I appreciate the touch of making this with generative AI. Unless someone went to the effort of deliberately writing "VIbc coam" on the spine.

I have a stupid question: Are you sure you're not confusing "line out" and "headphone out"? They're different, and pretty much every desktop supports both these days. But standard PC speakers usually connect to the "headphone" socket.

Private members aren't actively blocked from external access; they're passively marked "Access prohibited".

That means that rather than being unable to find the members of a class, C programmers simply can't pick up on the signals telling them that they're not wanted.

(Fellow C programmers: I'm joking. :D)

People can hate on Microsoft all they want, but I use LibreOffice on a regular basis and it does the same thing, for exactly the same reason.

Cheers to the person who linked to the "font - hide" solution. I didn't know that one and the equivalent works LO as well.

There are even rumors of a Final Fantasy VII reboot!

Final Final Fantasy VII?

The problem I find with many games made for Win95/98/XP is that the game uses one or more third-party libraries that were only "valid" for a year or two. After that, updates to the OS closed loopholes that the poorly-written old versions of the libraries relied on, but the poorly-written newer versions of the libraries released to deal with those issues then break compatibility with the previously-released game, which was never updated or patched.

Are Sony still selling new PS2s and PS3s? I think we can only buy them secondhand now, which means Sony already got whatever money they were going to get a long time ago.

Also, while the top sellers work reliably, unless something big has changed in the last year or so, plenty of PS2 games still don't work right in emulators, and even have game-breaking bugs. I have a large collection of PS2 games, and many of them are awful or unplayable in emulation.

He sure loves to evangelise "cloning", a.k.a. "copying other people's work". One wonders how anything new or even slightly tailored for each situation will creep into this ecosystem.

To make an analogy, there's usually nothing terribly wrong with the mass-produced clothes that big box stores sell. But it rarely fits that well, looks too stylish, or does much more than cover your nakedness. Often, that's acceptable. But sometimes you need special gear or want a really good quality, tailored shirt.

People still make a living as tailors. In fact, a lot of their work these days is making small alterations to the mass-produced stuff for individual clients.

I'm sorry if you've already checked this, but I had a similar problem with a Windows laptop recently that just would NOT stay in standby. It wasn't a question of if, but how long.

Eventually I found that some "Wake on IP' settings were set to "Wake on any/all IP traffic". I switched those off and now the thing stays in standby/screen blanked.

As someone who's currently interested in Atari 2600 development, I can tell you that MobyGames is way off in their count, even if you limit the count to physically-released games. There were well more than 10 new physical releases in 2025 alone.

It helps that developers do licensing deals with a few companies that produce physical cartridges with boxes and manuals on demand, but there are also still a surprising number of people making physical copies of games for sale in advance.

When I was in my teens and twenties, I used to believe that if I thought of something that I'd never heard of before, I must have been the first person ever to come up with it.

Now that I'm older and the Internet is ubiquitous, when I have those moments I go straight to a search engine. And even if I'm not the first, I still feel pretty good about discovering whatever it is for myself.

I am stuck using an otherwise old but theoretically bearable PC at work running Windows 11 from a spinning HDD. But I'll tell you, when I dug through the registry to turn off all the background indexing nonsense, it became damn near usable.