Reduced speed with degraded battery doesn't only happen for phones unfortunately. My Lenovo laptop is painfully slow when unplugged. I thought something is broken, but Lenovo told me it's because the battery is degraded. The consequences are similar as with phones: The battery can't be easily changed and the costs for letting it be changed by Lenovo are not worth it considering the age of the laptop. So I'll likely live with it until I'm annoyed enough to buy a new one.
I once built such a trial option myself. You could start a free trial (just within the app, no "native trial" involved) and then sign up for the paid plan with native in-app purchases once it ran out.
It got rejected by Apple. They insisted I use the native app store trial which is opt-out.
There are tools like EuroBillTracker (https://en.eurobilltracker.com/) where you can enter the serial number of bills that you received and can watch them travel around the world. If someone else tracks them as well, that is.
I entered 31 serial numbers over the last 15 years. Those haven't been seen again so far. I guess it's not the right kind of game for me... :)
I played with Where's George? for a few minutes, then got bored. None of these things seem to have enough adoption to make it interesting.
If there were money in it, someone would throw OCR at the problem. Say, attach prizes to certain bills, or finding certain patterns of bills (say, two bills whose serial numbers are mathematically related a certain way).
If a government wanted to encourage spending, they could turn the lottery inside out by offering payouts on cash being spent by everyone. You take a picture of your money and if the serial number is today's lucky winner you get $1MM. Though maybe that would encourage hoarding instead? Cobra effect perhaps?
Euro coin tracking was a bit popular in the early days of the euro, as it showed how coins moved around Europe (you can’t identify individual coins, but each country has its own coins that can be used throughout the euro zone. Spanish and Italian coins move to Germany and the Benelux faster in summer than in winter, for example)
You can still play that game with new coins, but it’s less f
visible now, as most coins are old and those already are well dispersed throughout the euro zone (and, of course, more and more people pay with a card)
Is there any reason to believe that this actually happened? Conveniently, it was published on April 1st. The story itself would be a great April Fools' prank. :)
Easy: my mother drilled it into me for years that a prank played after 12 noon on April 1st made you the fool, I've abided by that rule of the game for 35 years, I'm not about to start breaking it now.
I didn't ask. I just explained I was following up on some footage of a news report by them that I suspected might be computer generated, and I wanted to verify the legitimacy of the video and event.
Well, you can't believe them even if it's not. People tend to remember things that never happened.
Other than that, GP may have just been teasing. I mean what's the probability that you call them and they still have the same people there after 25 years? You call them and one of those rare guys (who's still there after 25 years) answers the phone. Or whoever answers the phone is willing to take the time to find someone who has been there since then. Seems unlikely.
I wasn't teasing, I actually called them. I was curious if it was a deepfake ML video so I wanted to find out. I got passed around quite a bit till I spoke with a guy in news room archives who had been there "a long time and would know", that's why I specifically got passed to him I believe.
> People tend to remember things that never happened.
While I don't intend/want to derail the focus here, this happens to make for an excellent coincidental articulation of one of the key things conspiracy theorists seem to not be able to comprehend in their mental models of the world.
It ought to be possible to find another clip of the same anchors in the 90s, which would settle the issue. I spent a few minutes on Youtube and found a lot of KOMO news clips from 1995 but none with those anchors. I still think it's authentic because it would be so hard to fake. If anyone really cared they could probably get someone at the TV station, which still exists (https://komonews.com/), to confirm that the clip is real.
It's unlikely that 'someone at the station' could confirm that clip was real, getting archive footage from that time would be difficult. I worked on various shows in the 00s, there's no way I'd remember any packages we broadcast, and there's no easy access to archives before 2008. We've been digitising decades of cut news packages in foreign bureaus for years, but I don't believe actual as-broadcast stuff on tape has been systematically kept, and we didn't have it digitised - at least long term - until about 10 years later.
Lifelong Seattle resident here. Yea, that's Keith Eldridge and everything there looks perfectly accurate to 1996 KOMO. Here's a 5yr old video of Keith for age comparison.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXIc5SQxG3o
However as much discussion we've had about the internet remembering everything, I can't find anything in Google to confirm "Microsoft Coffee" except for this site, discussion of it on Reddit 13 hours ago.
Google's index isn't as vast as they claim. Their "About 5,780,000,000 results" is a gross exaggeration. You can't actually view all those results even if you tried.
Most engines are also very aggressive at de-prioritizing abandoned sites, so most of the content from 90s essentially gone dark - it's indexed but cannot be found unless you know exactly what to look for.
Oh, I didn't mean you get 11 pages for every single query. I do know about the omitted results (but thanks for pointing it out, as its not obvious to many!), I used 11 as a placeholder since the final page # varies by query. Like, I get ~50 pages for 'icecream' out of the supposed 8 million or so. Crazy!
AFAIK there is no way to view all of those millions of results that they claim to have.
Egghead Software, which I visited a lot at the time because my parents' office was right around the corner, was at I think 4th and University, or somewhere around there. KOMO and the other stations are adjacent to downtown so it would be easy for them to come snag the box before MS PR descended.
Honestly this prank makes more sense to me as a forgotten thing than as a modern meta-prank. I would not be surprised if Bill or some other prime mover from that era hears about it and confirms at some point.
To get trademark protection in a particular class (e.g. candy belongs to class 30, "staple foods"), you have to demonstrate you are using the trademark in commerce.
Stuff like this seems whimsical, but it serves the very serious purpose of allowing Microsoft to claim exclusive use of their name in that class.
Remember that the prank preceded the mainstream web, and MS PR clearly went to great lengths to cover it up. I don't think the internet was "remembering everything" yet at that point
Google's public index is just the short head, maybe even less than 5% of the internet by pages. Old stuff is more or less all pushed out unless its popular.
you don't do google justice. They are fully capable of displaying very outdated information. As an example, i recently wanted to look up election results from a certain country, a day after. Google decided to show me some tired, old news snippets from elections in 2015.
> I'm assuming Seattlites would be able to confirm.
Perhaps, however remember the Mandela Effect. I'd expect ong time KOMO viewers and staff to recognise the presenters, and I'm sure they were the right ones. I wouldn't trust their recollection of this story though, especially once they had seen the video - after all the camera never lies.
Remember news anchors read dozens of these stories a day, to recall one specific prank 25 years later isn't likely. Unlikely KOMO still have recordings of their output from back then.
I still remember the prank from the late 1980s when KING ran a story that the Space Needle fell over.
KING ran retractions for days, and did their best to bury the footage.
I saw it when KING ran it, and had a good laugh. It was an obvious prank (the video looked like a bad cut & paste job, and the reporters were local comedians from "Almost Live"), but too bad a handful of humorless people ruined it.
I ran into Bill Nye some years later and asked him about it, and he replied they got into a lot of trouble for it.
Since about 10 years ago, Seattle started taking itself too seriously. It desperately needs a local humor show to add some balance, and what goes on is ripe for parody.
Almost Live was always making fun of Boeing, Microsoft, cops, local sports fans, anyone who lived in Kent, gangs, local hair metal bands, etc. All in good fun.
(They even got the hair metal band members to come on the show and parody themselves.)
I can't find anything to confirm the actual release advertisement of Turbo Pascal, either. There were later articles and those about later versions, but I guess Turbo Pascal never had a release advertisement. It's not indexed by Google.
The VHS tracking is what makes me suspicious (and of course the date, the lack of any mention of it at all)
If you've waited for 25 years to announce something, you're going to get video captured correctly.
> There’s the KOMO News footage, which some of us still have on a dusty VHS tape
Does anyone from Seatle recognise the two KOMO reporters?
If the footage is a deep fake over real footage from that time, I'm very very impressed. I suspect that the audio is fake, sort of matches up with the real recording, and the box is digitally replaced.
Former Seattleite... those are (were?) legit KOMO news anchors. I believe the person on the left's name is Keith Eldridge. I don't remember the name of the person on the right, but I do recognize them.
From here, I looked up pictures of anchors who worked in that time period, and I see Eric Slocum (now deceased) and Margo Myers who did evening news together in that time frame, and look quite similar to the people in the video.
EDIT: someone else identified Keith Eldridge, who definitely looks like a match for the video.
> If you've waited for 25 years to announce something, you're going to get video captured correctly.
I mean this assumes said perfect video exists. I don't think most people would go to extreme lengths to preserve a video tape of a prank they performed 25 years ago.
I dunno, I don't think I would care about getting a perfect capture of a VHS tape from a silly project 25 years ago. The VHS artifacts add character to the memory.
Yeah - I feel as if the task of building a fake news desk, hiring two (very convincing) actors to pose as anchors, filming it, and chopping it up in Premiere to give it the VHS look is way more effort than someone would put into a prank like this.
the rolling part of the tape is a little too much imo and a lot of programs have filters that add the grainy nature so it's not impossible. that and seeing as you can hire random celebs for 100 bucks nowadays to shout out at your friend it's not unimaginable that they faked this. it's probably true but also... who knows
I note that the thing "period" movies usually get wrong is the hairstyle, as the actors are reluctant to adopt the historical hairstyles. Even Star Trek TOS is plagued by 1960s hairstyles.
I don't know... The footage for some reason is in the form of a mobile phone recording of the playback of the actual footage. Now you could say that the creator of the page didn't have the original video just found it on youtube, but it's not the case. They were the one to upload it. (And now I see that they also have a photo of the VHS cassette on the site.)
Also, the recording itself is in a pretty bad shape, trying to sell you that it's a very old VHS tape that has been played a huge number of times.
I'm open to accepting it as authentic, even with those reasons. VHS to Digital Converters are some a common household item, and when I bought one for old family videos, they still can act up. The distortion can come from age and improper storage, not just overuse. Secondly, some of our old family photos from before digital cameras were made digital simply through scanning 4 of them together.
My point being, this could be one of those instances where a prank happened before April Fools became a corporate marketing tool. It wasn't hidden away out of fear, but just sort of "because" that was how the internet worked back then. Not everything was digitized and made available for eternity then.
Presumably it was the tape that degraded over the decades (perhaps stuffed in a box, moved from house to house, thought of as junk until they had the idea to post it on the internet)
I said this upstream, but I have clear memories of borrowing tapes of stuff people had recorded off their tv in the 90s and having exactly these kinds of glitches. I think we're seeing the difference between a professionally recorded vhs and a home system that someone just learned how to use.
Analog didn't have an "XxY" resolution. VHS was about 3MHz of luma resolution and 400Khz of chroma, which was 240 lines - but that was interlaced, so your actual vertical resolution was 480 lines per interlaced frame (30 per second at US rates) -- but your Y (luma) signal would change far more often than your Pb and Pr signals (which gave the color by recording how far off the Y signal Blue and Red were)
NTSC has a nominal resolution of 720x480i (240 lines per field, 60 fields per second). VHS on its best days could get about half the horizontal resolution for luma, and even less for color, but often ended up a bit worse, so 320x480i is probably a good approximation for the resolution (ignoring the fact that color is even lower resolution).
[edit]
On a slightly different note, the HiFi audio track (supported for playback by pretty much all VCRs by the late 80s; not sure if/when HiFi recording became normal) of VHS was undoubtably the highest quality consumer analog audio product to get wide usage, with an SNR and dynamic range slightly better than the very best cassette decks.
Maybe, but as I remember it, VHS looked much better than analog TV from the same time. I remember being marveled by how clear it looked in comparison (mostly because it did not have as much noise as analog TV did even with a good antenna).
My family didn't really mess with VHS recording growing up, but I do remember getting shitty tapes from friends' families who had recorded stuff off tv and seeing glitches like this. Could just be the vhs player/recorders didn't work as well as professional ones?
There's a screenshot of pcweek.com page but unfortunately (or very conveniently) the earliest the internet archive goes for that domain is May of 1996, missed it by just one month!
update 2:
From the main link: "There are a handful of print articles from tech magazines at the time"
Turns out that the Internet Archive has a ton of computer magazines scanned in and there's a lot from 1996 so now I'm going down a rabbit hole both searching for any mention of this and also nostalgia:
https://archive.org/details/computermagazines?sort=-date&and...
I'd expect to see something in usenet archives, or at least some mention of it somewhere before this year, even if it's to someone complaining about the lack of evidence of it happening. Couldn't find anything.
The fact I've spent some time actually looking this up though makes this the best prank of the last few years. The video especially is a masterpiece of fakery.
SSL cert is very suspicious. It is by Google Trust Services LLC valid starting on Thu, 01 Apr 2021 02:07:46 GMT. Video was uploaded to YouTube on April first.
>SSL cert is very suspicious. It is by Google Trust Services LLC
There's nothing suspicious about that CA. If you do a search[1] you can see plenty certificates issued for benign sites. My guess is that's the CA for google related products? eg. GCP, app engine, or google site builder.
What's so suspicious about celebrating the 25th anniversary of a prank by publishing it, but preferring anonymity because people on the Internet are terrible nowadays?
Ah ok, I thought Letsencrypt was the only available auto-issuing CA on Google Cloud but that must have changed with GKE. The 1e100 address is probably pointed at a gke load balancer then.
I disagree wholeheartedly. I'm pretty tired of fictional April Fool's joke. If you've got a good idea for a (harmless) prank, DO IT. Don't write up some lame webpage to make people think you did it.
> Don't write up some lame webpage to make people think you did it.
But are we sure this is just some lame webpage? If the prank is to gaslight the internet into believing the Microsoft Coffee prank took place wouldn't the news segment covering the prank also be fake? I have no idea if that was the anchor for that TV station in the 90s. That would be way more entertaining to me than some press release or fake product page.
Kind of related to the last few seconds of the news clip - Feb 14 1996 "Zoo Gorilla Gives Birth In Seattle" - I imagine visitation for the new baby would come around a month and a half after birth. https://www.spokesman.com/stories/1996/feb/14/zoo-gorilla-gi...
Had to remove the /1, but good find. That does seem to put the right timeframe -- and with confirmation they're real presenters too. It's not a matter of finding a c. 25 year old clip from the news to base a fake on, it would be finding one from about March-May 1996 (which itself would be amazing to have for no reason), and then replace it.
I'm leaning more to "this is real", but it's astounding there's no reference to it before yesterday.
It's true that going to the trouble of costumes and video editing is at least some effort. However yesterday had more than its fair share of very low effort Photoshops and year after year, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
To the original question, the alleged original prank still outweighs any contemporary green screen antics: producing multiple physical fake boxes, distributing them across town in multiple stores, and getting local news to pick up on it. That's a lot of work.
The effort/motivation ratio makes far more sense for the 1996 prank than for the 2021 one. The 1996 one works out: a group of co-workers, at a company with a divisive reputation but desperately longing for being considered cool, a year after the Windows 95 release campaign made shrink-wrapped cardboard boxes the centerpiece of attention. And 1996: from Microsoft Word Art to pirated copies of Quark Express, losing themselves to print preparation screen time was just something people did, in the 90ies.
The hypothetical 2021 prank? Why Microsoft? Why Java? Why the completely forgotten medium of cardboard boxes?
I can't find any mention of it on contemporary Usenet via Google Groups search, and you'd think someone would have mentioned it in comp.os.linux.advocacy if nowhere else...
For what it's worth, I searched The Seattle Times, the Seattle PI, and "Washington Newspapers" through the Seattle Public Library online portal and didn't find anything.
There were articles recounting April fools day pranks, but none mention Microsoft Coffee which is weird to me considering that it was covered on a local station.
We know Satya Nadella has a Hacker News team to speak positively about Micro$oft and defend it here. The real Conspiracy question is if they've been 'activated' to help cover up this story by trying to claim it itself is a hoax.
As they explain, if you have evidence of abuse on HN, you should be emailing hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate. But other commenters having different $BigCo tastes from you doesn't count as evidence.
I wouldn't be much surprised. The amount of things people do _not_ notice is staggering. When I do usability tests there's almost always something that doesn't get noticed although I thought it obvious and/or important.
Personal anecdote: I managed to buy paper for my printer and only noticed upon arrival that it was the wrong size. The product photo looked right to be. I did not bother to check the details - or even the product title. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Also, regarding "if the person isn't drunk": There's a great short talk called "the user is drunk" which makes one much more sympathetic to such seemingly unexplainable comprehension fails that sometimes drive product designers mad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2CbbBLVaPk&feature=emb_titl...
To extend on your analogy a bit: Imagine working on that term paper on GitHub and then having your repo deleted. The odds of reproducing that information completely is zero. But there might still be some forks (related species) around. So it's pretty hard to wipe out everything.
