Currently, PopOS although I’m not really that enthusiastic about it.

What? Why would you choose that over Baptist Church of Missouri SynodOS, you heretic?

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.

The interaction between Jobs (Michael Fassbender) and Woz (Seth Rogen) pretty much sums up the Apple ][ era.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fweZsmH4Tw

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.

• 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.

• 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.

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.

Then they would have to remove the various hooks in the Settings app that actually call and open the Control Panel.

How many are there? I can think of several (advanced mouse settings, advanced network settings, printer properties, date & time has a callout back to the old panel…)

Windows 10 came out nine years ago, so they don’t seem in any particular rush.

“Main Quest”. What does that even mean? That’s nonsense.

The idea that anyone finishes a game of Civilization is a myth.

I went through two defective EVGA cards within the original card’s warranty period. On the second card, EVGA tried to deny my warranty.

They eventually made it right, after I shamed them on Reddit.

Yeah, but ISPs are rich and VPN providers are not. The most recent numbers I can find for Cox (2020) show $12.6 billion in revenue.

So I’m getting a bit fascinated by this question, because I can do practical tests – I’ve owned CD-Rs since the format was invented w/ the original Pinnacle SCSI CD writers circa 1994.

I don’t think I have any CD-Rs that old any more, but I definitely have many from that era. Just for the heck of it, I popped an azo CD-R in my drive that I wrote in 1998, and I happen to have a hard drive copy of these files that I’ve carried forward on hard disks since that time as well (the CD-R was a backup).

I think the files are still in perfect condition – was able to copy w/ verify all 360MB of MP3s (and yes, before you ask, I was making MP3s in 1998 using the Fraunhofer DOS command-line encoder), and compare them to my hard drive copies which show matching SHA512 hashes.

If I’m still around 25 years from now, I’ll try again :-)

What is a sport? Why does it exist?

It exists because people come together to play it. And maybe because some people are willing to pay for tickets to watch it, or sometimes because powerful people want it (to sell product, to train people in national defense, etc).

If you’re not engaged with any of those stakeholders, you can’t change the sport. Ideas about the limited women’s class of sport will only change if the players & organizers want it to change – or in the rarer case, because the ticket buyers demand change. But many of these sports are not driven by ticket sales, so there is limited opportunity to win hearts and minds.

You claim induced me to do a little tidying on my CD collection. I just copied the oldest data CD that I own: the Hugo & Nebula Anthology 1993. It copied & verified no problem.

Unfortunately, that’s probably the oldest proper test I can do. Although I was using CD-ROMs as early as 1986, e.g. in libraries, I didn’t own any music or data CDs until about 1990. I could re-rip some of those old music CDs, I suppose, but I’m not sure it would tell us much as I’m not sure how to do a bit-for-bit comparison and I certainly don’t want to listen to the files.

I have many 30 year old CDs. They’re fine. They’ve just been kept in a typical home storage environment. I just ripped a Toad the Wet Sprocket CD I bought in 93.

Harrison Bergeron

I not telling you to accept or be happy with anything. I am saying that if you want women’s sports to work the way you think they should work, you’ll need to go through their governance bodies.

I kept the CDs for a while, much to my wife’s annoyance, before donating them to a local charity

I took them out of the jewel cases and put them into a binder, 4 CDs per page. It hasn’t exactly been a burden to carry it around for the last 20 years.

I couldn’t tell you how old my oldest MP3s are, except to say that a significant portion of my music library consists of MP3s I made myself with the Fraunhofer DOS command line encoder, and the Cassady & Green SoundJam software for MacOS. Of course, SoundJam is the software that Apple purchased and re-badged it “iTunes”.

The whole process is much less authentic.

I remember reading a letter to the editor in Stereophile magazine 30 years ago, when tube amps were coming back into style after decades of transistor and semiconductor amps. The reader pointed out that the language used in a review to describe the benefits of tube amps was ridiculous, and that calling the output “warm” or “intimate” (or dare I say, “authentic”) compared to semiconductor amps was simply an admission that the tube amps were making a change to the audio output that was not part of the original recording.

The function of an audio reproduction and amplification system, the author pointed out, was to reproduce the audio signal as accurately as possible to capture the content of the original recorded signal. Full stop. Anything else is nonsense.

The fact that CD sales are behind vinyl is a sign that the world has gone mad.

I mean… CD sales are only behind vinyl because vinyl has become collectible, while CDs offer no practical advantage over stored files on a hard drive or high-quality streaming.

And before you say, “but what about compression?”, the fact is that even lossy compression is good enough that most audiophiles can’t tell the difference. Audiophile publications started doing blind comparisons back in the 90s, and it quickly became clear that somewhere around 192kbps MP3 the ability of humans to statistically discern the compressed vs. uncompressed versions started to disappear.