I made the images in Deluxe Paint when I was 16-18 years old. It was a lovely surprise to be contacted two decades later by the author who wanted to print them in this beautiful book among many far more talented artists.
Suffragettes were ridiculed for collecting petitions in support of women’s right to vote. Who cares about papers filled with women’s signatures? How could that change something as fundamental as who gets to vote in a democracy?
The power of Big Tech money in today’s Western democracies is a similar tenet that’s just taken for granted. How could it ever change? Until it does, and then it looks obvious it had to.
The Pentium III does sound like a good chip choice for a retro cyberpunk story. Like they said in “The Matrix”, 1999 was the peak of human civilization.
(586 became Pentium, so 686 would be the Pentium Pro/II microarchitecture.)
The cartridge-style packaging of the Pentium II/III’s was also peak for the lineup.
My favorite PC I ever built was a dual-CPU Tyan motherboard that eventually held two screaming fast Coppermines. Needed a university copy of Windows 2000 to really make them sing—the Windows 95 series never supported SMP—and it was glorious.
I remember 1999/2000-ish I had both a Pentium III/Intel motherboard and Athlon PC. The Pentium III system was rock solid, and performed fantasic. Even the CPU and motherboard looked amazing.
The Athlon was solid but less reliable, various reboots and glitches. I kind have always had a preference for Intel since then.
A lot of that probably came down to the motherboard chipset. IIRC Intel made their own chipsets for the Pentium III and they were good and reliable. Athlons were coupled with chipsets from VIA and whatnot.
Some of those chipsets were fine and others were less reliable or compatible. The quality of the drivers for each chipset may also have mattered.
These are open weight models, so you can fine tune them on Lego content… But presumably they already have enough training data since they were made by Chinese companies who don’t give a shit about Western IP rights.
Name a country and it probably has its own problems: some combination of instability, corruption, authoritarian governments, collaboration with the US and EU governments that you want to escape…
ProtonMail is in Switzerland, so it’s perhaps the best mainstream bet. But the Swiss are absolutely not immune to US and EU pressure.
"Office is now Microsoft 365, the premier productivity suite with innovative productivity apps, intelligent cloud services, and world-class security. Office.com, the Office mobile app, and the Office app for Windows are combined in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app—with a new icon, new look, and even more features."
You can count on Microsoft to mess up their marketing message in the craziest ways. Why stick with the best-known productivity software brand on the planet when you can call it "365 Copilot"?
I doubt this will stop the lawsuit. Also Microsoft still absolutely sells Office 365 tiers separately from Microsoft 365 tiers. Their marketing is terrible and confusing but Offie definitely still exits as a brand, and you can bet your bottom dollar the lawyers are going to be having a great day on Monday.
Microsoft does not have a trademark for "Office", which is clearly a type of product and can't be used as a program name (just like you can't name your oatmeal "Oatmeal" and expect trademark protection).
The only way this would be infringing is if office.eu usage could be confused with Microsoft other's trademarks - like Microsoft Office - but I don't see that.
So no, office.eu will have a calm Monday on that front, just like hundreds of other companies offering products with "Office" in their name.
(I'm not a lawyer. Talk to a lawyer before deciding to take on a trillion dollar company).
I can't wait to launch my Office alternative in Cameroon, office.cm. I do suspect using such a generic TLD swap of Office's well-known domain for a knockoff is particularly perilous compared to others mentioned. Bear in mind the possibility for consumer confusion is a top criteria.
>just like hundreds of other companies offering products with "Office" in their name
There may be hundreds of other companies selling products with the noun "office" in their names, but there only is one producing a productivity suite called simply "Office". I would expect launching another productivity suite called "Office" would be trademark infringement. Just like I can't release a car called "Beetle" or "Golf".
I mean, I think that ship has probably sailed. Borland Office showed up at about the same time as Microsoft Office, in the late 80s. Then StarOffice, Corel Office, Wordperfect Office, throughout the 90s... If Microsoft had a defensible trademark there, then this would hardly be the first target. And Microsoft barely uses the "Office" brand _itself_, these days, and hasn't for years.
(There is still a product called Microsoft Office, but the thing that most users would think of as MS Office is now, bafflingly, branded "Microsoft 365 Copilot".)
This kind of conditioning has to be damaging to the model’s reasoning.
Consider how research worked in the Stalinist Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Scientists had to be mindful of topics where they needed to either avoid it completely or explicitly adapt it to the leader’s ideology.
Their alignment is probably more strategically built in during the training phase.
At least I assume Xi Jinping doesn’t just call up DeepSeek on a whim and dictate what they should have in model context (like Musk apparently does at xAI).
The virtualization itself is not the bizarre part. The bizarre part is where the actual OS is 16 bit and runs as the singular "task" of a thin 32 bit layer that merely calls itself a "memory manager". The details of that machinery (segmentation, DPMI, ...) are quite a sight to behold. And it's all because of how PCs evolved at that time, and because we needed to keep running DOS and still wanted to make use of all the extra memory that wouldn't fit into its address space.
I made the images in Deluxe Paint when I was 16-18 years old. It was a lovely surprise to be contacted two decades later by the author who wanted to print them in this beautiful book among many far more talented artists.
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