lol, yeah KB not MB.

damn, how far we really have come. amazing when you think about how many orders of mag we've seen in our life time.

stuff like "hi, my name's romney." or "hi, my name is bush." or any other super rich person.

they really are different from the rest of us little people.

"I know he can GET the job, but can he DO the job? I'm not arguing that with you. I'm not arguing that with you!"

(memorable quote from a really funny movie)

"we're sorry we have to let you go from amazon. but here, please accept this free extra month of amazon prime for your trouble. acceptance of free month constitutes agreement not to sue our sorry asses."

but finland, we can just copy their system wholesale

sounds like a deal. we get a good system AND we avoid paying full retail.

for the trs80, there were 35 track floppy drives and the (ohh, cool) 40 track drives. I think it was 80MB per side and generally only used one side of theh floppy.

we called drives that could write to both sides 'flippy'. you would eject the floppy, fip it over and reinsert it. you'd often get sector errors, as the 2nd side of the floppy disk was the 'reject' side, from the vendor. best side goes the 'normal' way. but we could often get use out of the 2nd side. rarely were there drives that used dual heads, so the usual thing was to write to the first side, wait for it to fill up, then eject and try writing to the 2nd side.

you would also have to punch a hole (the write-protect tab) in the other side of the floppy so that you could control read/write off each side. a tape was placed over the hole to allow writes; removing the tape made the floppy write-protected.

I think there was a max of 4 floppies you could chain. the filespec was "file.txt:drive", eg "file.txt:0" or "file.txt:1" for floppy 0 (first one) or floppy 1 (2nd one).

sigh. fun times. 48k should be enough for anyone.

can you write into the house buying contract, the requirement for inet connectivity?

I know, no one does that; but maybe it needs to be done, from now on.

in my area, at least, comcast is a per month basis; so if a house sale was hinging on this, I guess I could -install- comcast, verify it in the empty house (sigh) and then move forward with the purchase.

sounds like a drag - and if the market is a seller's market, then your request is probably going to kick you out of the running (unless your offer is that much higher than the rest).

CSAVE "CSTDAT.TXT",A

hang on, folks. this is gonna take some time.

look, if you feel so strongly, why not just report it to the MODS?

but VMs also present interesting networking problems. usually they want to have an internal vswitch and NAT and sometimes even internal 'magic' dns. for those of us who want stuff on the outside, the VM kind of gets in the way. and hardware is not really the same; you run thru virtio disk drivers and 'strange' video drivers and so on. its not at all the same as bare metal.

its great for when you need to 'run an app', but if you need bare metal, you need it.

ha!

my last gig was at cisco. you would not BELIEVE the amount of silver aluminum laptops that you see walking around the san jose (and world wide) campuses. half, maybe more than half of the employees! and I've heard more and more bay area companies are allowing their employees to select mac or win7 (sadly, linux is still rare for corp world). and some companies are almost entirely mac. a friend of mine was lamenting that all of his group and co-workers use macs and so he was 'forced' to use one as his main system at work. he grew to like it, but he would have picked a pc instead.

when I saw international interns (a ton of them at cisco) almost 95% (just a WAG) were with the silver laptops. it would only be the very odd one out that was using a lenovo or some other brand. I took some classes with the interns and the sea of aluminum on the edu-center classrooms was amazing.

at least in the bay area, apple is a HUGE thing. not sure when it happened, but it has happened.

I don't love mac stuff and I still prefer native linux on my systems, but I'm seeing a lot of mac stuff now in very mainstream corp america.

what? no 'burma shave' ??

so much THIS!

we can continue to ignore the current class warfare (war on middle class) but 'educating' kids in a field that is being given away exclusively to foreigners (there is a trend and it shows no signs of slowing down) is doing more harm than good.

we have to have an honest talk in this country and decide what we want to do. do we care for our own people and encourage the middle class to rebuild itself? or do we take the republican view of 'I got mine, fark you!' and the have's continue to own the land and the have-nots continue to sink lower and lower in the system?

if we want the 'I got mine, fark you!' world, then lets admit it and we can adjust accordingly. everyone should then go to school for 'business admin' and be able to manage the overseas 'talent'. but lets be clear; if we are going to be a land of 'managers', we will sink into being less than a first or even 2nd world country. once we lose our tech edge, it will probably be taken over by other countries and that will be the end of our tech leadership, world-wide.

do we want to be a country of managers or do we want to take-back our country and keep our own thinking people employed?

we need to discuss this. but the dialog does not ever happen. why? the ceo's don't want to shine light on their evil little plans....

(I see what you did, there).

its sad that people 'in charge' seem so disconnected from reality. teaching 'programming' or even engineering to americans, with the hope and assumption that it will make them more marketable to the job force - I have one word for that. HA!

its an h1b market and will get worse and worse as time marches on. immigrants can and will work cheaper than americans, employers know this and employers know the reason for the h1b push.

locals will not compete. its already that way, in tech areas of the country. you think the deep south is going to be any different? immigrants will go to the deep south and their THEIR jobs, too.

you joked about auto mechanics, but those are skills that cannot be outsourced. you have to be present to do an engine swap. rajiv (I mean 'bob') can't do this over the phone. those will be the safer jobs, going forward. not high paying, but lets be honest: a constant paycheck is way better than being out of work for months at a time, every year or two.

and what about those of us who think its all rigged, pre-determined and our vote just does not matter anymore?

we really are quite disconnected from those who make our laws. they don't come from us (they are from the aristocracy, almost always), they don't care about us and I am not quite sure that the ones we see on the news or tv are the ones that really run things.

so many layers of mistrust, but all well-earned. we saw GWB steal an election via court rule. we've seen massive fraud from election machine makers to those that run the machines. doesn't it seem odd that the 2 parties in the US are now so similar, they differ only on highly emotional polarizing topics?

it sure seems like we have lost all control over things. you can think you are voting, but your choice list was already picked out, sanitized and both choices are GOING to do what their masters tell them. that's how they got there in the first place (duh!).

perhaps voting works in other countries. I think its a total failure, in the US, though. sorry to say (as I live here) but it really is true. our system is broken beyond repair. little tweaks are not gonna fix anything this broken.

a lot of you are from a software background. you've seen systems that are bad by design and yet some 'helpful' person thinks that lots of litte band-aids will fix things.

part of moving forward is admitting that what you have is broken. define what you -want-, chart a course for it and implement it.

but that's not what we get. if we try, we are even called names...