Heh. I was in the cablemodem pilot neighborhood in the mid-nineties, and somehow managed to convince Dad to sign up for it. A few months later COX called trying to upsell, they got down as low as something like $1.50 more per month for cable TV on top of our Internet service and he still said no.

It was probably a good thing really, we already watched too much TV and that would have only compounded the problem, but I couldn't help but be amazed at how cheap he was being at that particular moment.

DOS4 is Windows ME.

I can't speak for DesScorp, but typically if IBM has agreed to a support contract then they will provide support.

I've always believed in using separate components for my home entertainment system to the greatest extent possible, and while not specifically for this particular scenario I still maintain that it makes sense to keep the system modular.

If nothing else, it means that if one part of the modular system becomes obsolete, only that module has to be replaced. And with the heightened pace of obsolescence of cloud-connected personal electronics these days it even makes sense from an e-waste perspective. It's a lot less wasteful to dispose of something the size of a Roku box or a Fire TV stick than to dispose of a whole TV. Plus it means from a security point of view that if one does need to protect one's accounts, even physically destroying the small object is a lot less wasteful or polluting.

On a discussion board I ran, I started a long running thread "Is this real, or The Onion?" challenging people to decide whether a headline was fictional.

It was hard. On one occasion it was both a real one and an Onion parody.

We are in Heinlein's Crazy Years, except he didn't foresee how weird.

Past discussion has stated that basically every large PRC Chinese company operates under a charter that allows the government to basically influence or take over the company at will.

Stop thinking of China as a Communist state. Start thinking of it as one giant company where the Politburo is the board of directors and the Inner Party are shareholders, and all of the people in China vary somewhere between employee and liability.

Yeah, I never had a problem with IRQ/DMA fuckery having a pretty loaded up (for the time) machine; Awe32 with Waveblaster daughterboard, ATI Rage 64 card, etc etc.

The main challenges back then were dealing with your low memory; figuring out the exact right order to load mscdex, memory manager, mouse driver and every thing else to squeeze out every bit of conventional memory, and using loadhigh to squeeze what you could into UMA, because that 1 kb difference could mean Wing Commander 2 didn't play the speech packs.

Enhance 57-19, track 45 left, stop

This is outline-ish, maybe not what you call a real history.
https://rusmania.com/central/k....

"Why does this happen? Because the better an organization is at fulfilling its purpose, the more it attracts people who see the organization as an opportunity to advance themselves."

And if their superpower is advancing themselves, mere merit has no chance to compete.

https://bobshea.net/empire_of_...

...need to be brought against both the principal studios and against the subcontractors. They're not supposed to allow this to occur. If their own supply-chains are so poorly documented that this occurs on any sort of large scale then it's reasonable to pursue penalties on even if on simple negligence.

Fair question. Testing it with nothing else around would determine for sure whether it's reacting against something nearby or whether it's breaking conservation of momentum.

Before spending money on that I'd insist on independent ground tests.

We have an overwhelming set of experiments and observations about momentum being conserved. But if someone can show a replicable exception someday, we'll have a huge overhaul to do.

My questions about this would include whether the inventor has given enough information for other people to build one. Then I'd look around to see if it's, by some unknown mechanism, reacting against something in the environment.