It reminds me of this book:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374602581/laserwriterii

Oh cool, I’ve been meaning to check this out ever since I saw her do a reading from a new book of hers. Her family runs a pretty well known restaurant in the city with a 900 item menu (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopsin%27s). Maybe she talks about in the book. Thanks for the reminder.

It's been that way since 2005. It's pretty much indistinguishable from TSA other than the badges on the uniforms.

> It's pretty much indistinguishable from TSA

It has never been, is not, and will never be, different. Instead of paying fees to TSA SFO pays slightly more to the contractor doing the job. It's the same. Same rules, same procedure, same equipment. Same, same, same. The only difference is the patches on the shirts.

Everyone in here has cultural amnesia about air travel in the 90s.

The current system is TEN BILLION TIMES better than post-lockerbie.

That's 0-100kph (0-62mph).

There’s an awesome write up of some of the tools written specifically for this demo.

https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2012/04/08/metaprogramming-for...

Probably worth a discussion in its own right: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37386377

The blogpost was delicious. The lekktor was a madcoder technique

This book was so bad it inspired a new word:

http://catb.org/jargon/html/B/bullschildt.html

That's a different book than the one I was referring to. I was referring to The Annotated ANSI C Standard: American National Standard for Programming Languages-C : Ansi/Iso 9899-1990.

I'm going to start using this word :D

Worldcom happened within 6 months of Enron and it was at least as serious.

There's a great paper from 2004 about reverse engineering the CMS of the Crusoe:

https://www.realworldtech.com/crusoe-intro/

To my knowledge the foreshadowed followup was never released.

It was: https://www.realworldtech.com/crusoe-exposed/

That's great to see. Thanks for sharing! It's been almost 20 years since I read the first part.

It was much talked about on slashdot when Walmart started selling a PC with Lindows pre-installed.

https://www.wired.com/2002/06/wal-marts-new-lindowsos-pc/

My prototyping team bought one of those Walmart Lindows machines to play around with and I remember being impressed, especially with the way a user could find and install software packages. I think the machine sold for some trivial amount, like, $200.

> the way a user could find and install software packages.

And even with app stores neither Windows nor macOS come close to the seamless experience of updating all software from a single place.

Apple had, for some time, OS updates in the App Store, but not anymore. The software update in the preferences app is a step backward in that sense - why have two ways of doing everything?

And Windows is even worse. I have at least 6 apps I need to open if I want the Windows machine to update everything.

I bought one of my parents a Walmart PC with Lindows. It worked out pretty much the same as a Chromebook would today, but with more apps.

My mom was on Ubuntu since she upgraded from MacOS 9. She even learned to run the update GUI by herself and would call me to tell she did it.

Sadly, my evil cousin upgraded her PC with Windows and I no longer know when she needs to update or clean up the disk.

My mom used linux from the late 90s through the early 2000s. She did not adapt well to using a mouse and windows but wanted to do online shopping so I set her up with a machine that started directly to a full screen browser and dialed the internet as soon as an internet connection was needed. She eventually got good enough with her mouse that she moved on to an XP laptop but I really loved being able to tell people that my mom runs Debian.

My dad and I got my grandmother set up with an EEE PC for sending emails. I don't know if she ever used it (perhaps she emailed my dad, but she wouldn't have been emailing me) but I remember setting it up to be as easy to use as I could (e.g. big icon that said "Letters" underneath for an email application) and writing her instructions.

I like to imagine there's a couple of these still in use. :)

It must be harder to get an i686 kernel up and running, but my 32-bit ARM machines are quite happy with almost newest ones.

I had a HyperCard stack of paper airplane designs that I must have printed hundreds of times. A cursory search didn’t turn it up and I have no idea where it came from. Maybe it’s lost to time.

This is probably not the one, but here is something I came across that seems a bit more limited and different from the thing you are describing.

https://archive.org/details/hypercard_wingmaker1

This is a cool stack, thank you. It’s not the one I remember, but I’m enjoying it nonetheless.

Decriminalization and legalization are different things.

Decriminalization is removing criminal penalties - there may still be fines or other non criminal penalties.