Definitely fun times. We had a place here in Ottawa called Century 21 (No relation to the realtor) that had used computer...stuff. Everything from Mainframe tape drives to all sorts of weird an obscure stuff. I traded a bunch of Apple ][+ manuals I dumpster dived for all the RAM I needed for the Apple ][+ clone I was building. It was a great place to hang out and oogle weird looking equipment and try to guess what it was for.

Most people forget, or never knew, that OS/2 was a joint IBM and Microsoft project. So with MS's marketing and IBM project management, it could have done well. But MS feared that it would compete with MS WIndows 3.x...whichwas true, it would have blown the doors off Windows. I wrote a kiosk application on OS/2...started on OS/2 2.1 just before OS2 3.0 Warp came, using what was called "IBM's Audio Visual Connection", or AVC, which later became the Ultimedia Builder. The big trick that AVC had was a IBM video capture and playback card that cost upwards to $5,000 or so I seem to remember. It could capture then play back video in either a resizable window, or full screen. The kiosk had a touch screen, and AVC could interact and control it all running under OS/2. The kiosk program I wrote was a tourism app called "Touch Ottawa/Hull". After using the touch screen to select the area Otawa you were interested in, and what you were looking for, eg Fast Food, it would bring up a menu of Fast Food resteraunts in that area. When you selected the fast food place, it pop up a screen that would show you a picture of the of the place, and/or some text, and would open window beside that to play a video clip, usually a commercial for the place. Then, if the place offered it, you could have it then print out a discount coupon for the resteraunt.

The company had me make a modified version of it, and it was renamed "The Electronic Trade Show". Again using the touchscreen selection, it could bringing up a commercial or just a graphic and text, it would allow businesses to advertise at trade shows to anyone who walked up to one of the kiosks and touched the screen. It could also optionally print out a business card or contact info for the company. The Government of Canada used this all over the world.

Fun days.

Oh, true, where "fringe minority" means racists, fascists, misogynists, etc. And "unacceptable views" means hatred and intolerance. Right on, 100% true!

Nabu was an Ottawa, Ontario Canada company that built their system around the North American Presentation-Level-Protocol Syntax (NAPLPS) for providing information over the Cablevision networks. It had some amazing technology but like the Hyperion Computer, it was another "Next Great Thing" that failed...not from the tech, it was excellent for its day, it was the lack of venture capital to grow the company from the respectable beginnings into an international product offering.

As the song says, "It's all about the Bass".

I believe there is, as there has been a steady production of spare parts for the Beaver by Bombardier but I don't know if that includes the full airframe or just parts that tend to wear and/or break. But I would think that they probably have full tooling since creating all of that equipment from scratch would be very expensive, and, I think, prohibitive. The fact that they are putting the DHC-6 Twin Otter, and the Beaver back into production as well as a new CL-515 firefighting water bomber would lead me to think that they have complete tooling for at least those aircraft, and maybe for all the type certs they acquired from Bombardier.

It may be out of current production, but Viking Air bought all the type certs for the de Havilland Canada planes from Bombardier and has actually been producing new parts for them. They are also tooling up to restart production of the Beaver due to demand, as well as an updated airframe version. Unfortunately, all of this has been pushed back by the plague, so who knows when/if they will start production of new Beavers.

Harbour Air in Vancouver, Canada has been testing their eBeaver seaplane since 2019, and it is working with Transport Canada & the FAA in the US for getting type certification for this plane. It is a modified de Havilland Canada DHC-2 Beaver with its radial engine with an electric one. There is precedent for this, as there is a certified type Beaver which has had its engine replaced with a Pratt & Whitney Canada PT6 turboprop engine creating the Turbo Beaver. Thus a fair bit of work has already been done towards certifying a DHC-2 Beaver with a different engine and help speed the process of getting its type cert.

That was my take as well, I have flow quads for years, and maybe watched hundreds of hours of other people flying them, and it seemed like a large quadcopter being flown by someone with a remote. The guy on it seemed almost terrified, and it looked like he took great pains to *not* move during the flight, I am guessing for fear of changing the center of gravity!

At first blush, the article seems to be saying that Linux systems are becoming more and more like Windows in terms of various types of malware. A careful reading of the well-crafted article will notice that they don't say "infections", it just says "attempts". To be more explicit, it says *attacks*, not "successful" attacks. The way the article is written would lead one to believe that Linux suffering more and more from ransomware and is just like Windows, but the reality is that although the number of attacks may be up, there is no indication that they are being *successful*. The article verges on being an example of fomenting "Fear Uncertainty Doubt", or FUD. I will not attribute nefarious intent when incompetence would adequately explain this article...but I do leave it up to the reader to decide how they judge it.

Leary was a great believer in VR and said it was very similar to taking LSD...so much so that he rewrote his popular catchphrase “turn on, tune in, drop out” to “turn on, boot up, and jack in.”

If they lose Crimea, it is not hard to imagine that they will continue their "scorched earth" policy that they have been practicing to level Ukrainian cities and towns they don't think they can capture. Blowing up the dam would put Ukraine in a crisis mode and give the Russians time to regroup.If they don't succeed in blaming the Ukrainians, they will say that it was the Wagner Group performing on their own initiative, and thus Russia can condemn them....while paying them for it.

Even if the Ukrainians were stupid enough to fire the M142 HIMARS GMLRS munitions they were supplied with at the plant, those things have an accuracy that would enable them to hit one room of a building and not hit another beside it. How do you think they took out the railroad bridge that is only a few meters wide? Two rockets would do it, actually one could probably do it, but you always fire two to make sure!

Unfortunately for the Russians, the Ukrainians are *smart* and would never do such a stupid thing! It is much more likely that it was a "False Flag" operation by the Wagner mercenary group, which gives the Russians some degree of deniability...similar to what they did when they murdered the Ukrainian Azov regiment POWs in the Olenivka prison camp and then tried to blame it on the Ukrainians and the HIMARS system.

The Russians look like they are using their mercenaries, the Wagner Group, to commit atrocities against Ukrainians. First they killed Ukrainian Prisoners of War and try to blame Ukraine for it, so it's not a stretch that they are doing the same thing at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power complex. I think that if Russia is pushed all the way back towards Crimea, they will also blow up the dam on the Dnipro River, and flood all of the downstream Ukrainian cities like Kherson. Then blame Ukraine.

Following this war, we may see war crimes trials that will be second only to the ones after World War 2 against the Nazis.

I'm large, I am round, and I am comfortable.