And after all these years I was convinced that the moon was made of blue cheese...

I'd imagine that there are a fair number of ethernet cards out there for 16-bit ISA that would work fine in an 8-bit ISA slot. I was more of an Apple II -> Amiga person at the time of 8/16 ISA, but I read somewhere that a lot of 16-bit cards would auto-detect an 8-bit slot and downgrade; tried it with my Boca Super X VGA card and it worked (in conjunction with my A2500's A2286 board). Don't know if that trick worked everywhere, but I also never tried the 16-bit ISA ethernet card I have lying around, either.

The problem is that the nation's rail system effectively collapsed between the 1950's and early 1980's. There were literally hundreds of rail companies formed in the 1800's (much like the internet boom?) and while most of them went bankrupt shortly after being established, the ones that did survive into the 20th century eventually merged or collapsed altogether over the years until they finally were shot out back with the formation of ConRail. What was learned from all this? Passenger rail doesn't turn a healthy enough profit to fund the operating costs of such a system. Freight, on the other hand, can and often does. The only reason why we have Amtrak and the various commuter rail operations around the country is because the (federal and state) government funds those systems so they can exist. Yes, part of your taxes may be going to help keep a commuter rail system you may never even use, however, it is for the greater benefit of the state to do this because it allows the wealth generated in a large city (like NYC) to be spread out to communities that may be one hour away. So high speed rail will either be very expensive or heavily funded by US taxpayer dollars. I'm sure it will most likely be the latter since the only advantages rail has over airlines is that you don't have to deal with the airport and is maybe 15% less expensive. If it is the same price or more expensive, it won't work.

Technically, Commodore didn't start development on the Amiga. It was started by a small business called Amiga, Inc. founded by some dentists who wanted to cash in on the video game craze of the time. Commodore only later purchased the company when they were looking for their next gen system and after Atari almost got their hands on it.

Might be slightly off here, but that is the general idea.

It used to be that you could read a specific date page. Great for catching up after not being on for a few days. Now URLs such as http://slashdot.org/index2.pl?issue=20110123 no longer work. This is really annoying.

So how will I know when I'm really "someone"?

What I would REALLY like is if Facebook would do one fairly simple thing: email me a copy of any message I send to someone.

I sent feedback asking for this which I didn't get a response (not surprised). They already send you copies of the messages you receive, so why not let me complete my archive by sending me a copy of what I write to others?

Not a major technological difficulty, but would be nice.

Highly likely that Woz probably touched it, but less so for Jobs, I would think. I've read in historical accounts that they employed a sibling to stuff boards and also there's the 3rd founder Ronald Wayne who may still have been part of it at this point; I believe he left sometime in 1976. This is serial number 87 (?) and I believe they only produced about 200.

I would imagine that Jobs was probably out hustling, so that would be his lower chance. However, the letter would most likely have been typed and signed by him.

My semi-educated guess.

What I've never understood, is why? Why not just check on writing; and reading on removable drives?

When virus definitions are updated, it is possible that a file that was written in the past is now considered infected. As well, the file could have been written to the disk without the antivirus software's knowledge (could have not been loaded, killed/crashed, etc).

Still, I agree with you that most of the time we have already scanned the darn file..

Where do you get your information about paper?

Anything organic can be made into paper; even owls and tree huggers. Heck, I've got a swatch of blue paper over 15 years old that was made out of a pair of blue jeans thrown into the digester (but with the metal buttons and zipper cut out). It actually makes me a bit annoyed when people have signs for "printer paper" or "newspaper only". That's crap. It all goes into the same batch of nasty chemicals and made into a pulp. Heck, they probably threw a spruce tree in there (with birds nest) while they were at it.

Short of it is, paper industry is still huge. Everything is paper or cardboard. It costs a lot more to get the raw materials (read: trees and the re-forestation involved) than it does to take any and all paper products and recycle it.

Is there a reason they can't go above the artificial limit of 192 GB?

I've read that the only reason why they limit to 192GB is simply because there isn't any x64 hardware out there that supports more than 192GB. I think it is because of the chipsets, not necessarily the RAM sticks or number of slots.

In other words, Microsoft supports up to 192GB because that is the highest amount of memory that they have been able to test with.

I would assume that as soon as 256GB hardware becomes available, they might re-state that limitation.

I think Zappa mostly appeals to people who appreciate weirdness for weirdness' sake, honestly. I like some of his stuff, the rest is just too strange.

No, if you want weirdness for weirdness' sake, listen to Captain Beefheart. Zappa was weird and was often categorized as "comedy music", but he was at heart a modern avant garde composer with heavy classical and R&B influences. The fact that he made rock and roll was because "nobody ever made any money playing classical music" (can't remember source of the quote).

The guy was a genius, but of a flavor that most people would spit out and stay away from because it tasted weird. As others have said, you either get it or you don't, but no fault if you don't because it isn't easily consumed.

I always thought that one was about BeOS.

No, that'd be "Pick Me, I'm Clean".

OK, so someone was listening to Frank's music and thinking about how to make a Slashdot story about it. Some story moderator thought it was cool to accept. I can appreciate that someone thought about these things and tied them together into a Zappa reference. Hey, I can get into that and I'm as excited to see it on here as CmdrTaco was when he first posted a story related to The Who 10 years or so ago (no, I'm not going to look it up and hyperlink it! grin). But what does annoy me is the claim that he had anything more to do with Linux than Beethoven, Taco Bell, Ford Pintos or rubber dog biscuits.

C'mon. Zappa's struggles over the years had nothing to do with computers or freedom of the tools he had. It was all about business, musician unions and satirical observations of "the world".

Sure, I could come up with something like, "hey! Opus the penguin from Bloom County was all about the position in society of the Linux user, and obviously because of the penguin reference!". Why not. But if anything, Frank had over 60 studio albums of material released and I'm sure one could make a lot more connections if they thought about it.

The author of the story says that Apple was influenced by LSD. While Jobs has been on record with the statement that it was one of the most important things he did in his life, I'm not ready to chalk up more than a few small points of that company's history to it. People claim to have grand visions and revelations under the influence, so maybe Jobs was just good at recording or remembering his revelations rather than just grabbing a bag of doritos and sitting on the couch listening to Pink Floyd. There were a lot of other things that contributed to Apple's success that had nothing to do with drugs or brainstorms thereof (see: Xerox, Homebrew Computer Club, IBM, Palm, etc).

So how is Linux influenced by Zappa? Linux was influenced by the entire history of UNIX and other commercial operating systems, not some avant garde musician. As well, why would he be using Linux? As others have mentioned, I'm sure he would be using whatever the best tool is. He made heavy use of the Synclavier back in the day because it was THE tool for electronic music and was capable of playing the complex compositions he defined and had someone program in for him (see: G-Spot Tornado and just about everything on Civilization Phaze III). I appreciate the progress that we've made in regards to music production on Linux, but from everything I've ever read about Frank, he's not going to use Linux for music production because of the philosophy. Yes, he was a tinkerer, but there isn't anything about Linux that you couldn't do with another platform when it comes to music.

Frank dedicated his time to his music and his family. I honestly don't think he'd have time for the difficulties involved with using Linux when he could just buy a Mac for Pro Tools or Digital Performer. Besides, I think I saw Mac Book Pro or two at a Dweezil Zappa show recently ;-)

Very fair points by the both of you. While I don't think I can speak for Florence, I can at least say the reason why New Yorkers probably get a bit more aggravated is that this kind of thing happens all year around at all hours of the day. There is no "off season" in NY.

Tell you what, though.. keep letting me drink the blueberry wine and I'll leave you alone next time you're staring at the high rises ;-)