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YOU wOULDN’T
DOWNLOAd A
CIVILISATION

…my mazda 2 outhandles my MX-5s and is the only car i’ve driven which keeps pace with my elise; we’ve been waiting for an electric subcompact hatchback for about ten years now but the stateside market keeps doing everything it can not to offer me one…

…depending upon the week, somewhere between ⅔ and ⅘ of my workflow can be in outlook…

…our IT policy required a shift to new outlook last year and it devastated my productivity: i struggled against its user-hostile interface for a couple of weeks and eventually just stayed home so i could get work done, despite our back-to-office mandate…in short order i was given an administrator account and i’m back on old outlook again…

…back in the CRT era i needed at least a 72Hz refresh rate to not feel any discomfort; that doesn’t exactly correlate with framerates on modern LCD displays but i think it’s a good proxy for the threshold of general perceptiblity…

…are greater framerates smoother?..sure, especially in my peripheral vision, but 72 FPS is generally good-enough beyond which returns start diminishing…

…NCSA mosaic won the web, absolutely; in truth i think it gave a lot of us an excuse to upgrade from terminals and shell accounts…

…i remember going to our computer lab in the early nineties and seeing a flyer about this new protocol called the world wide web, thinking to myself in what way is that better than gopher?..

…my experience before ‘high-efficiency incandescent’ halogens was the same: i have thirty-year-old proper halogen lamps either still going strong or which have been replaced only once over that period…these little A19 halogens, though, have an such absurdly-short duty cycle that they’re viable only by virtue of stocking up dozens of cases for pennies on the dollar when they were phased out a couple of years ago…

…i do hope that we have respectable consumer bulbs available in perhaps five years after those few hundred halogen bulbs are gone, but i’m not optimistic as poor spectra appear inherent to LED technology and the market seems to have settled on ‘good-enough’…proper incandescent bulbs are of course still available for specialty applications, but they’re not easy to get…

…the contractor-grade FEIT incandescents installed when we built our house enjoyed a MTBF of about five years; the FEIT halogens (‘high-efficiency incandescent’) i stocked up to replace them after traditional incandescents phased out are on the order of six months MTBF…

…while i question whether the manufacturing and distribution of ten fourty-watt halogen bulbs really emits less carbon than one sixty-watt incandescent running for the same duration, at least the spectra are unchanged: i’ve yet to find any LEDs which offer acceptable black-body spectra and i specify the things professionally…

…that’s the POWER model: the unit posted above is the consumer version with the SX chip, no math coprocessor and fewer function keys…

…NeXTstep was built on mach and, although i’m unsure if any antecedents remain in macOS, it was certainly production-ready in its day; i remember a couple of decades ago there were stopgap versions of the HURD built on top of mach instead of their own microkernel but i thought that was only ever intended as a temporary workaround…

…i presume on that basis that sustained developer interest was its greatest hurdle, no pun intended…

edit: …is this the post-mortem you mentioned?..

…i’m absolutely ignorant of its current state, but every time i’ve checked in on progress of GNU/hurd over the past three decades, it still hasn’t matured into a stable production-ready platform: i’m not sure if that’s an artifact of technical viability or developer interest…

…i think pornhub’s leaving money on the table not starting a SFW video platform…

…do you ever smell things which nobody else notices?..

…my original aftershox aeropex eventually developed a stereo imbalance after about four years of daily (all day) use, but they were fantastic for a collaborative office environment where other headphones get in the way; i recently replaced them with shox openrun pro which offer improved bass response but are otherwise nearly indistinguishable (although i prefer the original UI voice)…

…of course they’re not high-fidelity headphones, but especially with the improved bass i find myself enjoying music in a way nothing short of speakers can replicate in a shared workspace; i just forget that they’re there more often than not…

…they make for transparently fluent remote conferences, too: it’s kind of funny, since i brought mine into the studio after the pandemic, they caught on and now half our office wears them…

…with the prevalence of clickbaity bottom-feeder news sites out there, i’ve learned to avoid TFAs and await user summaries instead…

(clicks through)

…yep, seven nine ads plus another pop-over, about 15% of window real estate dedicated to the actual story…

Take a bath. And get a job.

(but yeah, eleven is awful)

…i’m surprised pornhub hasn’t rolled out an all-ages video site…

…well i guess draft messages in outlook can make-do in a pinch…

…me, summer of `93, insisting that the world-wide-web would never catch on when we already have gopher: cut to fifteen years later, i’m hanging out with its author on second life of all places, and yeah, that never really caught on, either…

…open platforms matter…