Do you mean my North Star Horizon circa 1981? Still runs. Still plays Zork and Adventure. Or do you mean my Dell XPS13 circa 2015. I replaced the battery once, so far, and hope to get 2 more years out of it. It's a Core i7 with 64 MB.

I like to get 4 or 5 "Moore Units" out of a PC. By that time the software guys are finally outstripping the hardware's capabilities although that used to happen a bit quicker in the old days.

I have a entry in one of my old lab notebooks from 1978 that reads, "Talked to Bill at Microsoft about the bug we found. He says it will be fixed in the next version." I was still working on my Masters thesis and using my advisor's S100 NorthStar Horizon w/10 Mb removable disk pack and the original Microsoft Basic for CP/M. Don't remember if the bug ever got fixed or not. We were using his Horizon that summer because the new Honeywell Multics machine at the University was still being installed.

Now we won't have to wait for Microsoft to fix those last few pesky GW-BASIC bugs.

Yet another vote for Gödel, Escher & Bach. I was blown away when I read it. It is now my favorite non-fiction book by far. I go back and re-read at least one chapter every year just for fun.

Dell already sells an 18" "All-In-One Desktop" XPS 18 which is thin enough to be a tablet and has batteries and a touchscreen. I have owned one for over a year and it is very nice. Fast Core I7, 8 GB and a terabyte of hybrid disk. They sell less tricked out versions as well. Other than the Android OS on the Samsung and the Windows 8.1 on the Dell they sound pretty comparable. Not sure this is a really new idea.

I spent a lot of time OSI-ing (Open System Interconnect) in my youth. Had lots of great features, even way back then. Much thought went into how to solve many of the problems that we seem to have with today's Internet. No need to start from scratch. We could even run DECnet over it. I could hook up my old VAX!

45ms from Sarasota FL on Verizon FIOS "15mbps" service. Fiber all the way to the demarc.

What asteroids/meteors? Those were American/Chinese/N Korean missiles.

http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/02/15/16977509-meteor-sparks-rumors-conspiracy-theories-in-russia?lite

And we haven't even heard from our 'Tin Foil Hat' brigade yet.

This proposal would clearly be:
- Against God's will
- A government conspiracy to subjugate us
- A plan by the Freemasons/Communists/Bankers/Democrats/Republicans to subjugate us
- Contrary to a natural cycle of extinctions

And most importantly "ALL THE PRESIDENT'S FAULT"

This is just a friendly reminder that we will eventually go extinct, and it will be our own damn fault.
 

All the USPTO examiner had to do was to look on the OAGIS website www.openapplications.org (or EDIFACT or ANSI for that matter), find the appropriate business process documentation and even the XML data structure definition for the control messages. This stuff is 40 years old already. This should be a basic step in the review process. The auto supply companies have been doing this kind of thing for years, with computers, on the internet! The orders are complex and extremely time sensitive and if you screw up even a very few times you are de-sourced. Suppliers can get specific orders from the customer in the traditional way or manage specific inventory levels and needs that change over time on the customers premises. That having been said there is no fix until something pushes the system out of its current screwed up equilibrium state.

In Deee-troit we have a Microcenter which is where I go most of the time. It IS geek central. The prices are pretty good, the selection is great and it is busy as h*ll all of the time. But.... I recently bought a Roku, a couple of iPads, a Nano and a Shuffle at Meijer of all places. They are a general merchandise discount department store based out of Grand Rapids MI. Think Midwest Super W*Mart. They keep sending me 15% off coupons that are good for all of their electronics plus there is stuff on sale all of the time and the 15% still applies. Try getting any kind of discount on the Jobs stuff most places. Plus it's a department store so no high pressure. Three caveats staff expertise is mixed, you need a Meijer credit card to get the discount and I'm sure part of the profits go to fund the founder's family's statewide political campaigns. They keep trying to be the Michigan Governor or Senator. So far unsuccessfully I'm happy to say. Like their store, their politics... not so much.

Here in Michigan we were once threatened by a bunch of drunk dudes who were out joyriding while we were out stragazing. Most of the time those type of guys were interested in getting a look through the scopes but these dudes were wacked. No harm came to anyone in this "incident". The only chemical weapons we ever encountered were wielded by the skunks. All in all much safer here.

The Afghans get props for their dedication to the science. Lets hope it gets better not worse for them.

I was fortunate enough to meet the man a few times during my short stay at DEC in the 80's. He was very gracious, intelligent and committed to the company. Ken was on the Ford Motor Company Board of Directors so he came to Detroit fairly often. I remember at one point he gave Henry Ford II a Rainbow PC and one of the guys I worked with had to go install it at the Duce's mansion. Henry gave Ken an Escort station-wagon which he drove for several years. Rest in Peace Ken.

I had to pull an old file consisting of a BASIC program off a 51/4" drive recently. After I found the disk it took an hour to locate an old drive in the "box of old drives" and install it in a case. It's original source was a Honeywell mainframe running GCOS (a.k.a. God's Chosen Operating System) and I must have downloaded it back in the mid 80's using some kind of ADM3A terminal emulator. Anyway, I needed it to look at the logic of some AI programs I wrote back then. Once I had it in Windows 7 it "mostly" loaded into VS 2008 and with a minor tweak or two ran just like the original.

Then everybody would be programming in Bliss and we would have VAXnotes instead of Facebook.

The oldest file has a timestamp of 20-Jan-1979. It was moved from my prof's North Star Horizon 5 1/4 floppy. Oldest file from my Horizon is 12-Jan-1981. Funny, most of these old files are MS Basic and VAX Basic source code. One has a program comment "REM Talked to Bill at Microsoft. This way of doing it avoids a bug in Basic"

The WOW (Wide Open West) guys have been trenching in the commons area here for the last week and I just got the WOW brochure in my mailbox. More service for less money. I'm guessing I have to endure Comcast for only a few more weeks! Thank you to our city council for insisting there be cable competition here in Rochester MI.

This award in not a joke. My experience supporting my own place and parents and in-laws, 6 total in multiple states, convinces me that Comcast is indeed the worst company in America.