I remember Encarta for its pioneering use of fractal image compression (whatever happened on that front), I recall reading a rather in depth article in BYTE magazine prior to the Encarta usage and thought, wow, and yet, it's one tech that seems to stagnated.
I Miss Microsoft Encarta
351–360 of 419 posts
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#352Encarta still has the best video/animation on Quantum physics I've seen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQnhqqISBSA
Thank you for sharing this video! It certainly clicked for me.
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#353Earlier 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…
Why do you think "safety deposit box" is a "safe deposit box", just because of the name and branding?
Give this a try, go open and put some rock in your safe deposit box, then call the bank and tell them you placed a C4 explosive in the box and will detonate it if they dont deposit gold under a park-bench in 2 days time.
Then watch how safe your safety deposit box is.
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#354Then build it. I’d donate.
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> International money transfers still take a significant percentage Some do, but I can get dollars from the US into most European currencies for less than .5%. We've come a long way from the '90s.
May I ask what platform do you use?
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yah. People will just die. Refugee sort of implies a refuge. There’s not going to be such thing’s around if things go south as we fear they are likely to. It’s gonna play out far more like the Old Testament.
> There’s not going to be such thing’s around Heretofor uninhabitable places such as ... greenland maybe?
Greenland barely has soil.
Take a look at the bed of a former glacier, and count the trees.
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#357Encarta 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.
> Seems you'd like a little more oomph
Seems like a case of "high-spec dev machine" vs "example target device".
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
This basically sounds like WinHelp, which was a compiled format of RTF, prior to the availability of HTML.
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?).
I can remember teaching myself HTML using a WinHelp file I found on a magazine coverdisk.
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#359Didn't Encarta try to close Wikipedia? Or do I remember wrong?
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
> International money transfers still take a significant percentage Some do, but I can get dollars from the US into most European currencies for less than .5%. We've come a long way from the '90s.
May I ask what platform do you use?
(Not OP) TransferWise tends to have a pretty good rate (usually sub 1%), though you would have to transfer a considerable amount of money in one go to get it down to 0.5%.