But they keep churning out the classic watches and they are everywhere and cheap.

I love how you can put all the games ever made for a given 8 bit platform on a single flash drive.

I was comparing games prices last week and I found that prices from the 80s aren't too different from modern game prices.

Elite was £20 in 1984 and that would be £66 today, which is not very different from what a good game for the PS5 costs today.

Except that games then were made by one or two people and nowadays games are made by teams with coders, musicians, artists, etc.

Yeah, the games industry is in a pretty big crisis right now, and I think change needs to happen both ways:

Consumers need to understand that keeping games at the same price for decades despite rising costs and inflation is not realistic. If they want the industry to thrive, they need to be ok with games being more expensive.

Meanwhile, developers need to stop making games so expensive. This is an entertainment industry / corpo problem, really. Companies have seen the big profits and decided that only the big profits will do, which means you need to make a big open world cinematic experience, which is expensive, and because it's expensive, they won't take risks on making anything actually interesting.

The only way gaming moves forward is if we make riskier games that cost less to produce, which is why indies are the ones making the good games these days.

Pine

Huh, back in the 2001/2002 timeframe I worked at an old company that gave everyone a Windows laptop but us engineers also had UNIX accounts on the server cluster, which we logged into for dev work.

Our company was hit with one of the worms (don’t remember which). Thousands of emails constantly coming in and everyone scrambling to delete them - except people like me, who were on vacation. I returned to an inbox that instantly crashed Outlook. IT was trying to find a solution. But I logged into the UNIX cluster, opened Pine, and deleted all the crap, page by page. When I got most of it done, Outlook started working again.

IT was shocked but then told everyone else to go do what I did, eliminating their need to do any work. So I guess you win some and you lose some..

ILOVEYOU was in 2000 and behaved that way. I remember we just shut off our Exchange servers until there was a fix. Email was still new enough that the world didn't implode.

Couldn't you delete or filter /var/spool/mail?

I am still using mutt.

Neither are Norway and Iceland.

The title says: "European countries" not "EU" which both are different.

Surely the climate and the solitude would be too much for someone from the Mediterranean, for example.

In the movie Thirteen Days, JFK mentions a book titled March of Folly by Barbara Tuchmann. I bought the book on that tip and it has an interesting chapter on Vietnam. I don't think adding a chapter on this "special operation" would even be worth it as it would just be repetitive.

How does that book fit in the timeline? It was published in 1984.

I believe they are mixing it up with The Guns of August (published in 1962, also by Tuchman), which JFK was fond of and supposedly drew on during the Cuban missile crisis.

You are absolutely right. My mistake. I read them both and certainly recommend them.

Thank you. I heard about The Guns of August when I was looking for related books after reading A World Undone. Then I forgot about it. I never heard of March of Folly but I'll read them both.

The author must have never spent much time with an accountant.

Banana Pi makes SBCs with lots of networking ports.

They don't. They work as intended and "hallucination" is actually a marketing term to make it seem they are more than what they really are: text prediction software.