smacktoward

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

And if my aunt had wheels and pedals, she'd be a bicycle.

They didn't stock up on ventilators by throwing darts at a dartboard to choose what type of medical equipment to buy. They stocked up on ventilators because a pandemic centering on a respiratory illness was statistically much more likely to occur than one centering on the kidneys.

The only real solution is to hammer home the message that "utf8mb4" is what you put into MySQL if you want UTF-8.

This argument would have been a lot more convincing before Bush v. Gore.

I can’t help it, I LOLed.

I guess you could argue that things could somehow have turned out even worse than that, but that feels like a reach.

Not at all. Being close to your inputs means you don’t have to ship them as far to make use of them. And the shorter the distance you have to ship them, the less you will pay for shipping. Lower overhead equals higher efficiency.

It’s like, why were car factories in the U.S. clustered around the Great Lakes? Because car factories need steel, and the steel mills were in Pennsylvania. And why were the steel mills in Pennsylvania? Because steel mills need coal, and the coal mines were in Appalachia. You could theoretically build these factories anywhere, but the company that built close to their inputs would have an economic edge over the company that didn’t.

It has, let’s say, not aged gracefully.

IRC was of course always open, but that's kind of orthogonal to this discussion as it never really had any traction with the general public the way AIM, ICQ, Yahoo! Messenger, etc. did.

I guess what I’m saying is, things sucked just as much then as they do now. Maybe more! Sigh.

It was great! The whole package fit in a couple pockets, you could turn it on and be typing practically instantly, and the modem made it easy to transfer your work (and also let the setup do double duty as an e-mail terminal). You could print from it wirelessly to any printer that had an IrDA (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared_Data_Association) port. And the whole thing ran for ages on a couple of AA batteries, which were cheap and universally available when you needed to replace them. The only downside was the Visor’s low-res monochrome display, but for writing that wasn’t too serious a limitation. I still miss that rig.

The AlphaSmart products seemed like an attempt to bundle this kind of cobbled-together DIY rig into a single product with everything included in one box. I never had the chance to use them, but I was disappointed they never seemed to find an audience.