Now you know how Mac users felt six or so years earlier. I went from TRS-80 to Mac in 1985. By 1991 I was already moving to the Mac IIci.

Seriously, the 8088/80286 and their addressing space limitations set back the DOS-based world by years, until Intel finally accepted that people wanted to use individual chunks of memory larger than 64K, and that they wanted to run their old real-mode DOS programs, too.

I remember people complaing about WPW 6.0. More specifically, I remember seeing newsletters printed with it that had text flow fucked up where lines would be missing at column breaks, or it would just suddenly start printing text from a different part of that article. So much for moving forward from WP 5.1. Also, a lot of people liked using WP5 with the bottom half of the screen showing "raw mode", where it showed the hidden formatting in the text, which wasn't so easy to translate to a WYSIWYG GUI environment.

I've seen A/UX in operation, and it indeed was nice, and felt a lot like what would become OS X. Probably one reason they didn't make it a mainstream product was licensing. There just wasn't enough of a free software tradition (including inside Apple, I'm sure) for it to happen like it did with OS X, and I'm sure AT&T Unix[tm] didn't come cheap. Also, back then 4 megabytes of memory was a lot, and people didn't tolerate memory hog operating systems on single-user computers.

But Apple was trying to move away from the classic MacOS environment. They just happened to fail at it multiple times with a bunch of pie-in-the-sky ideas. Pink and Copeland were just two of the attempts. It took NeXT buying them for negative 400 million dollars and bringing in an already working Unix-based system for Apple to get their act together. Steve Jobs liked to say "real artists ship", and when it came to a next-generation operating system, the Steve-less Apple consistently failed to ship.

I remember the bad old days in the '80s when cable TV reception would go to shit on rainy days because they used microwave links to connect their various head ends in a big city. Then they upgraded the whole system to fiber, which turned out to be a good thing years later when cable modems became a thing.

I clicked on that link and it gave a pop-up:

Wow, trying to scare up funding using the abortion bogeyman. I find that disgusting from either of the aisle. (Oh noes, they're going to vote on a bill that has no chance of passing! It's the end of the world!)

Anyhow, I particularly love how they managed to put so many vertices out in the hahbah.

One big reason for this is the Electoral College system for electing the US President. If, say, one party had 40%, and there were two parties with a similar platform splitting the remaining 60%, the minority platform will win.

In the 1912 election, Teddy Roosevelt running as the Bull Moose party candidate managed to beat the Republican candidate Taft, and Woodrow Wilson won with 42% of the popular vote. He also got 88 electoral votes to Taft's 8.

In the 1992 election, H. Ross Perot took 18.9% of the popular vote, but failed to get a single electoral vote, and probably didn't affect the election enough to be responsible for the loss by GHW Bush.

At least it isn't as bad as the recent UK election, where UKIP had significant support in terms of individual voters, yet only ended up with two seats. In the US, senate and congressional elections require a 50% majority for a candidate to win. If the majority is not met, a run-off election with the two leading candidates determines the winner.

Think about that for a moment, folks. That's a QUARTER of a fucking CENTURY. Many Slashdotters weren't even born then, and for most of the rest, it's still been more than half of their lifetime.

And he's still not officially gone until they make the first episode with either A) none of his characters or B) a replacement voice.

I think WordStar has problems with Unicode support. But then again, so does Slashdot.

Cave paintings certainly have some migration issues.

If they had to take "stranded" astronauts down in an emergency, the launch vehicle wouldn't matter at all. Just fit a Dragon capsule with some Soyuz seats (so that they can use their custom-fitted seat cushions) and some O2 tanks and CO2 scrubbers, and send it up.

I'm not sure if the hatch door can be properly shut from the capsule side, or if it can be un-berthed without using the arm. Maybe they could undock the capsule and have everyone suit up and EVA to it, after docking it first to install seat cushions.

And for what it's worth, F9R is more than good enough to be man-rated, it's the Dragon 1 capsule that isn't man-rated, due to the lack of an escape system, sufficient life support (O2/CO2 management) and most importantly, no seats.

More importantly, what are they going to do about all the DHMO in it? That stuff is dangerous in the quantities we're talking about here!

In other news, 50,000 grandmas will now have to find a new dial-up service.

Also HVAC work, even though you may have been conditioned to think otherwise.

There is one thing that can be repaired without too much trouble: the power supply. Electrolytic capacitors, especially from the 200x's have a bad history of blowing out. For $25 in capacitors and an hour of work, you can fix a broken power supply. I've even done it once myself. Of course the cost of LCD TV sets keeps going down, making it only really worth repairing big TVs, as the falling prices just make them that much less worthwhile to repair.

A TV repair place recently opened up near where I live, but they also do computer repair. These days, with tube sets all but gone, there isn't a lot of difference in the skill sets needed.

Indeed. It only means that C programmers are more likely to know when they've used an ugly hack.