Companies are actively segregating employees, ranking them by their "importance" to the company. Why? All the way from the quarterly reporting on gross revenue/employee to justifying the summer picnic expenses to making the business more salable.

A similar concept to yours, pressing a silicone button on the drive breaks open a sealed capsule of silica sand into the HDA; this would most certainly scrub any magnetic film from the rotating disks. And during its self destruction, it would attempt to rezero and seek, sure to polish most every data surface and thoroughly destroying the heads .

Don't listen to these people... It says that you really liked the free time and imagination you had when younger.

I have done the same - slotcars (some repo, some orig), wham-o superballs, my old marble collection, model and electronics kits, science fiction movie and poster collection. Funny thing, you can find them in better shape and more complete now than I could find or afford then.

All that stored happiness, with little maintenance cost, for less than $1k - where can you get a better bargain than that?

PS Still waiting for that primo Matt Mason for 15 bucks.

As many others, I had a blast with the 400/800/XL Ataris. In one hacking project I ran the official 400/800 Translator disk which overlayed the internal XL OS ROMs with those mostly compatible with a 400/800 system. After loading I then dumped the memory locations, readdressed them, and used an EPROM burner of my own design (my coworkers laughed - you should have seen the EPROM eraser they made up to mock my attempts, complete with framing hammer) to burn it into an EPROM, which I used to replaced the on board ROMs. As well, I fixed a few things I didn't like the OS defaults (don't remember now what they were tho'). I had several (P)ROMs selectable via switch and a board I layed out and etched. Most anything would then run on an XL, some that the Translator disks would not as I recall.

I also organized a user-group hardware project to build the famous bank-switched memory add-on published, where, maybe Byte mag. I modified it to use the 256k chips IIRC. 5-10 people but only a few comprehended what they were doing, and only a few finished though everything was supplied including solder.

Those were the days.

Interlibrary loans; maybe they will, maybe they won't.

How will they prove/disprove by disinterested parties an actual landing?

haha

I see it as a forced, painful, crowbar'ed lurch. But it is a good thing, regardless.

Americans could look to technology as long as the resources of the land supported individualism (that IMHO cannot last further than, say, another century based upon population growth). As our needs overlap, the need to cooperate and find political solutions will grow as fast, maybe faster, than even technology needs.

That is where we differ.

Something that is bound to be as ephemeral, trite, as (most) television is should not be payed for by me; I should be payed for watching it. Though of course, many people also are voluminous readers of romance novels as well.

They could not include every processor, of course, but this was a nice piece of hardware at the time. The Heathkit microprocessor trainers used it (programmed it to play Anchor's Away! as extra credit for retired Navy prof), had accum A, B, and an index register/addressing (the first uP to do so?), 16 bit regs, flat memory space and memory mapped I/O. Preceded the later 6502 which had a similar programming model. It was clean and fun to learn; the Intel architecture has always been foreign to me; was there separate I/O bus instructions? dunno...

I listened to his talk on TED and I was not convinced that it was the way forward, though I do acknowledge the adoption issues and that it may be one way to get there from here.

I hope many see this fundamental change as a potent opportunity to minimize complexity, control, and interference and that we not lose it.

Maybe nutty, maybe not... Hasselblad's explanation on their website and historical foundation clearly points to Shirra personally going to a photo shop and buying the consumer camera model that went into space with him, albeit some minor changes... him personally recommending them to NASA as an amateur photographer as NASA was not happy with onboard cameras, apparently already familiar with them...
True or not!?

Agreed! Being an CDDA user and MP3 listener since their early appearances I have heard mediocre but also incredibly good MP3 implementations. But in my best, reasonably recent, A-B testing results I have been unable to discern the difference. The overarching issues have always been in the quality and equalization of the source material.

*Interestingly, on a recent critical listening A-B test, the only difference I did detect was an absolute noise floor on the supposedly already silent passages - I thought Wow, the mp3 algorithm is doing a great job, only discarding the least relevant information.

Microsoft has to have something to sell, and as they have in the past, selling you *another* OS is not out of the question.

And even if they are not new-product ready and profitable, I think it would be even more financially urgent to attempt adding complexity to the current technology mix to hold them over until they do. New browser, methods, new development envs., IDE's, New Serverxxx w/extensions, SPs, patches, everything that keeps their juggernaut running.