True about games (dosbox as an easy alternative) but not business software. dosbox doesn't support printing (I think there is one mod that does, but the mainstream doesn't) so if you want to use your old Lotus Agenda or Ventura Publisher or Xywrite, etc., FreeDOS may be preferred.

Good point. I've observed this too.

I have a bootable USB stick which boots into FreeDOS. The only thing on the stick, besides the OS and some utilities, is a copy of an old, simple word processor called Better Working Word Processor. When I really want distraction-free writing, I boot this up and there is simply nothing else to do but write (somewhat a la Jonathan Franzen, though I'll never quite have the reputation to go with it).

But I do notice that even with the hard drive spun down, battery life is little better than running my full Linux Mint installation.

There's nothing that compares with Sony Professional headphones, and they're less expensive than you'd expect. Normally I hate Sony but the pro headphones are one heck of a product line.

Of course, they're ... heh heh heh .... "somewhat" larger and heavier than earbuds, and as for looking hip ... not. Unless the audio engineer look is somehow "in." Be sure to wear thick glasses with black frames.

I do nearly all my magazine-type reading on the Internet now, too, but I did enjoy the print magazines in their day, great old stuff like "Radio Electronics." Not that I wish to return to those days, which weren't really the good old days if you think objectively about it.

I still like a print newspaper but if I were to be fully honest I'd have to say it's hardly a necessity any more, and it mostly contains wire service articles I read online two days earlier.

I'm trying to understand how rising water uncovered something. I can see rising water floating something into view or the like, but uncovering? Shouldn't that be falling water levels? (This is not an anti-climate change question, by the way; I just don't get the idea here.)

Lyft just announced their opening in Honolulu and the cab companies are already lined up to fight them.

Cab service is very expensive here, for instance $50+ for a 7-mile ride from my place to the airport. Lyft to proposing to undercut taxi service by about 30%, which is a step in the right direction but still nothing close to cheap.

It will be interesting to see what the city does, that is, to find out who has been making the biggest payoffs.

"A lot of great books (which do have commercial value, for the Gradgrinds reading this) are written by English Lit graduates, and are likely better for that."

I don't know. Have you read some of today's "great" literary fiction? Like stuff by Don DeLillo or Jonathan Franzen?

"Better" isn't the word I'd use. I don't know if those two are English Lit grads, but for sure English Lit grads go nuts over them, heaven knows why.

And people actually pay good money for this. Unfortunately if I want a new laptop, I too have to pay for it, even though the first thing I'll do is get rid of it and install Linux.

As a former technology manager, I can say that (at least as I saw things) the challenge and responsibility of management is to understand the capabilities of the staff and get them into roles in which they can succeed. If someone is underperforming in a certain job, then the manager must get them into a job in which they can perform. Everyone wins in such a case. The organization doesn't need to go through a fire/hire cycle, and instead ends up with an employee who contributes. The employee keeps his/her employment and, as a real contributor, definitely feels better about him/herself. (This needs to be done without a salary cut, which is destructive to everyone's morale, not just the staffer.)

This is, of course, if the employee is at least making an effort ... laziness or not caring is a different issue.

Multics was amazing for its time. Then Honeywell took it on as a commercial product and didn't know how to sell it, or more like their sales people were clueless and didn't want it competing against their own home-grown crappy operating system and hardware. So Multics died.

In the minicomputer era, Prime Computers (a competitor to DEC) built an operating system that they called a "mini" Multics, because it used the same security ring idea, but it wasn't a tenth as good.

And I do myself remember Project MAC as I was a student at MIT in those days.

I do a lot of book reviews, and the biggest difference by far between publisher-published books and self-published books is the quality of the editing. Self-published books often (too often) are not well edited if they are edited at all.

"... file format portability ..."

Is that a joke? MS file formats have changed a lot over the years. Remember the introduction of docx?

OpenOffice reads more MS formats than MS does.

Microsoft has become largely irrelevant and they're trying to get back to their glory days. The same happened with IBM some years back. Both companies expected their users to go where /they/ were going, instead of the other way around. Then, to no one's surprise but their own, they lost their edge in the market. "We're so big and we're so important our users have to follow us wherever we go." Windows 8, anyone? Sic transit gloria mundi.

I'll go one better, paper tape readers and I think 110 baud timesharing service.

Can't say that this is recommended (i.e. don't do it!), but given the "diligence" of some medical practitioners who are more interested in maximum billing than patient care, the results could be similar :)