They actually only did a saucer separation three times during the entire TNG run. The pilot episode “Encounter at Farpoint”, the cliff-hanger douple-part episode at the end of Season 3 with the Borg, and that one random episode back in the first season. If you count the “Generations” movie, that’s a fourth and final time.

That’s not fair. You can make bootable Linux flash drives in Windows too.

I get the impression in the Star Wars universe that technological advances have slowed to a near halt. All of the tech is really old, and very little has changed for quite some time. A brand new X-wing or lightsaber or landspeeder isn’t all that different from one that was built 50 or even 100s of years ago. That’s one of the reasons why stuff in Star Wars looks so used - as tech doesn’t go obsolete, stuff ends up staying in service until it’s completely worn out and every bit of life has been squeezed from it.

That’s why you don’t really see where the technology comes from - the big innovators, discoveries, etc. are long in the past. Though we do get to occasionally see factories and manufacturing facilities where things are being built.

If it makes you feel any better, from a quick scan through some of the images the vast majority of them at least seem depict the characters as older and grown up.

Git at work.

Mercurial for my own stuff.

We also noted that the supplied key locks the power button, as it did on some ancient systems.

The ancient systems I knew didn’t have a power button, and instead power was controlled by a physical switch on the high voltage side of the power supply.

The key actually locked out the keyboard, which was possible since the keyboard had a dedicated connector. So you could still turn the computer on, but you really couldn’t use it.

I suppose locking out the power button is a suitable replacement for a modern case.

Some early PC software, mostly games, were written expecting the computer ran at a fixed speed which was the speed of the original IBM PC which used an Intel 8088 that ran at 4.77 MHz. If the IBM PC was more like computers such as the Commodore 64 which changed little during its production run, that would have been fine. But eventually faster PC’s were released that ran on 286, 386, 486, etc. CPUs that were considerably faster and hence software that expected the original IBM PC hardware ran way too fast.

The turbo button was a bit of a misnomer since you would normally have it on and leave it on, only turning it off as sort of a compatibility mode to run older software. How effective it was varied quite a bit - some computers turning it off would get you pretty close to the original IBM PC in terms of speed, but others would just slow the computer down, but not nearly enough, making it mostly useless for what it was intended for.

Out of the box, Vim’s default configuration is very basic as it’s trying to emulate vi as close as possible. It like if you want things like headlights or a heater or a tachometer in your family car, you got to create a vimrc and turn those features on. That was my experience when I first started using Vim - I spent a lot of time messing around creating a vimrc until I got things the way I wanted.

One of the big changes with Neovim is their default settings are a lot more like what you would expect in a modern text editor.

Generally I find many these frameworks will make some complicated things simple, but the cost is some things that were once simple are now complicated. They can be great if you just need the things they simplify - or in other words can stick to what they were intended for, but my favorite way of keeping things simple is to avoid using complicated and heavy frameworks.

Well, at least it’s 1920x1200 resolution. The old 10" netbooks mostly had 1024x600 which was terrible even by standards from 15 years ago.

That sounds like one of those fixtures where the ballast is in the fixture and the bulb is just a bulb, similar to a regular fluorescent light fixture. As opposed to the screw-in CFLs that most people are familiar with where the bulb also contains the ballast.

Those are kind of unusual in homes - I’ve mostly seen them in commercial applications like hotels and stuff like that.

I had something similar, except it was a blown fuse.

Granted, the fuse was soldered in place and you had to take it apart to get to it. But once it was replaced it worked perfectly. No idea why the fuse blew either, unless it was just defective.

That’s mostly just indirect lighting.

Bias lighting is specifically lights that are placed behind screens to help reduce eyestrain from viewing a bright screen in a dark room.

My first Linux install was Slackware sometime in the late 90’s. I didn’t really use it though, as I never managed to get it working with my dial-up Internet. Stupid winmodems.

The first distribution I actually used was Mandrake. Others I’ve used since then include Suse, Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, Manjaro, and EndeavourOS. I’ve landed on using Manjaro on both my main desktop and laptop, though I have secondary machines running Debian, Slackware, Ubuntu, and EndeavourOS.

I remember in the original 1990’s NASCAR Racing game, I discovered a glitch where if I managed hit an AI car into the outer wall a certain way while driving backwards, it would launch said AI car backwards at some incredible rate of speed which could make for some spectacular wrecks.

Anyhow, that’s what I spent most of time doing.

Does Encarta count as owning an encyclopedia?

I’d at least start them with something simple like Paint or Notepad. Once they have that down, then you can throw the disaster that is the MS Office file save dialog at them.

I wish the company I worked for had some system like that. I know they have a system for quarantining suspicious emails because every once and a while it’ll flag and quarantine something. But almost everything sails right through. You’d think the cybersecurity department would put more effort into one of their first lines of defense, but instead it’s more fake phishing emails.

I still have that exact model of Dell sitting in a closet. Was in regular use until around 2014 or so. Even ran Vista on it for a while.

It was not my dorm room PC though, that was an Athlon XP box I put together myself.

As a Minnesotan that knows New Prague I had a good laugh at a small midwestern town being thrown into this comparison.

New Prague isn’t a bad place, but admittedly not a whole lot of touristy things to do there.