I apologize if this seems rude, but why should I be interested in your opinion? Are you an authority on economic policy?

It's been pointed out to you that this is flawed and why, so I won't repeat it. However, there is a grain of truth in this. A president's policies with regard to economic matters don't really take effect until their second year in office, given the constitutional procedures regarding budgeting, etc. If you want me to take you seriously, take the figures in the links I cited, and demonstrate how accounting for this changes the premise I posted.

I tried to select sources that referenced actual numbers. Feel free to cite numbers of your own, but this is such a well-known phenomenon at this point that denying it strikes me as highly unusual.

I don't think it's very fair to blame former President Bush for the financial crisis. Though his 2003 tax cuts included a provision eliminating capital gains tax on certain home sales, which created structures that allowed the real estate and financial markets to become corrupted and eventually collapse, assigning blame to him is like blaming the owner of a gun shop when someone commits a crime using a gun purchased at that shop.

The core cause of the financial crisis was the over-leveraging of securities backed by subprime loans. Given that these loans were overwhelmingly not backed by Fannie Mae and/or Freddie Mac, I'm struggling to determine how the author of that article is making the connection between rules regarding affordable housing access for the poor and minorities and the financial crisis (I do like his books, though). After some cursory Googling, I located this, which, while interesting, isn't especially relevant.

This is why.

The opposite is literally true. I don't personally vote economic issues (there's nothing wrong with doing so), but if I were to, voting Republican would not be an optimal choice.

You seem to primarily vote your wallet, and you also have a liberal position on at least one social issue, or, at least, you're not crazy about the Republican platform position on that issue (please correct me if I read you wrong). Again, nothing wrong with that, but holding a Republican preference with what you've shared of your political views seems... decidedly strange. I'd honestly be interested in how you arrived at the preference you have.

What deterioration? Now, I'll be the first to admit that we're not exactly seeing Clinton-era growth, but we are seeing steady, albeit slow, improvement. Again, literally the opposite of deterioration.

For 3D-accelerated games from that era, I've had good luck with dgVoodoo. Unaccelerated DirectDraw stuff often flat refuses to run on newer versions of Windows, but I've gotten some things to work with The DirectDraw Hack and similar programs, depending on the game.

But, that's not really what you're asking for. QEMU might be a good starting point; getting it to emulate a P3 and a Geforce 4 may be a lot of work (I haven't perused the source), but probably not impossible; I mean, it's designed to emulate selected CPUs and video cards already.

WINE is getting good, too -- I want to try this when it's working.

If you don't need perfect timing, just consistent timing for kerberos and log file sanity, then running ntpd on ESXi with tinker panic 0 and about four time sources will work well, with no more than a few seconds drift at any time.

A friend works for a large server vendor. He told me a while ago that they essentially only provide and support the management tools for their servers as VCenter plugins anymore; because, almost without exception, their customers only use them as ESXi hosts.

And here's the complete context, where you can see that he was talking about infrastructure:

Good job proving the grandparent's point.

2 + 2 = 3.14159

(I want to join in the mistake-making, too.)

This works really well, actually. DOSBox is good enough that it seems more stable than any 486 hardware ever was. It runs my old DOS/Windows apps handily, runs on any recent Windows/Linux/OSX OS with no drama, and the source is readily available in case I ever run into something that needs some tweaking to get running. Not that I've needed to do that much; I think I made a small hack to 0.72 to get it to run something, which ended up working in 0.73 and 0.74 without modification.

I initially misread the first option as 'gives erections'. And, frankly, that would be as good a use of a virtual assistant as anything else they do. As cool as the software can be, it's really just a UI paradigm; all of the operations in the poll options are straightforward enough to do with a standard smartphone interface. Not to diminish the importance of UI paradigms, as they can be industry-changing, but at the same time, I've worked through enough of them to be less interested than I used to be.

'Decent speaker cable', according to the reply to your original post, is simply cable of sufficient diameter to lower resistance. This is correct -- any two conductors of sufficient size will work fine in this application. Induced noise isn't an issue at the voltage levels required to drive a loudspeaker, so no shielding is required (or desired -- shielded cable would introduce capacitance issues that would potentially cause your amplifier some distress). I do sound reinforcement for extra cash sometimes; I have personally used two sets of booster cables and 500 feet of barbed wire fence as a speaker 'cable' for an outdoor event. I mostly use bulk lamp cord in normal situations. Monster Cable is largely unnecessary and overpriced (and, frighteningly, is generally regarded as low-end among the cork-sniffing segment of the pro-audio world).

A tube amp may emphasize either even or odd order harmonics, depending on the circuit design in the output stage. A single-ended output stage (one in which one or more tubes are used to simply amplifies the current of the input waveform) will indeed tend to emphasize even-order harmonics. Many tube hi-fi amps use a Class A single-ended output stage for this reason. An amp with a push-pull output stage (one in which the input waveform is split into two, with one phase-inverted 180 degrees from the other, and each new waveform sent to one half of one or more output tube pairs, which are biased so that each member of each pair essentially amplifies the current of one half of the original input waveform) will tend to emphasize odd-order harmonics, as even-order harmonics present in the signal will be canceled out when the signals are recombined by the output transformer. Most guitar amplifiers (probably the most common use of vacuum tubes anymore) are Class AB, push-pull amplifiers, which, aside from being much more efficient than single-ended amps, add mid-frequency punch to what would be a somewhat thin tone otherwise.

/Finally, a chance to use my archaic, outdated electronics knowledge for something. =P

Transistor amplifiers typically have a much faster slew rate than tubes. The slowness of tube amplifiers is mostly related to the rectification stage, though -- in older amps, a diode tube such as a 5AR4 or 5U4 is used, which can have a slew rate of 100 ms or more under some circumstances. Newer tube amplifiers typically, though not always, have solid-state rectification (usually 1N4007 diodes in a bridge configuration), which slew much faster.

Another characteristic of tube amplifiers that is of interest to musicians is harmonic content. Where a transistor amplifier simply takes an input sine wave and outputs an amplified version of the same wave, a tube amplifier will output dozens of harmonic waves as well. A "clean" sounding tube amp likely outputs a signal with 10 to 15% THD. A single-ended amplifier (one in which one or more output tubes simply increase the power of a signal) will tend to emphasize even-order harmonics (even-numbered multiples of the input frequency). An amplifier in a push-pull configuration (one in which two or more output tubes are paired, with each member of a pair amplifying one half of the input waveform) will tend to cancel even-order harmonics and emphasize odd-order harmonics (odd-numbered multiples of the input frequency).

A couple of weeks ago, I worked on a modern tube amp which was designed to allow flexibility in all of these areas. It had multiple stages which could each be overdriven separately or together for different overload characteristics, rectification switchable between tube and solid-state, and an output stage switchable between push-pull and single-ended. It even had multiple bias/plate voltage presets to allow use of multiple tube types in the output stage. Complicated, but kind of cool, too.

And the grandparent is correct regarding the gullibility of audiophiles. Anyone who would spend $60/foot on "premium speaker cable", when dollar-store lamp cord will conduct the same voltages and frequencies in an identical fashion should probably have their picture posted next to 'gullible' in the dictionary. =P

/me raises hand sheepishly. I'm still using the IBM Model M keyboard that I got with a cast-off 286 (the first computer I ever had that was mine, and not shared with someone else) in the mid-1990s. It's the only keyboard I've ever owned; I found it to be a little surreal when they became collectors' items in the past decade or so. I'm also still using a no-name $8 PS/2 mouse (one of the early optical mice) that I got about ten years ago. Maybe I should turn in my geek card for not bothering to upgrade my old junk, but it works fine for my purposes, and the last time I bought a motherboard (a couple of years ago, IIRC) it wasn't difficult to find one with PS/2 ports. When the ports are finally gone, I'll buy a cheap PS/2 to USB adapter.

I looked up the figures on the New York State government website, I would be surprised if New York City was not included. This doesn't 'skew' any figures; the figures are either accurate or they aren't. It is possible that the two states aren't easily comparable, but I think they are, as long as differences between them are taken into account in the comparison (as I did, using per-capita government spending rather than overall spending, for example). Both states had major businesses within them fail badly in 2008 (auto in Michigan, Banking in New York). Jobs were lost in both sectors of the economy; IIRC, finance was actually hit harder. Both sectors of the economy were subsequently bailed out by the Federal government. New York is doing relatively better now. If the great-grandparent were correct, that higher taxes, government spending, and unions were the cause of Michigan's economic woes, this would not be the case, as all of those things are more prevalent in New York.

Or, to word things differently, why is New York City, in your words, a "major business & finance centre" even though taxes and government spending are extremely high, and union membership is common? Is it possible, as I stated in my initial post, that taxes, government spending, and unions have much less of an effect on economies than the great-grandparent is asserting?