smacktoward

AKA the Osborne effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect

Once upon a time (aka the early '90s), Gopher and WWW were both simple systems for publishing hypertext. Neither one was appreciably more complex or ambitious than the other.

WWW eventually pulled out into the lead, due largely to licensing considerations; WWW had been developed at CERN, which explicitly disclaimed any ownership over it, while Gopher had been developed at the University of Minnesota, which preferred to leave its ownership claims ambiguous. People gravitated towards WWW for the simple reason that they knew no one would sue them for using it.

As WWW's userbase grew, demand grew as well to add features to it. Mosaic added images and image maps; Netscape added JavaScript; and on and on and on. Eventually WWW grew to the ginormous, do-it-all system we know and (ahem) love today. Because Gopher had been left behind in adoption, it didn't have those pressures to extend its capabilities; it was free to remain the simple hypertext system it was in the early '90s.

I see a lot of people today point to Gopher as an example of what the Web should be. But this misses the point; the Web isn't what it is because of some design decision it made that Gopher did not, the Web is what it is because it had users. The more users there were, the more things people wanted to do with it; and the more things people wanted to do with it, the more features got tacked on.

If Gopher had been the one with the permissive licensing back in the '90s, it's very possible that it would have been the hypertext system everybody used, and today we'd be complaining about how complex Gopher has become and asking "hey, whatever happened to that toy Tim Berners-Lee was hacking on back in the day? Remember how simple that was?"

One reason it can't happen today is because it never ends well. Ion Storm was a huge disaster; it produced Deus Ex, but it also produced Daikatana, one of the truly legendary bad games. The studio mismanaged itself so badly that by 2001 the whole thing had collapsed except for Warren Spector's team in Austin, who soldiered on for a few more years before giving up.

Webpack's general design philosophy is to dump a bag of tools on your head and tell you to use them to assemble a build system. So anytime the bag gets larger, I cringe.

As with most things Apple, it is a joy as long as you restrict yourself to only plugging the device into official Apple peripherals, preferably ones that are available to buy right now. It’s when you start hooking your Mac up to old hardware or random commodity hardware that the problems surface.

Of all the complaints that could be lodged against PHP, performance is a weird one.

The Times can claim that a harsh tone and a small factual error in Senator Tom Cotton’s recent op-ed was the reason the entire paper had a meltdown, but the staffers who revolted initially claimed that Cotton’s argument for bringing the National Guard into cities put black lives in “danger.”

Cotton’s entire argument was that the military should be sent into the cities to crack protesters’ heads, which is something significantly more aggressive than “a harsh tone.”

If I were to take to the op-ed page of the Times with the argument that national stability requires that we send the military to crack the heads of everybody who writes for the National Review, I suspect they would waver somewhat in their commitment to unlimited free speech.

I used the title the author of the article gave it. I generally try to do that when submitting, unless there is a very very good reason not to -- e.g. it's something completely incomprehensible to someone who isn't a regular reader of that specific site.

We've had forty years for people to build features like this on top of IMAP, and nobody has done so. This would seem to be a decent indication that the Unix philosophy is not going to produce much innovation in this market.

In every company, no matter how obscene the margins they're making on a given product, there is someone arguing that those margins could be even larger if they just cut a few corners.

Eventually someone listens to that person, and decades of painstakingly built-up brand value gets thrown out the window in order to bring home six nickels tomorrow instead of five.

Is YOLOv5 the Correct Name?

Candidly, the Roboflow team does not know.

It seems like, unless you can say with certainty that you have a legitimate claim to use an existing name, the right and safe thing to do would be to not use it. Just name your project something else. You lose the brand recognition of the existing name, but on the other hand you avoid the risk of your project getting dragged like this.

When in doubt, save yourself a headache and just use a different name.

... he asks, in his column in a prominent national magazine.

Schoolteachers (in the USA, anyway) get paid next to nothing, and frequently have to buy classroom supplies out of pocket because their school system doesn't have the budget to buy them.

Nobody becomes a schoolteacher to get rich.

rather expensive editions that are rarely discounted substantially, such as the Criterion Collection

Criterion's web store (https://www.criterion.com/shop) has sales all the time. There's one on right now through June 15 that gives you 30% off all titles. I picked up two titles through a 50% off sale last month. Subscribe to their email list or follow them on social media and they'll give you a heads up when the next one is coming.

The root account is a loaded gun. Sudo su is a loaded gun with the safety engaged. You can still shoot yourself with it, but you have to take an affirmative action first (disengaging the safety/sudo su), which cuts way down on the number of trips to the emergency room.

If you are taking your epidemiological guidance from a site called "Conservative Review," which appears to exist mostly to provide Google juice to other sites in Glenn Beck's media network, do me a favor and don't come within ten feet of me without a mask.

When you're rich enough, you quickly get surrounded by people who are happy to agree with any damn fool notion you come up with.

Every single person who installed Bonzi Buddy thought they were getting it from a good source.

Gruber’s not really adding much here to the original NYT reporting. I would suggest changing the URL for this submission to point directly to the article at the Times.

This post has also been flagged, which is both disappointing and unsurprising.

Yes: https://packagist.org/

I would love to find an Epyx/Atari-style joystick that connects via USB. The only joysticks anyone makes anymore are big hulking flightsticks, but so many older games were designed around those smaller joysticks you held in the palm of your hand. They just don't feel the same with a giant flightstick.

Both Silent Service and Silent Service II have been reissued and are available from a bunch of online game retailers. Since GOG is currently having their summer sale, you can get them both in a single bundle for just $1.49: https://www.gog.com/game/silent_service_12

The title of the new game is just The Mighty Eighth, no specific bomber mentioned. The real-world "Mighty Eighth," the Eighth Air Force (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eighth_Air_Force), operated both B-17s and B-24s.

Publishing rights for a lot of the classic MicroProse games seem to currently be held by Retroism: https://retroism.com/

This includes the original MicroProse Mighty 8th (https://retroism.com/b-17-flying-fortress-the-mighty-8th/), along with the Silent Service games, F-117A and F-19, the original Sid Meier's Colonization and a bunch of others. Though there are some notable MicroProse titles missing from their catalog: M1 Tank Platoon, the original Gunship and Gunship 2000, and F-15 Strike Eagle III all jump out at me.

Scroll down to the bottom of the article, there’s an 18th-century recipe for “mushroom ketchup.” (Along with a video on how to make it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29u_FejNuks)

Be interesting to see how close it is to your wife’s modern version!

If we still defined AI the way it was originally defined, the AI prophets would have to admit they are nowhere near developing AI.

That would have been uncomfortable, so the AI prophets have instead responded by changing the meaning of the term.

Business Wire isn’t a news wire service, though. Examples of those would be the Associated Press and Reuters. It’s a wire service for the distribution of corporate press releases, which by definition are going to be biased.

That’s not to say there isn’t a place in the news world for services like Business Wire - corporate press releases can be valuable sources of information. Just that any reporter who would take something off Business Wire and run it verbatim as a news item is not very good at their job.

Phone and cable companies are extensively regulated.

I’m in exactly the same boat. TrackPoint 4 life, yo.

What’s extra weird is that the first TrackPoint laptops appeared more than 20 years ago, so any IBM/Lenovo patents on the technology must have expired by now...