RickRussell_CA

Certainly, but Apple was comparing itself to other computer companies with international reach, not to the white box PCs coming out of the Floppy Wizard store in the strip center.

The interaction between Jobs (Michael Fassbender) and Woz (Seth Rogen) pretty much sums up the Apple ][ era.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fweZsmH4Tw

So, I lived through that time, and I supported computers professionally during that time. I started working at a university help desk in 1989.

It’s easy to go back and look at Apple products and white-box PCs of the era (or quasi-legit clones like Compaq, HP, Gateway, etc) and say, “oh, on specs, the Apples were MASSIVELY overpriced – you can get a much better deal with the PC”.

The problem was that PCs were nowhere near on par, functionally, with Macintosh.

• Networking. We were running building-wide Appletalk networks – with TCP/IP gateways – over existing phone wires YEARS before anybody figured out how to get coax or 10base-T installed. We were playing NETWORK GAMES (Bolo, anyone) on Mac in the late 80s.

• And when they did… what do you do with networking in DOS? Unless you ran a completely canned network OS (remember Banyan, Novell, etc. ad infinitum?) and canned apps specifically designed to work with it, you were SOL. Windows 3.0 and 3.1 were a joke compared to System 7.

I configured PCs and Macs for the freshman class in 1995. For the Mac? You plug the ethernet port in and the OS does the rest. For the PC… find a DOS-compatible packet driver that works with your network card, get it running, then run Trumpet Winsock in Windows 3.1, then… then… it was a goddamned nightmare. We had to have special clinics just to get people’s PCs up and running with a web browser, and even then, there were about 10% of machines we just had to say “nope”. Can’t find a working driver, can’t get anything working right. Your IRQs are busted? Who fuckin’ knows. I ran the “Ethernet Clinic” until the late 90s, when Windows 98 finally properly integrated the TCP/IP layer in the OS.

• Useful software on the Mac had a pretty consistent look & feel. On the PC? Even in Windows 3.1, it was all over the map. You might have a Windows native program, you might have a DOS program that launches in a console window, you might have a completely different graphical interface embedded in the software (Delphi apps, anyone?). Games were using DOS into the mid 90s because getting anything working right in Windows 3.1 was a total fuckin crap shoot.

Windows 95 started to fix things, finally. And Windows XP would finally bring an OS with stability comparable to Mac (arguably WIndows 2000 as well, but it was never really offered on non-corporate PCs).

The short version is: that $3000 Mac could do a lot more than that $1800 PC, even if the specs said that the CPU was faster on the PC.

Well, that button probably dates from the late 80s or early 90s, when Apple was comparing Macs to branded IBM PS/2s and such that were sold to schools and enterprises.

And they weren’t wrong, at the time. Those PS/2s were fuckin’ expensive.

you’d like it better over there full-time

The passive-aggressive version of “don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out”.

Or… just let people live with their multiple personalities. It’s not like people didn’t have alt accounts on Reddit specifically so they could talk about stuff in a way that wouldn’t reflect on their primary account.

As long as people behave appropriately on an instance, it’s nobody else’s business what they do on other instances with different accounts.

“Decline in overall quality” is a subjective metric, though. Does defederation reduce participation? Certainly.

But ya know, there’s a reason people defederate certain instances – usually because those instances have attracted people who are disruptive to discussion on other instances.

It’s really been no problem at all for me to keep a foot in lemmy.world, kbin.social, lemmy.ml, and beehaw.org. And a few other instances that appeal to more niche audiences.

And if I really feel like discussion on an instance is offering something and I’m missing out, I can always get an account there.

Not that I’m arguing against better moderation tools, of course. By all means, lemmy devs should prioritize those as soon as scaling/stability issues are dealt with.

My main concern is the long-term cost of compute and storage. These instances aren’t going to be free, and hopefully we can build a funding model that works.

Everybody knows AI is evil.

I guess I never used Twitter as “intended”. I always just cultivated my follow list and watched the people I was following, and looked at the ppl they were replying to & retweeting to identify new people to follow.

For me, Mastodon has been much the same.

Like Lemmy and kbin, it’s a federation model, so strictly speaking you can join any instance that is federated to the rest of them. The first instance I joined (mstdn.plus, I think) got defederated for some reason and the updates from outside the instance stopped coming, so I joined techhub.social, it’s been pretty good.

In my opinion, the output of the disastrous Zoom meeting with the moderators & community of /r/Blind .

Reddit leadership made it clear that they have nothing but contempt for their users. They essentially refused to answer essential questions for the disabled Reddit community.

I guess Spez thinks nobody will care as long as they get their fill of GIFs and pics? I have no idea. I’m not closing out my account, but whatever reddit intended to sell to me, I’m not buying it.