant today. That store moved locations and the old building is long gone now.

Depends on how old it is. Mine’s a 1995 model. I’ve measured its energy usage and a new fridge would pay for itself at around 9-10 years if I bought a basic model*. That’s around the lifespan I’d expect from a new fridge. So I’ll just keep using the old one until it dies.

(*) Current fridge is a basic, low end model, so assuming I replace with a similar basic, lower end model. Payback would be much longer if I upgraded.

It’s actually available for individuals now, the first time Microsoft has done this. Though it isn’t clear if Home versions most individuals would have is included, or if it’s for the Pro version only.

Along the same lines,

slackware.com today:

http://www.slackware.com/

slackware.com in 2001:

http://web.archive.org/web/20010404232132/http://www.slackware.com/

I have a Jansport that’s about that old from the college days. It’s held up pretty well I must say. No idea about newer ones.

When I was in college, I would have thought it crazy to be using a backpack older than I was.

You’re not getting anymore security patches, but as long as you keep your browser up to date and generally be careful about what you download and run (as you should already be doing) you’ll likely be just fine.

I’d estimate sometime around 2029 or so the major browsers as well as security software will start dropping support for Windows 10 and at that point you may need to start thinking about moving to something else if you haven’t already done so.