HN user
But, the counterargument to this is if it helps people start books, [...].
It certainly doesn't. Not that it matters to people who love reading books, for they know judging a whole book by its first page(s), or based on some formula extracted from one of those silly self-improvement tomes, is just ridiculous (especially the latter reminiscent of "Pritchard's graph" from Dead Poets Society).
Another day, another rotten candy apple for giggling postliterates.
The average user didn't have "to mess much" with that in DOSland either. Most of that is just false memory.
IRQ settings? Pffft. Cards came factory-configured to a default that was then detected by the setup routine of any game coded in a merely competent enough fashion. And you were free to change the jumper config on the card... which obviously meant you had to change it accordingly in a game's (or application's) setup config. It's all in the manual. Et cetera.
That indeed teached you at least a modicum of working basic literacy of how some of the systems in your computer worked. Back then, I never heard PC people bitching about these trivialities. That came much later, often in form of lamentations of still bitter Amiga nerdlingers, confused "retro" gamers, or (other) computer illiterates.
"A machine of this make was Yelena's choice to confirm Xander's car payment and facilitate image uploads of Yorgi's safe!"
[...] because interactive and non-interactive forms of storytelling have different narrative needs and require different approaches.
Which can be blended and remixed successfully. The follow-up, Prophecy, is a clear testament to that (while another family member, The Darkening, was a total disaster). The only reason Wing Commander IV feels rough around the edges is because of the still immature emergent multimedia technology, some problematic game mechanics, and related design as well as narrative choices.
RIP.
When I posted a notice of his death on Bluesky, Shane McKee, a consultant in genetic medicine in Northern Ireland, responded: “I'm still using my Psion Series 5mx daily.”
Psion's little marvels were (and in some instances still are) the backbone of many outfits in my industry, especially smaller ones.
And that can be a problem. Especially in a city like, say, Vienna, where people just do not check before they cross some of these little cosy streets.
And not just that: Street's full of smombies, already keeping in mind that the situation awareness of the average pedestrian is a joke to begin with.
Also... mopeds and scooters are not a problem here in big-city Europe, they blend virtually completely into the vehicle hum, with two notable outliers: a) asshole mods, and b) the odd classic, two-stroke sewing machine. But even then, there's many other vehicles much louder than scooters. In the countryside they might be more of burden, for obvious reasons.
"Of course, none of the airplanes you listed are still flying passengers today."
The Il-62 and the Tu-154 are still in limited service, for example. Not that it does your pseudoargument any favors anyway, as service history plays obviously absolutely no role in evaluating a design purely on its visual accumen.
"You just seem to have a fetish for aircraft with fully or partially rear-mounted engines."
Hey, what can I say? I'm more of an ass man.
"Sitting next to those big engines would suck, especially after reading on multiple accidents where they exploded and killed or nearly killed everyone onboard."
I fail to see what this has to do with visual aesthetics, but the safety record of the 747 was not so hot; already excluding the malaise brought on by the fetishes of terrorists and the Evil Empire, of course.
So or so, Bogost's statement is akin to describing the Amiga 500 as the only beautiful home computer. And that's obviously ridiculous. As for your statement, nah, I won't have to search very long for people agreeing with me on many of the aircraft listed; whole coffee table tomes have been published specifically dealing with the subject of Soviet, French and British classic, especially narrow-body, airliners.
Concorde, Tu-144, L-1011 TriStar, Il-62, Tu-154, SE 210 Caravelle, de Havilland DH.106 Comet and Vickers VC10 are all much sexier. Just for starters.
"[...] the 747 is the only commercial jet that deserves to be called beautiful."
Pathetic drivel. There's legion of commercial airliners that are more beautiful than the 747.
"Websites are still inferior to Flash of the early 2000s. It's taken decades and they can only mimic a fraction of its power. And none of its ease."
Somewhat mirrors my experience with all those rubbish non-PDF formats for digital document publishing, e. g. ePub: Often terminally ugly and utterly useless on top of it (not properly citeable, et cetera).
And you'll better start to practice worshipping those ads unless your ass wants to be the star in B-166ER's last home video.
Funnily enough, he spoke about one of his first "agentic computing" implementations: a computer agent of his he tasked with compiling a sort of newspaper for breakfast reading. It ran overnight for 12 to 15 hrs., and collated textual as well as graphical information from specified news resources and databases. That was ten years before the interview, in 1980. Sadly, the piece doesn't go into more detail on the setup or its performance metrics.
He also mentioned that the idea of agentic computing was already 30 years old, and that he was busying himself with the topic for 15 years by then (1990). So... five years from taking interest (mid-70s) to his first practical implementations (1980).
Yeah, just a week ago I read an interview with Alan Kay from 1990, where he shared his thoughts about the third revolution in computing: the "intimate computer" (the agentic platform that follows the "institutional computer" and the "personal computer").
77,302,580 Americans made it happen. 87,037,184 voting-elligible Americans sat it out.
"Are other IT shops really doing a lot of piece by piece upgrades for employee machines?"
My experiences cover only Europe, mostly in sasec (safety and security, not infosec) shops, including sasec-related engineering and product development. The only Macs I see in any pro capacity are those of clients and rent-a-lecturer/instructor-types, the latter seldomly part of the industry. In my neck of the woods we run mostly on machines from Panasonic and Lenovo; in-house repair labs are a thing (some of them with expertise and equipment that makes the Rechenzentren at the local universities bow their heads in shame).
What a lot Apple people don't seem to get into their heads is that there's user segments to whom the virtues of Apple's "silicon" is utterly irrelevant; the small benefits you'd get out of it are completely negated by a litany of cons that makes their products completely undesirable.
The birth of machinima! One of the giants of 90s PC gaming, nothing even remotely like it on other platforms of the day.
"I think, realistically, the issues the author describes - particularly with the keyboard and trackpad - would drive me up the wall for any kind of serious use."
Me too. But the tray table compatibility resonates. I had hoped someone would build a modern netbook as a detachable focused on productivity and light gaming (say, Steamdeck class), maintainability and (modular) expandability; a modern road warrior that's also a nice hobbyist machine that stands some abuse. Framework was/is positioned to put something out, but they decided to release the F-12 instead.
"The Flop.
MUTOS 1835 was a UNIX port which we did under contract for an AT-compatible from Robotron. Since this machine was never produced, the whole thing must be seen as a flop."
Yeah, just about 20 EC 1835s were built (the "C" is the Russian "S"; they're ESER (ES EVM) machines, after all). But then again, there's MUTOS 1700 (for A 7100 and A 7150) and MUTOS 1834 (for EC 1834)... along with CP/M, CP/M-86 and DOS, of course. The 32-bit (386) follow-up to the 1835 was planned for 1993/94. Well, history had other plans. I remember my first programming lessons in my school's computer lab in 1991... on Amstrad 386DX/20 machines.
1. ES EVM (EN) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ES_EVM]
2. ESER/ES EVM (DE) [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einheitliches_System_Elektroni...]
3. ES EVM (RU) [https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/ЕС_ЭВМ]
4. A 7100 (DE) [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_7100]
5. A 7100 @ "Starring the Computer" [https://starringthecomputer.com/computer.html?c=630]
6. A 7150 (DE) [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_7150]
7. EC 1834 (DE) [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/EC_1834]
8. EC 1834 (EN) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EC_1834]
9. EC 1835 (DE) [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/EC_1835]
In the flickers:
Yeah, Double-Oh-Seven reigns supreme on the N64. And Bomberman, of course.
"It is a laptop that’s designed to be your laptop for at least two or three upgrade cycles, which, for Apple, implies a new laptop."
In all fairness, most Apple users are technically illiterate (hardware-wise). And running upgradeable machines to optimum efficiency necessitates running a redundant setup, e. g. the main bird and a compatible support unit, usually an older one, but capable enough to take over relatively seamlessly for a while, enable diagnostics, facilitate maintenance, and so on.
Most Apple users have only one computer, with their secondary machine the iPhone, itself a neutered simulacrum of a pocket computer, just good enough to do some basic outsourcing of troubleshooting, and to place an order for the next computer of course.
People who gravitate to Frameworks offerings, or similar machines, are just of a completely different mindset than the typical Apple customer. As evidenced by threads like this one. That's also one of the reasons why the F-12 was a misfire. You don't "half-ass" machines built for long-term support. And in this climate, an entry-level LTS machine that's supposed to become popular needed and needs a different approach. Which begins with the form factor.
I consider the Framework 12 a conceptually flawed machine (especially given the setup of its maker) but, as a general computing option, it would still be of much better value to me than anything Apple had or has on offer; every hardware feature I value in general purpose mobile computers is implemented better in the machines of other builders. And the less said about the OS and the backing platform and company, the better.
"Das Neue Universum"
Interesting publication (history) [1].
What I've personally seen that needed an FPU: a water analysis package for a "field laboratory" (its centerpiece being a luggable PC), several in-house applications of an insurance company (which my mentor, a mathematician, coded), as well as a bespoke, modular sasec (safety and security) suite for facility management. I'm slowly building a reference list of DOS- and UNIX-based industry software, as I have an interest in that stuff. Can't help with any names. Yet.
So much for needed. Packages that run without, but are only fully useful with an FPU, were relatively common.
Aye. Well, hopefully something comes to pass as a lot of industry-specific applications demand the (emulated) physical presence of an FPU. Keeping that in mind, it's obviously high-level bitching (as we say in Germany); I, as a fan of IBM PCs and compatibles, am very fascinated by your and others' awesome work in this domain.