A few things hurt its adoption:
  - Once 14" & 16" TFT screens became affordable there wasn't much point in making the keyboard fold. Folding 14" screens were still a few decades away.
  - It came with Windows 3.11 installed WIndows 95 wasn't bootable off CD so if you wanted Windows 95, you had to install 20+ floppys through it's slow external floppy drive.
  - Once Windows 95 was installed you had a TCP/IP stack and modem firmware that didn't always play together. Mine made at least one round-trip to IBM so I can't be sure it wasn't a modem hardware problem.
  - The eraserhead mouse controller was flaky so IBM sent out new rubber eraserhead tips. They seemed to have learned something about dispearsing static electricity from plastics because it worked fine after this replacement.

Once these were installed, I eventually upgraded the RAM, bought a larger hard drive and caddy, installed Slackware 95 Linux on and an Amiga emulator on one partition. It was my workhorse for more than a decade and even processed some SETI@home frames on a 75MHz 486DX.

The first age-related hardware failure was the battery. At the time I had access to an X-ray machine and I saw that it contained 10 AA NiCad batteries. This explains why it never had great battery life.

The BIOS clock battery died in the early 2000s. Looking at the wholesale disassembly required to replace it convinced me that I should have had a professional do this. The battery is dead and dry now and I hope it never eats through the motherboard.

That black rubber case grew sticky as with similar products from the 80s and 90s. Talcum powder helps a bit.

I haven't booted it tonight but did a few months ago when I noticed a new problem cropped up. The internal TFT screen connectors developed a loose connection. For a while I was able to get it to work by pressing around the frame of the display. It still works using the dock and an external VGA connector. I'm trying to decide whether to try to fix this or find someone who would have the time and expertise to do a full restore as described in project butterfly.

With physically smaller emitters and smaller lenses necessary for focusing and the abililty to switch on and off as needed without a warm-up period and modulate at frequencies far beyond 60Hz LED streetlights should have been better for light pollution. But since they reuse fixtures designed for discharge lights many of which reused fixtures designed for gaslights, they throw light all over the place. Their light spectrum is broader than sodium and mercury discharge and much broader than low-pressure sodium lights. They are also a strong emitter of Radio Frequency interference.

Early car radio antennas including the one in radio pioneer Lee Deforest's Worlds Fair concept took up quite a lot of extra space. But these days the problem is:

1. People who sell ads LOVE the bidirectional "instant Neilson ratings" aspect of streaming radio.
2. Cellular oligopolies love forcing people to use their product (and gather listening habit stats to sell to their advertisers)
3. Manufacturers of car entertainment centers don't want to bother with large low frequency circuitry for a relatively small marketshare.
4. Authoritarian countries which manufacture car entertainment centers don't want anonymous trans-border capable receivers to be available for their domestic market.

We were camping in the dog-walk overflow area of a private campground in the 1990s. I was kicking myself for not having made reservations at the beautiful State Park a few miles away. A severe thunderstorm hit and we might've heard sirens in the distance so we abandoned the tent and turned on the car radio. Most FM stations were over-the-horizon and playing top 40 so we tuned AM and heard more, this time top 40 of the 1940s. Glen Miller, Bing Crosby... Long afterwards we learned that flash flooding forced evacuation of the state park down at the lake.

The biggest problem with AM and FM radio is the same as the problem with FoxNews, Sinclair, ClearChannel (now iHeartRadio), Twitter and Facebook. The profit model relies on siloed oligopolies and nation-wide scale of communication. Profit motives discourage "voluntary cooperation with the FCC and other authorities" emergency communication. Ditto for phone networks, you can be next to an AT&T tower and have no signal on your Verizon phone. (This is not the case in most of the world outside of the U.S.)

Not only does this profit model discourage use of our public airwaves for public service, in many cases it works against the public. How many AM radio stations were spreading Covid misinformation throughout the pandemic? How many were 24/7 Trumpublican political infomercials unregulated by the FCC? How long has it been since "talk radio" has taken callers? People like Rush Limbaugh always had an itchy dump-call finger for the rare occasion when a doctor, environmental scientist or person of color would call out his racism. But this generation's "talk radio" hosts needn't take calls from anyone. Instead they spew an endless stream-of-hateful-consciousness. #RagePorn. And when that divides us against ourselves, no one willl bat an eye when a station decides to air the Kremlin's Russian propaganda in Missouri.

Well said. Add these avantages of AM radio:

• Over FM:Better propagation in mountainous regions and over-the-horizon in vast rural spaces of "flyover country."
• Over Satellite: Simpler receiver, Much simpler transmitter. Non-subscription model. Better regional focus (for non clear-channel stations)
• Over streaming 4g/5g: Requires much less infrastructure so more resilient during war or disaster. Unidirectional communication, broadcaster to listener so there is no communication uplink to tell advertisers, advesaries, government, autocrats... that you are listening to LGBT AM in Georgia/Saudi Arabia, WOKE AM in lower Alabama or Radio Free Europe AM in Donbas

I have a 2006 Nokia E61 which by some measures could be considered a smart phone, it ran their proprietary Symbian OS, had a browser, email, Skype, plenty of other apps and I was beginning to enjoy playing around with python on it. The E71 was smaller, more beautiful, had a lovely keyboard that beats my current Blackberry Priv, a very slow to sync aGPS and the best online maps on any phone I've ever had. Seriously folks, there are not many iPhones in the Wadi Rum desert, rural Ireland, Jerusalsum or newly constructed ring roads in Beijing and it shows. The E71 was my favorite phone for writing when I was on the train but it died as did the HTC chacha I bought to replace it. (Water damage.) The E61 still works. My current phone is a 2015 Blackberry Priv and though I bought it for the in QWERTY keyboard (rare but highly useful to writers and people with visually impairments.) Its physical keyboard isn't great but is otherwise an excellent phone that still, though its the first phone I've owned with a battery that isn't easy to replace. If it weren't for companies forcing obsolescence with no-replaceable batteries and refusing to update the firmware/OS, smartphones could easily last 5 years. Instead most of us are forced to replace them in 18 months. The amount of e-waste generated and the cost to dispose/recycle this should spur countries into some kind of right-to-repair or right-to-upgrade laws. But Google, Apple, Verizon and AT&T have a lot more sway with our government than environmentalists and consumers. With all of the BS going around the web about 5G cutting down trees and spreading deadly disease, few understand the completely unnecessary planned obsolescence which will come in on a wave of 5G which will put your existing phone and millions of others into landfills.

Apple also claimed that its phones are increasingly unrepairable because repairability would stifle innovation. Blackberry had wireless charging in 2015. Other android phones had it earlier and are more repairable than anything Apple has made since 2012. Apple's proprietary charging connectors don't even last as long as aftermarket Android connectors

Apple should stop pretending and admit it likes its uproprietary earphones, connectors, chargers and protocols because they're profitable planned obsolescence.

The European Union, U.S. and other large markets could pressure these multinationals into making their products modular and repairable. They could also subsidize repair shops to relaunch what was once a large, local and profitable industry. Countries which are successful at implementing this would have less e-waste. Also require a label for the carbon footprint required to create a product, better yet tax the company proportionally to the carbon footprint of every product sold. As long as governments and consumers continue to reward planned obsolescence, we will fill our landfills with e-waste and destroy our environment to make these trinket status symbols that will be useless in about 18 months.

A large and growing number of homeless Americans are veterans of the string of George W. Bush wars which have now lasted longer than the revolutionary war, civil war, WWI and WWII combined. The current U.S. president has plans to clear out these homeless, but it has been done before. In the 1930s, WWI veterans camped out in Washington DC to demand help with financial difficulties brought on by their service to our country. President Herbert Hoover asked General Douglas McArthur to clear away these homeless. Eventually the veterans won out and the GI bill was created along with VA loans. The problem is that more than 99.9% of these VA loans and GI bill educational grants and loans went to white men.

Some people became very wealthy by selling houses in racially redlined neighborhoods using socialized FHA and VA loans. 30-year mortgages locked in this segregation until the 1970s. But as recently as the mid 1990s I was shown a racially map by an IT recruiter in Milwaukee. And if you believe current real estate and lending practices are color blind, I have some swamp land to sell you.

Let's ignore the "do humans have human rights?" thing because I'm probably debating with one of Putin's Trump trolls. Do you not realize how social media, even the old fashioned email and usenet kind, has a FROM: and a TO: address? How sure are you that you've never liked a page, sent or received to a message, frowny faced a photo... of anyone who might accidentally get caught in the U.S. State Department's six-degrees-of-separation friend-of-a-friend ferners-aint-human dragnet?

The astute reader will neither reply to, rank nor read this post as it almost certainly has crossed beyond the civil right's zone. (Communication satellites flying in 22,500 mile high equatorial s***hole orbits)

The U.S. isn't on a slippery slope to a police state, it's a cliff and Americans are lemmings.

...And Carlson, Ingram, FoxNFriends and pretty much everyone else on FoxNews "aka The Anger Channel" except for those times when FoxNews covers actual news as text overlaying some pretty nature photographs and music to calm everyone down before the next rant-a-thon.

So when uncle Bob flipped FoxNews on after Thanksgiving dinner it gave the cat a migraine, Gramma turned off her hearing aid and little Timmy set the remote on mute and then "lost" it down the couch cushions. We finally dug down to it shortly after Christmas but Rover accidentally bit it in half when he was trying to snarf down all of the popcorn and doritoes wedged between the Ikea frame and the tivek backing. Uncle Bob says we should save any pre-1982 pennies Rover poos out because the copper will be worth several thousand dollars after Stephen Moore uses the Federal Reserve as a MAGA 2020 campaign slush fund. The cable remote defaults to closed-caption so we won't have a volume control until we save up for a brand new Wisconsin-made 85" LCD TV. We're sure that will happen very soon but until then, CC on Fox is like having a teleprompter for our thoughts.

Does Donald Trump know that goggle results are biased by previous search history? Maybe Melania was using his browser recently.

Please toss your cookies after using the official presidential browser!

I can hardly wait until PhD students, diplomats, engineers and doctors can rely on a Trump approved search engine: Error : Your search - "Science" - did not match any documents. Suggestions: Make sure that all words are spelled correctly. Try different keywords, e.g. "Chinese Hoax" Try more general keywords. e.g. "Creation Science" Error : Your search - "Russia" - did not match any documents. Suggestions: Make sure that all words are spelled correctly. Try different keywords, e.g. "Crooked Hillary" Try more general keywords, e.g. "NO COLLUSION!" Error : Your search - "Stormy" - did not match any documents. Suggestions: Make sure that all words are spelled correctly. Try different keywords. Try more general keywords. Try premium version of this search engine for $140,000 Your search - "Fake News" returned 84 million results including: (Failing) New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Guardian, London Times, Irish Times, Independent, Reuters, AP, CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC, BBC, NHK, Der Spiegel, Scientific American, Economist, NASA, NOAA, WHO, CIA, FBI, NSA, MI5, Omorosa's tapes, Cohen's tapes, Billy Bush tapes, pee pee tapes... Your search - "Real news" returned 5 results: FoxNews InfoWars Breitbart National Enquirer trumptwitterarchive.com

American style socialism favors the freedoms and rights of fictional corporate entities. European socialism favors the rights of individuals or the public good. In the U.S. foreign companies are leveraging Kelo V New London to stomp over individual rights, including declaring nearly new home as condemned, grabbing 40% of a city's water capacity and violating the Great Lakes pact.

Ireland chose not to become a corporate whore this time but has tried American style corporate socialism in the past. Have you heard of the potato famine? Chances are you heard wrong. Irish farms exported other economically productive at the same time as the farmers starved. In the more recent past Ireland did bend over to Apple, Dell and other IT companies only to have them downsize or close down once their tax incentives expired. The Irish government also used tax money to buy distressed property after the first celtic tiger property bubble burst and then they sold it to REIT vulture funds such as the one managed by Dan Quayle. Quayle makes money while Irish homelessness is skyrocketing. Deja vu to the foreign slumlords who inspired the Irish land wars a century and a half ago. This may have been a poor decision but much poorer decisions are being made every day in pursuit of short-term corporate profits.

This isn't the first time some yokel has used planning laws and bent the ears of Irish politicians to stop a development project that would help the Irish economy. This foreign bloke killed an Irish wind farm because he didn't like the looks of it and claimed it would harm some freshwater mussel. Then this same daft American claimed that "climate change" would wash his land into the see so he tries to erect a damn sea wall. The Irish got the last laugh though. It seems that there's this tiny endangered Irish snail that doesn't like walls very much.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall...
-- Mending Wall by Robert Frost>

Both environmentalists and Paul Ryan's pro-Chinese corporate shills are missing the point. This isn't about the total amount of Lake Michigan water used or even the significant percentage of treated water used. As the article points out, Paul Ryan's pet project sets a precedent of diverting water out of the Great Lakes basin. Only a few kilometers and a few meters of elevation divide the Great Lakes water from the Mississippi river system. Where the plant is located, wastewater would flow away from the Great Lakes but they applied for permits a few miles away n Racine on the Lake Michigan shore.

To put things into perspective, the city of Racine (pop 77,571) consumes 16.9 million gallons per day. So this plant would increase the city's consumption of treated water by 41%. But under the Great Lakes Compact (2008) nearly all of Racine's water and water from other cities bordering the Great Lakes must return to the Great Lakes. With this, 40% of Racine's consumption would diverted outside the Great Lake's basin. This sets a precedent so that Milwaukee, Chicago, Toronto, Detroit, Gary and other large cities with reason to sell or divert Great Lakes water can point to Racine and say, "They did it, so why not us?"

Hand-waving arguments about man's insignificant effect on the Great Lakes system fall flat. As one who grew up in Racine I've watched Lake Michigan's eco-system change several times with algae, lamprey eels, alewives, lake perch, salmon trout, zebra-mussels and the Asian Carp (coming soon). The latest threats come from a 100-year old project to divert Great Lakes water to prevent Typhoid fever in Chicago. The damage and/or cleanup from this may cost billions.

The administration and politicians owned by Foxconn have lost all credibility when it comes to the use of scientific principles to assess the wide-ranging and long-term economic, social and ecological effects of short-term business misadventures such as the Foxconn con job.