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> There is a funny email that had been released after before Jobs's passing where a user complained of a spotty signal, and his advice was basically to not hold the phone in that direction (or with his hand over the top part where the antenna was positioned).

Is this a reference to “antennagate”[0], when Jobs dismissed an affected user telling them to “just avoid holding it that way”[1]?

> because 3G technology at the time wasn't robust, and one shouldn't have expected him to have all the solutions that were out of his control

If so, this is an incredibly bad take. Lots of other phones had implemented good 3G connectivity at the time, including Apple's own prior iPhone. Apple made a mistake here, and the takeaway should be that corporate hubris is real and companies aren't your friends, not some cockamamie prattle about how we should accept bad products because technology is hard, boo hoo.

> had Jobs lived to 70 or 80

Jobs' own death is another fine demonstration of his arrogance. Very ironic to refer to it in this paragraph.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_4#Antenna

1: https://www.macrumors.com/2010/06/24/steve-jobs-describes-ip...


Yes, I now realize it was the antennagate story. I included a link to a Slate article that featured an even more unsympathetic writer, which was in 2010, a year before Jobs died.

In retrospect, I think Jobs knew his time was limited, and telling a customer not to hold it that way wasn't an unforgiveable sin- in fact, there was some truth to it, even if they didn't have a better modem at the time (my article mentions Qualcomm).

And I agree, that yes, hubris is real. I like how Bill Gates told Jobs at the D7 Conference in 2007 that his charisma and spell wouldn't work on him because he was a minor wizard. https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-says-steve-jobs-w...

Btw, an in-house modem is something Apple us finally returning to, now that they are ready: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidphelan/2026/05/16/iphone-1...


No, they blocked the UK because it was either that or open themselves up to £18m in fine liability thanks to the Online Safety Act[0]. Social media sites which are unable or unwilling to operate strict, full-time content moderation have all blocked the UK because the alternative is being held punitively liable for abuse by bad actors. Pretty much a no brainer. (And that's without even getting into the quagmire of legitimate, consenting, age-gated adult content.)

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Safety_Act_2023


This is great, but it was originally published in 2019. See the past discussions in 2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22932134 (114 comments) and 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27576902 (114 comments also).

It’s been updated many times since then!

So? That was 5-7 years ago. I haven't seen this before, so I appreciate it being posted :)

Yep! Just that the post title should have a (2019) in it. Or maybe (2021) or (2025), given the most recent revision dates.

Fair enough!

Not only that, for a device from 1995... It's still amazing to learn about this, its not as if most people will read this once, and remember everything on the page in one go.

Check out the rest of Copetti's site. He's got similar posts on almost all the other consoles. So much gold.

> it would be almost unusable at anything less than 13"

Native resolution on a 13" MacBook Air is already pretty unusable. Out of the box, the 13" MacBook Air (physical screen resolution 2560x1664) is configured with display scaling so that the “looks like” resolution is 1470x956 (i.e., macOS renders everything at 2x1470x956 – 2940x1912 – and then scales it down to match the display for output). If you dial the “looks like” resolution down to 1280x832 (so that the rendering resolution matches the output resolution; because, say, you prefer that every UI element not be a little bit blurry from being scaled down), you'll find yourself unbelievably short (ha) on vertical resolution. You basically have to turn dock hiding on. Even then, fixed-position headers are very common on websites these days, so between that and browser chrome, you'll often find that actual webpage content is crammed into the bottom half of the display.


Or put the dock on the right side of the screen.

In my experience, 13.3" MBA is fine for many applications. A little smaller (eg 12.5") might still be usable. 11" would not work with current MacOS.


gotta have dock hiding & menu bar hiding & compact toolbar/tab settings for browser. only 80-90px of wasted height. The rest is web view. I can't think of any website I frequent having that fixed-position header either, so I'm gucci.

I often use my laptop for reference while cooking, and I find recipe websites are the most common and egregious offenders.

And when you say “PC original”, you really mean “DOS version wrapped in DOXBox”, because it's easier to ship that on both Windows and Mac than patching the Windows version for Windows, and shipping a Wine wrapper for Mac. (Have they ever shipped a Wine wrapper for anything? I don't think so.) What a shame.

I do really wish an application-level classic Mac OS emulator existed. There are lots of great full-system emulators for classic Macs (Basilisk II, SheepShaver, DingusPPC), but no Rosetta-style “make the old application run in the context of a new machine” execution environments. I'll grouse to whoever will listen that all of the best edutainment software of the '90s and early '00s is trapped on PPC Mac OS.


Probably the closest thing I remember existing to this was (in its "modern"-ish form) https://github.com/autc04/executor

Not quite what you're looking for I think but it was a Wine-style reimplementation of MacOS.


I think that is basically exactly what I've been looking for. Thank you!


Marathon Trilogy. Ambrosia SW games. Spectre VR. My childhood was so flavourful. The one downside is that nobody on the playground were talking about the games I had access to.


I loved Marathon and we even had enough Macs in our lab to have a few lan parties. Wonderful memories.

And the Ambrosia folks were giants! So many great games - Maelstrom, Ambrosia and the EV saga! There was such a thriving ecosystem of plugins for EV!

It definitely touched others because the original Marathon still exists as Aleph One, and Endless Sky does a great job of capturing the essence of the Escape Velocity games!


Almost forgot the OG Bungie hit Pathways Into Darkness! I keep that on my Basilisk env too for the occasional hit of nostalgia.


PiD is probably my favourite game of the FPS-Text-Based-Horror-Adventure-RPG genre.


Naev is a good choice for Eacape Velocity fans looking for a modern game. Naev has a lot of depth and polish, very well crafted.

You're flabbergasted that Lenovo would trash a sub-brand? Lenovo? The company who trashed their own brand with Superfish?


This argument would hold a lot more water if the alternative you're siding with weren't Amazon.


How did you get siding with Amazon from giving up on the Kobo website? There are more than two options, re-reading some of the dead-tree variants I have would keep me occupied for years. Hopefully a new alternative would come out before I run out of space for books


Anna's Archive aren't filing the serial numbers off the epubs they redistribute. Rightfully or wrongly distributed, the attribution is crystal clear.


Assuming password authentication is disabled, why wouldn't you SSH into your hosts over the open net? Why Tailscale? Why Wireguard?


> for learning.

That's great if that's what you want, but you are commenting in a thread full of people gleefully spouting off about decades-old installations that they self-admittedly have “no idea” how to upgrade. Most people in here would be better off if they admitted to themselves that they are not actually taking advantage of the opportunity to learn, and are instead undertaking a liability.


In this framing, learning is always a liability. The real issue is undertaking the liability while not capitalizing on the opportunity it presents.


The “liability” I refer to is that of wilfully, knowingly leaving a system unpatched in order to avoid the learning opportunity of upgrading it.

We're working toward the same goal here, yes.


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