Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I Miss Microsoft Encarta

hanselman.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 419 posts

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#371

Post by tripzilch »

tzs wrote: post #180
shortformblog wrote: post #37

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 think Microsoft had the right idea—it was the killer app for CD-ROMs—though it turned out that the internet would only make it a temporary success story. It was a killer app for CD-ROM, but for the title of the killer app I'd say DeLorme's "Street Atlas USA" had at least an equal claim.

... not quite equal, Encarta was useful in more places than just the US.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#372

Post by amaccuish »

gnulinux wrote: post #300
GordonS wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, I'm almost 40, really didn't realise Encarta had still a thing for people who are now in their early 20's!

Well, we're talking about mid to late 2000s (~15 years ago). Remember that Encarta was supported until 2009. And I grew up in a developing country so everything was happening with a few years lag.

I'm 22 in the UK and remember Encarta fondly.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#373

Post by DrAwdeOccarim »

saagarjha wrote: post #344
tern wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I can travel anywhere in the world and find a place to stay within an hour, and do so frequently 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?

...yea. Weird. But now once you get their you can video conference call with a loved one for cheap, which in a sense takes some of the magic out of traveling as you're never really that much farther away than if you had gone to the grocery store.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#374

Post by tripzilch »

77pt77 wrote: post #328
isostatic wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The deepest rabbit hole I tend to find is tvtropes. Start at https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DownTheRabbitHol... and before I know it time has gone.

Tvtropes should come with a warning

I actually used to have a custom TVTropes Greasemonkey script, that would disable all the links on a TVTropes article. That way I could read it if someone linked an article through a forum or other, but I couldn't go down the rabbit hole. Super simple, little overkill, worked great as a deterrent/speed bump.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#375

Post by clows »

charliemil4 wrote: post #319
hedora wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The projections from big oil in the early 80’s say the global economic system will collapse in about 20 years. They nailed the current temperature rise. No reason to think the rest of the extrapolated curve is wrong.

Source? Curious to read

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97...

possibly https://skepticalscience.com/1982-exxon-accurate-prediction.... (totally unverified - lots of links to the sources though)

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#376

Post by saiya-jin »

DrAwdeOccarim wrote: post #373
saagarjha wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can travel anywhere in the world and find a place to stay within an hour, and do so frequently 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?

...yea. Weird. But now once you get their you can video conference call with a loved one for cheap, which in a sense takes some of the magic out of traveling as you're never really that much farther away than if you had gone to the grocery store.

You can always leave the phone at home, or simply turn it off till some emergency comes and then immediately turn it off again.

It might sound pretty awkward these days of pathetic instagram 'celebrities', but actually makes things like backpacking in the middle of nowhere much, much better experience. The magic is still out there

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#377

Post by tripzilch »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #25
GordonS wrote: 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…

Oh no, I've been looking for "modern Encarta" for years, in particular something that would easily show me different regions coloured by statistics and criteria - the ability to pick part of the earth, and then colour selected regions by economy, or productivity, or politics, or whatever, was phenomenal. Tablets _should_ be such a natural device for an educational geography product; but with free Google Maps + Wikipe…

Isn't GapMinder sort of what you're looking for? https://www.gapminder.org/tools/

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#378

Post by CaptainZapp »

badsectoracula wrote: post #260
jenscow wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly what I was thinking. That was a pain - I think I ended up writing RTF by hand.

Authoring WinHelp files is a pain (and indeed better done by hand or via a convertor from a saner format), but from a user perspective WinHelp is IMO the best format - the only thing i'd like (assuming WinHelp was still distributed with Windows 10 - though you can copy it from a machine that has it and it'll work) is the contents sidebar from HTMLHelp (which is also nice, but a full blown browser engine is IMO overki…

Call me a very ancient oldie, but the - in my opinion - best help system ever was the one from VAX/VMS.

It was rather simple, but thanks to its hyrarchical structure extremely accessible, even when you just started using the operating system.

DEC's extraordinarilly well structured documentation added to the whole experience.

Compared to that most technical documentation today is outright atrocious.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#379

Post by majewsky »

alanh wrote: post #239
echelon wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a door to door encyclopedia salesmen came to our house That's an alien relic of an anecdote as there ever was. The world has profoundly changed in the last twenty five years. Cheap, ubiquitous, networked computing has almost completely rewired society and changed business, jobs, dating, friendship, travel. I really wonder what the next big changes will be. Cheap satellites in orbit and dramatically reduced LEO cost…

My family was never one to spend a dollar if we could spend a nickel, so our encyclopedia was significantly out of date, as was our globe. But if you knew that the USSR didn’t really exist anymore, everything else was pretty much the same. Most knowledge doesn't become wrong; it just becomes history.

My physics teacher once announced, "physics survives all regime changes", as he whipped out a stack of GDR-era textbooks.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#380

Post by corint »

aksss wrote: post #148
cpach wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never mess interactivity when browsing Wikipedia. I love that WP is text-based, so that I can read it in my own preferred tempo. I rarely watch videos since to me they always feel too slow compared to reading text. I understand on an intellectual level that Youtube is a great platform that provide lots of value and entertainment to lots of people, but I never feel that greatness since it’s not something that I pers…

I’m the same way. Video is such a slow mechanism for consuming information, so unless it’s primary material to bear witness to something, it’s usually just a lot of overhead - slow talking intros, context setting, bias, association, etc. My memories with Encarta aren’t that special - the searching was cool but I think I was jaded to the cdrom video thing already, wishing it could be better technically. Definitely gav…

...and in many cases, sufficient filler to tip the video over the 10 minute mark so that more adverts can be shown during it. Don't forget to like and subscribe!
Post reply on HN