I recall reading an article where Hewlett himself, or was it Packard himself, was saying that it was important to remain a privately held company because of the nature of what Hewlett Packard did. It may even have been in an in-house publication.

Some years later I found Agilent with a bunch of machines running Windoze as the operating system for their systems!

The justification probably went something like:

        "Well, that's so the average inexpensive programmer,
          who only knows Windows of course, can buy a library
          to link with their code to put into the machines, and we
          can charge for the upgrade to every new version of Windoze."

What about Carrier Grade Linux, that a different branch of HP rolls up for a price for paying customers, and when I looked it up HP were basing theirs on Debian with things like real time patches, memory management patches, monotonic clock patches, etc, etc, etc?

I recall contacting HP Global Solutions one time from hospital, wanting a little technical assistance and expressing the hope that they had had a good party when Carly Fiorina (sp?) had left. I never heard a word back from them.

When I was R&D Manager for AIReSEARCH Mapping back in 1990 (I Just found some of my old business cards the other day) I had directed expenditure of over A$50,000 in 1990 money in Hewlett Packard's direction - for a combined 500Msps multichannel DSO and Logic Analyzer and gear to interface to an Intel 16-bit microcontroller to "Do It The Right Way". That would be over $117,652.17 in today's Australian dollars. They couldn't even bother to talk to me and get me a photodiode, some op amps and resistors, capacitors and an audio interface to hook up to some binoculars to investigate a pulsating light I'd seen. (It looked like low audio frequencies on a hill several kilometers away. Might have been a car with sound system driving the headlight circuit or perhaps a shootemup's screen showing pulsing light through a window. I wanted to _hear_ the light.

An inquiring mind (mine) wanted to know! Besides, I had nothing better to do in hospital than to smoke cigarettes. Queensland Health got me hooked on Tobacco Smoking!
You couldn't hear the TV properly because, although it was a stereophonic TV it was behind a plastic protective screen and it sounded all muddy and indistinct and was prone to being adversely affected by background noise. A sincere attempt to 'go through channels' met with an ignorant assertion that because the TV was stereophonic already it was clearly a non-problem. Screw that; she was deliberately misunderstanding my point - that the plastic in front of the box the TV was contained in was adversely affecting the sound and It could be easily improved by some external speakers by the sides of the box that housed the TV. Sure, you'd want to make them blunt-cornered and blunt-edged, but mounting them to the sides of the box shouldn't present a problem and the sound would be improved out of sight. It was probably "Not our core business." (Another excuse I've heard for not taking me seriously.)

I kid you not! I thought I had some good reasons to believe that the smoking habit wouldn't stick but it did, from sometime in 1996 to the present day! I've smoked
about a pack a day of mostly Virginia cigarettes pretty much ever since, and with Australia's punitive tobacco excise that makes it about 70% of my (admittedly
tax-free) pension. No wonder I'm having trouble paying the bills.

With apologies to the tremendously tall and late Douglas Adams, who could reportedly cause pain all up and down the high street when he played his electric guitar:-)E

Social worker: "What do you do with a Manically Depressed non-Robot with Untreated ADHD?"

Me: "What do you do if you _are_ a Manically Depressed non-Robot with Untreated ADHD?"

Medico: "Well, we clearly can't treat it with Ritalin because once upon a time, like two decades ago, he was a bit paranoid and thought people were 'out to get him', so clearly he couldn't even be tried on Ritalin and watched closely in hospital or seen frequently by his GP, because we know that these 'older kids' like to swap pills on the playground"

Nurse: "Ahem! Excuse me, doctor, but this is an adult male we're talking about, and he hasn't even got into a significant fight since high school. And he reports that he tested with a genius-level IQ just prior to 'the shit hitting the fan' for him in early 1996"

Medico: "So what's his complaint? We're now following all the current rules for prescribing these medications, including the one about not allowing Strattera to be
used in anyone who wasn't diagnosed with ADHD and treated in high school."

Nurse: "Didn't you talk to his sister? There's apparently actual Super 8 footage of him and her at Lyons Primary School here in the ACT way back when and she says that he's dressed as 'The Absent-Minded Professor,' with boxers on and his trousers folded over his forearm." It's got to be PATHOGNOMONIC of ADHD, Doctor. And besides, Doctor, he claimed that on his first psychiatric hospitalization, no-one even tried to 'talk him down', they just stopped actively talking to him and brought him in here. He says his mother even went silent on the trip back to his home and didn't even tell him that his computer system and CD collection was gone until they got back there and he saw that the front door had been forced. No wonder he might be 'a bit paranoid'. His first psychiatric hospitalization and he loses $29,413.04 worth to a burglar? No wonder he thought someone was out to get him."

I could have bought a nice-looking second-hand Fender Stratocaster that I saw one weekend near Toowoomba, I think. (If only I'd known back then what Robert of the Red beard (from Humbug meetings) later told me about electric guitars.) I should probably have bought it on the spot. Unless it was expertly covered up, it showed none of the signs that Robert of the Red beard had (later) warned about.

To Robert of the Red beard who used to go to Humbug meetings: Sorry about the Viola, I actually on-lent it to a cute female and subsequently lost touch with her. I thought that It might cheer her up a bit while she was in hospital. I have a lead on her, though. Apparently her family owns a certain piece of real estate in Belgium. You wouldn't believe its name, though. When I had the money to replace it I tried unsuccessfully to find you. Catch up with me and I promise to make good on it somehow. I should have put the money in a term deposit account and just let it roll over until we met again. We live and learn. Oh, and Robert, what was the name of that overweight guy from the USA that you said was involved so heavily in programming some of the earliest computer games? The one who was insulted and virtually chased away by that CSIRO guy. I'd like to talk with him in any case. Please get him to leave his contact details with the current Humbug crowd and arrange for them to let me know how to contact him. I hope he's okay. Alternately, make yourself known to me somehow here on Slashdot.

Back to tremendously tall people, I once saw, in Central Station Brisbane, a stunning woman who must have been about Seven feet Six inches tall. For comparison, the Science Center in Brisbane at the time had a mark at Seven feet Two on one of their walls, and it was labelled as "The Tallest Woman In the World". If it were just that she was tall you might think I was just mistaken, but she had some very distinctive horizontal ridges below each eye, at least partially protective of the eyeball.

She was striding along, looking great, really eating up the distance with her long legs and looking, in fact, straight into my eyes as I stood still and watched her, right around rush hour with my Sony Vaio in a bag on my shoulder.

If you think this rings true, vote my other submission NOTSPAM and vote it UP: https://f6ffb3fa-34ce-43c1-939d-77e64deb3c0c.atarimworker.io/submissio...

I previously wrote:

> ...some text...
> ...
> What if the patches of dead forest in Finland's West are Putin's test
> of some bio-weapon intended for eventual, or possibly imminent,
> threat to attack along Finland's Eastern border?
>
> Finally: Has anyone ever heard Putin pronounce the word 'Lebensraum'?
> Does he do it with a proper German accent?

Grammar error in previous: remove "threat to".

Tesseractic.

Pardon me for intruding, but I have an old story, and the word 'Peril' caught my eye too.

Firstly, on 'Peril' - One of my all-time favorite movies is Death In a French Garden, which I saw once or twice in the '80s. It is apparently also known as 'Peril', and some years ago I bought a copy of 'Peril' online on a Blu Ray disc. Unfortunately my efforts to view this have so far been thwarted by technology and circumstances, and I have not yet found an online streaming service that has it. Long ago I rented a copy of Death in a French Garden on an NTSC VHS videocassette but it wouldn't play properly on the VHS player I had at the time on the television I had at the time. It just would not sync properly. The music impressed me and reminded me of my cinema experience but the picture was well-nigh impossible to make out. My more recent purchase seems badly made because it causes my player to vibrate alarmingly in play. Ripping the disc to a .iso file produces a 29GB monster that will not burn to a 50GB medium, apparently because it is single-layered, and on the 50GB medium each layer is only 25GB in capacity. I have discovered that the 100GB Blu Ray media are only 3-layered and _not_ 4-layered as one might suspect, so the 29GB image _should_ burn to a 100GB disc, according to my current thinking. It might be possible to simply truncate the image to a little under 25GB and burn it to a 50GB disc, but there is a great twist in the ending and it would be lost this way, quite aside from the iffy nature of truncation.

Curiously, my previous attempts to play the disc resulted in _no_ subtitles and a soundtrack that doesn't remind me of my old cinema experience, nor my NTSC tape sound track memories. A brief trial on a former neighbor's player resulted in no subtitles as well, but another guy reported no problems at all, when lent the disc.

Does anyone know whether my plan to burn a 29GB (single-layer) rip of a Blu Ray disc to a 100GB disc is likely to work?
(I plan to use Verbatim archive quality media.)

Secondly, an old (2004) Finnish acquaintance regaled me of a story from World War II in Finland, where the Fins made veritable fields of slaughter out of camps of German tank crews when they were encamped at various locations in their quest to take over the region by the use of their rather effective (in most places) tanks. He seemed very upset that the Fins had so little trouble exterminating that particular winter threat to Finland's security. Finnish soldiers simply hid in the trees in white camouflage and picked off the German crews one by one until there was nobody left alive to fight them. Finland probably has most, if not all, of the captured tanks and other vehicles in storage somewhere still, but they are almost certainly nonfunctional.

What if the patches of dead forest in Finland's West are Putin's test of some bio-weapon intended for eventual, or possibly imminent, threat to attack along Finland's Eastern border?

Finally: Has anyone ever heard Putin pronounce the word 'Lebensraum'? Does he do it with a proper German accent?

Tesseractic
-- I used to be a perfectionist; now I am much better - I can compromise.

I see. Thanks for that. That certainly narrows down the possibilities. I know that the Bren machine gun shoots tight 'groups', much tighter than the M60, for example. Spraying the bullets around is often useful to kill, and the Bren has fallen out of favor for not just its complexity but also the tight 'groups'. If you had to launch bullets over a big hill using a mortar sight though, you might still choose a Bren for just that reason.

Have a nice day, iggymanz.
Regards, Graeme.
-- I used to be a perfectionist; now I am much better - I know how to compromise.

I'll tell you one person that the FBI ought to be looking for:

The guy in the photo on either X or Facebook who was said
to be hosing down the crime scene. He was on top of a roof
with a thick hose squirting water onto what might have been
where the shooter was sited.

He was facing away from the camera and wearing an FBI jacket.

I'll give them a bunch of (probably unnecessary) hints:

Was he really an FBI agent?
Was that really the roof in question?
Are there any other shots of him?
Can you see his face in any of them?
Were any of the other shots of him
                taken with an old film camera?
What do they look like when blown up?

There must be an honest investigation into this whole thing.
I seriously think an aimed shot to the ear, even though it seems
difficult, is something an experienced marksman could achieve,
from that distance, even though Trump had reportedly just moved
his head. It could have been choreographed.

We need to know before the election; you may say it's none of
my business, being an Aussie, but when the USA sneezes, the
world catches a cold.

Tesseractic.
-- I used to be a perfectionist; now I am much better - I can compromise.