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I Miss Microsoft Encarta

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201–210 of 419 posts

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#201
post #171

Writing this from an occasionally-connected hand computer in the “developing world”, don't use Encarta. Use Kiwix. I have a 45000-article slice of the English Wikipedia here in 6 GB, with nearly all the pictures, and even animations and some video and audio, such as the radio broadcast of the Hindenburg crash. To give you an idea of its breadth, articles I've consulted recently include "anal sex", "rectum", "convolut…

Don't pretend like Wikipedia doesn't depend on donations from primarily capitalist economy citizens. Just because an organization is non-profit does not mean it's anti-capitalist, or commons-based. It is still a private organization run by private individuals. They just don't distribute profits to shareholders and their business model is donation-based, just as churches have been for centuries. I agree that there's a…

I don't know why you would suggest I was pretending that? The rest of your comment seems like an irrelevant rebuttal to something I didn't even suggest, except that you seem to not know what "commons-based" means, so you falsely assert that Wikipedia isn't commons-based [peer production product].

Capitalism is a system of production in which productive work is carried out by employees using means of production, such as factories, that are the private property of a capitalist that employs them, and that capitalist is the owner of the work product. Linux is largely produced this way, although originally it was produced by commons-based peer production, and so, for that matter, is the Internet Archive; Wikipedia and LAPACK largely are not. The distinction doesn't have anything to do with non-profit corporations; whether the capitalist is a non-profit corporation or a private citizen doesn't really affect the system of production much.

"Non-capitalist" doesn't mean "anti-capitalist". Capitalism wasn't anti-feudalism either! I mean, except in the sense that in Europe the nascent capitalist cities often gained independence from the feudal system, and eventually capitalist power structures became more influential than feudal ones and displaced them after a few centuries, but in that sense everything is anti-everything-else.

Very few people are less anti-capitalist than Jimmy Wales.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#202
post #29

I had Encarta '97 as an 11yo, purchased at a Malaysian street vendor market for probably all of 3 bucks. It felt incredible to have that much knowledge available for almost no money. And it wasn't just boring text like the paper versions, there were videos too! There was point in time where that truly felt like the future. Considering that we're now in the age of autoplaying, monetized "content" video nearly everywhe…

Pretty much same experience but in Argentina. I got Encarta 97 or 98 for 5 pesos, 5 dollars at that time, when I was 11 years old. Later I read about a Visual Basic course in a newspaper so I figured out that the way to build software was using this Visual Basic software. So I went to the same place where I bought Encarta and got Visual Basic 5, which was my first programming language.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#203
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember getting Encarta 95 back when it first came out (I was 14 at the time) and the interactive elements and audio clips blew my mind. It changed how I thought about information and got me that much more invested in learning technology. Literally a week after getting Encarta a door to door encyclopedia salesmen came to our house and I showed him why I did not need his books. You could see the look of terror in h…

My parents got us a full blown Encyclopedia Britannica book set in the 80s. Probably cost $1000 which was difficult by how much they made. But they paid it down monthly. I used to have loads of fun thumbing through those books. There were a few index books where you looked up a topic and it would refer you to a page in one of the other books. Closest thing to the internet back then.

I had a complete set of the Joy of Knowledge Encyclopedia when I was a kid in the early 80s. They'd send you a magazine-sized section each week and you'd gradually build up to a full set which you could bind yourself in the provided hardback covers.

I think subscribing to that was one of the best things my parents ever did for my education. Over the course of my youth I devoured it several times and credit it to my earliest exposure to countless subjects that they'd never touch at school.

One of the most notable things about The Joy of Knowledge was the extraordinary explanatory art. One day I will have to find my books and make some scans.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#204
post #171

Writing this from an occasionally-connected hand computer in the “developing world”, don't use Encarta. Use Kiwix. I have a 45000-article slice of the English Wikipedia here in 6 GB, with nearly all the pictures, and even animations and some video and audio, such as the radio broadcast of the Hindenburg crash. To give you an idea of its breadth, articles I've consulted recently include "anal sex", "rectum", "convolut…

While I appreciate the recommendations, the language/tone is a bit over the top. Nobody’s seriously suggesting you should dump offline slices of Google Maps, or Open Street Map (OsmAnd) in order to use an outdated virtual atlas. It’s more like we’re reminiscing on how National Geographic (and others) used to actually publish these very large world atlases, and how for it’s time, CD-ROM-delivered encyclopedias for the…

Thank you! Censored.

The original article does indeed suggest that people like me are using Encarta today rather than the things I suggested. I assume Scott is correct about that, and I wanted to offer them some better alternatives than the profoundly shitty proprietary experience offered by Encarta. I mean, what does Encarta have to say about principal component analysis or anal sex?

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#205
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 combination of hardware and drivers that would work reliably together.

Encarta itself (at least at that time) was written as a Word document. Hyperlinks were defined using footnotes, and animation and audio placeholders were defined with custom OLE objects. The whole thing got exported as RTF and fed to a compiler, which created the runtime data structures optimized for CD-ROM access and that also built a full-text search index. The compilation was very slow and required huge amounts of RAM.

Around this time, the team had some awareness of HTML as one of many emerging hypertext markup languages, but the internet was still a few years away and no one knew what format would "win" for hypertext. In any case, there were no tools or browsers at all, so we had to build everything -- including our own search engine for the CD-ROM.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#206
post #3

I 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…

Are you kidding me? The only way hearing the opening screen again[0] could evoke more warm fuzzy nostalgia with me is if at the end it would crossfade into Baba Yetu from Civ IV's main menu screen[1]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fRX4R6MY4A [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5e0Qelqp-Cc

The MindMaze[1] music takes me back. I spent three-digits hours on that game as a little kid.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hT-VbFcck6A

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#207
I didn't have Encarta, I had the lite version, Microsoft Bookshelf. I recall it being a major help on many junior high and maybe even high school homework assignments. It had a dictionary, thesaurus and a mini encyclopedia! It was decidedly less than Encarta, but it still inspired a sense of wonder and amazement in at least one young person.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you kidding me? The only way hearing the opening screen again[0] could evoke more warm fuzzy nostalgia with me is if at the end it would crossfade into Baba Yetu from Civ IV's main menu screen[1]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fRX4R6MY4A [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5e0Qelqp-Cc

The MindMaze[1] music takes me back. I spent three-digits hours on that game as a little kid. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hT-VbFcck6A

It shouldn't be that hard to build MindMaze on top of Wikipedia. I wonder if anyone's done it?

Although I do remember the hard geography questions very frequently just being "What is the county seat of (insert random US county)?"

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#209

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…

I remember getting Encarta 95 back when it first came out (I was 14 at the time) and the interactive elements and audio clips blew my mind. It changed how I thought about information and got me that much more invested in learning technology. Literally a week after getting Encarta a door to door encyclopedia salesmen came to our house and I showed him why I did not need his books. You could see the look of terror in h…

Do you happen to remember this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fRX4R6MY4A

:)

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#210
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a Fujitsu Scansnap 1500 and a heavy duty paper guillotine (basically a very sharp, very tall blade, kind of like this one on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/HFS-Heavy-Guillotine-Paper-Cutter/dp/... ). The ScanSnap came with a license to Abbyy's OCR software (which is good for words but it makes for interesting jumbles when you have tables and of course no math recognition). And the Foxit PDF editor version. Sin…

Ah, I should have guessed it would be a destructive process. Still something I'll keep in mind but I have a particular weakness about destroying old books, even if intellectually I understand 1) it's not a valuable book and 2) there are other copies out there and 3) it's worth more to me in PDF form.

Non-destructive scanning is very much an option, but it's slower, more expensive and requires a bulky rig. It's probably only worth the effort if you're a serious data hoarder.

If you have a handful of precious books that you really can't bear to cut up, commercial non-destructive scanning services are available at ~$30 per book.

https://linearbookscanner.org/

https://www.diybookscanner.org/

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