spankibalt

I was asking for Maiden, plural of Maid. [1]

1. [https://www.dwds.de/wb/Maid]

“Maiden” in German is neutral.

Nachweise erbeten (citations, please). :)

Does this work well? I had a colleague who swore by it on account of it having (some) NTFS-capability by way of a plug-in.

Cool. Just checked for the tape I have in a drawer within arms reach: a BASF Chrome II from sometime between 1997 and 2000. There's a techno live set from the early aughts on it, that's the only thing I know about it lol

Odd. I distinctly remember listening to music via Winamp, and updating my tsv-databases, while copying downloaded data (mostly e-books and music) from the local uni's internet saved to Zip 100 disks (and later Zip 250s on a Pentium II). Same for the ubiquitous LAN parties. One thing to add is that the read and written data were completely sequestered (i. e. on different drives); an early safety practice that became a habit a long time ago.

> Decompression in conjunction with primitive multi-tasking on MacOS and Windows. That remained an issue until Windows XP.

No problems here on Winamped Windows 98, albeit on a Pentium 166 with MMX. Often enough it was just a systems configuration issue.

Yeah, you're probably right... at this point it'd probably be a drop in the ocean for any respectable city pooch lol

I wonder if microplastics ingestion is a thing to be wary of.

Something like that is nice if it's got long-term support, works all in a single downloadable file (i. e. in a similar manner as TiddlyWiki), has good documentation, and isn't vibe-coded/written. As a nice part in a browser-based swiss army knife. Otherwise, no thanks.

> I expect fireworks.

Me too. Fireworks of "We have to move on" and "We have to reach out", etc.

> I think you missed the subtext that comes with the duckling designation and maybe took some self-irony of 2CV drivers for real.

I have never, ever in my slightly more than forty years on this rock heard Germans refer to the 2CV as "hässliches Entlein", let alone their 2CVs, and especially not in colloquial conversion. It was always just Ente. Same goes for printed materials, e. g. magazines, books, etc.

As a matter of fact, I believe it's the opposite of what you imagined: The "ugly duckling" designation was used from time to time either by ignoramuses (e. g. in older magazine headlines), or, in an ironic fashion, by some of the machine's owners.

> Again you may be thinking of the DS, which was Citroën's flagship model and its fender skirts were the ultimate expression of cool.

No, I'm talking about the 2CV. At this point I should mention that I'm East German. Citroën cars, compared to other Western makers, were relatively common where I grew up during the 80s. The most common one before the Wende? That's right, the DS!

> The 2CV was designed from the start as one of the cheapest cars possible.

Utilitarian/economical design and beautiful styling are not mutually exclusive.

EDIT:

> The Dutch Wikipedia article explicitly calls it Lelijke Eend and the German one has some references to "das hässliche Entlein" and how Citroën tried to sway people to a more favorable nickname.

So... according to the German wiki's source the blame goes to an early impression from some random Dutch journo. Quickly shortened to Eendje, already before the car made it to the German market. Where it was virtually always just called Ente, cause nobody uses more words in colloquial speech than they have to. Especially not with a mouthful like "hässliches Entlein".

> No one at the time thought it was a beautiful car.

Maybe in your small bubble. The 2CV was, and is, as much of a style icon as the Käfer (Beetle), the Topolino, the R4, the Mini, the Cinquecento and other greats of its time. As a matter fact, it's undoubtedly one of the titans amongst outstanding examples of automobile design and culture. Where the heck have you lived?!

> Style icon? Maybe you are thinking of the DS.

Yes, style icon. That is a well established matter of record.

> The 2CV was commonly considered ugly so much that in Germany it was only known as Ugly Duckling [...].

Utter rubbish! The Germans, I happen to be one of 'em, call(ed) the 2CV just Ente. That translates to duck.

> Heritage and vintage looks, will only take you so far.

Amen. A, in this case rather ugly, restyling of a wheeled smartphone is not something I have an interest in. That's why you need the people that work on designing and signing-off (on) the thing understand what made the original such an oustanding design in the first place.

Who in the name of the Twelve Hells did they hire to fuck up one of the greatest utilitarian car designs (especially in its Fourgonnette iteration)?

Glad I wasn't the only one instantly reminded of the catshite parasite.

> BM PC design philosophy was the furthest thing possible from “open architecture”.

I was talking about IBM PC and compatibles. Big things have small beginnings, and so on.

> Essentially, authoring a Blu-Ray is complicated, and involves using expensive and proprietary authoring software to write Java code under severe RAM limitations that limit what you can do.

Product design centered around corporate identity/branding did the rest.

Hopefully the next proprietor(s) doesn't indulge in some Fritzl type shit.

Damn, quite some brutal matchups! My eternal champion spits fire, runner-up is the Mini. :)

Speaking of documentaries, there's also Ecstasy of Order: The Tetris Masters (2011) [1], which deals with the Classic Tetris World Championship.

1. [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1836974/]

> I don't know if the dominance of the PC was a foregone conclusion by 1985.

I firmly believe it was, as it's the philosophy (i. e. the open architecture) that gave it such a headstart that the competition couldn't have catched up. Keep in mind what an open architecture really means in the world, i. e. not just the West.

> Failing the growth of that market in this counterfactual world arguably the A2000 and a bridge board was probably the first Amiga that could have seriously taken-on the IBM PC.

Pitting an already well-established and rapidly expanding open architecture and Commodore's first foray into an open architecture against each other wouldn't have, and indeed didn't, play(ed) out in the latter's favor.

The A2000, a workstation-class machine, arrived in March '87. Too late. Around that time Compaq had already sold around 25,000 of their first Deskpro 386 machines, which hit the streets half a year earlier. According to Michael Geran of E. F. Hutton & Co., Compaq sold 90,000 Deskpro 386 computers in the second quarter of '87 alone.

The bridgeboard was an option for cost-conscious operators, especially those with small businesses. They were well-received especially in West Germany where the A2000 sold well. Their limiting nature and performance wouldn't have made them relevant.

> I think a stronger Amiga marketing presence could have killed Macintosh.

That is an intriguing possibility!

> Their combined influence might have actually given the IBM PC and Macintosh a run for their money.

Not a chance, I think. Combine both and you still would not have beaten the sound philosophy, openness, speed, and flexibility of the IBM PC & compatibles. Ironically, to increase your chances massively, you'd needed to have enhittification (with its preference for locked-down rubbish antithetical to general-purpose computing) already dominating the market. Even as Amigas and Ataris were much more open than their cousin's terrible grandchild of today: Apple. A platform which many Amigatari nerdlingers of yesteryear gravitated to...

Gud lorde, don't be daft. PPW matters until it hits a point where any optimizations above that line are of much less importance to some people (e. g. me) than other specs. Not to speak of necessary attributes completely absent from your PPW dream machine, which indeed negates PPW considerations on a per device/device-class basis. Which excludes optimizations for microprocessor series. It ain't rocket science.

Well, since an adequate cooling solution is a part of a machine's feature set for me, my point still stands.

Let me appropriate and rephrase a sentence from earlier in the thread: "performance per watt doesn't matter at all if the combination of the machine's feature set, both in hardware and software, as well as form factor, is essentially useless to you".

> The ghosting on the original Game Boy did not blend pixel boundaries and did not affect static images.

It still gives you, especially when factoring in the condition of the STN screen, a "fuzzy" picture and with its own lo-fi glow, analogous to a CRT setup. Which was the point. I owned a brick, from 1992 onwards.

> It looks nothing [...] like a zoetrope (which has sharp images and reasonably low sample-and-hold blur because of the strobing).

"Sharp images" is certainly not the experience I had when looking through 'em at country fairs back in East Germany in the mid-to-late 80s.

And not just that; invoking the Game Boy here is not the closer many people think it is, given that its STN LCD screen was fuzzy (e. g. ghosting) yet also had this distinct, subdued lo-fi glow, almost like looking through a zoetrope. Somewhat analog to lo-fi CRT setups.

> All of them will. [...] It’s already being used everywhere without “the wider public” even noticing.

Doesn't your lot ever get tired of the intellectually lazy, rubbish absolutisms you peddle? Same goes for the projections; just because you slop it, doesn't mean everyone will.