Yes, and you've got to remember to download it as soon as you buy it. I've been stung a couple of times by companies going out of business or inventing rationales for removing "old" things.

I know it's a really picky take, but I resent the implication that I should want to keep my personal files mixed in at the same level of the file hierarchy as all my applications' random settings, cached data, and temporary garbage. Documents, Music, Videos, Projects, .config, .cache, SelfishAppName, OtherSelfishAppName...

It bothered me when Microsoft started doing it in Win95, and it still bothers me in Linux. Especially when software acts surprised (or occasionally indignant) that I don't keep all my files in those directories. I have lost small bits of my own work over the years by forgetting to back up things that recalcitrant software refused to store anywhere else.

But I am amused that this is the same name that I use at the top of my own storage hierarchy for self-made things.

I think that when RHoI wrote "3D", they meant "hardware accelerated 3D". Many early 3D DOS games either did their 3D entirely in software, or included hardware acceleration support as a kind of optional bonus. Software 3D shouldn't give DOSBox much more trouble than most 2D games. The original release of Quake didn't even have any accelerator support; it was patched in later.

Yep, I put an Afterburner mod in mine back in the day and got the best of both worlds: a screen you can see without standing outside at midday, and a comfortable, wide layout that doesn't make your hands cramp up.

I was thinking of a variable-length hash, but if we use a fixed length (which I acknowledge the term "salt" does imply), then I agree.

I think it depends a lot on a person's individual knowledge. If you keep studying far enough away from your main area of expertise, there'll still be some point where you stop and have to blindly accept that something "just works", but it will no longer feel like that's what your main field is based upon.

Imagine a chef. You can be an OK chef just by memorizing facts and getting a "feel" for how recipes work. Many chefs study chemistry to better understand how various cooking/baking processes work. A few might even get into the physics underlying the chemical reactions just to satisfy curiosity. But you don't need to keep going into subatomic particles to have lost the feeling that cooking is based on mysterious unknowns.

For my personal interest, I've learned about compilers, machine code, microcode and CPU design, down to transistor-based logic. Most of this isn't directly applicable to modern programming, and my knowledge still ends at a certain point, but programming itself no longer feels like it's built on a mystery.

I don't recommend that every programmer go to this extreme, but we don't have to feel that our work is based on "magic smoke" if we really don't want to.

ADDED: If anyone's curious, I highly recommend Ben Eater's YouTube videos about "Building an 8-bit breadboard computer!" It's a playlist/course that covers pretty much everything starting from an overview of oscillators and logic gates, and ending with a simple but functional computer, including a CPU core built out of discrete components. He uses a lot of ICs, but he usually explains what circuits they contain, in isolation, before he adds them to the CPU. He does a great job of covering the important points, and tying them together well.

I did jump through the hoops necessary play this, years ago, although I can't remember why. It was probably due to reading an article much like this one.

Honestly, while I think it's important to make a note that this game existed, I also think some people overreach a bit on just how influential it was. I wouldn't say that anyone needs to play it these days unless they really want to. Just look up a few screenshots; it plays almost exactly how it looks like it plays.

That depends on your definition of "folding bike". It may not fold in the middle, but where I live this type of bike is still considered to be a "folding bike" by vendors, and more importantly, by train and long-distance bus companies, which will let you ride with one as luggage.

The total volume of this bike when collapsed is actually significantly less than my middle-folding bike when collapsed, even though it is a bit longer in one dimension.

All that being said, I prefer my 20" inch wheels to the 16" wheels on these bikes, because I get a rough enough ride as it is. I don't think I could put up with 16" wheels every day on some of the roads around here.

Yep, it's probably easier to get an Android device and install readers on it than to try for a prepackaged FOSS reader.

I use several apps on my Android phone, but mostly Kindle (for Kindle, duh), PDF Reader (for PDFs, duh again), and Lithium (mostly for EPUB but pretty much everything else, too). I get most of my e-books as DRM-free EPUBs and PDFs.

I learned about Bloom filters from an article discussing how old systems and algorithms shouldn't be forgotten because you never know when they'll come in handy for another application. The example they gave was using Bloom filters to reduce data transmission for MMOs; break your world into sectors and just send everyone a Bloom filter of objects mapped to sectors, then the client can request more detail only for objects that are within a certain range of the individual PC.

I once had problems getting an OpenGL program running under Windows on a 2nd gen i5 laptop, and discovered that the issue was that Intel had actually removed support for anything later than OpenGL 1.1 from the later versions of their drivers for those iGPUs.

After a little research, it looks like there's a "legacy" version of Mesa (mesa-amber) recommended for iGPUs on anything older than 3rd gen, and also that even the main Mesa drivers don't support Vulkan fully on 3rd and 4th gen Core iX processor iGPUs.

I think that you may just be out of luck trying to use Vulkan on a 2nd gen Core iX CPU iGPU, but I'd love to hear from someone who knows better.