The interaction between Jobs (Michael Fassbender) and Woz (Seth Rogen) pretty much sums up the Apple ][ era.
RickRussell_CA
was RickRussellTX @ reddit
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023
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So, I lived through that time, and I supported computers professionally during that time. I started working at a university help desk in 1989.
It’s easy to go back and look at Apple products and white-box PCs of the era (or quasi-legit clones like Compaq, HP, Gateway, etc) and say, “oh, on specs, the Apples were MASSIVELY overpriced – you can get a much better deal with the PC”.
The problem was that PCs were nowhere near on par, functionally, with Macintosh.
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Networking. We were running building-wide Appletalk networks – with TCP/IP gateways – over existing phone wires YEARS before anybody figured out how to get coax or 10base-T installed. We were playing NETWORK GAMES (Bolo, anyone) on Mac in the late 80s.
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And when they did… what do you do with networking in DOS? Unless you ran a completely canned network OS (remember Banyan, Novell, etc. ad infinitum?) and canned apps specifically designed to work with it, you were SOL. Windows 3.0 and 3.1 were a joke compared to System 7.
I configured PCs and Macs for the freshman class in 1995. For the Mac? You plug the ethernet port in and the OS does the rest. For the PC… find a DOS-compatible packet driver that works with your network card, get it running, then run Trumpet Winsock in Windows 3.1, then… then… it was a goddamned nightmare. We had to have special clinics just to get people’s PCs up and running with a web browser, and even then, there were about 10% of machines we just had to say “nope”. Can’t find a working driver, can’t get anything working right. Your IRQs are busted? Who fuckin’ knows. I ran the “Ethernet Clinic” until the late 90s, when Windows 98 finally properly integrated the TCP/IP layer in the OS.
- Useful software on the Mac had a pretty consistent look & feel. On the PC? Even in Windows 3.1, it was all over the map. You might have a Windows native program, you might have a DOS program that launches in a console window, you might have a completely different graphical interface embedded in the software (Delphi apps, anyone?). Games were using DOS into the mid 90s because getting anything working right in Windows 3.1 was a total fuckin crap shoot.
Windows 95 started to fix things, finally. And Windows XP would finally bring an OS with stability comparable to Mac (arguably WIndows 2000 as well, but it was never really offered on non-corporate PCs).
The short version is: that $3000 Mac could do a lot more than that $1800 PC, even if the specs said that the CPU was faster on the PC.
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Well, that button probably dates from the late 80s or early 90s, when Apple was comparing Macs to branded IBM PS/2s and such that were sold to schools and enterprises.
And they weren’t wrong, at the time. Those PS/2s were fuckin’ expensive.
1·1 year agoAnything that complements your career as a Cheese Greeter
Do what you enjoy. Half-ass all the things.
FYI, the new official Office default is Aptos. I’ve been making work docs with it for a few weeks and I have to admit, it looks really clean and technical.
The differences between victim survey statistics and crime reporting statistics are not easy to explain. In the US, trends in victim reporting tend to lead law enforcement statistics by a year or two, which makes one wonder whether law enforcement is padding the numbers – either to make themselves look good (when crime is increasing according to victim reports and it would reflect badly on them if LE statistics followed suit), or to make themselves look necessary (when victim-reported crime is going down and LE statistics might make LE look redundant).
RC cars. I was into local club racing in the 90s, dropped out of it when my kids were born, now I’m getting back into it.
The technology improvements in power, battery capacity, and radios have been frankly astonishing. Setups that would have cost $1000+ back in the 90s come as ready-to-run kits for $200 now, and perform better.
110·1 year agoLicense to kill -9
Maybe 8 to 10 days. My kid got it at school, a little more than a week later I was coughing. I tested positive on home tests for another 10 days or so, I remember because I had to cancel some Dr. appointments.
But I was very vaccinated and it really was no worse than a short cold.
71·1 year ago“An entire data center” is 8 rented racks in two enterprise data centers (4 racks in each). They’re paying $60K/month for racks, cooling, and location.
IMO, I think the world is going to transition to using they/them for gender unspecified folks. I’ve been practicing using they/them in written and spoken communications, and it comes off a lot less strange than you’d think.
Unfortunately it has weird issues with my bog standard Intel HP Omen laptop and a 2060 GPU.
Basically any kind of sleep mode kills the GPU. I have go into Display settings and force a re-detect to wake it. Kind of a pain when you use the laptop connected to an external monitor with the lid closed.
I can’t believe I forgot about this, but if you really want to explore the question of future people reconstructing the past through AI, watch the movie Marjorie Prime, which is explicitly about this question.
Yeah, almost nothing. SMS is a utility tool for me. I doubt anyone will ever care that my wife wanted more zip-lock bags.
You’d get a better picture of me through old USENET posts (which are unencrypted, of course), or reddit or web forums or Lemmy (all of them unencrypted, I suspect). Good luck, future people.
We must have VERY different opinions of what our shopping habits or e-mails say about us. My email wouldn’t tell you jack squat.
Future people do not give a damn about your shopping, your Visa number SSL’d to Cherry-Popping Hot Grampa Action websites that you visit, nor password-protected partitions, no matter how illicit.
And this, it would seem, is your saving grace: the amazing haste of people to forget your name, your face, your litanous list of indefensible indiscretions.
They’ll glance you over, I guess, and then for a bare moment you’ll persist to exist; almost seems like you’re there, don’t it? But you’re not. You’re here. Your name will fade as Front’s will.
That’s a fair question, but I think the answer is obvious. Until the invention of photography, literally the only formal records we had of past events were the things people bothered to write down, paint, or sculpt. And of those, we only have the arts and written records that actually survived. So to find out information about the distant past, we have little choice but to extrapolate from artifacts, dig up old buildings, etc. The artifacts and records that we do find have outsized influence on our understanding of the past, compared to all the information and details that have been lost, which can literally never be recovered.
From the 21st century onward, that relationship is inverted. Any hypothetically useful unit of information about the past will be recorded hundreds or thousands of times, and the useless units of information will outnumber the useful units by many orders of magnitude. Sure, if someone proves to be exceptionally notable, there may be some value in decrypting their past Amazon purchases or cracking the encrypted SSD they left behind. But that’s going to be the exceedingly rare exception, rather than the rule, especially when the world’s data stores are crammed with news articles, photos, videos, interviews, blog posts, reddit posts, journals, and non-encrypted records that appear to tell a complete story of the lives of notable people, and for that matter the day-to-day lives of regular folk.
And that SSD may be every bit as exciting as the Hunter Biden laptop hard disk… that is, barely exciting at all, and full of such routine and irrelevant information as to be an almost pointless exercise in data forensics.
In the final analysis, nobody cares what Harold Q. Dumpington bought from Amazon in the week of June 4, 2017. That information is technically still stored in Amazon’s databases, but (1) Amazon already has access to it, so encryption is a sort of non-issue, and (2) nobody cares.
The reality is: socially engineering a password or setting up a “man in the middle” attack in a coffee shop WiFi is a hell of a lot easier than attacking encrypted data, but even those attacks are relatively rare, and usually executed against corporations with money. As tempting as it would be for some hacker to get into Jennifer Lawrence’s e-mail or Chris Pratt’s Amazon purchase history, it seems that it’s really not worth the effort to anybody, except in some edge cases.
Putting aside the whole question of what people might want to feed into an AI, why would anybody want that data AT ALL?
MC Frontalot has a song about this, Secrets from the Future.
Certainly, but Apple was comparing itself to other computer companies with international reach, not to the white box PCs coming out of the Floppy Wizard store in the strip center.