It hurt my brain.

I mean, *really* hurt my brain.

In its day the C64 had absolutely the most sophisticated (and integrated) sound capability of any personal computer on the market. While IBM PCs were wrestling with sound cards with IRQs in order to get very basic sound capability, the C64 integrated sound components were sophisticated enough to synthesize speech. Very obviously synthesized speech, mind you, but it was an incredible feat for its time.

... that StarOffice was a wildly popular office suite in Germany in the 90s (before Sun bought the code), I'm surprised the percentage isn't higher.

Science Fiction (and to a lesser extent, fantasy) seems to be hell-bent on being seen as "respectable" and I just don't understand why. Do roving gangs of literature professors give speculative fiction authors wedgies, swirlies, and shove them into lockers? Is it no longer OK to like stories about space rockets, laser beams and aliens?

... if you're a full-time employee. I found it a little difficult to work there as a contractor. The people I worked with were great, but there was friction because they were pretty much all expecting to be lifers and I considered it a short-term gig. The culture there (at least, when I was there around 2000) was very uncomfortable with the "mercenary" mindset of "do job, get paid, leave."

A netbook that requires internet access in order for it to function in any useful manner? What's the point of a netbook if you can't use it to type up a quick memo/article when you're flying coach on a 4 hour flight? Gah. I am not a fan.

... is that the company named the application after a computer that went berserk and started killing people in order to preserve the mission objective.

I'm not sure I want to listen to my house singing "Daisy, Daisy" in an ever-decreasing key as the corpses of friends & family float listlessly in space. I think people would probably stop coming to my parties after that.

Suggested company motto: "We're 7000 releases away from full-blown psychosis!"

... go ahead and spoil my payday!

http://www.ubersoft.net/comic/hd/2000/12/next-logical-step

http://www.ubersoft.net/comic/hd/2000/12/next-logical-step-ii

Apple, if you really want to go forward with this please have your lawyers shower me with cash.

Ghostview used to have (and may still have) a dual-licensing setup -- the most up-to-date version of Ghostview was under a non-free license that could be purchased by companies that wanted Acrobat support on platforms Adobe wasn't interested in supporting, and the older versions of Ghostview were released under the GPL. I remember RMS commenting on this at the time, and his comment was "I'd rather it be all GPL, but if that's what the creator needs to do in order to support his work so be it."

Perhaps I misunderstand the article, but I don't see this as a new position or a deviation on RMS' part. I also personally disagree that it's "anti Open Source" -- first, on a pedantic level, RMS would say that the issue had nothing to do with "Open Source," rather it was about "Free Software." ;-) Second, and probably a lot more relevant, if software is licensed under the GPL, then it's licensed under the GPL. You're free to hack on it, distribute it, improve it, modify it, as much as you wish under that license, and any new work you add to that software under that license stays under that license as well. So what exactly are you losing?

Einsturzende Neubauten, Minor Threat, Sex Pistols, Subhumans, Throbbing Gristle, Big Black...

... I know exactly what you're talking about! After buying my Pre, I found that:

  - I didn't immediately lose weight
  - I still had to wear glasses
  - the damage to my hearing (after 20 years of listening to good music) wasn't repaired
  - my credit limit wasn't raised, and my day-to-day living expenses weren't reduced

Sure, overall it's a great phone, as far as portable phones that store important information, take pictures, play music and access the internet go, but those four points stick in my craw. Fail!

How exactly does a spreadsheet fit into the "casual user" profile?

"Oh, I was just screwing around one day, modeling possible amortization breakdowns on various theoretical mortgages. You know, just to kill time before I finished up the index and the table of references in my letter to grandma..."

... there is a thriving homebrew community which Palm supports. Precentral.net has a heck of a lot of apps available for the Pre that are not available in the official Pre store.

(I am not affiliated with Precentral.net, I just have a fair amount of homebrew apps on my Pre).

On the ribbon there is an entire tab dedicated to references... from there you can access tools to generate a TOC, list of figures/tables, cross references, endnotes, footnotes, indexes, etc. Usually I don't bother with all that stuff until the end of a documentation project so it's nice to have it all in one place.

I used to do that with the old toolbar too. In fact I do sort of wish it were possible to customize these ribbon bars in the same way you could customize the told button bars. Still, I'm surprised at how convenient it has been in some cases.

I know a fair number of other technical writers who absolutely hate it, though.