https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/03/ab-1043s-internet-age-...
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https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/03/ab-1043s-internet-age-...
It means "To obsolete a unique feature in third-party software by introducing a similar or identical feature to the OS or a first-party program/app." The term stems from Apple's 2002 release of Sherlock 3, which made a popular third-party app named "Watson" irrelevant.
The games were developed overseas (India I think?). I would send them bug reports in Mantis and overnight they would send a new build. Sometimes they would even fix the bugs. I would burn the builds on to EEPROMs and verify them the next day. The EEPROMS had a little round window so they could be erased in a UV box before programming.
Fisher Price used a video codec from Actimagine to fit video clips onto the game cartridges. That's how I learned about Virtualdub. I remember editing clips from a show called Winx.
The big competition was the Leapster LeapPad and they were trouncing us.
One fun thing the engineers did periodically was a toy teardown to see how competitors saved on cost. Cost was critical. They told me how Walmart basically dictates toy cost because they controlled the shelf space.
HN discussion of above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44107655
How Well Do New Python Type Checkers Conform? A Deep Dive into Ty, Pyrefly, and Zuban (2025-08-29) https://sinon.github.io/future-python-type-checkers/
1. Do you need a shared, consistent data store?
2. Does more than one entity need to contribute data?
3. Data records, once written, are never updated or deleted?
4. Sensitive identifiers WILL NOT be written to the data store?
5. Are the entities with write access having a hard time deciding who should be in control of the data store?
6. Do you want a tamperproof log of all writes to the data store?
It used to be hosted at purl.org and run by the OCLC but in 2016 it was transferred to the Internet Archive.
https://web.archive.org/web/20161002094639/https://www.oclc....
In case the older version goes away, here is the archive.org version from October 25, 2023:
https://web.archive.org/web/20231025013949/https://www.23and...
Does anyone have an actual diff?