I read the complete short stories of Arthur C. Clarke recently and one of the things that really struck me was that several of the early stories (long before NASA) had lunar-native plants growing wild on the Moon. For a hard SF writer I found that extraordinary; you forget just how much the speculative consensus has changed within quite a short period.
In a similar vein, several of the early stories seem convinced by the evidence for psionics...
Clarke had a pretty interesting progression from belief in many paranormal claims to hard core skeptic over his lifetime, and similarly from pantheist to atheist.
Before the advent of cell phones it seemed expedient to have telepathy for quick communication --- that said, Heinlein did predict them in his novel _Space Cadet_ (though they don't make more than a brief appearance).
NVCleanInstall, maybe? I couldn't find anything called "NV Install".
Personally I'm still running with the drivers that came with the box when I bought it in 2020. GeForce Experience is an abomination; besides the mind-boggling bloat, demanding that I create an account just to download a driver update really made me determined never to buy NVidia ever again.
Yes, apologies I was on my phone earlier and didn't find it from a quick search. But I just checked my laptop and that's the one I'm using. I allows stripping out some telemetry and a few other things beside GeForce experience.
Middle-clicking on individual feature links to open them in a new tab is broken. Given that these are real `<a href="/features/foo">` links, and the URL is exactly the same for broken and not-broken, I've no idea how they managed that.
Expected: the new tab opens shows the usability details about this feature.
Actual: the new tab shows the text "Error when loading feature font-size-adjust." Refreshing the tab shows the expected content after a flash of unstyled text
Notes: this only happens when ublock origin is enabled for the domain. Turning off ublock origin for the domain and then attempting to repro with the given steps results in the expected behavior.
Coincidentally, I've just finished Thomas' Religion and the Decline of Magic. It's very long and massively overexampled, but still a good and eye-opening read.
When it came out in 1971 it cost an extortionate £7; one national newspaper had an editorial saying people might be forced to pay for it in instalments.
How is that extortionate? Using the inflation calculator of the Bank of England that is 86 pounds now or $110. Admittedly that more expensive than the current price of $24 for the paper back, but at worst that seems to be twice as expensive as a common price for a 850 page book?
At October, 1970, the provisional figures of average weekly earnings of full-time manual workers were £28 Os. 11d. for men aged 21 years and over, and £13 19s. 10d. for women aged 18 years and over. Between October, 1965 and October, 1970, average earnings of all workers covered by the regular inquiry rose by 45.9 per cent. and the general index of retail prices by 26.4 per cent.
https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1971/jan/...
So it would have been around a decent chunk of your weekly wage as an average worker, it sounds like. I think what we would need to know is how much excess income someone would have for something like that at the time.
Consider that some technical books have a potential target audience of thousand or so people. Then ask how many hours the book needs to save you to be worth $100. Depending on the book that can look very cheap.
Oh I forgot that's a thing in some countries. I did both of my university degrees just borrowing books needed from the library, they have to have enough copies for every student if needed.
Most of the time we'd end up with a group of friends where we'd each buy a different book then share among each other. Not many were spending the whole amount every semester, especially past the first year when we didn't really know any better.
I think I paid similar for Wolfram's A New Kind of Science back in the early 00's. Huge great beast of a hardback tome, promising the secrets of the universe. I don't think I ever finished it, and ended up giving it away to a charity shop after schlepping it around the world with me, unread.
Heh. I remember doing your first solution for an Eye of the Beholder-style FPV engine back on the Amiga circa 1994. This was using existing blitter mask bitplanes so there was no sprite creation, everything was very fast (assembly). Can't remember whether I did culling based on bounding boxes first.
I also remember being quite chuffed about coming up with a "novel" approach using dithered planar masks to offset colours into palette ranges for not-too-blocky lighting. Then Quake came out. You forget just how siloed we all were before the Internet took off; every wheel imaginable must have been reinvented so many times...
Maybe it's just me or something temporary (I use Old Reddit, like all right-thinking folk) but for the past couple of days the image wrapper page seems to have been sent to the glue factory. I'm just getting the image now, unadorned.
Yes, I encountered one for the first time in the bathroom of a holiday let and, having no idea what it was, got very confused as to how I was supposed to turn it off. Fortunately we had an experimental nuclear physicist in the party who was able to explain that turning the light off would actually be a very bad idea.
In a similar vein, several of the early stories seem convinced by the evidence for psionics...