jasonwatkinspdx

Right now it's largely a vanity product sadly.

Yeah, the Pro and MMX were totally different market segments, not alternatives for each other. The Pro's competition at the time was DEC Alpha, PA RISC, etc. It wasn't a chip that made sense for ordinary PC users at the time.

I wonder where you'd hit the performance limits vs the algorithmic improvements. On our family pentium 120 playing an mp3 in Winamp took 10-15% of the CPU, so I'm not sure how much headroom there'd be.

But anecdotally I'll share that one of my brother's college roomies was a consultant for RealVideo and was behind their initial codecs. He came back to them with algorithmic improvements a bit later and they just cold shouldered him saying the existing codec was good enough.

So who knows if the biz side folks at the time would have even seen value in better codecs, as unbelievable as that seems to us now in the streaming and zoom call world.

Yeah, when glquake and the Voodoo1 came out, I was actually initially disappointed because I'd seen demos of vquake on the verite and its texture mapping was closer to the original. But you couldn't complain about the framerate of the 3dfx.

Yeah, Cell was a disaster, and it showed Sony leadership at the time was actually clueless about big reasons the PSX and PS2 were so successful (it's the developers dummies!)

Really the PS3's only saving grace was it was a great deal for a Blu-ray player.

AIRC the 256 was the first consumer card with hardware transform and lighting, so it's not wholly dishonest to refer to it as something more substantial than just a triangle rasterizer. Also DirectX didn't support shaders until a year or two later.

Yeah, early on in the DVD era having deleted scenes and commentary tracks was totally new and a big deal for a lot of us.

In the peak of the DVD era my SO and I were both big movie fans, and at one point had watched literally everything the Blockbuster and Hollywood video in our neighborhood had. There just wasn't the embarrassment of riches of the post youtube world.

It's because reporting requirements changed, in particular employees with stock options no longer counted as shareholders for the purpose of crossing the mandatory reporting threshold.

Before that change companies like MS were in essence forced to IPO, because they'd get all the downsizes of public reporting, without the benefit of accessing market liquidity. So once you were over the threshold, it made no sense to not go all the way.

That's no longer true, and has coincided with a huge expansion in private equity funding growth stage companies vs needing public liquidity. As a result these IPOs being done after their growth stage is largely over are offering the public a very different bet that tech company IPOs of the past.

I think Google's biggest social media fumble was just letting gtalk fade away into irrelevance.

I've met folks that descend from the Zapotec in southern Mexico, and they still use whistling language to talk to each other across mountain valleys.

Yeah, I think that's fair. IMO DS9 got the balance right because it's a bit more gritty than TNG, accepts more complexity and ambiguity, but still holds up those ideals as something worth striving for even against severe difficulties.

I'm sad to say the newest Trek shows have just missed me.

The varieties used for win are generally not good for eating and vice versa. Not universally so but generally.

> I don't know any pot smoker who ever gave a flying crap if it was legal.

I know plenty.

Generally they fit the pattern of being familiar with it from exposure a few times as teenagers or such and liked it, but it wasn't a big enough deal for them to want to find and maintain a relationship with a drug dealer, concerns that if they pulled it out at a party it might lead to consequences within their social or professional circle, etc.

Ah yes, it's always those dastardly feminists' fault...

Yeah, also I think part of that was Gene wanted to portray a more optimistic vision of the future as a principled thing, which I get, but that also made Classic and TNG feel a bit superficial and low stakes a lot of the time. DS9 is personally my favorite series, mostly because of the age I was when it came out, but also because I liked that they shifted it to be a bit less idealistic.

I played a bunch of random shareware games on our family's Apple IIgs and I'd love to find some of those again, but I was so young I can't really remember much other than like some visual images and vibes.

Another part of the story a lot of people don't know is apparently Lucas's cut of the original Star Wars was horrible, so his wife came in and redid everything and that's the version that went to theaters. And she was the editor on the remaining two of the original trilogy as well.

I think it's pretty clear to everyone now that when Lucas is flying solo his final output is... not great. He obviously imagined a universe a lot of people find compelling, but wasn't always the best person to realize the vision of that universe.

I'll just say that I'm aware of instances where founders have used "clerical errors" in an attempt to trick departed employees from properly vesting their options.

I don't have any inside info about this case obviously, but it's clear Nvidia would have ample motive to try to claw back whatever they could as mid 1996 was when they made their pivot after the disaster.

Again, not throwing around accusations here, just saying it may not be as cut and dried as "it was just an oops but everyone forgot about it for 30 years."

Yup, my friends had one and loved it despite the... unique styling.

They live in the Puget Sound area, and both work at the same place. It worked out to where they could do their commute, and ordinary errands entirely on battery, and only needed the range extender if they were going into downtown Seattle or on a road trip or such.

It was considerably more messy than that but I don't want to dredge up old drama in detail.

At around the same age I learned a version/imitation of Object Pascal for scripting the PIRCH IRC client on windows 95. It was neet when a friends dad who was a professional programmer showed me the latest version of Delphi, which he was pretty excited about, and I could actually understand most of what he was showing me.

Ah yes, the same way they built us all solar roof tiles.

They're assuming $30/kg launch costs.

Nope, it's a single massive panel sat and they're using $30/kg as their launch costs.

Up to you how plausible you think that is.

You don't seem to understand what DoorDash did wasn't legal. They violated NY's minimum rate law which has provisions specific to gig economy delivery services.

You may be treating everyone equally in your mind, but prose like the above reads as pretentious to most people, so I don't think your approach is particularly persuasive.

Additionally, when I make comments like the above, I don't think the person I'm responding to is actually persuadable. It's not some sort of good faith socratic debate.

Yeah, the comment is a variation on this common thought ending cliche: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-som...

And these people are always so smug about it, like they're Columbo at the end of an episode doing the big reveal of your moral hypocrisy or whatever.

If they can get Starship reliable enough, it'll definitely be successful even if it never goes to mars.

But despite SpaceX's huge successes with Falcon, that doesn't prove they'll cross the finish line with Starship. Falcon and specifically the Merlin engine made just about every choice they could in favor of risk reduction rather than the best possible performance. It was a continuation of work that Tom Mueller did while at TRW.

With Starship they're in more uncharted territory, especially the re-entry concept, and the engine has been designed under the opposite philosophy of trying to push limits.

Ok, so let's imagine that it's common that mom and pop stores cheat employees by adjusting timesheets. Let's say we also find that Walmart was doing this as official policy accross all their stores.

Are we supposed to just say "welp, that's ok Walmart, keep doing it, because we can't stop every other mom and pop store in the nation from potentially doing this."

It's an absurd position to take.

Yeah, the issue isn't knowing how to build small reactors, it's whether you can do so with enough economy of scale and learning to make it cheaper than conventional nuclear.

And I personally have switched from bull to bear on that. I was rooting for NuScale but they're hitting the same thing as everyone else.

Meanwhile, battery storage has been on an insane cost reduction curve.