Up until perhaps about the year 2000, almost everything electronic with a speaker that plugged into the wall, except for really good audiophile equipment, had a faint 60 Hz. hum audible during periods of silence in the program material. One easily learned to ignore it, but it was there. (It was very hard to avoid it in phonograph cartridges, for example).

The ubiquity of 60-Hz hum (or 60-cycle hum as it was called then) was the basis of a plot point in Theodore Sturgeon's psychoanalytic SF story, "The Other Man," for example.

The very characteristic rattle of a motion picture projector--most familiar from 16 mm projectors in classrooms or 8 mm projectors showing home movies, but also faintly audible in many movie theatres. Probably around 1900 to 1980 or so.

The whine of a reel-to-reel tape recorder rewinding, rising in pitch as the diameter of the remaining tape decrees, followed by the dramatic snapping noise as the end of the tape comes off the reel. 1945 to 1990 maybe.

"As he relaxed, he was pierced by the familiar and irritating rattle of some one cranking a Ford: snap-ah-ah, snap-ah-ah, snap-ah-ah. Himself a pious motorist, Babbitt cranked with the unseen driver, with him waited through taut hours for the roar of the starting engine, with him agonized as the roar ceased and again began the infernal patient snap-ah-ahâ"a round, flat sound, a shivering cold-morning sound, a sound infuriating and inescapable. Not till the rising voice of the motor told him that the Ford was moving was he released from the panting tension."--Sinclair Lewis, "Babbitt"

If you look at one of those Internet compilations of Photos you really need to look at to understand, it is very impressive just how confused you can be by chance juxtapositions of visual elements.

#18 is particularly interesting. It's not a precise juxtaposition. The shadow looks like the shadow of a flag; it's not shaped like the rug. You can understand intellectually what's happening in about five seconds. And yet it takes a real effort of will to perceive the rug is lying on the sand. Relax for an instant and it once again looks as if it is levitating.

... I'd love a Studebaker smartphone, but I would die for an Exidy Sorcerer smartphone.

Different technologies have different characteristics, and I guess one has to use one's personal weighting function. I had a pretty good system (AR turntable, top-of-the-line Shure cartridge, electrostatic earphones) and I love digital audio and honestly don't know how anyone can stand vinyl.

I used a dust bug, I used a DiscWasher, I treated my records very carefully, but there always came the dreaded moment when I would hear: "tick." And at that point, I'd always tense up, and only relax 1.8 seconds later if I didn't hear a second "tick." Three consecutive "ticks" 1.8 seconds apart would seriously interfere with my enjoyment of the sound. My success rate on removing them by cleaning was very low--more often then not, the cleaning attempt (even with the best D4 fluid etc.) would simply add a very delicate, light background crackle.

And I am not even talking about tape hiss, surface noise, warp wow, rumble, and a little trace of 60 Hz hum that I never could quite get rid of. And ugh, getting to the end of a symphony and having the big loud glorious coda come up in the inner groove (vinyl was pretty good at the outer edge, but no-kidding-obvious-problems in the slower-moving inner grooves).

And taking the occasional bad pressing back to the record store and arguing with the store clerk about exchanging it.

And changing the darn record every 20-30 minutes... and feeling guilty if I left it unattended and came back later to find it had been playing the end-groove for hours.

Even with a good tonearm and lightweight cartridge, vinyl does not sound as good on the tenth playing as it did on the first.

Digital audio may have its faults and if people enjoy the characteristics of vinyl, there can be no dispute about tastes. But to me the positives outweigh the negatives--by about a factor of ten.

I assume it's a loose reference to overlap between techies interested in open-source products.

In the very early days techies were among the earliest editors, and the content was heavily weighted toward software and computers. My personal introduction to Wikipedia occurred when I was Googling for information some technical details on ASCII--specifically, to confirm my suspicion that both DEC operating systems and CP/M ERRONEOUSLY had used CTRL-Z where CTRL-Y should have been used, confirming that CP/M got some of its ideas from DEC operating systems.

Anyway, by far the best article that came up in the search was Wikipedia's article on ASCII. It was the first time I'd seen Wikipedia, and of course I kept thinking it had something to do with Wiccans etc.

It seems as if there is some historical revisionism going on. My understanding is that Larry Sanger was a guiding light behind NuPedia, a web encyclopedia that was to be written by experts and vetted by authorities--and that after several years of work, only a few hundred articles were completed.

Wikipedia was started as a side-project and rapidly outpaced NuPedia. Sanger acknowledged its success but regretted Wikipedia's failure to value expertise, and proceeded to launch a new project, Citizendium, which has struggled and sputtered and currently survives with about 20,000 articles and relatively little prominence.

While Jimmy Wales acknowledges Sanger as a co-founder of Wikipedia, and has said that Sanger created many of the policies that to which Wales credits Wikipedia's success, nevertheless it seems a little disingenuous for Sanger to emphasize "Wikipedia."

...shrugs.

Googling on 'site:slashdot.org "flying car"' turns up numerous references to flying cars, ALL in very advanced stages of development and ready for production, flying your way soon.

Terrafugia... "Flying Car Passes First Flight Test..."

PAL-V One, "Finally, a flying car for the masses" made its first maiden flight...

M400 flying car "more economical than SUV"...

"the SkyCar, an invention by Moller International" was to be "Ready by end of year." And that year was 1999.

...would be running on more computers than all other operating systems combined by, IIRC, 2003.

Yahoo! was originally an acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle."

If it doesn't stand for that any more, then it must stand for Jonathan Swift's fictional Yahoos, creatures that were "filthy and with unpleasant habits, resembling human beings far too closely for the liking of protagonist Lemuel Gulliver.... The Yahoos are primitive creatures obsessed with 'pretty stones'they find by digging in mud, thus representing the distasteful materialism and ignorant elitism Swift encountered in Britain. Hence the term 'yahoo' has come to mean 'a crude, brutish or obscenely coarse person."

A pity that they are doing this. As time goes on and SEO gets cleverer and cleverer, I find that Google's searches are becoming less and less good, and it would seem that a human-generated directory would start to become useful once again.

And you can't even tell me which one that is--because they are all called "Windows."

These days Microsoft is changing their branding around faster than a huckster playing the shell game. No end-user knows what the implied promise of any of their brands is, and none of their brands are stable for long enough to figure out whether the implied promise is kept.

I'm guessing this is a reflection of inner turmoil, and that whenever some internal group gets a new manager, that manager gets to pick new names for everything.

Microsoft, like some other companies, doesn't quite get it that perception is only part of the reality, the reality is also part of the reality. You can't solve the problem of inconsistent user interfaces just by calling it all "Windows."