I Miss Microsoft Encarta • Hacker News Board

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#411

Post by thaumasiotes » Wed, Aug 21, 2019, 4:57 PM UTC

dredmorbius wrote: post #368

thaumasiotes wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I'm compressing thoughts for brevity. The codex, handwritten, allowed random access, but was still phenomenally expensive to create. On the order of a million dollars per copy. They were chained, the language was standardised -- you brought readers to the work (Latin) rather than works to readers (vernacular). Moveable type, cheap paper, mass literacy, vernacular language, typographic conventions, high-speed presses,…

> The codex, handwritten, allowed random access

So do scrolls. You're not supposed to open the entire scroll at once. The codex is better at this.

> but was still phenomenally expensive to create. On the order of a million dollars per copy.

This is nonsense. You can prepare a very expensive book, but you don't have to. The idea that books were necessarily earth-shakingly expensive to create conflicts with the known reality of commercial popular novels in the ancient world.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#412

Post by chrisco255 » Wed, Aug 21, 2019, 7:34 PM UTC

kragen wrote: post #315

chrisco255 wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

Sounds like you should read the rest of the article, not just part of the introduction. Also, in general, I think you should read more stuff that's objectively true instead of stuff written to persuade you to support a particular political agenda. Reading persuasive tracts like the ones you're paraphrasing gives power to the leaders of the political faction the tracts are from; reading things that are objectively tru…

I don't have time to read a Wikipedia article on a subject I've been studying for decades. I have my own understanding, based on my own readings and my own experiences. Wikipedia is not the ultimate source of truth or final word on any one subject. It's a great resource, but it's far from comprehensive, and it's still subject to narrative slant.

Calling out Wikipedia as non-capitalist is superfluous. It's bizarre, because you still fail to acknowledge that non-profit institutions have existed for centuries, and no one ever bothered to label them "non-capitalist". You are conflating two orthogonal subjects. Sure, profit is an essential component of capitalist economies, but the exclusion of profit does not make an organization non-capitalist any more than it makes it non-communist or non-feudalist.

In general, you should avoid being condescending. I don't give power to anyone, those are my words.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#413

Post by ozzmotik » Wed, Aug 21, 2019, 10:30 PM UTC

wingerlang wrote: post #330

snoshy wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

i certainly found myself thinking a similar thought, if only because said username seems highly applicable to my own life. mostly the jobless part as i have done a lot of work to leave the junkie aspect behind but i would be lying if I said vestiges of it don't still remain

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#414

Post by ew6082 » Thu, Aug 22, 2019, 1:53 AM UTC

mixmastamyk wrote: post #409

1stcity3rdcoast wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good point, so I just looked it up. This April 1991 ad [0] shows 386 desktops with a hard drive at around $2000 in 1991 prices, and the comparable 486 models with a hard drive start at $7300. To put that in perspective, $2000 in 1991 is $3700 in today’s dollars, and the 486 would be a staggering $13,500 today. [0] https://books.google.com/books/about/InfoWorld.html?id=0FAEA...

Interesting, I do remember 2000+ dollar computers in that time period, but $3700!? Although '91 is earlier than I got back into PCs, strongest memories are probably more around '93, '94. The 486SX might have been the ~$2000 computer at that time. I remember later having the AMD 386/40 and 486/100 made better performance affordable.

At that time you could get a moderate 386 system at Walmart or Radio Shack for around $800. These were pretty common consumer systems for kids just on their way to college.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#415

Post by numismatex » Thu, Aug 22, 2019, 5:28 AM UTC

joblessjunkie wrote: post #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…

[dead]

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#416

Post by OJFord » Mon, Aug 26, 2019, 12:48 AM UTC

jdietrich wrote: post #210

floren wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Only $30? (No missing 0?) That's on average (assuming a range of novels to textbooks thay makes the average...) only doubling the book cost to get a copy in another format.

Not ideal (IMO buying the physical book should entitle you to a zero marginal cost PDF copy too, which some publishers do adhere to) but certainly better than I expected.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#417

Post by ravenpi » Mon, Aug 26, 2019, 11:19 AM UTC

pmyteh wrote: post #92

Tokkemon wrote: post #84

One of my favorite CD-ROMs from my childhood was an Encarta offshoot called Microsoft Exploropedia, World of Nature. Basically Encarta for natural sciences but tailored for kids. That game was the bomb.

There is an entire book on the creation of Explorapedia, I sing the body electronic: A year with Microsoft on the multimedia frontier by Fred Moody (my copy is ISBN 0-340-64927-5). It's fascinating for its insights not only on the messiness of the design process, but also the process and deadline constraints that the team were working under (which feel like a general rather than a specific set of lessons).

While I have heard good things about the book itself, it is tainted by the fact that Moody was its author. The man literally and viscerally hated Linux, and went to great lengths to paint it in as poor a light as he could -- and then seemed surprised when people took issue with that. [Note that I neither condone not participate in flaming, but the man's tone really necessitated entire asbestos wardrobes.] I was neither surprised nor saddened when he and his column parted ways.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#418

Post by V-2 » Tue, Aug 27, 2019, 8:17 AM UTC

asdf21 wrote: post #254

V-2 wrote: post #165

Here in Poland Encarta is probably best remembered for its ridiculous entry on Poland, depicting it in a rather outdated manner, to put it mildly. It caused quite an uproar back in the day, and went sort of viral. See http://of19.internetdsl.pl/bzdury/encarta/ (in Polish, but includes the screenshots in English, which are self-explanatory)

Seems about right.

Well, is not.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#419

Post by pmyteh » Thu, Aug 29, 2019, 11:55 PM UTC

ravenpi wrote: post #417

pmyteh wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an entire book on the creation of Explorapedia, I sing the body electronic: A year with Microsoft on the multimedia frontier by Fred Moody (my copy is ISBN 0-340-64927-5). It's fascinating for its insights not only on the messiness of the design process, but also the process and deadline constraints that the team were working under (which feel like a general rather than a specific set of lessons).

While I have heard good things about the book itself, it is tainted by the fact that Moody was its author. The man literally and viscerally hated Linux, and went to great lengths to paint it in as poor a light as he could -- and then seemed surprised when people took issue with that. [Note that I neither condone not participate in flaming, but the man's tone really necessitated entire asbestos wardrobes.] I was neith…

Interesting. I haven't read his column, and that really isn't something I would have guessed from the book. It's nuanced on Microsoft as a company and pretty empathetic towards the people working on the project who are the characters in his story.