Yeah, there's one guy I always tease about pants because once he stood up and was only wearing shorts. Scared me for a second.
Now imagine that in 4K!
Anyways, that's just it... there's no social pressure without eye contact. It is too tempting to websurf during a teleconference.
Well, that's why we need those new and better graphics cards - for real-time generation of a sufficiently believable artificial face of you "looking" into the camera.
People living in South Korea and Japan get to enjoy gigabit bandwidth - and they are relatively cheap too!
I thought the Scots were supposed to be cheap, not Koreans and the Japanese?
64 million light years would be at the other end of the galaxy
...a completely different one to boot.
I agree that the comment that sparked this was talking about special purpose machines (tabulators, etc.) vs computers. I suspect that he went googling for computer history, though, and found the rather specialized definition of "general purpose computer" that the mainframe people created.
I didn't "google" for it, I have known this since I was nine or ten, a quarter century ago, when I got interested in the history of computing. Although I admit that in my native tongue, we called them "universal computers", not "general-purpose computers", which is obviously the same meaning in English, as per the IBM page. The English form of the same term is the only thing I found recently. (Obviously, all the historical publications I was reading as a kid were in my native tongue, not in English.)
Also, some of the old low-end business machines (even the stored program ones, of course, otherwise I wouldn't mention it) had more in common with the tabulating equipment than you might think: many of them were designed to be plugged into the tabulating workflow, given that they were very limited in their internal storage. Only the larger business machines were self-sufficient. I'm not really sure there was any fixed frontier between the tabulating equipment and standalone business computers.
"I said nine inches, not nine centimeters!"
Yeah, I can see how the gift replicas could become awkward...
Living on Earth may be expensive, but it includes an annual free trip around the Sun.