The "village idiots" meme has been heard loud and clear by a generation of potential converts. Which is why Windows and the Mac still dominate the market.

I`m sure many Slashdot posters know kids who have iPhones. But I rather doubt that is the norm.

MS Chat was a jargon free IRC chat client with a very clean layout and the animations were optional.

The IBM PC team went to Microsoft for an OS - and Gates sent them to Klildall. At a time when everyone and his brother was trying to make a serviceable 16 bit CP/M clone. Klidall could be difficult to work with and CP/M-86 drifted into development hell. The $240 price tag for the affordable SOHO office machine IBM waanted to build wasn`t helping his case either. MSDOS got the job done and competive MSDOS machines were on the cloneing of the IBM PC BIOS.

I'll take it as given that you are single without children or other dependents. Also that you never experienced a flood, wildfire, dust storm or blizzard. The real thing is nothing like a YouTube video. A lesson I don't advise learning the hard way.

I am growing increasingly weary of reboots. For every series that hit all the right marks - Harley Quinn and Wednesday come to mind. Perry Mason perhaps -. we get a dozen more which are lame and lazy - or exist only to kick the fandom in the teeth. Velma. There is also something to be said as well for having a clear driving narrative that encourages strong and engagaing character develooment. You shouldn't be exposing all the pieces at once, but they should be falling naturally into place. B5 did that kind of serialized story telling very, very well.

I`m reminded of Data`s attemt t master stand-up by playing to a holodeck audience. The canned laughter in response to his jokes sounded forced and unatural. Profoudly unsettling. You learn comedy by engaging with your audience not by looking into a mirror.

No where on the site is a floor plan or a rendering of the finished structure. Which sort of matters to potential buyers. Lenders, zoning boards, etc. There is walled estate home here that suggests a minimum security prison or a sewage treatment plant with delusions of granduer. Not the most welcome of neighbors. Edison`s concrete homes were a beast to repair, plumb and wire. How well is this structure going to to age? Will it still be marketable 15, 20, 30 years down the road?

Edison sold cast on site "concrete" homes as affordable houses. The forms had to radically simplified to build a singuarly ugly box like tract home. Plumbing and electrical work - repairs of any kind - were a nightmare. This about the time Sears and others were moving towards selling attractive soundly enginered wood frame homes in kit form.

The modular design of the MSDOS and Windows PC was its greatest strength. An infinitly customizable but still mass market product. No how matter good your Amiga or Atari ST was out of the box, the PC would eclipse it sooner or later.

A longg time back, Walmart tried to make Linux mass market. It couldn`t decide on a single plausible mass market distribution. So it tried them all. None caught fire - and shoppers were left confused and wary. Walmart didn`t sell systems nor did it "certify" that the peripherals it did sell had compatible drivers. This at a time when everything labled "ready for Windows or the Mac" worked out of the box. It was also a time when AAA software delivered strong afternarket sales - and the "free" alteratives little known and second-rate.

Your CRT will fail eventually. It weighs 50 lbs or more. It probably needs a ATSC 1 to NTSC SD converter. New digital sets are already transitioning to multichannel 4K HDR ATSC 3/NextGen OTA. While your cable TV wants you to subscibe to an app for service on all your devices. The methods may have been much cruder. But advertisers have been building profiles of their markets and users since radio went commercial in the 1920s. You could make a fair argument that targeted marketing was well undrstood a generation earlier. The geek unplugged has no influence on the production of new content or the availability of the old. He might as well not exist.

Metropolis enters the public domain. But is that also true of restored prints of the film? Next question. How do you compete with Criterion and the handful of others who know how to hammer a successful restoration into a marketable product. The geek needs to think less about copyright and more about the owership and condition of primary sources. Restoraton requires sophisticated technical skills and artistry - and a rock solid line of credit. The also tends to conflate derivatives in other media with fan fiction. Its easy to recreate the lo-res Enterprise bridge of 1965. Now do Holmes`London in 1886. Sets and props. 4K HDR quality.

Steamboat Willie on YouTube for 13 years. In HD on Disney+. Disney owns the primary sources and theatrical quality digital restorations. The expene would break the geek before he went into distribution. Disney could put its 4K cut of SW into global distribution for free and the cost woudnt show as a rouding error on its bottom line

Steamboat Willie is eight minutes of silent era sight gags with a synchronized sound track. Primary sources nitrate stock and an obscure mechanically syncronized phonographic disk system. If you are Disney, MoMA or the LOC that is not going to be a problem. It is going to be a problem for the geek who thinks his DVD rip can compete commercially with the pristine HD restoration Disney distributes for free on YouTube and its other platforms. There is almost nothing in Steamboat Willie which suggests a plausible conflict-free derivative. Remember that Disney owns the rights to hundreds if not thousands of MM stories in all media and all languages. Good luck crafting a villian that is 1/10 as memorable as The Phantom Blot. One final note. Without the trademarked character designs your project is as good as dead. Termite Terrace tried to go with a erartz Mouse in its early days. But the audience wasnt buying it.