I know it's just a typo in the article but I really love the phrase "malware invested version"
In a way, this phrasing also works.
I Miss Microsoft Encarta
41–50 of 419 posts
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#42Obviously this is pure nostalgia. Wikipedia + Google is superior in pretty much all imaginable ways. And available to people "in the developing world". (I don't really get why Scott included that part. The number of people who have access to a PC with a Microsoft Encarta CD-ROM and also don't have web access via their phones.. my guess is that the total number is about 17, globally.) That said, nostalgia is fun somet…
> "Wikipedia + Google is superior in pretty much all imaginable ways"
Excluding grammar and style maybe. A lot of Wikipedia, including many articles on important subjects, are painful to read. Either because they were written by committee or simply by somebody with poor language skills (sometimes even worse than my own!)
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#43It's not reflected in OP's screenshot, but there was a period where Encarta (and a companion product called Microsoft Bookshelf) used a very flat, Swiss-design aesthetic that was catnip to graphic-designer-wanna-be kid me. You can draw a direct line from that era through Microsoft's Neptune UI experiments down to the Metro design language.
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#44Obviously this is pure nostalgia. Wikipedia + Google is superior in pretty much all imaginable ways. And available to people "in the developing world". (I don't really get why Scott included that part. The number of people who have access to a PC with a Microsoft Encarta CD-ROM and also don't have web access via their phones.. my guess is that the total number is about 17, globally.) That said, nostalgia is fun somet…
I'm sorry, this is just incorrect by somebody who either hadn't fully used Encarta / Compton's, or doesn't remember them. I have been looking for 5+ years for a tablet or PC "Atlas" which can easily, with a click of button, show me graphs, or colour regions, based on specified criteria such as political types; economy; climate; productivity; and other interesting stats. Wikipedia articles are horribly inconsistent ab…
You can download the CIA World Factbook, but it isn't an app, nor does search work offline. It is basically a scrape of the site.
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#45Obviously this is pure nostalgia. Wikipedia + Google is superior in pretty much all imaginable ways. And available to people "in the developing world". (I don't really get why Scott included that part. The number of people who have access to a PC with a Microsoft Encarta CD-ROM and also don't have web access via their phones.. my guess is that the total number is about 17, globally.) That said, nostalgia is fun somet…
Not purely. Things like the timeline shown near the bottom don't really exist as far as I can tell on Wikipedia. Also the many writers few editors leads to articles feeling rather disjointed at times with information being repeated pointlessly in different ways in different sections sometimes, there's something to be said for the edited entries of yore in that regard.
I think it'd be really neat and useful for wikipedia to add things like that. A filterable searchable timeline to say "show me all the wars fought in or involving country X" or a map with layers showing different information or events.
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#46Odd anecdote, but my middle school had Encarta 2009 on all the computers and I spent a lot of time going through the historical location free roams finding bad geometry to glitch through walls.
I found out-of-bound clips in like 4 of them, and thought it was all very cool seeing all the level geometry and non-clearing graphics smearing across the screen. Probably contributed to my interest in computers and cybersecurity, ironically, no matter how much my teachers said it was a waste of time...
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#47I miss it and I also miss a real encyclopedia collection. They both offer a thing Wikipedia always lacks: consistency, in writing style, in topic depth, in error rate. I still remember the weekend in 90s when I had a copy of Encarta and threw the whole weekend to click through topics after topics, and amazed at things it offered. It’s so much fun.
Encyclopedia's are interesting.
They had to pick and choose what to go into depth on, but when they wanted to go into depth, they would hire the best writers in the field to explain everything really well. Issac Asimov penned more than one encyclopedia article, as did other science fiction authors.
I honestly learned most of my fundamental science knowledge from old 1950s and 1960s science fact books. Asimov in particular has multiple books that explain science really well, down to the level of nuclear fusion and fission, biochemistry, and a lot of other subjects, and I had a few other books in the same vein that were all really old, and really good.
I remember one book that was biographies of famous scientists, it went into depth about Marie Curry and her contributions to science. Reading that ~age 10 certainly impacted my views on gender equality and helped me believe that potential is not limited by gender.
Wikipedia, for all the great things about it, won't really do that. There isn't a Wikipedia page I can point literally anyone[2] at and say "read this and you'll understand the fundamentals of radiation and atomic physics".
I am sure such resources are out there on the web, but the odds of stumbling upon those resources at random is less than the odds of coming across a good science book at random in a thrift store.
That said there are some awesome YT science channels who have worked to fill this gap in quite well, but video sources are different than written sources, with each having their strength. (I read that short 10 or so page biography of Marie Curry probably a half dozen times, not going to do that with a YT video!)
[2] Where anyone is defined as "age 10 and up, with no mathematical background, who wants to be entertained while they read."
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#48Obviously this is pure nostalgia. Wikipedia + Google is superior in pretty much all imaginable ways. And available to people "in the developing world". (I don't really get why Scott included that part. The number of people who have access to a PC with a Microsoft Encarta CD-ROM and also don't have web access via their phones.. my guess is that the total number is about 17, globally.) That said, nostalgia is fun somet…
Disagree.Your argument is like why buy Financial Times when all the info is out there for free. Wikipedia,while a brilliant invention on its own, is not, and probably never will be a substitute for Encyclopedia type of sources, including Encarta. Subjects like politics, history, nutrition and medicine are very sensitive ones and there's tons of resources out there that tend to either massage the data,or bend the reality all together,which renders them absolutely unreliable.
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#49The period of time before the infiniteness of the internet but after CD-ROMs could pack lots of information was fascinating to grow up in. You had lots of curiosity but still limited access to information so you deeply explored stuff. Add to that, something like Encarta was curated by opinionated editors (whether or not you agree with them is different from the fact that the nature of content is different when it isn…
This makes me think about when I used to go to the MacWorld convention in San Francisco as a kid in the early 90's. My mom would take me out of school every year to go (just for the expo hall, we didn't have enough money to actually go to the conference).
I was just overwhelmed by all the different software on offer, and would load up my bag with free samples and spec sheets for software I had no legitimate need for as a 10 year old, but I ate it all up. I would ride the BART home after, just pouring over my loot and being so excited to try the demos at home.
I went a few times after the internet took off, and it just wasn't the same. Who needs demos from an expo hall, when you can just download everything? There was nothing new to see at the hall, everything could be seen from your home just by visiting a url.
I love the world with the internet, but there certainly has been something lost.
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#50I was going to submit this earlier today, but I thought "nah, nobody else on HN is going to be old enough to remember Encarta" :) I remember when our family first got Encarta, and I spent hour after hour reading and marvelling about how all this information could be so easily accessible! I think we had a 14k dial-up Internet connection at the time, and the web was barely getting started - I really had no idea how thi…
[deleted]