I believe my friend still has our 32" 1080i tube TV kicking around. All 180lbs of it. has HDMI and everything if I recall. Old consoles look awesome on it and if you can get your PC drivers to play ball games on that also look stellar, but text looks like trash.
I had one of these. Somehow got it on clearance at Circuit City when it was being EOL'd. I must have hit that window just right, because I got it for something like $450?
Managed to sell it about five years back for $200, and someone picked it up from my house and carried it out of my basement. It was a win all around. They got an amazing display for their old consoles, and despite my fondness for the same, I just wanted to be rid of the thing because I was prepping to move and wanted to rid the house of CRTs.
I really feel like Cray was a larger than life person with any of the stories I've read. It really makes me wonder why no one has made a docudrama movie about him...hmm
I had the opportunity to work for Seymour Cray when he split off Cray Computer Corp. from Cray Research in ‘89 and a bunch of us moved to Colorado Springs. He was a fairly quiet and intense guy, always focused on whatever the “pacing item” of the project happened to be that day.
I'm genuinely curious why python instead of something like PowerShell for Excel specifically. Seems a little out of the farm but I also get how it's a more adopted language.
Python is the most popular language for data analysis with a rich ecosystem of existing libraries for that task.
Incidentally I've worked on many products in the past, and I've never seen anything that approaches the level of product-market-fit that this feature has.
Also, this is the work of many people at the company. To them go the real credit of shipping and getting it out the door to customers.
To associate Excel with all those third-party Python analytical packages. Monte Carlo comes to mind; in the distant past, that was an expensive third-party Excel plug-in.
I have a fleet of harmony remotes and they all still work great. I'll continue using them until an open source alternative arrives that fills this void
Every few months I go searching again to see if anything can beat the Harmony remote with hub (no screen on the remote) and nothing comes close. I mean there are a few products that are decent and what I'd buy if Harmony stopped working but they are not as good as Harmony. The battery life is measured in months (like 6-12) and not having to point the remote is huge QoL improvement. Pair that with being able to script actions for on/off and it was an amazing device.
For a while I hoped someone would buy their Harmony division and keep making them but alas, it was not meant to be.
A laptop of this age should have a serial port. It's possible even with something like Win95 to run a null modem and tcp/IP over that and SMB to copy files to a semi modern OS.
Pidgin was pretty awesome, though its underlying library was so riddled with vulnerabilities…
I greatly enjoyed how with XMPP’s in-band registration you could do things like give each contact a unique XMPP address, only to be used with them. You could have unlimited (well, I never hit a limit) accounts, across a load of servers, proxies per account, unique OTR keys per account, etc.
I don’t think the UI has really been surpassed either, tbh. I really wish someone would do a modern rewrite of Pidgin in some memory safe language.
That said, the vulnerabilities in "libpurple" were way over hyped by someone who rightfully got kicked out of the security community. Most of those vulnerabilities were in fact in protocol implementations that are plug-ins to libpurple and not libpurple itself. I know it's a technicality, but hearing this blatant lie get repeated for over a decade is exhausting.
I mean the Internet adopted ASCII emoji like smilies and what not pretty early on from what I know. Also capslock for yelling is pretty widely known but I don't think there is any way other than chat or word of mouth people pick up on a lot of these.
This is something of a distinction without a difference when we're talking about Western use of ideographic writing in general. Ideographs that are put together from existing symbols are still ideographs if the final shape represents an idea that it also physically resembles. Emoticons were widely used in exactly the same place where we find emoji today, and were conceptually perceived as atomic units, not as colon + parenthesis or whatever.
What makes an emoji different than an emoticon is mostly that some official body gave official recognition to the emoji's existence by adopting it in Unicode and didn't do so for the emoticon.
Emoji were easy to implement in Japanese because they already had an input system, and all the UI to turn phonetic into single characters: はなー＞花. From there it's trivial to implement はなー＞ as well.
They become easier to implement in European languages as we got predictions, and touch screens, but until then implementing emoji would have been much more complex.
The point is, although emoji as known now come with rich selection of emoticons, same didn't apply to earlier Japanese emoji sets.
"Emoji present on the Sharp PI-4000 (1994)" from the article shows 20+ animals(12 from Chinese calendar), 9 relatives(grandpa, baby, so on), 3 types of alcohol(beer, sake, cocktail), and two smileys, one happy and one angry, out of 160 symbols. That's quite unlike typical non-Japanese emoticon sets before iOS emoji.
Granted, the Sharp pocket computer emoji wouldn't have been designed for chat, so there would have been less need for emoticons - but if you look at the list of emoji implemented in phones from NTT doCoMo and J-PHONE had back then linked in the article, there are just 5 each, neither even having a single circular smiley.
I'm not sure that I agree. Maybe the kaomoji were used for second/third person (I haven't used them much), but :) :( :D and friends aren't any less first person expressions than most emoji are.
It was also a Trinitron.
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