"Please buy me! Won't someone please buy me?" How FUBAR is TWC that they're so ready to sell to someone, anyone? Either a) they had this in the pipeline before the Comcast deal fell through, in which case how many other deals are on standby?, or b) they brokered a major corporate sell deal entirely within the last month, presumably under immense pressure.

In my opinion, TWC is desperate to sell because there's an internal house of cards that's about to fall over. Someone needs to unload it quickly so that a pending spectacular failure will be on someone else's watch.

Online copies are just RAID done at the file level instead of the block level. The reason that RAID is not considered a substitute for a backup is that user error or a compromise can damage all online storage. If your backups are online, they are not backups, they're just redundancy.

Gays and lesbians frequently do have babies, I think what you mean to say is that the incidence of _unintended_ pregnancy is very low for gays and lesbians. This is what I regard as the only tangible difference between homo and hetero couples.

Churches DO approve of sex, but only if it is done expressly for the creation of more tithers. The Catholic Church appears to have always preferred quantity of life over quality of life. They took over 300 years to "forgive" Galileo, so I doubt of they will be changing their stance on creating as many Catholic baptized babies as humanly possible any time in the near future. Homosexuality has traditionally been discouraged precisely because it lowers the birth rate; see the history of Sparta as a case in point.

The problem is that there is crossover between the religious tradition of marriage and the legal status of marriage. My recommendation would be to make the two completely independent, thus finally achieving the ideal of separation of church and state. Churches have the right to not consecrate unions they disapprove of, for whatever reasons. But the state should not be allowed to discriminate, especially when that discrimination is based on religious mythology, not scientific evidence.

Refusing to grant same-sex couples the same legal status as other couples is blatant discrimination against the children of same-sex couples, of which their are many, regardless of whether or not you consider them "natural". Eliminating this discrimination is a fundamental civil rights issue. Yes, we probably should have a discussion regarding whether or not all the legal advantages conferred with the legal status of marriage are appropriate, but it appears obvious that you can't grant rights to some families while denying those same rights to other families -- that flies against the basic principles upon which our nation (USA) was founded. Is Ireland different? There the state has traditionally deferred to the church in ways that make uncomfortable those of us that believe in the principle of separation of church and state, but I believe the same civil rights arguments apply universally.

So Gerald Fitzpatrick and Patrick Fitzgerald can now finally get married? They don't call them "Gaelics" for nothing!

Which points out a basic flaw of the system: taxpayers are punished for the law enforcement officer's failure to follow the rules, and the law enforcement officers themselves are apparently not held accountable for their own actions. Granted, people would be reluctant to work as police if they could be held personally responsible for any damage they cause, but couldn't we strike a better balance? Doctors are required to pay exorbitant sums for insurance to cover their mistakes, but police are bailed out by the state even in blatant cases of willful misconduct... something doesn't sound right about that. The advantage of making cops self-insured would be that eventually bad cops would find it too expensive to continue in that field, as their insurance rates would skyrocket after multiple claims.

There were a few things (GDI handles and suchlike) that had very small limits. Once you exhausted them, the system was basically unusable. There was a little program you could run that would show the number allocated vs allowed. By the time you'd launched one program, they were normally 60-90% gone.

These two are related. OS/2 needed 16MB of RAM to be useable back when I had a 386 that couldn't take more than 5MB (1MB soldered onto the board, 4x1MB matched SIMMs). Windows NT had the same problem - NT4 needed 32MB as an absolute minimum when Windows 95 could happily run in 16 and unhappily run in 8 (and allegedly run in 4MB, but I tried that once and it really wasn't a good idea). The advantage that Windows NT had was that it used pretty much the same APIs as Windows 95 (except DirectX, until later), so the kinds of users who were willing to pay the extra costs could still run the same programs as the ones that weren't.

I never ran 3.0 on a 386 to try that. On Windows 3.1 it wouldn't work, because the OS required either (286) protected mode or (386) enhanced mode. Running 3.0 on a 386, the DOS prompt would use VM86 mode (yes, x86 has had virtualisation support for a long time, but only for 16-bit programs). Windows 3.0 could run in real mode, so would work inside VM86 mode. In real mode, it didn't have access to VM86 mode (no nested virtualisation), so probably couldn't start again.

I'm not sure if it ever became a real product, but the Novell guys did have Netware running as a paravirtualised Xen guest. Apparently it was quite an interesting challenge, as Netware was one of the few operating systems to use rings 1 and 2 on i386.

And Windows 3.1 lost real mode support. You could run Windows 3.0 on an 8086 with an EGA screen and 640KB of RAM (I did - the machine originally shipped with GEM). I think 3.1 still have 286 protected mode support, but didn't work very well unless you ran it in 386 enhanced mode. It was a bit sad that the version of Windows that required an MMU didn't use it to implement memory protection...

Sort of. The desire not to cannibalise sales was a key factor in the design of the PC, but these were also features that IBM didn't think would be missed.

IBM knew what multitasking was for: it was to allow multiple users to use the same computer with administrator-controled priorities. Protected memory was for the same things. Why would you need these on a computer that was intended for a single user to use? A single user can obviously only run one program at a time (they only have one set of eyes and hands) and you can save a lot in hardware (and software) if you remove the ability to do more. And, of course, then no one will start buying the cheap PCs and hooking them up to a load of terminals rather than buying a minicomputer or mainframe.

My father's company got their first Windows 3.0 install because they bought a diagram tool (Meta Design, I think), that came with a free copy. The company that made it had decided that bundling a copy of Windows 3.0 was cheaper than writing (or licensing) a graphical toolkit for DOS and an associated set of printer drivers. I don't know if they were the only company to do this, but after a year or so they stopped bundling Windows and just expected their customers to either have a copy already or go and buy one.