I'm a little later than some of the other posters. We've had a computer at home for most of my life, starting with an IBM PCJr. I grew up playing games on that or Apple II's at school. When I was about 8 or 9, we had a 486-based machine that dad put together. My interest started with wanting to learn the command line to launch my games. It continued when I started to wonder how programs got onto the floppy disks we bought, in the first place. I asked around, and someone had an old book of BASIC programs. It was just full of program listings, and not terribly useful for learning the language from scratch (especially without outside guidance). I figured out enough to do some basic math, to use goto and print, but not much else. I forgot about programming for years (but I knew more about how the computer worked than my father by the time I was about 11).

Fast forward to 10th grade. I had the option for QBasic and Visual Basic programming, followed by C++ in the second semester. I took it. Getting back into programming (Okay, really, getting into it for the first time), felt *right*. Those classes kind of sucked; not much structure, and they treated C++ like "C with iostream", but it was enough to get me looking on my own and teaching myself more.

It seems like the comparison includes the limitation of "without substantial engineering expertise". That situation doesn't apply with Wozniak (assuming you're talking about the Apple I, not the Macintosh, which wasn't made in a garage or back yard). i kan read also hedged their claim by saying "The vast majority of people lack the expertise to build or program computers[...]".

Of course, ikr could've phrased their comments better to eliminate the confusion.

Reading Rainbow was a children's show hosted by LeVar Burton, starting in 1983 and running for 23 years. Each episode was themed (e.g. "construction"), and different segments that fit that theme would be included. That might be something like LeVar going to a construction site and talking to the foreman about how he helps build a building. There was usually a section where a minor celebrity would read a children's book aloud, and the show ends with shots of children, one at a time, doing a couple-line review of a book that they liked.

A couple of years ago, Burton's company produced a Reading Rainbow app with free books and some of his "field trip" segments (apparently. I haven't used it.)

Wooo! LaserDisc! It bugs me that the streaming copy of a movie that some of them provide is marketed as the "Digital Copy" of the movie, when the movie itself is on DVD and Blu-Ray anyhow.

"The Cloud" is more of a marketing term than a technical description of a specific hosting set up, and different people will use different definitions. You can let them continue the guessing game of which meaning you're using and keep calling them idiots, or you can define the term that you're using.

Wonderful, until you've got something (like medical diagnosis) where it could be useful to know something about the patient's ancestry (and help more people than it hurts, social construct, or not).

Condescension. Wonderful. That'll certainly be conducive to creating an interesting discussion.

I'm pretending precisely jack shit. In fact, I said that "bucketing" people provides opportunities for discrimination.

Genes get passed down, of course, and that propogates traits that are associated with the social construct of race (skin/eye/hair color, hair texture, etc). I'm not debating that organisms pass traits to their offspring; I'm saying that someone's racial identification doesn't necessarily have a firm basis in their genetic heritage.

Race is primarily a social construct, rather than a genetic one. Your race is still a label that bigots use as a basis for discrimination, "imaginary" or not.

Descent 1+2 should work fine in Dosbox (and I think that's how GOG distributes those two, anyhow). Descent 2's Windows 95 version seems to work in Wine (according to the AppDB), and so does Descent 3 (especially the GOG version).

I guess the question is this: Is it worth whatever extra configuration time it would take to get the joystick working under Linux via the adapter, recognized by Wine, buttons mapped correctly in-game, etc? I'm not going to guess that it'd be easy to use that controller on newer games (in Windows), but for the original Descent games, I'm guessing "where there's a will, there's a way" would be the appropriate expression.

As an asterisk on those numbers: The SNES count doesn't include any of the Japanese releases, while the PS1, PS2, and N64 counts do. The Super Famicom has 1,442 titles, and 231 were released on Satellaview. Eliminate the titles that were common between the NA/PAL list and the Japanese lists, and the count still comes below the PS1 game count (so your point still stands). I just wanted to compare apples to apples.

That's a silly claim. Replace "possible" with "profitable", and you've got a better argument (but still one that I'd disagree with). DRM will keep an honest person honest, but they're not the ones an IP holder has to worry about anyhow. Someone dishonest will still find a way around the DRM (with the aid of the tiny, clever percentage of the population that can invent ways to circumvent it).

Oops, should've worded that differently. I was thinking of the G5 (or the 970 series, if you want to stick with the IBM names). I was just looking for a well-known 64-bit IBM-produced chip from before 64-bit x86.

If you want to be picky, it *is* supported by Windows 8.1, but only if you use the 32-bit version of the OS.

IBM introduced the 64-bit version of the PowerPC architecture in 2002, and I think that some of their mainframe processors were 64-bit about 2 years before that.

It doesn't; the comparatively-cheap 2nd array of 6TB drives (or equivalent storage method), providing off-site backups does. Having the serial numbers makes it easier to replace the drives themselves.