It also has something to do with the competence of the freight railroads. Last March, I rode Amtrak's Crescent from NYC to Atlanta, a 17-hour trip conducted mostly over Norfolk Southern trackage once leaving the Northeast Corridor. We arrived in Atlanta on time, much to my surprise (we did have to wait for at least one freight traveling in the opposite direction in the dead of night). On the return trip the Crescent, already 12 hours into it's trip from New Orleans, not only arrived in Atlanta on time, but arrived and left Washington DC on time, and arrived in NYC ahead of schedule. The NS portion of this route is identified as a future high-speed line. I quite frankly can't see how they'd do it--watching the line from the last car on the return trip through Virginia, you would not believe how much the line twists, turns, rises and dips over a fairly large chunk of the route.

I've taken a number of trips NYC-Pittsburgh via Amtrak's Pennsylvanian (a 9-hour trip), also using NS tracks after leaving Amtrak-owned lines. Most of these were on-time. In one trip, the conductor specifically credited NS dispatchers with getting us out of Harrisburg, PA ahead of two waiting freight trains, and another year, we arrived on-time in Pittsburgh after tailgating a high-priority UPS freight for several miles. We were switched onto the adjacent track against traffic, and arrived in Pittsburgh literally racing alongside the freight we were behind only minutes before. This line (Harrisburg-Pittsburgh) is also identified as a future high-speed route. Frankly, the mountainous regions are something to behold when you remember that for the most part, the tracks go up and over them rather than through. Approaching Horseshoe Curve, you'll notice a road high up the mountainside on the opposite side of the valley. Then you notice that it's not a road, but it's the railroad you're traveling on. Then you remember that mile-long freight trains run on this line too. It's enough to give one pause.

The biggest delay I've had on these trips was about 45 minutes on one Pittsburgh-NYC trip, when our locomotive died pulling out of Philadelphia, PA on the way to NYC. No spare locomotives were available there, and we were transferred to the next arriving Corridor train from DC.

---PCJ

Well, didja ever notice that rubber "rain boots" are an exclusively female phenomenon? (at least in the US it is, anyway)

---PCJ

(emphasis mine)
That's what happened in my case. Attempting to get my two cents in before the chat topic veered off in another direction caused me to spontaneously touch-type, although it didn't take years--more like a couple of months of doing it every night as part of my online routine. One night I hammered out a few lines of text significantly faster than I usually did, and realized after the fact that I didn't look at the keyboard to do it.

---PCJ

Without going full-screen, recent videos have been looking worse on my "primary" computer, a fairly old 2ghz Celeron laptop. Up to about 2/09,(which according to Wikipedia is when YouTube switched to h.264 for pretty much everything), the videos I uploaded ran nice and smooth (I usually didn't run them full-screen, and rarely in HQ). The ones I uploaded after the changeover look like they were shot with a cheap cellphone, with awful amounts of frameskipping, which is painfully obvious in the model-train videos that make up most of my uploads. Downloading these FLV's and attempting to play them also stymies all of the player/converters on my system (although that may be that my install of the K-Lite codec pack is outdated)

Seeing as it takes more horsepower to decode H.264 than the older H.263/Sorenensen/Spark/whatever they were using before, I assume it's my aging PC that's at fault. But buying a new PC just to get 30FPS on YouTube is a non-starter, given that the existing one still does everthing else I need it to do at acceptable speed.

I'm wondering if I transcode my uploads to be identical to YouTube's flavor of .FLV, but with H.263, will it allow them to slide through unmodified, seeing as the older uploads haven't been molested. Otherwise, I'll have lost most of my desire to put stuff up there anymore.

---PCJ

One of the things the Opie & Anthony Show revealed about "regular radio" in one of their rants about the industry is that most radio stations do not honor requests, even though they solicit them by broadcasting their "request lines". What they do instead is record the caller's request, and if it happens to match up with something already on the official playlist at some point in the future, they play that call as the lead-in to the song, making it appear that they fulfilled a request, but in reality it was something that was already scheduled to appear in the rotation. Needless to say, if your request isn't on the "approved" list, lotsa luck getting the DJ to gamble with their jobs playing an unsanctioned record.

---PCJ

It's not my primary system. I just left whatever OS was there when it was superceded by a newer laptop running XP. It actually only gets fired up when I want to print to it's printer over the network, either from the XP machine, or an even more ancient '98 laptop (PII-266) that sits in a corner and runs Thunderbird to collect email. Oddly enough on that laptop, leaving IE running next to TB seems to keep it stable enough to run a a few weeks at a time without locking up :)

It sounds like an awkward arrangement, but I've had issues with the XP machines seeing each other or the NAS on the network. The two '98 machines mostly behave themselves (for the amount of time they're actually in use printing or diddling with the NAS box), so I haven't been motivated to retire them.

I am aware of DOSBox, though. I'm eyeing it for use on my Vista...er, future Win7 machine that's waiting to take over as primary.

---PCJ

"The days of Win98SE driver disks are long gone"

True. But for those who still have machines running '98, there is a little known generic mass storage driver for '98 that allows use of newer drives that do not come with '98 support.

I have a tower still running 98SE that I installed this driver onto. It'll take any flash drive I shove into it, that whore :D.

---PCJ

One of the drives in the article (OCZ Throttle) functions in this way. The review notes that it still needs a USB port to power it while plugged into SATA.

---PCJ

I wonder if it has anything to do with Albion's alleged incompatibility with laptop displays. I remember seeing the retail package years ago, and was going to buy it right then and there when I spotted the warning in the system requirements. At the time, the only computers I had were laptops (lack of space for a conventional desktop/workstation)

---PCJ

Amtrak has never had a guaranteed source of funding. Throughout its history it has had to literally ask Congress for funding every year like a child asking for its allowance. While it has historically had enough congressional support to get it enough money to survive another year, there was never any guarantee it would get funded in any particular fiscal year till Bush Jr's last year in office. That the company still exists today can be largely credited to the 1970's Arab oil embargo, since when Amtrak was first created, it wasn't expected to survive into the next decade*. And thus funded accordingly.

Can you imagine trying to do long-term planning such as buying passenger cars** and locomotives (both of which have been in short supply for years) when there was literally no guarantee that your company would even be around in 12 months?

*-Amtrak's first new diesel locomotives (the EMD SDP40F) were designed to be easily convertible to freight use owing to the real possibility that the company would collapse.
**--the average passenger car in the Amtrak system today is around 30 years old

---PCJ

Amtrak offers incentive payments to the freight railroads to get its trains through on-time. There are penalties involved in delaying passenger trains, but sometimes these are viewed as the cost of doing business, (or it would seem that way)
My last round-trips on Amtrak were as follows:

NYC-Pittsburgh: On time. Conductor announced that Norfolk Southern let us out onto their tracks ahead of two of their freight trains, as we left Harrisburg (Amtrak owns the line between Philadelphia and Harrisburg, PA. The rest of the line is NS).
Pittsburgh-NYC: On time

NYC-Pittsburgh: On time. We tailgated a high-priority freight train on the last leg of the trip, but we were able to get onto the eastbound track, caught up to the freight, and actually arrived in Pittsburgh alongside it.
Pittsburgh-NYC: About 45 minutes late. Our electric locomotive-put on in Philadelphia, died pulling us out of the station. Restarted and died less than 100ft later. Restarted and managed to push the train back far enough to get the last car to the platform before dying again. No spare locomotives were available in Philadelpia, so we were put on another Corridor train arriving from DC. We had cars to ourselves at the end of that train, just a litle less legroom.

NYC-Atlanta: 17-hour trip. On time. I think we had to wait out one passing freight train.
Atlanta-NYC: Ahead of time. Maybe the schedule was padded--we left Washington DC exactly on time, and arrived in NYC. Then again, my train also arrived in Atlanta on time--12 hours after its trip began in New Orleans.

From Atlanta to DC the line is rather smooth, but unbelievably curvy. Watching the line from the last car, it was hard to believe a passenger train could make time. And this is supposedly one of the designated HSR corridors.

Conclusion: The particular freight railroad you're dealing with affects the timeliness of the journey. Norfolk Southern is recognized as being good at getting passenger trains through its system. Some others aren't.

---PCJ

(not a specific reply)

On my first trip into Canada, via bus at the Blackpool Border Crossing (New York/Quebec) my phone showed one bar of Verizon Wireless signal while waiting on line in the Customs building. After passing through the facility and exiting at the other end of the building to re-board the bus, my phone had switched over to roaming, in a distance of less than a hundred feet (If you look at the Google Map image linked to from the above Wikipedia link, it's the small narrow building above and to the right of the toll plaza just beyond the physical border).

---PCJ

NYC has been replacing a large chunk of its diesel bus fleet with CNG-powered buses, and there are also hybrid-electric buses (though I don't know if they're being activley acquired or still testing). As for the diesel buses they've had particulate traps in them for some time. You can see into the ends of their exhaust pipes and they appear to be as clean inside as they are outside (although I know that doesn't mean anything WRT CO2 emissions)

---PCJ

Well it's not from your youth, but there is Five Minutes to Kill Yourself, which takes place in an office.

Knock yourself out...

---PCJ

I've had one laptop-drive-in-an-external-case take a powder. It was being used in exactly this fashion, only powered up to recieve files being backed up. Fortunatley I had already gotten into the habit of backing this data (artwork projects) up to multiple external drives, so this only prompted a mental note to buy another drive to replace it.

Since these projects stayed on flash drives while they were works-in-progress, I simply left the files in place rather than deleting them after backing them up. When the drive is (almost) filled up, I stick it in a drawer and buy another one--they're cheap enough to not be a burden, and I get an additional layer of backup (these drives do not see any additional writes and only occasional reads). Nobody's really answered the question of how long the data on an idle flash drive will remain intact, so an additional offsite HDD is in the cards for the next upgrade.

---PCJ