True but they never used to actively use it i.e. on purpose. If they wanted to find a file, they'd open Word and use the open/file option to move around the directories.

You think that's bad? I know someone who has been using Windows daily in their job for 20 years and yet they have never heard of/seen Windows Explorer (not IE) and only found out that start/all programs lets you see what apps you have, a few weeks ago. They save all their IE short cuts to the desktop, not to IE. Basically, their desktop is one huge splat of shortcuts to apps and web pages. They even keep their photos and docs there (mercifully in a folder).

Or Harry Potter which as Rowling was constantly told, had none of the right tick boxes ticked and many of the 'avoid' ones ticked. Didn't end up doing too badly as I recall after the first few dozen rejections. To be fair, that probably falls into the ~15% 'got it wrong' region the story mentions.

Yes, this. The level of arrogance here can be amazing.

On the other hand, I don't find any of this very suprising. At school we learned all about various ancient civilizations gong back thousands of years, Romans, Greeks, Egyptians, Chinese etc so grew knowing all about the amazing things they got up to and the things they invented across science, engineering, medicine etc. Jarred Diamond has some good books on this.

Agreed. Seems amazing now that you could get spreadsheets and word processors running in 8 to 48k. The only time in recent years I've seen amazing efficiency was a graphics demo that drew a fully rendered scene using algorithmically generated textures. Demo ran for about 5 minutes scrolling about the buildings and hills and was only about 150k

(Non Brits stop reading now, this won't make any sense) Back around 1980 a friend developed an RPG called Bank Holiday Monday where you could play a Mod, Rocker, Punk, New Waver etc and was based around the regular mass fights that featured heavily at seaside resorts back then between the various factions. He had maps of Southend, Brighton etc and you moved around, using weapons and vehicles etc to try and demolish the other faction. You could build your characters up with skills like 'Motor Cycle maintenance' if you were a mod or 'Chain attack' if you were a rocker. ISTR a 'More eyeliner' skill for New Wavers that made it likely an enemy would get scared and retreat. Was quite good fun in an English sort of way.

That was one of the first (might even be the first) paper based games I ever played. I remember trying to get the sheets photostatted (not photocopied, get off my lawn etc) to prolong the life. Just looked it up on Google and it still seems to be around. Plus Google images game me a major nostalgia rush so thanks for that :-)

I miss Classic Traveller and my 3 little black books. Spent a huge chunk of my teens/twenties running games. That is all.

Just need to print the bacon and you'll have a fine meal in no time.

Thank you, yes, what you said. I forgot, the phrase 'big government' means something else in the US and has strong connotations for some people.

This is just yet another big government project gone awry. We get these in the UK all the time. I seriously doubt anyone is talking about the testing of this particular project though. Those involved in testing will just keep doing what they do, good ones doing it properly, bad ones doing it, well badly. The other 99% of the population will just bitch about the site as being generally crap but they won't be saying 'They really should have done more integration and load testing'

Plus of course, not all currencies have just 2 decimals and some have exchange rates which produce huge numbers such as the Yen.

I work in a bank. Our end of day processing runs up numbers in the trillions. Individual currency accounts used for internal processing can easily be in hundreds of billions.

Indeed. I've picked up some PHP to build myself a CMS for a personal website project and C# for another pet project. TBH, my employer tends to work with safe, tried and tested tech for stability so the only way I could get exposed to anything particularly new and 'trendy' is to do it myself and how better to learn something than a project or two at home?