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I Miss Microsoft Encarta

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281–290 of 419 posts

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#281
post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough, I read it wrong. When I read "commons based" I assume the word commons to mean public property, or Commonwealth concepts. And while Wikipedia doesn't copyright its material, it's still very much a private enterprise, despite depending on volunteers to add content. There are still paid employees of Wikipedia that ultimately manage it. It's not entirely decentralized in that sense. I think your definition…

No, there are paid employees of the Wikimedia Foundation, but not of Wikipedia. They do not ultimately manage Wikipedia, just its hosting; an ArbCom ultimately manages each Wikipedia, although there are the predictable and tiresome power struggles from time to time. However, that's ultimately irrelevant — what counts is that Wikipedia isn't written by employees and isn't owned by the owners of the means of production…

I didn't realize that's how Wikipedia was structured. I think that's fascinating.

"Characteristics central to capitalism include private property, capital accumulation, wage labor, voluntary exchange, a price system and competitive markets."

Capital accumulation is an emergent property of private property. If you can own things, and government protects that and is prohibited from seizing property based on arbitrary factors, then capitalism emerges by default. It's not a "command-based" economy once private property and individual rights are established.

Markets aren't centrally managed in any way, they simply emerge as a property of people trading private property. That employees trade time for someone's else's private property (cash) is just a system that tends to work. I think there's other systems, it's certainly not the only way to organize, but it seems weird to say that it's non-capitalist. When I join a volunteer based organization, and donate my labor, it doesn't mean it's non-capitalist. The organization has simply chosen to give away IP rather than give away services (as a homeless shelter or food bank might do).

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#282
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Encarta’s case, cheap, high density storage mediums were passed by something that already existed and had existed for quite some time before, the internet. In other regards maybe the storage medium was just a side detail and the important part was what could be done with that data thanks to faster computers. There might be some parallels here today with machine learning. Neal Stephenson's quote about the future al…

As Encarta was being developed (~1991 per another comment here), the Internet was still highly nascent. I was at uni during this period, and a major bragging right of the campus I was on was dedicated high-speed network connections to other schools within the university system ... over 56K leased lines. Those were shared amongst the 100k+ student, faculty, and staff population (though a very small fraction of those u…

> The technology of written works has undergone several seismic shifts, from clay tablet to papyrus roll to codex to moveable type.

This confuses a number of different types of technology. For example, we haven't undergone a shift from codices -- we still use that form for all our written works today.

Clay and papyrus are materials on which text is written. Scroll and codex are physical forms in which long texts are organized. Movable type is a technology for recycling printing blocks. None of those three types of things are related to the other two, except that it's impossible to store clay as scrolls because it will dry. Clay is stored looseleaf.

Interestingly, the history of writing in the Near East shows exactly the same confusion -- a big reason written Aramaic grew more popular than Akkadian was that it was drawn on paper and Akkadian was carved into clay, despite the fact that logically nothing's stopping you from carving letters into clay or drawing cuneiform on paper.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#283
post #261
post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the phase that usurped Ecarta's position had more to do with good quality web search and to a lesser extent the crowdsourcing model of Wikipedia (run by a foundation rather than a for profit mega corporation) than to content or data standards.

The arrival of good internet search along with the ever increasing pool of web content doomed a curated content approach such as was used by Encarta (which could never aspire to be as broad or deep as the web). I can tell you, based on watching sales figures and talking to many customers, that web search was a much bigger factor for the business than was Wikipedia. In any case it would have been much trickier to get…

No matter where I go, there you are. Welcome to HN, Joker :).

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#284
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Encarta’s case, cheap, high density storage mediums were passed by something that already existed and had existed for quite some time before, the internet. In other regards maybe the storage medium was just a side detail and the important part was what could be done with that data thanks to faster computers. There might be some parallels here today with machine learning. Neal Stephenson's quote about the future al…

As Encarta was being developed (~1991 per another comment here), the Internet was still highly nascent. I was at uni during this period, and a major bragging right of the campus I was on was dedicated high-speed network connections to other schools within the university system ... over 56K leased lines. Those were shared amongst the 100k+ student, faculty, and staff population (though a very small fraction of those u…

The Internet went from exceedingly obscure to global in the ten years of the 1990s.

This reminds me of the infamous Today show segment circa 1994.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95-yZ-31j9A

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#285
post #272
post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cashless and bankless society. I moved to London last year and have used cash roughly zero times since. Visiting my parents (outside London) is like jumping in to treacle. Finding coins for the bus? Paper tickets on the train? Give me a god damn break. Even using chip and pin is weird now since almost all my purchases, except for dining out, are either touchless, online, or via mobile app. In 20 years i think cash (b…

> Brick and mortar banks will be gone entirely. I certainly haven't set foot in one over a decade. Don't have a safety deposit box with precious metals and jewels inside? Many, many people do - among other items (guns, cash, drugs, etc). While "brick and mortar" banks may not exist, something of the same nature will - some kind of high-security place to store stuff like that, away from home. Maybe it will also be com…

I seem to recall reading an article on HN a few weeks ago about how banks are pulling out of the safety deposit business now that their new branches don't really need vaults for cash, and it's not clear that any replacement for those services is emerging with the same geographic reach as the retail banking system.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#287

Encarta is a great example of Microsoft winning a market, and after it was defeated, letting it fade out. Wikipedia in some ways beat it, but the interactivity elements of Encarta make it something that you kind of wish had a more direct role in the modern day. I wrote about this topic a few years ago ( https://tedium.co/2017/07/13/who-killed-the-encyclopedia/ ), and it led a former CEO of Encyclopaedia Britannica to…

Encarta is a great example of Microsoft winning a market, and after it was defeated, letting it fade out.

Encarta lasted from 1991-2009.

The iPod was introduced in 2001, saw sells start to fall off a cliff around 2009 and were all discontinued in 2017 - except for the iPod in name only iPod Touch. No one would say that the iPod was a failure. Encarta helped start the multimedia PC boom that helped make home computers more ubiquitous just like the iPod was Apple’s introduction to a wider audience.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#288
post #261
post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the phase that usurped Ecarta's position had more to do with good quality web search and to a lesser extent the crowdsourcing model of Wikipedia (run by a foundation rather than a for profit mega corporation) than to content or data standards.

The arrival of good internet search along with the ever increasing pool of web content doomed a curated content approach such as was used by Encarta (which could never aspire to be as broad or deep as the web). I can tell you, based on watching sales figures and talking to many customers, that web search was a much bigger factor for the business than was Wikipedia. In any case it would have been much trickier to get…

Hello trumpetsailor! My former colleagues have been pointing me to multiple fun Encarta threads across social media.:-)

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#289
I remember the cool woosh sound the menus made in Encarta. I also loved the interface that seemed to make it stand out from other Windows applications. I opened up the dlls in Borland C++ to look at the artwork that made up Encarta!

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#290

Encarta was part of my first job out of university. I worked in Microsoft's Multimedia Division, tasked with creating the first video and audio drivers for Windows. IIRC the BMP, WAV, and AVI file formats all came from this team at about this time. In the summer of '91, I was tasked with assembling a 386 PC with an early CD-ROM drive to demo an early build of Encarta at a trade show. It was a lot of effort to find a…

> In the summer of '91, I was tasked with assembling a 386 PC

Interesting, as the 486 came out in late '89. Seems you'd like a little more oomph, but perhaps they were too expensive at the time.

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