“Fixed that for you.”

Close but no cigar on that Genesis/Megadrive controller, there.

The original Atari VCS/2600 had 128 bytes of RAM. It is astonishing what programmers were eventually able to achieve on it with basically nothing. Although additional memory could be included on cartridges, and many games did so. Or had to do so, I imagine.

In the case of the USA specifically, at that time and place it was very much in vogue among the educated to be into all the trappings of classical Roman and Greek history. This is also why Greco-Roman style columns and other architectural fripperies were so popular both on plantation houses and government buildings. The founding fathers lifted no small part of their thoughts on democracy from the Greeks.

Unlike hard drives and SSDs which as you have observed are incessantly manufactured in powers-of-ten mega/giga/terabytes but marketed as if they were powers-of-two mebi/gibi/tebibytes, a RAM chip’s capacity is absolutely, definitely, 100% down to the individual bit precisely the capacity at which it is rated in powers-of-two megabytes. Due to the way that memory is accessed there is no other way and it cannot be fudged. (The exception is ECC RAM which typically has an extra bit per byte to hold the parity data, but this is not accessible to the user so that’s moot.)

There is a small bite of your memory space taken out for Memtestx86 to reside in, which is necessary in order for it to run. Your BIOS probably has some portion of memory reserved as well, either for peripheral memory mapping or for use as video memory, or similar.

There is probably also some rounding going on in the total capacity that Memtestx86 reports.

Venezuela is also larger than Texas, at 352,140 square miles per Wikipedia vs. 268,596. That’ll make Texans really pissed.

In the immortal words of Daniel Rutter (again): If nothing else, backups are necessary because at some point in your life you will confidently instruct your computer to destroy your data.

Be careful of what, spontaneously learning to fly? I’m still trying to wrap my head around what possible sequence of events could have led to hooking that bike by its forks on the pole like that while apparently causing very little damage to it in the process. Okay, he’s knocked off the front fairing and the windscreen, if it had one. But both tires are still inflated, the frame appears straight, the lower splitter is still attached, and I don’t even think the fork tubes are bent.

Just.

How?

You’re like the gym bro reincarnation of Haruhi Suzumiya.

I learned the cop knock early on in my delivery career. People ask why I didn’t use the bell. Because more than half the time the bell doesn’t work, that’s why. I don’t have all night to stand out here looking stupid. Hitting your door with my baton did, though, didn’t it? Plus if you’re going to bust out of here running your mouth with some dumb shit, I’m already holding my baton.

I wouldn’t do it hard enough to leave a dent in the door except with people I really disliked.

I never had the occasion to whack a customer, regardless of how richly some of them may have deserved it. But people lurking around the vicinity who were stupid enough to believe they were the first person to think of jumping the pizza man from behind at the door were a different story.

That’s fine if you have a mouse that isn’t shite. I have a coworker who also does this, in his case via having the cursor speed jacked up as far as it’ll go in Control Panel. But the crap mouse he has on his PC means that the cursor now moves several pixels per sample. It’s impossible to move it one pixel at a time, which means some very small UI elements in inexpertly coded programs (like, just to name one example, our inventory control software) are smaller than the minimum movement distance and you can’t place the cursor on them to click them.

He seems to spend most of his day on reddit, though, so this apparently has not impacted his productivity much. Meanwhile, if I use his machine I just become Captain Keyboard Shortcut in self-defense.

They are not. They’re architecturally very, very similar but there are some small differences between the Japanese and US machines.

Some of this was very deliberate on Nintendo’s part. The pin count on the Famicom cartridges vs. NES ones is different, and the Famicom lacks the infamous 10NES lockout chip which was present in the US models and their cartridges. Famicom game piracy was rampant in Asia prior to the US NES release, and Nintendo didn’t want that to play out again in the West. The NES was made incompatible out of the box with Famicom carts not just to prevent imported Japanese Famicom games from being played on it, but also to prevent the myriad of bootlegs available from being played on it as well.

This is before getting into the expanded capabilities provided by the Famicom Disk System, which we never got in the West. Fun fact: The expansion port is still there, on the bottom of your NES beneath that little hatch cover, but it was never officially used for anything. That was probably its originally intended purpose, though, since the piggyback cartridge strategy used by the top loading Famicom would have been quite tricky on the front loading NES and its gimcrack faux VCR mechanism.

There is some more rambling to this effect in the now ancient post of mine here, including a showing off of the adapter in my Exitebike cart. As the story goes, for the US launch of the NES Nintendo could not produce enough game cartridges fast enough so their solution was to take existing stock of Japanese carts and bung them in cheap but official Famicom-to-NES adapters complete with a lockout chip on each, and package them all up in a US style cartridge which has a ton of extra room inside to begin with. Notably, if you’ve ever wondered when you were a kid why your Exitebike game pretends to have a save function, and where it’s trying to save to, there’s your answer: A Famicom tape recorder, which is a peripheral we never got in the US. But the game ROM is actually the Japanese version on a Japanese cart, in an adapter.

But if you’re a dedicated enough nut, you can take that adapter out of your old Exitebike or Gyromite or whatever cart, and stick any Japanese Famicom (or pirate) cartridge in it, and mostly they’ll just work with some minor limitations. The NES, for example, lacks the ability to accept the extra sound channel input that Famicom cartridges could provide via add-on chips.

I dunno about misprints, but I’ve got a five screw Excitebike as well as a five screw Gyromite that are Japanese Famicom cartridges inside the shell with a Famicom to NES adapter. This was an actual official thing, and was how some very early titles were distributed at first.

While we’re talking rarity, I also have a copy of Fantasia for the Genesis which is naturally the only cartridge in my entire collection that won’t boot no matter what I do to it. I use it as a cartridge slot dust excluder these days.

I’ve never met anyone who got rid of any classic video game stuff who didn’t regret it. The moral of the story is, don’t. This is why I have an entertainment center full of stupid old consoles and three bookshelves full of games for all kinds of systems.

A few systems I traded in over the years to fund newer consoles when I was young and didn’t know any better. I got all of them back, though, and in most cases before they became trendy enough again for the used prices to skyrocket.

Or constructive dismissal.

“We’ll make all those expensive whiners quit, and then they won’t get unemployment benefits. Don’t worry, we’ll replace their positions with AI. It’ll totally work. Honk honk.”

535nm for most/all of my greens.

I do have one of the old 1000mw Wicked Laser blues as well, however, which I think is 445nm.

Oh yeah. And my engraver is 100 watts of infrared (1084nm?), not milliwatts, although the range is probably a bit crap for this sort of thing and it’s not exactly concealable. You’d also want to pack rather a long extension cord.

And the Power Base Converter. I don’t think that will pass through the 32x, though. I’ll have to dig mine out and try it some time.

That’s only the rear wheel drive ones. There are still plenty of other idiots who were dumb enough to put down even more money for the prior more expensive variants.

Rampant incompetence?

You probably don’t even have to go that far. You can rake-pick most consumer locks in a handful of seconds and with zero talent required. I theoretically know how to pick locks in the traditional “little click from pin 1, pin 2 is set, pin 3 is loose” kind of way but in reality I never have to on any consumer grade lock. Just tension it with a little screwdriver and fuck it at random with a bent paperclip and you’ll probably get it open. I’d be immensely surprised if these things are secured with anything more than a dinky 4 or if we’re feeling especially generous 5 pin through-hole cam lock.

I have my permitted auto ISO range set to 100 through 3200. I find that anything above 3200 produces a result that’s grainy enough to annoy me, which is probably a result of my smaller sensor (read: being cheap). I always have stabilization enabled.

I concur on the zoom tightness ring as well. I have no use case for such a thing whatsoever. Even at its tightest it’s not quite enough to keep the lens barrel from getting slowly bounced into its extended position if you have your camera danging from your neck while e.g. hiking, and I would much prefer it to have a lock for the fully retracted position like the smaller Canon zooms do. Possibly suitably upsized, as appropriate. That position would be much more useful as a second actual control ring. Maybe there was some mechanical reason a hypothetical second control ring could not have been added in front of the zoom ring as well, but I’d really doubt it. Perhaps this is what we get for the 200-800 still not being an “L” lens. At least it came with a hood and a strap.