Why are we talking about the circumference when you can't be any more than one diameter away from any other point on Earth? It's not as if the poll is actually asking you to drill the tunnel, it just wants its length.
Depends how often it takes to count as really using it
OK then they're not eligible to register either -- so it does seem like a needless extra step. And I'm a little uncomfortable at how easy things get when you ARE registered -- where I live (western Mass.) they don't even ask for ID when I vote. It'd be OK with me if it were a little harder to get in the door, but once you can prove you have a right to be there it doesn't matter whether you remembered to get your name added to a list ahead of time.
2K cache memory for the PDP-11/34a -- it made a *huge* difference!
Aw c'mon, you could totally fit a TCP/IP stack in 48 KB. Pretty much nothing else, but as you say, there's your security for ya!
Seriously! Great for development and no one bothers writing DOS viruses any more.
>UEFI is an overdesigned solution to a non-problem.
Well it does solve the problem of 30 years of backwards compatibility. Thank god that's over! I really *hate* the fact that I can pull out any floppy, CD, or USB drive from when I was 1/3 my current age and expect it to boot up beautifully on my latest PC. I mean it's not as if backwards compatibility is the only reason x86 stuff rules the Earth
Seriously, I don't get it either. Slow booting is caused by slow BIOSes, not by the fact that the BIOS model is inherently slow -- it isn't! Many popular BIOSes have ridiculously long POSTs but that's their fault. Once that's over, loading the boot image from disk takes a few hundred milliseconds (max) even in real mode with INT 13h. Switching from real mode to protected mode takes a few dozen microseconds, using boilerplate code that we all debugged back when the 386 came out. Why complain about that now? They've increased the BIOS disk size limit a bazillion times and there's nothing stopping them from doing it again (last time around they finally generalized it so all you have to do is increase the packet size that can be accepted by the same EDD calls).
Exactly! The really amazing part is sending a manned vehicle some place insane. We (humans, I mean) were really good at that back in the 1960s -- an impressive number of crazy stunts worked on the first try.
Building something with motors and a decent oxygen supply would also be very cool, but the truly awesome part is withstanding the pressure and it's already been done, *fifty-one years* ago. So why should Branson get so much credit for something which, so far, is just a painting anyway?
Why are we pretending this hasn't already been done? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathyscaphe_Trieste
Once I made up a batch of little circuit cards that adapt the 8" drive bus to work with 3.5" controllers, and put up a dinky little web page advertising them at a price that would just about get me my money back (with nothing for my time) if I ever managed to sell all ten. Now it's twelve years later and I sold eight of them in January alone!!! Usually it's more like one a month but it absolutely blows my mind how many other retro-geeks like me are in the world.
Admittedly the users are mostly/entirely people like me who want to take snapshots of all their old disks for use under emulation, so that might not fit the definition of "using" them (since they'll stop once they have read everything).
It's kind of funny that CDs aren't considered antiques, even though they came out in 1982 so they're not that much younger than 8" floppies. I guess no one ever really thought they were too big (physically) or expensive so the upgrade path was just to increase the capacity at the same form factor and maintain backward compatibility (so it's convenient to keep using them even now, for things that fit). It was very odd that the first direction floppies went was to the 5.25" mini-floppies, which were slower and had much less capacity, instead of upgrading 8" drives to store 8 MB per disk or something amazing like that.
Anyway I'd love to know where the original poster thinks you can buy brand new 8" floppy drives. My Googling just turns up mislabeled NOS 5.25" stuff, and a blank media vendor whose page is copyrighted 14 years ago.
This may not count since it was in the 1990s (so the mid-1970s were a lot more recent then), but I read what I understood to be the original source code for MBASIC-80 off of PDP-10 DECtapes for one of Paul Allen's people. (If the stories we've all heard are true, MBASIC-80 was originally cross-assembled on PDP-10s, starting at Harvard before Microsoft was founded.)
The hardware was a PDP-11/34a with a TC11/TU56 DECtape rig, with FILEX.SAV on RT-11 and also my own home-grown utility that takes snapshots of tapes in 18-bit mode. The TU56 drive crapped out in the middle of it all, which was really embarrassing since I had to repair it in front of the Vulcan guy (who'd flown across the country just to visit my squalid nerd lair, but apparently working DECtape gear was rare enough that he didn't have much choice), but at least the whole thing was successful.
When I say
This might not cause that much trouble, because when you *register* a trademark (as in (R)) you have to specify what business the mark will be used in and it's limited to that. A non-registered trademark (as in TM) is harder to defend but has a lot more wiggle room for the trademark holder. IANAL but I'll continue using the word "Face" w/o worrying, unless I'm building a social networking web site.
Obviously we're talking about pets here. Humans are on their own!
I have CVT Avant Stellar keyboards on the two PCs I use most. They're not the "ergonomic" style (I don't think I have whatever problem those solve) but they're supposed to be designed by whoever did the original Omnikey keyboard (which I have on another machine and love), and indeed they have the same wonderful clicky feel and metal back. I like them so much that I bought a spare (even though it was $189) since I didn't want to go through withdrawal when one of these dies, but it's never happened. Once in a while a key will get flaky (stubborn and/or bouncy) but then I'll just pull off the keycap (tool is included), dribble some 91% rubbing alcohol into the switch, and then I'm back in business.
Besides the reliability, nice feel, duplicate set of pre-EKB F-keys on the left (I've been using the same editor since 1983 and pressing those keys is involuntary at this point), I *really* like the fact that they included extra keycaps (and that tool I mentioned) so you could put Ctrl to the left of ASDF (as God intended, or anyway, all the non-PC keyboards I ever use) even though the Ctrl and CapsLock keycaps aren't the same size and so aren't swappable. There seems to be a slight bug in the firmware though -- obviously I programmed the keyboards to exchange those two keys, but once in a while they get confused and what's now the Ctrl key ends up working as CapsLock anyway (so the LED comes on and I'm shouting until I notice and fix it). It doesn't happen often enough to affect my loyalty, but it's weird.
ANYWAY so if the Northgate name on this ergonomic thing means it's in any way similar to the earlier Omnikey and Stellar KBs, definitely definitely buy one.
Never test for an error condition you don't know how to handle. -- Steinbach
