Thanks for sharing - that’s actually pretty interesting. I knew about Polars, but I didn’t know it performed better. I know about that in passing from folks that are in the Cloud “Data” space, who use SaaS platforms that are heavily Python based. That includes Pandas and Polars, but also Jupyter. That really threw me for a loop, but the more I think about it, the more sense it makes.

Exactly. Access was a dirt-cheap rapid application design (RAD) tool in disguise, and very easily could have been shaped into a smooth on-ramp to ASP, ASPX, IIS, and SqlServer solutions. In short: a hypothetical “Access.NET” would have been really something.

On the other hand, now we have a super easy jumping point for anyone in a large business who can program a little to spin up a new startup. Find a business process that’s currently a spreadsheet/on paper, write a database frontend to easily handle that then sell your solution to businesses looking to remove load bearing paperwork and spreadsheets

You just described most of my career, and how a lot of contracting shops get their start. Managers need reports, and someone has to program them. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve replaced Excel with custom software; a faster way to do this is usually welcome. That said, the cloud “Data” space is doing a lot right now to reduce this kind of task to Jupyter notebooks and some other proprietary solutions.

Hah! I suggested almost the same thing before reading your comment. I agree.

Anyway, that in particular story would never happen in the visual mediums.

I dunno. The SFX crew would probably love to kitbash the ship more and more each season. Meanwhile, the merchandising opportunities would be off the chart. “Voyager? Yes, which season/version of the ship are we talking about? There are seven.”

but that what made it home was the Federation culture that the original crew embodied.

That’s pretty much the core theme behind Prodigy, so we know that would have worked as a narrative device. Too bad they didn’t give that a shot back then.

I get the impression that this is hard to do right. I am so incredibly thankful that the Battlestar Galactica reboot went there for pretty much the entire series, and did a great job. Heck, I even cared about the ship by the time it was all done. Meanwhile, Stargate:Universe screwed it up at every opportunity.

IMO Voyager, as both a crew and as a ship, should have been unrecognizable by the end of the voyage. I’m talking all sorts of exotic tech bolted to the hull, a greater Delta Quadrant crew compliment, crew diet of hydroponics from very distant worlds, and maybe even a few additional ships in formation. They even bothered to mention the bio-electronic ship systems in the flippin’ pilot, which could have turned into a sentient starship or something. It could have been epic.

IMO (not a scientist), moon dust is basically pulverized glass, only without the benefits of weathering and erosion. So think of lots of microscopic sharp, abrasive, shards of finely pulverized volcanic rock and obsidian. Get that stuff anywhere near a mucous membrane - eyes, nose, mouth, throat - and it’s going to irritate you. At the same time, it’s pretty much intert; well, at least the parts that don’t instantly react to oxygen or humidity that is. My guess is that Schmidt is just a little more sensitive to the physical sensation of it, or perhaps he rubbed his eyes with a glove by accident, giving him an extra big dose.

And for the uninitiated, it’s well documented that everyone in the lander was physically exposed to moon dust. There was no airlock on the lander, so every excursion resulted in bringing whatever was on the suits right into the cabin. They reported that it “smelled” like burned gunpowder, so they were at least all inhaling the stuff.

Meanwhile Banks are using… Bank Python.

Captain Jackson: I recognize that Starfleet has a made a decision, but given that’s a stupid-ass decision, I’ve elected to ignore it.

Once, I actually had my hands on a German WWII-era infrared targeting… wand? Scope? … It was a huge shoulder-mounted flashlight with optics that were used to illuminate aircraft using IR. VERY sophisticated for the time. According to the declassified doc that came with it, the power requirements were insane. Basically it had to be plugged into a mobile generator - probably on a truck or half-track - or the grid, to use it.

So it’s not out of the question. G.I. Joe in an alternate WWII timeline could have had laser sights on machine guns, provided they were tethered to a “mobile” power supply like that.

Access let you build visual apps, usually data-entry workflows, around its internal SQL database. You could build small apps with it using Visual Basic and a visual UI editor. Plus, all your work ships as a single file, provided the user also has Access installed. In many ways, it was like Apple’s Hypercard, but also way easier to write than webpages with the same capability. Oh, and you don’t need a server anywhere to make it work; it’s 100% local. It was also the next logical step to take after the most complex things you can do in Excel.

That said, it was crippled from the start - still very useful, but not for heavyweight stuff. It’s limited to a fixed number of UI, pages, database rows, etc, so it wouldn’t compete with more expensive MS solutions (this thing came with Office). I don’t think it got a lot of love because of that, but I personally used it to solve some real problems in the workplace, without need of any (official) developer resources.

In the present day, it would actually compete with a lot of simple business cases that are served in the cloud at some cost.

Excel-sior!

Instructions unclear: never left bed. :(

Alas, Access was too powerful to make the transition to the cloud. It couldn’t be allowed to survive.

Let me make One Note here since you Power-Pointed that out.

I think there’s enough for way more than that if we dip into the whole O365 suite.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vJjIUPRWjg

The Prosperity Gospel folks go a step further and equate wealth and health with the will of god. That being well-off is the direct result of being in god’s good graces. It side-steps observations of financial inequality in the face of moral equality, by hand-waving exceptional wealth as deserved by truly rare and exceptional people. And that conveniently plays off of confusing causation for correlation, so we arrive at “money = godly.”

For the record: I hate that this has a name and it’s a real thing.

I was gonna say. With a crater that large, we all lose.

NGL, I want this as a sticker for my water bottle.

Edit: I really should search for these things first: https://www.amazon.com/DHMO-Dihydrogen-Monoxide-Warning-Sticker/dp/B0714PZL1Q

Venice? Wow, that’s actually kind of on-the-nose for a show of excessive wealth.

https://historywalksvenice.com/article/early-venice/why-did-venice-get-rich/

TL;DR: Venice exists in its current form (canal city on an ever sinking atoll) not because of climate change, and not because of some fishing village put their backs into it for hundreds of years, but because of money. LOTS, and lots of money from a shipping/trade boom a very long time ago.

The fact that Bezos built his obscene wealth on shipping and international commerce, just makes this even more appropriate in a gross kind of way. Like he’s deliberately connecting himself to Venice’s history, and everything that implies.

You know what 'ol Jack Burton says at a time like this?