21 more years? Then, I am sure, it will be off support and, as Douglas Adams says, it will be invisible 'cause it is an SEP (Somebody Else's Problem).

In an '80s Industrial Technology class using a Computer Numerical Control (CNC) mill, students had a bad habit of busting cutters by hitting clamps as they fat fingered the tape program and ran it. So I wrote a CNC simulator that would read the program and "cut" paths in a 3 dimensional array of bits, each .001 on a side. Since the machine had a raster graphics board they could watch the cutter do its thing "real time". We had gotten one machine for the lab but if the machine was useful would get more for student access.

The mainframe folks denied our request for our machines and we said OK, if your mainframe will do that we are fine. So, a good student translated the program from DEC FORTRAN to IBM FORTRAN and we submitted the job. Of course, the mainframe bogged down and it would have taken a week to do one job, so they briefly raised its privileges and the entire system bogged down. No other jobs could run. They contacted me immediately and said they had to kill the job. I simply replied that, Gee, then I guess we won't be able to have 16 students run that weekly in their labs? The purchase order for the remaining machines was approved that week.

For perspective, MIPS were long ago discredited but old systems were measured in them. An LSI-11 is about 1 MIPS as is a mainframe, a modern laptop is 221,700 MIPS or more.

I turn off location in the settings and I think that kills everything. Then if I need a map or something I want, I turn location on, use it, and turn it off. I get plenty of spam, and don't need location based spam too.

We think of the Internet as fast but it is hard to compete with the speed of a station wagon full of DVDs to move large volumes of data.

The same happened for Mathematics.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mcclernan.com%2F2015...

Broken link for the full program is https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F...

Those of you who tuned in their 1958 B&W TV could watch one of the finest science videos ever done. If you want to just watch the pertinent video, here is a two minute excerpt from the AT&T science show. https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F...

But, those who want to see a very creative show on meteorology, there is this https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F...

Enjoy. And see how long people knew this was coming.

There is precedent to this sort of operation. Regulating fact checkers is cheaper though, than opening your own office of facts like this one:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...

As processors and memory shrink more, down to that ultimate single molecule level, a cosmic ray can disrupt a bit much more easily than with larger more primitive chips and bits. I wonder how much of this is a side effect of Moore's law in action. Unintended consequences, maybe?

Amateurs wrote Linux and many open source applications... Amateurs are committed to excellence in their practice. DO NOT EVER equate amateur with incompetence. Amateurs are driven by a passion to excel...

Incompetence is best named as it is ... incompetence. And Professionals deserve credit for their accomplishments.

Within its limits (40 watts per channel) my 1972 Dynakit stereo sounds better than most common systems. Given sources such as CDs and DVDs, the audio is great. Of course, the speakers/equipment are huge and portability is kind of lacking. On the other hand, FM radio has definitely benefited from improvements in the past decades and old FM receivers are rather deficient compared to even portable units nowadays.

Now, all of THAT said, a pair of Koss PRO-4AA headphones and a fraction of a watt of clean audio from a good audio card, MP3 player, CD player, or laptop is hard to beat and I cannot tell the difference between a good amplifier and a good portable device driving the headphones......

Imagine if you, like I, have 18GB per month cap for satellite service. I had no use whatever for streaming but the DVDs are wonderful. The only complaint I have is that some new stuff is available streamed well before on DVDs, so that messes stuff up a bit. On the other hand, I have a local Family Video store so I can go there and rent a new movie once in a while for less than I had to pay for streaming I couldn't use. So, I am happy with the change. But I am so far from the Information Superhighway that sometimes the crickets cover up the road noise!

How about extending Creative Commons concepts to the invention realm? Instead of simply being able to demonstrate freedom of the idea by publication or otherwise provable prior use, you could free the idea by wantonly releasing it into humanity's commons. Along the way, you could specify similar categories of use, like attribution, not for profit use, etc. and still make money from some applications of the technology. Unless it infringed existing (prior) patents somehow, the publication of the description would invalidate future attempts to patent the idea, thus protecting the inventor and humanity at large from a wasteful fight. Patents mean nothing for a sufficiently valuable invention with sufficiently powerful opposition, so why not just open it up and get away from all the litigation? Just consider the intermittent windshield wiper as an example. Already there is little cause to patent an idea because defending it becomes a serious problem for most mortals. Raising the cost and barriers to what was intended to be a protection for the little guy removes the last vestige of fairness from the law anyway. If one claims an invention by some commons method, it assures safe use unless it already infringes, and companies the world round could share in the wonders of American Innovation. Mr. Lessig, are you listening?

"None of them will want to be the one to send Joe Sixpack into orbit."

You forget the ship loaded with Telephone Sanitizers, Beauticians, Managers, etc. from Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker series...

Not only that ... but ... Since we have no use for people able to produce really nutritious wholesome food on this planet, maybe we send them to another where their work is appreciated

IDE drives do not allow you access to the physical data format. It is written on the disk when it is created and not changed. In the old days, hardware wore out soon enough that the physical format could become unreadable and need to be replaced with a new one. Fun, huh?

Actually you have to go back to the early 80s when BIOS had the low level init utility for hard drives and the drives themselves were simply bit writing and reading devices. At that time you could establish an arbitrary physical format on the drive before you wrote the OS format. In fact, I remember how you could take a 20 MB drive and make it a 30 MB drive with a different RLL (Run Length Limited) encoder that stashed bytes more compactly. That process exceeded the capacity of the processors of the time so was in hardware. So, I guess, just go back and get a 10 or 20MB drive with interface card and have at it.