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I wonder why they didn't go with the IMF Special Drawing Right, which is used in many other international contexts. (Including aviation - the liability limits under the Montreal Convention are in SDRs.)

You can't just go by time zone names because there are weird exceptions, like most of Arizona not doing DST. Then there's Indiana, which didn't do DST until 20 years ago, and there are some counties that switched time zones when the DST law took effect... if you're in one of those counties will you just accept old timestamps being an hour off? Granted, this gradually becomes less of an issue the further we get from the change. But nothing guarantees that there won't be further changes in the future.

And that's just the US, there's almost 200 other countries each with their own laws.

US Patent #5,662,332 - Trading card game method of play, inventor Richard Garfield, assigned to Wizards of the Coast https://patents.google.com/patent/US5662332A/en

Obviously there have been lots of other TCGs, but up until that patent expired in 2014, they had to either be sufficiently different from MtG to avoid the patent, or pay royalties to WOTC.

You very much can with board and card games. Monopoly was patented and so was Magic: the Gathering.

My question is whether this patent only covers specific game mechanics introduced in the most recent Pokemon game or whether it's broad enough to monopolize the entire genre. Because if a clone of the original Pokemon from 30 years ago (has it really been that long? I feel old) is infringing, then the patent is clearly invalid due to Nintendo's own prior art.

The "classic API" would probably be Xaw or Motif. Those haven't changed since practically before there was Linux.

The ISA is only part of the computer platform, and the x86 PC is the only platform that's significantly standardized between vendors. There were several incompatible 6502-based computers in the 1970s and likewise for the 68k in the '80s, and now ARM is in the same position. I don't know if there's any way this can change, certainly it's not in any vendor's interest to make their products easy to clone, that's the "mistake" IBM made with the PC. And ARM is doing well for themselves just licensing CPU cores and letting their customers do the rest.

The most significant contribution that DEC BASIC made was the REPL-like "immediate mode" that lets you execute individual statements without having to RUN the whole program. It was copied by both Microsoft and almost every other BASIC implementation since. Being able to fiddle around with "PRINT 2+2" is so fundamental to the BASIC experience that it surprised me to learn that Kemeny & Kurtz didn't come up with it, DEC did. (It came from DEC's earlier language FOCAL, which had an "English-like" syntax and doesn't resemble BASIC in any other way, and probably ultimately from LISP.)

For all the complaints about our corpus being contaminated by AI slop, there's been plenty of human-generated slop being regurgitated over the years as well. Lazy textbook writers copy and paste from older books, lazy test makers quiz on arbitrary phrases from the textbooks, nobody ever does any fact checking to see if any of it makes sense.

My favorite example is the "tongue map" - decades of schoolchildren have been taught that different parts of the tongue are responsible for tasting sweetness and saltiness and so on. This is contrary to everyone's experience, and it turns out to have been a mistranslation of some random foreign journal article on taste buds, but it's stuck around in the primary school curriculum because it's easy to make it into a "fill in the map" activity. As long as the kids can regurgitate what they're told, who cares if anything they're learning is true?

That would've been rated well after the fact, since the MPAA didn't introduce film ratings until 1968.

The funny thing is the classic Looney Tunes weren’t made for Saturday morning kids shows, but for movie theaters to be shown between the newsreel and the feature. (And weren’t necessarily kid stuff either - they were full of topical references that nobody has understood since the 1940s.)

Warner Bros has been a lousy manager of the Looney Tunes property lately but I expect they’ll remembered fondly for decades more, while most of the repetitive schlock that was made for Saturday morning will be forgotten.

When Congress passed the CPB defunding bill, the Republican sponsors paraded around the most deranged takes to air on NPR in the last few years and asked, why should our tax dollars keep going to this?

And I'll be the first to admit that NPR has completely lost its mind, it's losing its listenership, and it needs to be humbled a bit. But audio is much cheaper than video and NPR's remaining listeners will easily be able to make up the shortfall. Meanwhile we're going to see PBS, whose news coverage mostly avoided the pitfalls NPR fell into and who run a lot more non-news programming, take a huge funding hit and resort to even more pledge drives and reruns, while local affiliates in large swaths of the country have to close entirely.

This is throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and not even throwing out the bathwater.

The "." to terminate input was used in FTP mail on ARPANET, defined in RFC 385 which was well before anyone outside Bell had heard of Unix.

The revenue cut for use of public streets is known as the "franchise fee." For the legacy cable companies, this was fixed by federal law in the 1980s at 5% of total revenue from cable television. For legacy phone companies, it varies by locality, but it's based on landline phone revenue.

There's a federal law from the 1990s banning any such taxes or fees from being charged on internet service, so cities don't collect anything based on that.

That overblamed decision was (a) specific to Michigan corporate law, and a reason why Ford reincorporated in Delaware shortly afterwards and (b) a finding that Ford had to pay dividends to its shareholders rather than reinvesting profits in expansion, which no modern court would require. Warren Buffett and Steve Jobs both cancelled dividends and nobody objected.

The story behind the lawsuit was that the Dodge brothers had just left Ford (then a private company) and they planned to use their dividends to start a competitor - which Ford suspected and which is the reason why the dividend was canceled.

At one point I stumbled onto a document from circa 1990 laying out a fairly coherent rationale - / was always a filesystem on the local machine while /usr could be a site-wide NFS share across many machines. Thus you got things like splitting off architecture-independent /usr/share from binary /usr/lib (because if you have a few different kinds of workstations, you'd want one /usr per architecture but /usr/share could be site-wide) and creating /sbin from binaries that had been in /etc from day one. Oh and they came up with /var (also possibly a network share) so /usr could be mounted read-only.

An interesting idea, but I have to figure the majority of Unix sites kept /usr on the local machine like always.

An LTO-9 tape cartridge can store 18 terabytes (they advertise 45 TB but that's with the built-in compression scheme and we want to compare raw bits to raw bits). One of these new 1.6 petabit discs would be just over 11 tapes, well under a station wagon.

Yeah I remember as a kid saving a file with Word 97, then opening it on a different computer with Word 95, and there was a box between every pair of characters. Looking back, it's clear that the internal representation had changed from an 8-bit encoding to UTF-16 but I learned to be careful to "save as Word 95" every time from then on.

A while back I read a piece by, I think, Joel Spolsky on the "design" of the XLS format. It was mostly a dump of Excel's internal memory structures to disk, with some optimizations to speed up saving and loading on the slow disks of the time. He seemed quite satisfied with how well the software performed but all I was thinking is "any other program trying to deal with those files is screwed." And "any other program" includes later versions of Excel.

It'd be nice to have some documentation of the internals of old DOC and XLS formats, just for the sake of recovering old files for archival purposes, but it's likely that Microsoft never bothered documenting them, even internally.

We had a bunch of riots a couple of years ago, don't you remember? The match was lit, the fires (metaphorical and literal) burnt for a while, and then gradually everyone got bored and things went back to normal.

We need less of Richard Stallman and more of Matthew Garrett. Free software is good. Monomaniacal obsession with free software at the expense of literally everything else is why Stallman's allies are few and far between.

Landlines carrying electricity meant that telephones still worked even when the power was out. That's maybe the one thing I'll miss about landlines.

Before the Miller test, standards for "obscenity" were arbitrary and varied greatly from place to place. A magazine that printed an excerpt from James Joyce's Ulysses was banned as obscene, while a few years later the book as a whole was allowed to be published. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._One_Book_Call...

Many of us like to think of the First Amendment as broadly protecting the right to say whatever you want, dating back to its enactment over 200 years ago, but that interpretation is much newer.

The USFL exists. It doesn’t really compete with the NFL but that’s more due to NFL teams having much more money with which to buy nearly all the top talent.

This feels like one of the weird no-dialogue segments on the Muppet Show, only with people instead of Muppets.

"It's not cheap, but I'm sure the government will buy it."

Do you look up your stock prices in the WSJ tables? Mako's point isn't that print is obsolete, it's that printed daily snapshots of constantly-updated data are.

(Which I 99% agree with, there are some rare cases when you want old snapshots that haven't been subsequently revised, but does that mean we need to keep printing tables in every copy of every day's paper?)

This has never been public record in the US, part of how America’s lax reporting requirements for private companies have traditionally made it more “business friendly” than Europe.

As of 2024 private entities in the US will need to report ownership to FinCEN though it still won’t be available to the public.

How about the oldest software in common use? There's probably some parts of the 1973 C rewrite of Unix still around in modern Solaris, idk how common that is. tcsh also dates back to the '70s and is also falling into disuse.

Maybe TeX, written in 1982? Though pdfTeX displaced the classic TeX DVI compiler long ago, and all the major TeX distributions translate the Pascal source code to C. I don't know whether that means it's a different program from the one Knuth wrote 40 years ago.

ISP-hosted Usenet was a cost center. Between the potential liability from illegal content, the heavy bandwidth usage of alt.binaries.* and the lack of interest in anything else, it's no wonder ISPs shut it down. Frankly I'm a little surprised they still offer email, I can't remember the last time someone gave me an ISP email address. I can't see any business model for ISPs to start offering Mastodon/ActivityPub either.

Back in the early days, a Usenet server represented a natural community - a university or employer. The early regional ISPs like Panix were small enough to still be community-like, though the common bond was looser. Modern ISPs, your Comcasts and Verizons, aren't communities at all, any more than customers of any other large business are. So although from a technological standpoint it makes sense to organize user-facing decentralized services on an ISP basis, from a social perspective it really doesn't anymore.

I posted a bit on Usenet in the early 2000s. It felt like a vast dying civilization, and I was fascinated by the depths of its history, so I ate up stuff like this.

One thing that sticks out is how much technical constraints defined Usenet. The decentralized store-and-forward structure was designed based on the extremely low bandwidth available (initially 300 baud modems, connected for a few minutes each night) and the various newsgroup hierarchies were largely meant to signal which groups should be prioritized over others when a site was determining what to carry. Hence the insistence on comp.women over soc.women because only the comp.* groups made it to Europe. As described in the article, the switchover from UUCP to TCP/IP made the "backbone cabal" and their carriage decisions obsolete shortly after the Great Renaming took place, yet the naming conventions remained.

A big difference between Usenet and modern services is that, except on the rare moderated newsgroups (where a moderator had to approve all messages before posting) anyone could post, all posts went to all servers carrying the newsgroup, and nobody could force other servers to delete posts. It was expected for users to "killfile" anyone whose posts they didn't want to read, but it was nearly impossible to ban someone from a newsgroup so that nobody could read their posts. Ban someone from one server and they could just sign up on another. Defederating a server, the so-called Usenet Death Penalty, was almost exclusively used against spam servers. These properties of Usenet made it an attractive platform for sharing pirated and other illegal content, which in turn led to the demise of ISP-hosted Usenet servers in the late 2000s (by which time most of the legitimate discussion groups had migrated elsewhere).

There was nothing like the current Mastodon drama with sites defederating each other over whether certain political views should be allowed by moderators, because there were no moderators and no notion that any political views were unacceptable to post. (Of course, political posts outside political newsgroups were considered rude, but there were no bans for rudeness, only killfiles...)