Good humor truck. Helm's bakery truck with the long drawers loaded with doughnuts, brownies and cookies that would drive up one's street. It was a So. California thing. The guy blew a whistle with a lever-actuated thing like a parking brake. They were *always* nice people. Oh... they're seemingly gone.

Here we go. Excuse the formatting. Good Morse Code (I can still send it and receive it). 15.575 with an interruption. Scratchy records Inna godda da vida www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIVe-rZBcm4 Dial Up MODEM handshake Click, click, click of (then) illegally added telephones on the line. Anything related to "shortwave radio". RSA (Radio South Africa) on the SW Theramins (except for replays of "Good Vibrations") A.M. Radio Tunes played on vacuum column tape drives (Dymec 3030). The sound of old 2-cycle lawnmowers. Captain and Tenille (oh, skip it). The spring-induced "echo" of an automobile "reverb" system". "Heathkit". Honesty

I volunteer at schools and have 4 close relatives that are teachers. NONE of the schools have competent administration of the computers, the networks or the OS installations. It's all "well, these are the rules and we can't do anything about it" crap. My son's computer class (MDUHSD) has NO monitors that aren't VGA. He brought a RaspPi in to it and we had to mod the config.txt file and bring an adapter in to it so they could display the video on the archaic stuff. However, they have a LASER cutter without purpose that someone bought. Corruption at its best.

I think I saw a banner for the movie on the cliffs in front of Streisand's home.

At least Zuck once wrote software and had some ability. Meg is a former toy company and soap company CEO that was placed in a CEO of a technical company. She has zero capability to run such a company. She, like other former HP "leaders" is currently in the "loot" process, to be followed by the "scoot" process. The only reason she's in the position is that Ray Lane (who appointed her to HP's Board) didn't want the CEO job. She was essentially his proxy. Now that Lane is gone, I don't know who's going to pull her strings to get her to act.

Sounds like the current state of Hewlett Packard.

Correct. Wistron makes some of their cheap crap. Other ODM spinoffs of Chinese companies make the rest of the laptop/desktop stuff. HP doesn't design or produce any of their PC products but the same is true with Dell. HP also manufactures no computers except a small portion of their enterprise servers in the U.S. Most of the stuff is migrating to Singapore and Mexico. Most of the content for their large servers is manufactured in Malaysia. (I refrained about making a comment about quality here).

I hope they take the founder's names off of the computer company. The last four CEOs have been an insult to Hewlett and Packard, its employees and its customers. Hewlett-Packard (now called "HP" out of shame) used to be the epitome of creativity, innovation, treating employees with respect and an "Extra Measure of Quality". Now it's nothing but a continuing estate sale of what once was a great company. The Board of Directors is to blame. The manifestation of its incompetence have been a succession of terrible CEOs (Fiorina, Hurd, Apotheker and now Whitman) who individually and collectively are incapable of understanding what is required to innovate products. The inkwell is also going dry (HP's primary source of profit was selling ink and it financed the remainder of the company). So what's left? HP Lab's funds have been cut for decades. Ink is drying up. Their PCs are designed and build by the cheapest Chinese bidder and the enterprise hardware business R&D capability has mostly walked out away out of frustration. Such a sad decay of a very, very good technology company.

Lutz isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer. I watched him make the same comment several years ago in an Elon Musk documentary that I watched on Neflix. He also referred to the techies in "silicone (sic) valley". It appears he's using the same line now. Apparently this is a comment he repeats.

I'd be willing to pay for a high quality PC or tablet that wasn't made in China by the lowest bidder. I'm frankly sick and tired of poor quality Chinese crap! I once suggested to the CEO of my company (named after two people) to do the same (ignored of course).. To make it in the Yoo Ess but it'd damned better be good quality. I'd pay the premium. Sort of like the "Harley Davidson" of computers with out the T-shirts. I am so tired of supporting CEOs that bet bonuses based on short term quarterly report results at the expense of the long term health of the company. I'd also like too support a company that is truly innovative vs. one that can't even design a product and instead, outsources the crappy design and manufacture. Give me a premium product and I'll pay a premium price. I realize not everyone wants this but dammit! Give us a choice!

H.P. once had a CEO with a degree in medieval history and a quick blessing of a MBA. Carly Fiorina used her first degree extensively in finding new ways to punish employees. She was also rather good at dividing and conquering a corporate culture. I'm not sure her efforts were appreciated though.

Microsoft is a dying old fart company, much like Hewlett-Packard. What they can't earn with innovation is being replaced with attempted acquisitions. Unfortunately, all that they acquire is typically destroyed with no revenue to the bottom line. Acquire, lay off the people, destroy, forget. Management by "bean counters" vs. the ability to invent. Sad but the state of large cranky corporations of the day.

Once I received one of those Remco science kit crystal radios. I got bored with it and took the headphone from it, soldered a couple of safety pins to the wires. I found I could pierce the twinlead telephone cable running down the side of the house and tap the phone. I felt bad about doing it once I found my mother talking about my Christmas present. I never did it from then on. We had a "radio shop" class in high school. We used to spiral the leads of an axial electrolytic capacitor (high voltage), charge it with a power supply and grab it by the ends, being careful not to touch the leads. We'd wait for a group of people to leave their classes, yell "catch" and toss it to someone walking by. They'd get zapped. After a while, no one would catch anything coming out of the classroom. We'd get tube radio audio transformers and an electromechanical buzzer. We'd pulse the secondary (8 ohm) with the buzzer and make ourselves a nice high voltage zapper. We had fun with those. We'd make "match stick guns" out of closepins. Rig the spring to strike a "strike anywhere' match head and propel it. We''d put firecrackers in the top of a soup can in a hole the same size of the firecracker and put it in a pan of water. Propelled it rather high. We''d take apart TVs and radios that were "scrappers" and see what happened when we applied 120 VAC to them. We heard they parts contained lots of smoke so it was our job to get the smoke out. We'd use long extension cords and test the parts for smoke in the front yard. My parents didn't mind our doing this. We were learning. It all led to "harder stuff" and I ended up with a degree in electronics engineering. I'm now passing on my "knowledge" of mischief to my son who is also interested in science. We've made one helluva potato gun and mess around with rockets.

I use my Marantz 2285B daily. I have a Logitec Bluetooth receiver on it's front end and listen to internet radio with it from a signal supplied by a tablet. I also use it on some JBLs connected to my Samsung LCD TV. That's a mixin' of eras. I love that thing (the Marantz).

I was forced to use one of these when reloading WinXP on to a laptop. There wasn't a SATA driver for the SATA HDD in the laptop and I had to load it so XP could talk to the friggin' HDD in the laptop.