341–350 of 419 posts
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Not to stray too far from the subject, and you clearly have some valuable ability to improvise in tough engineering requirements. Where did you end up?
Hopefully his username is not an indication.
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> 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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/business/safe-deposit-box...
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I think this may be a bit of an exaggeration. It's true that people socialize more in the subway than they used to, now that they can send WhatsApp audio messages to their friends instead of reading a novel. But the grocery store half a block away still sells food in much the same way they did in 1994. Bigots still yell at me on the street to go back to my own country. Most of the workforce is still employed rather t…
For the ~95th–99th percentile wealth class, the world has changed considerably. For instance, I can travel anywhere in the world and find a place to stay within an hour, and do so frequently. As a business owner, I can find an international market for my product in a matter of months. I can get anywhere I need to without owning a car. I can maintain a high salary while living in a remote location, of traveling. For t…
Could you not do this before? Just book a plane ticket at the airline desk and ask for an empty room once you arrive at a hotel?
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It was in fact exactly that. The WinHelp team got folded into our group, and then WinHelp became something of an orphaned project for a while (or maybe forever?).
Off topic: Thank you for getting me to research the history of the hyperlink [1]. - 1945 linked microfilm pages in the essay "As We May Think" by Vannevar Bush [2] - 1964 the term "hyperlink" in Project Xanadu by Ted Nelson - 1983 the "highlighted link" in HyperTIES system by Dan Ostroffin [3] - 1989 manifesto for the Web by Tim Berners-Lee [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlink#History [2]: https://www.theatla…
"Douglas falls asleep in front of a television and dreams about future time when he may be allowed to play a more active role in the information he chooses to digest."
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I think this may be a bit of an exaggeration. It's true that people socialize more in the subway than they used to, now that they can send WhatsApp audio messages to their friends instead of reading a novel. But the grocery store half a block away still sells food in much the same way they did in 1994. Bigots still yell at me on the street to go back to my own country. Most of the workforce is still employed rather t…
For the ~95th–99th percentile wealth class, the world has changed considerably. For instance, I can travel anywhere in the world and find a place to stay within an hour, and do so frequently. As a business owner, I can find an international market for my product in a matter of months. I can get anywhere I need to without owning a car. I can maintain a high salary while living in a remote location, of traveling. For t…
Even in poor countries Facebook and cheap instant communication like WhatsApp have rewired the way people socialize and stay in touch.
This is mostly a response to the commenter before you, except your last sentence.
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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
What would that look like? An incompatible sister network that offers something the existing internet does not offer? A new network created after major disasters and world wide nuclear war destroy all existing infrastructure? I can’t imagine the existing internet would ever be replaced, certainly not by something offering privacy like ToR, because not enough people really care about privacy. The average person doesn’t really give a damn.
I miss Encarta, but most of all I miss Mindmaze.
It'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.
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…
We have an old encyclopedia set - not Britannica though, from the 1910s or 1920s. I think it was my grandfather's originally, bought for father and uncles. Perhaps the generation earlier. Whilst it's not especially useful in today's world, it's a fascinating relic, especially on trades and skills that have declined or died out. On medicine, zoology and other sciences, it's occasionally surprising how we used to think…
Same for me. My grandfather was a teacher and I saved quite a few of the old school/teaching books after he died.
Did you know that the Empire State Building is the highest building on earth?
Well, it was, when these books were printed. :-)