People conflate Facebook as a concept with Facebook the application (or website). I believe social media is a great idea, whether it's Facebook, Twitter, or MySpace. How that information is presented is what gets botched, especially when the platform looks to monetize.

I don't want an algorithm deciding what I should see and when. I don't mind the interjection of ads between articles and posts, I just want to read how I want to see it. I want to see friends posts in chronological order. I want to see articles according to interests I dynamically set. I want the ability to filter - exclude or include - according to my preference, not the platforms.

Is that really too much to ask? Can't my preferences coexist with monetization?

I think so.

My favorite issue of Byte (so much so, I've kept it all these years) is from March 1988 [https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1988-03, PDF pages 225-232] solely because of the beach ball rendering with Phong shading.

After modifying the code so it would compile in Turbo C, I'd execute the program on every PC in the office. The article states the program took 8 minutes on an 80386 with FP emulation; add in an 80387 and run time dropped to less than 30 seconds. That was my experience on our fleet of 286 and 386 office machines.

Running it on my home PC (286-12) without a floating-point co-processor took significantly longer than a 386 but when I plugged in a 287 (yes, I actually bought one so I could run AutoCAD 9), it decreased as dramatically as the 386/387 combo.

"The Late, Great Lanet Earth" by Hal Lindsey.

Dullest Campaign Ever - NYTimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/31/opinion/brooks-dullest-campaign-ever.html

"Finally, dishonesty numbs. A few years ago, newspapers and nonprofits set up fact-checking squads, rating campaign statements with Pinocchios and such. The hope was that if nonpartisan outfits exposed campaign deception, the campaigns would be too ashamed to lie so much.

"This hope was naïve. As John Dickerson of Slate has said, the campaigns want the Pinocchios. They want to show how tough they are. But the result is a credibility vacuum. It’s impossible to take ads seriously. They are the jackhammer noise in the background of life."

I have a collection of 5-1/4" floppies that I've partially archived using an old PC. But I would rally love to use a 5-1/4" USB floppy drive to complete the process. So far I haven't come across anything - not even hints on converting a USB 3-1/2" if it's possible. Any suggestions?

The Turbo Pascal 3 family included three compilers:
* TURBO.COM, the standard compiler;
* TURBO-87.COM for compiling programs that would only run on a computer with an x87 math co-processor;
* TURBOBCD.COM that included a binary coded decimal (BCD) data type for highly accurate real numbers.

Initially, the latter two were additional products and had to be purchased separately. At 3.02A, all three compilers were included in the package.

Yes, I still have my 3.01A & 3.02A diskettes with manuals and will keep them 'til the day I die.

[Grr, didn't realize I wasn't logged in until after I posted the comment.]

It may be revolutionary but for people who stutter - like myself - and others with speech impairments it's disconcerting.

Since switching to Windows 7 I'm no longer so concerned about how my Start Menu is organized. It's far easier (and faster) to simply type in the search box what I'm looking for and select it from the results.

Is this the same stack they use on their website? The same one that renders their website unusable on iPads?

Overall, I think it's a pretty good list. But where's the sports category? Beginning with simulators like the ancient "NFL Challenge" by XOR Software to the life-like playability of Madden Football, video sports games have been some of the prime drivers in advancing the state of gaming platforms. Some of the early commercials for the Xbox and Dreamcast put a heavy emphasis on their NFL franchise games to demonstrate the new realism available. Without these, who knows how "Splinter Cell" and the like would've evolved.

According to an update on gizmodo this is more likely a fake.