Few remember the dark times before the turn of the millennium.
The article is from Nov 30, 1999. New York Times, if you aren’t clued into newspaper aesthetics.
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I would have guessed a bit earlier than '99 (I mean, IBM was still selling PCs at that point?), but probably not by much. I don’t remember that movie, either, but it definitely looks like a 90s movie.
Also, who is LGR?
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Lazy game reviews:
Pretty big youtube channel covering mostly vintage PC gaming. The oddware videos are particularly amusing.
Until the end of the World is mostly known for its soundtrack-- and it is a great soundtrack if you liked the bands of the time., but if you can find the movie, it’s a great example of “five minutes into the future” type settings,.
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I bought an IBM PC shortly before then, when there were two competing 56k modem standards. I also signed up for IBM as my ISP (while keeping AOL because I didn’t know if just an ISP would be as good). It was a bit underwhelming by the fact that the modems in their PCs were the type that was incompatible with the modems that their ISP service used, so it was always slow. Seems like they would’ve at least coordinated that, but no, they had an ISP that was incompatible with the PCs they sold.
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My favorite of that era was the I-Opener which sold for $100, but could “only” connect through a monthly subscription.
But the “hardware lock” was just the IDE connection for the hard drive had all the pins flipped. So you could buy a $5 convertor and have a great little Linux machine .
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Interesting. I’m not much of a youtube kid, but that does look like some fun stuff. And that video at least partially explains why I don’t remember them: sold only at Circuit City for less than a year before being sued into the ground. 
How very on topic for this thread. 
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That sounds awful.
Subsequent attempts by Netpliance to thwart hacking included gluing the BIOS chip into its socket with epoxy and modifying its settings (rendering it unable to detect hard drives), limiting the type of CPU one could use to that included with the unit, and even cutting the pins on the IDE connector.
I don’t know why, anymore, but it still always amazes me that people (or businesses) so reliably double-down on their original dumb idea when confronted with clear evidence that they don’t have a viable business model. No one ever “hacked” one of those machines, they just used the hardware that they paid for as they saw fit.
Definitely poor UX, though. 
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Maybe grocery stores should move fragrance-free products into their own aisle, or into a fragrance-free section at the end of each aisle.
Because it can be hard or impossible to go into fragrance-fume-filled aisles, stop there with your eyes burning, read the labels through the tears, check the ingredients, and read the ingredients labels through the tears.
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What a great idea.
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Thanks. Maybe I should split this with an architecture thread.
I realize I should do more cooking, but it’s one of my nastier migraine triggers. Worse than walking as far as I can, about as bad as turn signals, not as bad as full strobe lights or coffee contamination in my food. I’m not sure why it’s so bad, but it involves a lot of standing around, walking short distances, and reaching or climbing for things.
It would probably help if I could use a wheelchair to cook. But I can’t afford a wheelchair, and anyway, I wouldn’t be able to use it in the kitchen. The counters are too high. The shelves are too high. Some shelves are too high when I’m standing, because I’m only average height, and everything’s built for standard height, 2 meters or more, so I have to climb onto chairs to reach certain shelves.
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More architecture:
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Oh fuck him. His company bought one that a friend worked for and basically “modernized” it with awful business management ideas making it a dreadful place to work. Not to mention ruining the basic mission of the company.
ETA as if an open office will solve any of the country’s problems.
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The panopticon does solve the problem, if the “problem” is too much liberty, or too little authoritarianism.
The prison is the hospital is the school is the workplace. Michel Foucault warned us.
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And student = patient = employee = prisoner. Eeesh.
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It depends what you consider a problem.
Besides the panopticon weeding out liberty, the accessibility problems can help weed out disabled undesirable people from the office. Too introverted. Too autistic and/or sensory-sensitive. Too allergic to perfume. Either those who require service dogs, or in compliance with the ADA standards, those who require refuge from dogs. Next, if there’s some way to bring health insurers’ assessments into the hiring process…
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Or people who have to go to the bathroom too often.
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Yeah, I’ve had to do that since I was 13. But in that case, bathroom accessibility is the biggest barrier. e.g. locking bathrooms to keep people from using them, filling bathrooms with painful cleaning fumes or perfumes, etc. and of course wheelchair accessibility. All these are worse with Crohns than with any of my issues though.
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What do you mean it’s not catching on? I have to re-process pdfs to convert jpx into Kindle-readable formats before sideloading them.
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One of the .gov sites that has tons of public domain maps and historical pictures has almost everything in JPEG2000
Thank you IRFAN viewer
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Trying to find a fix for certain flashing elements, stumble on yet another few discussions of how to cause them, e.g.:
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