It's strange to think that even the original 1981 IBM PC (*) included a cassette interface. Can you imagine loading *any* program on an x86 PC like this?! (**)

I know that cassette decks were still common on home machines (and disc drives expensive) at the time, but on a business machine that cost $1565 at its launch- a little over $4000 in today's money- the concept seems bizarre.

Wikipedia says that very few of them left the factory without floppies, and I suspect that some of *those* were fitted with third-party models. It notes that MS-DOS required disc drives and that without it it defaulted to a ROM-based BASIC implementation... did anyone *ever* buy and use an IBM PC without drives and use it in this way..?!

(*) And the more home-oriented PCjr apparently included it too, but that flopped anyway.
(**) And can you imagine how long it would take to load a modern-sized program at speeds comparable to a Sinclair ZX Spectrum?! We're talking well over a month and a half per gigabyte of data. :-)

Do these use silver nanoparticles like some antibacterial socks do? Yeah, there's some concern that those might leak into the environment where their anti-microbial action isn't likely to be such a great idea.

(Personally, I'm well convinced that relatively untested nanoparticles getting into the environment is going to be a big issue in the next 20 to 30 years... this will be *after* we've been using them for a long time, and they're well established in the ecosystem and food chain. The only question is which ones are going to cause a problem...)

As has been commented elsewhere, there are limits on how downhill the race can be (no greater than an average of 1 in 1000) and the straight-line distance between the start and the finish can be no more than 50% of the total distance (i.e. there are limits to how favourable the wind can be, especially as running into then against the wind doesn't entirely balance itself out).

*What* "isn't running"?!

Worth noting that there are limits on how downhill a marathon course can be to be considered for world records.

Wikipedia states that "The decrease in elevation between the start and finish shall not exceed an average of one in a thousand, i.e. 1m per km".

Whoosh!

I don't think the implication was that it was. I think the implication was that you cited wording to imply that the constitution includes wording to prohibit indefinite copyright, and jklonvanc showed- by example- that this could be abused to the point of worthlessness, since a million years is still a "limit".

That doesn't imply that he approved of it, merely that a moderate amount of weaselling proved the *word* of the constitution could be followed while doing what they do now, regardless of whether it met the *spirit* of that clause.

It's arguably misleading that Visual Basic .Net was chosen as a dying language, because I don't think it was ever that successful in the first place.

It's more VB6 (and its predecessors) that are the ones that were once very successful and now dying if not almost dead by now. Despite sharing a similar syntax, VB.Net was never the same, as it was .Net-based, and not directly compatible with its predecessor. As the article notes, since MS basically forced everyone onto .Net, everyone chose C# over the retro-flavoured VB.Net anyway.

I briefly used what I realise (in retrospect) was a Model M keyboard at a job I had in the late-90s. At the time I found the fact the resistance was half way down and very obviously "click switchy" (i.e. requires relatively high amount of pressure to get through, then suddenly breaks) to be strange and unnatural. I'm no millennial membrane-weaned weenie; I'd been using computers since the 80s, most of which had mechanical keyboards back then, and while some had been mediocre, some I really liked. They all went "tap" at the bottom, unlike this weird and unsatisfactory action. I have to say that Model M did nothing for me, and I'd no desire to return to it.

When I bought a Cherry mechanical keyboard for myself, I intentionally avoided the ones with the Model M style force gradients in favour of the ones that go "tap" at the bottom.

I've said it before here, and I'll say it again- the people who like Model Ms seem to *really* like them, but I'm convinced that the majority of people who didn't grow up using that keyboard or anything like it would- at best- find it an acquired taste, and probably be happier with one of the better membrane jobs (sacrilege!) or a mechanical keyboard with a more regular action.

I also think that membrane keyboards nowadays aren't that bad. Maybe I'm just used to them, but while I've come across some truly horrible examples at the dirt-cheap end, I've also come across some that were quite pleasant to use (and oddly, were also dirt-cheap models). Still not quite as good as the best- in my judgement- mechanical keyboards, but much better than the mechanical keyboards on some 80s home computers.

Anyway, back to the Model M. Yes, it feels "expensive" and "well made" in that it's obviously mechanical, and heavy, but that doesn't make it that great to type on IMHO (any more than I'm going to deny that my membrane keyboard at work is okay, simply because it's cheap). Some people think they're really great, and that's fine, they're entitled to their opinion. However, given that the borderline fetishisation from a disproportionately vocal number of fanboys might give others the impression the Model M was the be all and end all, I'm quite happy in balancing things out by saying I don't think they were all that, to be honest.

According to the Wikipedia article, the "Agilent" name is still being retained for the "life sciences, diagnostics and applied markets(?!) [remainder of the post-spinoff company]". Which ties in with what this person said.

But, yeah. What a crap name.

Worth remembering that both the "halves" of the current HP are just the remainder of the original company after its previous split/spin-off of Agilent anyway. Agilent was arguably closer to HP's original business (i.e. test equipment and the like) than what remained of "HP" (nominally the former parent) after that.

In short, the current HP is already the result of a split, and the "new" HP will be whatever bit keeps the name, but will it have any meaning beyond a badge?

It's a similar case to Motorola, which had already split or spun-off parts of its business more than once into On Semiconductor, and a few years later into Freescale before the remaining "Motorola" split into two distinct companies with that name (one of which was later bought by Google).

Yeah, but the point is, they were still far from being solely focused around the cartoons- those were just a part of the whole.

As I mentioned, I don't strongly associate cartoons with Saturday morning TV, but the examples you give were more late-1980s and 1990s, by which point I would have been in my teens and losing interest in such shows, so perhaps things had changed by then, or maybe it's just how I remember things. My primary memory is a bit earlier than that (i.e. the 80s alone, I'm old enough to vaguely remember Tiswas, just!), though I do recall SMTV being on circa the late-90s/early-noughties and from what I remember of that, it was still far from focused on the cartoons- there was a lot of Ant and Dec and Cat Deeley doing comedy and messing about as well.

Additional; I should also have made clear that the magazine shows referred to were mostly live (and hence obviously live-action, not animated), obviously contrasting with the primary animated US model, and that the earliest of them- Tiswas- apparently grew out of attempts to liven up the continuity between the mish-mash of kids shows shown on early-70s Saturday morning ITV.

The balance of humour, style and gimmickry varied between the different shows, but they all followed the basic template to some extent.

You might find this article informative (though I suspect that unless you were actually there at the time, you probably won't want to read *that* much on the subject!)

From what I've heard, those *did* exist (and still do to a limited extent), but even at their peak weren't remotely as common nor as prominent as most people in the west seemed to believe. Apparently most of the ones around were associated with nearby sex/erotica shops, i.e. generally more out-of-the-way locations.

Back to Saturday morning cartoons... I get the impression that this is (or was) an American cultural phenomenon(?) In the UK, both the BBC and ITV showed a lot of US import cartoons when I was a kid, but my primary memory of those is of them being shown on weekday afternoons, after school. I don't recall them ever being generally referred to as "saturday morning" cartoons here.

Indeed, that's probably because though Saturday morning television on the two main channels (BBC1 and ITV) *was* aimed at kids, it was primarily in the form of circa three-hour magazine shows like Tiswas, Swap Shop, Going Live!, SMTV, etc. Those generally included lots of different segments and features. Though they did include some cartoons as part of the mix, that was never the sole focus- far from it, it's certainly not what I associate with them.

This was pretty much the standard "Saturday morning" format here from the mid-70s until the decline of such programming on the main channels in recent years.

I get the impression that this format wasn't so common in the US, at least not in the "golden era" the "Saturday morning cartoons" nostalgia seems to be harking back to. Though I understand that many cartoons were shown as part of "The [Main Feature Character] Hour" and the like (where a number of cartoons were tied together under the banner of the most well-known one), that's still basically "all cartoons" and somwhat different to the live format shown on UK TV.

I dunno... I hear that "Worker and Parasite" didn't play too well with US audiences ;-)