'The auto guys failing' would have amounted to GM and Chrysler filing for bankruptcy. That would have allowed them to shuck off the shimmering fat layers of management that need to go, and it would have allowed them to flush out the UAW parasites that are sucking them dry. They would have emerged from bankruptcy as whole and viable companies.

That's been forestalled by outright government interference in the Bankruptcy process. Bankruptcy is not an end-point. It is a corrective process.

Frankly, you clearly have no understanding of the bill.

Frankly, both of you are relying on your own chosen Readers Digest Condensed Versions of the bill.

The bill is chock full of fucking pork. It's amazing that anybody can praise it without it being backwards-day.

so the poll tells you jack shit.

The only poll that matters is happening in November.

And there are going to be a lot of incumbents flayed. Hopefully almost everybody up for election who voted for that fucker will be among those whose viscera is lying in the dirt.

Is that putting it simply enough?

America was slipping down the hole into the Compost Tank before 1951. People figured out what FDR was all about (yes, he fucked up the US bad during his terms) and didn't want it to happen again. The US wasn't a terrible dictatorship, but it wasn't become of Rooseveldt not trying. The dude was saved by WWII happening to occur on his watch. Otherwise he would have continued to drag the US economy down a shithole which his socialist policies and probably been out in two terms or less.

'The One' is the phrase often used to refer to the dude who's in the White House right now.

I'm afraid he doesn't need dope to be any more loopy and out of control.

Kind of funny-sad how going to google for this background info

Yes. I agree. It's kind of funny-sad how Lloyd's comments are essentially ignored in the Mainstream Media, and that only the blogosphere does any analysis of them.

Now if 'they' can just get those pesky blogs to shut up, things will improve. Where's a Dan Rather when you need one?

But now, for the most part, Chavez is the precipitate.

It's also a good thing Amiga is dead, and incapable of seeing this.

the little bit about "Apple Branded Hardware".

Yes, but Apple always sticks a few of the little Apple stickers right in the packaging. Put Apple Branded sticker on clone's box. Voila!

That's not really impressive, when you consider the audio quality of the cassette recorders used to store data on those low-end cassette-based computers from the 80's. In fact, Radio Shack recommended against using too 'high quality' of a cassette recorder. The data is encoded in basically the voice band. Too wide a frequency response just increases the artifacts and noise that get recorded, which is actually detrimental to the quality of the digital record.

The actual issue is not so much that it looks like a hoax, but that it is so endlessly poorly carried out.

I would tend to agree. But the original C64 was poorly carried out, too, so this as a nostalgia product has some merit.

Now, before people roll out of the shag carpeting to rage at me, the C64 was an inexpensive and well marketed, but technically second rate product. I mean, they put a whole second 6502-type processor in the disk drive and set the machine up to read/write from the disk over a pokey-doke serial interface. That was never impressive. Adding a Hard Disk to your C64 system amounted to again buying a whole separate subsystem significantly more expensive than the C64 itself that, again, was a whole separate system with another processor, that talked to your C64 over.... get this... a pokey-doke serial interface.

Not impressive, except in a marketing sense. The C64 was a marketing phenomena, and as a result many youngsters 'cut their teeth' on it. Then, said youngsters went on to make good use of their C64 in spite of what was built into the system, basically doing an end-run around the way it was set up.

The Altos 586 has an 80-track 'quad density' disk drive. It is 720K.

There's one about four feet from me here.

The Altos 586 has a 5-1/4" floppy drive. But it's a quad density drive, that means it's 80 tracks and 720KB. You can't find 80 track 5-1/4" media anymore, but you can use higher quality double-density (360K) media. Don't try using High Density (1.2M) media.

It's an ST-506 interface. The controller is built into the main board. It doesn't feature ISA slots.

The Altos 586 is from before the ISA slot was invented by IBM.

This isn't a Pee Cee.

G=C800:5 is a jump command to the low level formatting code in the BIOS extension on a Western-Digital type 8-bit Hard Disk controller. It was also the method for a lot of the clone cards.

It didn't always work, though. The original IBM-PC and PC-XT machines had the Xebec controller. You started the low level format with that controller by poking values into various I/O ports on the controller card, again using Debug. I don't remember the sequence offhand but it's all documented in IBM's Technical Reference Manual section for the Fixed Disk controller so can be easily looked up. The Xebec controller low level routine is sort of spooky, as you don't get any user feedback. After you've send off the bytes to start the low level format, the light on the hard drive comes on and the long, slow formatting process begins. You know it's completed when the Debug prompt comes back. The Western Digital low level format provides a little more interactive feedback while it runs.