HN user
I don't think New Atlas is a reputable site.
https://medium.com/democratizing-finance/liquid-piston-insid...
This is likely all part of a pump and dump. That's why it's a weird article.
They've been advertising this heavily of all places on instagram and taboola chumboxes. Obviously none of those people need this engine, they're looking for marks.
The "writing was on the wall" by 1994 in my area. A number of BBSes had already converted to dialup ISPs - so by 1994 a major influx of users were those really not interested in the scene at all. By 1995 things were precipitously in decline - there were just way too many cheap and easy ways to get Internet access and that's where everyone was going. Some of my favorite BBSes were still around even in 1999 - but it was pretty much dead at that point.
The BBS Documentary has a nice segment on this - especially poignant if you lived through it.
But once you have convinced yourself that its industry standard, why look as deeply into alternatives to even figure out if there are better tools?
I suppose that's true to an extent. However one of the reasons spreadsheets in general are so popular is their fluid accessibility. Just about anybody can get right to work even in Excel. Once you've gotten started in Excel there's little incentive to leave. That it offers a full blown powerful programming environment (which is definitely not the best in almost any area) erases much reason to seek alternatives. It's not a situation where Excel is meaningfully less accessible than the alternatives.
Many already convinced themselves that excel is the one true format and there is no reason to look hard at anything else.
I mean this is sort of true. It's simple enough and good enough and actually insanely powerful on top of all that. What is the compelling reason to even seek an alternative? (saying this knowing full well that people often do, and usually it's Sheets).
And lack of external data sources is not a small potatoes feature (speaking in reference to Numbers here) - I think that alone puts Excel and Sheets way above Numbers. (And personally I can die happy not seeing another line of AppleScript for the rest of my days).
At least GSuite gives you browser accessibility - and even Excel to a large extent. Numbers ties you to the Mac desktop and iOS crowd. That seems like an already poor incentive to switch. It's great that it works for some people - but it's a niche product, where Excel simply isn't, period.
No offense but you clearly are not a spreadsheet power user (and to be clear you're starting off with what feels like a pretentious reply/generalization: always turns out that the person stating that opinion is an Excel expert and barely looked at anything else.) I have never heard anyone that has used both products deeply ever admit that Numbers comes close to the capabilities of Excel (and this includes a few former Numbers devs). They really aren't even in the same product category. For basic spreadsheet stuff that 90% of people do, sure, and Numbers does have some UI niceties - but the differences go well beyond drag and drop behavior. It's way harder if not impossible to use AppleScript like you can VBA. What is the Numbers equivalent of ODBC? How do you connect pivot tables to external sources? Excel has tremendously more builtin functions. Excel has far better performance, which can start to matter.
Meanwhile Numbers can have field types like star ratings. It uses a fundamentally different visual abstraction. Numbers focuses more on appearance and makes better looking graphs easily out of the box. At the limits of their feature sets though, these are really tools aimed at different audiences. For basic spreadsheet functionality, all of the major spreadsheet programs in the last 2 decades are serviceable.
What's uh? Compuserve had email, but it was not Internet connected nor SMTP, where did I say or imply otherwise. And a BBS in the 1980s wouldn't ask you for your "email" address.
CompuServe was not a BBS in the typical use of the term. And anyway CompuServe did not have an SMTP gateway until a bit later, 1989. They had their own closed system with their infamous octal User IDs eg: 74661,130. BBSes with direct internet email relays were always a rarity until the 90s, when BBSes were rapidly on the decline. And much more prevalent were relay systems such as FidoNet, RelayNet and StormNet.
The easiest way to have access to email and the internet in the 80s was via a university shell account or certain larger industry and defense employers.
No it would not. And "News" on a BBS called the Underground BBS is definitely not something probable. And real name? LOL. This is dream like - superficially/vaguely resembling reality, but very off on careful inspection.
GI side effects in general and bleeding in particular are higher in analgesic dose level of aspirin. Aspirin is a very blunt instrument - it is both anti-inflammatory and anti-thrombotic - it destroys your platelet function even in low doses - this can be a feature/benefit (ie stroke and coronary artery disease or MI) - but for pure analgesia it usually just means increasing bleeding risk for no benefit.