Yeah that was in the Dubya administration, with the “gold” Sacagawea coins.

Aww look at the tinies! Those little ears!

I don’t know, I have to wonder if it’s weight.

Those are impressive, and unique. They have an aesthetic to them that reminds me of the Amiga? out of an IBM CGA card? Trust the demo scene to pull that off.

My father’s 2017 Toyota Avalon gets 2 mpg better than my 2003 Chevrolet S10. How does a slickly shaped sports sedan make 20mpg when a 23 year old pickup with an engine that was primitive even then make 18? Meanwhile a 90’s Corvette can make 30.

I kinda stand with Yahtzee Croshaw on this: The video game industry is a lot bigger than the film industry and makes a hell of a lot more money, so filmmakers should probably do a little learning their place.

The CGA card used that technique anyway. The IBM CGA card had a 9-pin RGBI digital output and an RCA analog NTSC output. There was a 16 color text mode, rarely used. Color graphics were usually done via the 4 color mode, which chose between four awful pallettes: light and dark variants of white black magenta and cyan, or yellow black red-orange and yellow. So they appeared kinda terrible on an RGBI monitor, but by dithering the colors together and using the analog output, you’d get other colors.

I’ve kinda known that most of my life because my elementary school had a lab of IIes, most of which had color monitors, a couple of them had monochrome monitors. So there were a couple of them that were inexplicably “just green.” Most of the rest of that I learned from The 8-Bit Guy on Youtube.

That Wozniak guy’s a good electrical engineer. Clever dude.

What the Michael A. Stackpole is she on about?

Super Mario Bros was published in 1985 not 1972 but yeah.

Back in the 90’s, video games were new enough that you could forgive the film industry for not being familiar with them. It’s been 30 years. They still don’t get it.

That was a limitation of the monitor you were using, not the computer. All models of Apple II to include the Plus, e and c had color graphics. But it was common practice to pair them with monochrome monitors, first because they’re cheaper than color monitors, but also…the way the Apple II achieved a 16 color palette was through NTSC artifacting. It only ever tried to send something like six colors over the cable, but when you put two dissimilar colors next to each other, they get smeared together somewhere in the analog domain and they come out some other color. It allowed them to achieve 16 colors, but it had a drawback: Text that was supposed to appear black and white would have green and purple fringes, which made it blurry and hard to read. So if you were using the machine for business or something you might choose a monochrome monitor to get sharper, easier to read text. Apple’s first party monochrome monitors were indeed green.

The Apple Macintosh wasn’t innovative. Here’s how you “innovate” an Apple Mac: Take an existing product of your company, the Apple IIGS. Make that worse by reducing the processor clock speed so your new product will be superior in some way, because your new product is going to lack backwards compatibility, internal expansion card slots, color graphics or multi-channel audio.

The iMac wasn’t innovative. It was an evolution of their existing product line in trendy packaging.

The iPod wasn’t innovative. Even the UI was taken from Creative. Rio beat them to the market by several years.

The iPad wasn’t innovative. I was handed a Dell tablet PC a full decade before the iPad hit the market.

Apple was innovative twice in its very long history: The Apple II was the first microcomputer that combined color graphics with internal expandability, and the iPhone had a capacitive touch screen. The most innovative thing Steve Jobs ever said in his life was “You can just use your finger.”

You built the world’s most resource intensive asshole, you deserve to have your lips sewn around it.

Removed by mod

Promise?

Did you know that the C5 Corvette was one of the most fuel efficient 20th century GM products? It was so fucking aerodynamic that it made 30mpg on the highway, even with its pushrod 2 valve per cylinder 6 liter LS engine rated nearly 400 horsepower. The contemporary fish-eye Camaros were close to that figure as well, when equipped with the 3.6 liter Buick V6, because again they were very aerodynamic.

It’s illegal to build a car that aerodynamic these days because it doesn’t pass modern pedestrian safety laws. See, if you’re going to kill a pedestrian with a car, you’re legally required to make initial contact at thorax height like any of the bus-nosed pickup trucks on the market today, not at shin level like 90’s GM sports cars.

But enough about China.

Reminds me of the time Pizza Hut took Papa John’s to court over their slogan “Better ingredients, Better pizza, Papa John’s.” Papa John’s’ winning argument was that the slogan is in nature a boastful opinion, as almost all slogans are. They submitted to evidence a search of the US Trademark office’s records of slogans in then-current use, and the only purely factual slogan they could find was Sony’s “It’s A Sony” slogan, which was only purely factual via tautology.

My favorite one was “I’m your blind spot.”

On food and non-alcoholic packaged beverages, yes. Find me the nutrition facts on a bottle of whiskey.

I tend to call that section of history the Contextless Era.

A lot of folks got their music from P2P software, and a lot of stuff got mislabeled. There’s a lot of people who to this day think Metallica recorded a heavy metal version of Carol of the Bell (Metallica has nothing to do with the Trans Siberian Orchestra), or that The End Of The World was made by Group X. ANY prank phone call recording was attributed to the Jerky Boys, ANY male stand-up comedian but especially Bill Engval was atribbuted to Jeff Foxworthy, and ANY comedy music especially parodies were attributed to Weird Al.

Except for a recording of the Hyrule Overture with invented lyrics. That got attributed to System of a Down, entirely because of a resemblance to the lead singer’s voice.

And that’s just what Limewire did to us. It’s been said that the modern internet is just 5 websites full of screenshots of the other 4. Yeah, Newgrounds, Ebaumsworld, YTMND, to an extent the Something Awful Forums and a few others constantly outright stole each other’s content. Just…re-uploaded the flash animations.