If it makes you feel better, I vaguely remember working with MFM drives. It's been long enough ago where I don't remember anything about how they work. :)

I think I used this one. Looks like just about the same thing. It's probably identical inside.

http://www.tigerdirect.com/app...

The most ancient laptop I ever touched was a Compaq 386/16 with a 20MB 3.5" 1/2 height IDE drive. It sounds pretty much like the same, or probably the piece of crap I had was a predecessor. I do remember it was clearly a 20MB drive though. I swapped it for a regular desktop 40MB IDE that we had in the shop.

Everything I found about that series says it's IDE. I couldn't find anything specifically saying the physical size, but I suspect it was a 3.5" drive. I seriously doubt it was RLL, MFM, ESDI, or anything more exotic. So he's wasting everyone's time asking rather than just opening it up and seeing "ooh, a IDE drive." Even if it was, he could go find some combination of adapters to use it. Anyone who's worked with stuff long has a box full of adapters and cards for exactly this. Well, I did ditch all my ancient cards on eBay a few years ago.

I'd be surprised if the drive even spins though. Most of the time when I go to try ancient hardware, the drives don't spin, or spin enough, even though the owner remembers that it was working when they shut it off.

The new machines lack LPT ports? WTF kind of machine did you buy without an LPT port? A laptop, sure, a desktop? You have to look hard, even today to find a machine that doesn't have a printer port.

Pretty much anything built in the last five or so years won't have serial or parallel ports. If you're lucky, you might have some headers on the motherboard that can be brought to the slot cage with connectors in brackets like what were common before ATX, but I've run across plenty of motherboards that don't even have those. Notebooks are even less likely to have them. This Dell Inspiron E1505 I'm typing on is a bit long in the tooth...main reason I'm keeping it going is its 15" 1680x1050 screen. No serial or parallel ports on it.

When I saw a sufficiently-old notebook come through my office a while back that had a serial port on it, I hung onto it for talking to our switches and routers. I forget what model of HP it is, but it's old enough that it runs on an Athlon XP. It's probably the better part of 10 years old at this point. The last emerge -uND world took a couple of days to run, but it's fast enough to run Minicom and Firefox, and to do traffic captures from the switch: serial connection to the management port to enable SPAN, Ethernet to the SPAN port for capture, and WiFi to talk to the whole thing from my office instead of the server room.

Lets see... What would they say? This is the one-sided conversation, since it doesn't matter what you say anyways.

"Ok, we can accept that estimate."

"Ya, ya, ya, whatever."

"We'll have that information to you by the start of the project."

"The information isn't ready yet, we'll have that by the time you need it."

"I thought we had that to you already. We'll have to check with the information source."

"The PMs have some changes."

"Here's the information, but there are some small changes."

"No, those are small changes, they won't impact the timeline."

"No, you can't have more time, we already made commitments."

"The PMs have some changes."

"What do you mean you won't have it in on schedule? You agreed with the initial estimate."

"You're going to stay here until it's done, I don't care how long it takes."

"I don't care that you've been in the office 30 hours straight, this is your fault."

"We're hiring an off-shore company to help you with the project. Get them up to speed."

"The PMs have some changes."

"Since we have the off-shore team, we need to cut your department back."

"I read an article saying Java is the future. Redo it in Java."

"What do you mean we're waiting on the off-shore company?"

"We fired the off-shore company. You're good, you can get it done in time."

"Ok, hire more people into your department, but we're only offering half the salary, and no more bodies."

"Why is this project so far behind? Don't you know what you're doing?"

"The PMs have these changes."

"Why aren't you done? We're weeks from the deadline!"

"You didn't meet the deadline. Don't you know deadlines are firm. We have commitments."

"I don't want excuses, I want results."

"You and your idiot team are fired. Get out of my building."

[2 months later]

"We need you to come back and finish the project. We need it by next Monday, that should be plenty of time."

"Here's all the new specs. They should be easy to do."

"What do you mean total rewrite, it's only a few chances. You are an idiot. Get out."

[1 month later]

"We need you to come back and finish the project. We need it by" {click}

"We need you to come back and finish the project. We need it by" {click}

"We need you to come back and finish the project. We need it by" {click}

"Why do you keep hanging up on me?" {click}

He was a wise man...

Most people do not have a problem with the jackboot of authority, so long as it is on their feet rather than their neck.

This is the worst crime of all.

Firefox comes with a couple of calculators built in. It has since before it was called Firefox.

I've heard of similar things. For example, this guy sending air, water, and sugar.

As long as you have the right safety labels, there shouldn't be a problem. The guy in the above link screwed up with the "Rocket Fuel" label.

If they were sending a mill, why did they say "It's a machine for making guns"? IT could have been labeled as coming from "GG Machine Works", and if they needed a declaration of contents it's just "a CNC machine."

I can't even think of the countless things I've shipped. Usually I'm only asked on International shipments for the customs declaration. If I explain what's in them, it's too complicated, so they just put "computer parts" or "tools".

I've received some things that surprised people, like ammunition (legally marked and shipped as such, handled by UPS), a truck front axle, and all kinds of weird smaller things.

There is pretty good historical evidence of what did happen when a big volcano blew out lots of ash and particles. Mount Tambora for example, that had an eruption in 1815, and the following year, 1816, became known as "the year without a summer", because of this. There is no good reason to expect a significantly different outcome from filling the atmosphere with other similar particles. It will become colder.

On the other hand, this does argue for the possibility that the system can behave somewhat predictable, with negative feedback as it were, within a smaller range of excitations, like varying the speed of an aircraft as long as it runs faster than stall speed. But once driven past some inflection-point that we can expect to be there, given that the system is chaotic, all bets will be off.

Still, this suggested solution seems to be worse than the problem. The possible increased temperatures and CO2 will just make for better growth conditions for all kinds of plants, of which many are food for animals which in turn are eaten by humans. Less sunlight, less heat, less CO2 and there will be less foliage, then eventually less food available. How can that good for anything?

And finally, back in the 1970s and 1980s, there was a lot of argumentation about acid rain, caused by partculate pollution from coal-fired plants, where the sulfur was precipitated as acid. Countries have managed to put a stop to this kind of pollution, though there are still localized problems with particulate pollution in cities. And now there are someone arguing that this sort of thing actually could be worthwhile in an attempt to halt a perceived warming process?

This is supposed to "reverse" the climate change? As in making it essentially perpetually cloudy? This sounds nothing so much like a nuclear winter, though without the nukes...

How something like that is going to reverse anything, now climate being that chaotic as it is doesn't easily move forwards or backwards along some line, like a car or animal does. It will change it, sure. Probably to the nuclear winter-like conditions, as if that were anything better than today's situation. Or maybe this would also keep heat in, so we would get what is essentially a runaway greenhouse... now wasn't that what was supposedely the problem initially?

This is just wrong on so many levels...

Hey Bill. Kindly go fuck yourself. Seriously. If you believe (and apparently you do), that only Ivy League universities can provide any education of merit, then you really are more of a mindless tool than I suspected.

QFT. Consider how well the Ivy Leaguers mismanaging the executive branch of the government are doing as further proof of the uselessness of credentialism.

He's using climate change as an example to demonstrate his point. (A near-unanimous consensus among scientists maintain that climate change is happening and is a serious problem; over 50% of the US population disagrees. This demonstrates that the US population is largely science-illiterate or science-hostile.)

O RLY? (The Google link should bypass their paywall.) In addition to "consensus" being inherently unscientific (was Copernicus "science-illiterate" when he proposed his heliocentric theory of the solar system when the consensus view was in favor of a geocentric theory?), there is much to suggest that the "97%" number is as overcooked as most of the recent temperature records have been.