Not giveaways, but it was instead a "name your own price" discount that allowed you to pay as little as $1399 and as much as $9999 (your choice) for an OP-1. What's bizarre is throughout the month of July, the OP-1 Field was completely SOLD OUT. And it felt pretty galling to their customers they would have this "name your price" promotion continue into July with the same device as the previous month - most people expected them to switch up which item would get the discount. No one was able to purchase an OP-1 from July 1 - July 31 at any price on their site.
I traveled across the country promoting Comcast@home for the summer of 1998. We visited malls near major cities where the service initially rolled out -- places like the Irvine Spectrum and the Smith Haven Mall. For each mall, the local cable company (usually Comcast, sometimes it was Cox?) provided a cable drop that gave us an approx. 300kbps connection. In some cases, this was the first broadband internet connection the mall had ever received (with most stores using dial-up modems to transmit their sales to the corp. office at the time).
Our setup required a POTS connection as well so we could do races between the two. We used comically large jpegs to do the demonstration.
My most memorable experiences from that time were from interacting with older folks who had never even seen "the internet". Some people had traveled many hours just to see the internet for themselves — even crossing state lines to get to us. And we felt like the Oracle at Delphi. Folks not even knowing how to use a mouse asking us to find information about their army platoon or information on old friends who they lost touch with. Some just wanting to us to explain what the internet was and how they might be able to use it.
We traveled with an enormous rack we called the UBR (which they told us was a universal broadband router -- which we picked up in San Jose from Cisco Systems). Sidenote: Sorry Cisco for backing up into (and majorly damaging) the fence surrounding your dumpsters!! This device provided a network connection to each of the four kiosks we had spread over the small footprint we were allotted in whatever court they had set aside for our use.
I remember showing folks how fast the connection was by downloading Doom to the local machine. The UBR would cache large files so in some cases, files would download in what felt like an instant and we would have to explain what a cache is and why those kind of speeds are not representative of average use.
I was a very heavy internet user at the time and had only ever experienced a connection as fast in the dorms on campus at the state college I attended.
It was a blast.
To Patrick (from Toronto) from @Home: I never did read RFC 793 which you so thoughtfully printed out for us on what seemed like a ream of paper.
It definitely depends on what language you’re using and the complexity. But Claude 3.5 and now 3.7 are far superior in my experience for coding tasks. It’s like the difference between ChatGPT 3.5 and 4. It’s far and away more useful and less error-prone for my use cases than other sota models. Cursor + Claude 3.7 in Agent mode is my goto.
Yes, I believe it’s a fork of VS Code, so all your favorite extensions and settings are portable. It will even ask to import your VS Code settings on first launch.
Just set it up and it was incredibly smooth. As you said, it's a fork. So it even offered to copy over all my settings/extensions. Let's see how it goes.
I briefly worked for Crunchyroll, which began life as an anime pirating service with subtitles. The contracts with the Japanese anime publishers came later. Now they vigorously protect their content from "pirates".
So saddened by this news. I worked with Gordon. He had a wonderful sense of humor. Was a true believer, die hard technologist, uncompromising, witty and honest. Will be having a drink here in his honor shortly.
If anyone is interested in modding an Atari VCS (2600) for similar high quality output, Tim Worthington's excellent Atari RGB mod kit is an easy and affordable way to upgrade it.
https://etim.net.au/2600rgb/
Tom7 is my favorite content creator. Each of his projects feels like a ~master’s thesis~ video dissertation. If you are not familiar with his work, please take some time to watch his other videos. They are all outstanding so I won’t recommend any specific one.
Tom7, if you’re out there (here), thank you for the free education and entertainment. You are an inspiration!
There is a new VirtualBoy emulator that runs on the Nintendo 3DS so that you can play these games again in 3D. And yes, you can adjust it to play in a different color than red. Some of the games, especially Wario deserve another look from retro game fans. https://github.com/skyfloogle/red-viper
