The interaction between Jobs (Michael Fassbender) and Woz (Seth Rogen) pretty much sums up the Apple ][ era.
RickRussell_CA
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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.
2·5 months agoThey need Dimo Higgins, Goblin Hunter
1·11 months 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.
Yeah the Senvion situation is an object lesson in the dangers of proprietary systems.
Yeah, but look up the story on the Senvion turbines. Basically, Senvion operators have had to pay big money for service contracts with 3rd parties since Senvion went out of business.
So, if I’m reading this correctly, this is the Konigshovener Hohe wind farm which is built on the site of the Garzweiler open-pit lignite mine. According to this article, the site was inaugurated in 2015 with 21 Senvion turbines.
The problem is, Senvion went out of business in 2019, and customers have been struggling to support their turbines. Apparently the Senvion design is exceptionally dependent on software access. Siemens and others have stepped in to offer support contracts to Senvion turbines in good working order, but with the opportunity to mine more lignite at the site, maybe RWE felt that it was time to spin down the Senvion turbines.
It seems like there may be many factors in this decision.
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.
The act of conferring with only a subset of that group
Cis women are stakeholders, I didn’t mean to imply that they are the only stakeholders That may be lack of clarity on my part. I definitely did not mean to suggest that ONLY cis women’s opinions matter, or should be considered in rulemaking.
I offered that as a counterpoint to the assertion that the opinion of cis women is morally equivalent to the opinion of racists.
Again, I don’t really know how or if women chess players (cis or trans) were solicited for their opinions on these rule changes.
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.