Fifteen years later, a DOSEMU window still sits on my desktop. It's set up with the 4DOS shell, which I've used since... wow, going on 25 years, I bet. JPSoft released it to the public domain a few years ago. I mostly use it for PC-Write, my text editor of choice. I guess they'll pry it from my cold, dead fingers. I also use it for some file management; 4DOS' filename and command completion still makes bash look clunky and retarded by comparison.
Wine now runs quite well; I have it configured with Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, for those troublesome IE-only web sites some f*ctard webb*stards delight in. And I still have my old copy of Paint Shop Pro set up in Wine; for what I do, it blows GIMP and Photoshop away. GIMP will do everything PSP will, but it takes four times as much clicking and typing to do it.
I have the QEMU emulator installed, set up to run ReactOS, which is an open-source Windows clone. I honestly don't use ReactOS much, but I check it out every few months to see how they're coming along.
I have DosBox set up with Minix. I've been meaning to port some stuff to Minix, but Real Life(tm) keeps getting in the way.
I have VMWare Player set up; most of the Linux packagers post VMWare images of their new products. It's very handy; I'm running SuSE 10.2 at the moment. Now I know that SuSE 11.1 has deprecated Konqueror in favor of Firefox (slow and clunky by comparison) and something called Dolphi, which is a separate file manager. A giant leap backward, in my opinion. And KDE4 is butt-fugly.
They're not emulators, but I fairly frequently have a VNC session open to the Windows box I use for the scanner, and an SSH session open to a shell account on another machine.
Click...click-click-click.... spread across two monitors:
host system: SuSE 11.1
DOSEMU running 4DOS
Wine running Paint Shop Pro
QEMU running ReactOS
VMPlayer running Windows XP with TurboCAD
VNC connected to Windows 2000 on the scanner box
DosBox up with Minix 3
Why? Because I'm a complete geek, is why.
"All your software are belong to us!"
I rode a Yamaha 650 turbo with the optional 12 lbs. of boost one time and boy did that thing fly. Wish I could have afforded to buy it.I disabled the wastegate on mine completely. It didn't seem to hurt it any.
For 1986 it was a rocket ship. Or, as one friend put it, "feel God's great hairy Foot kick your ass into the next county..."
The oddest thing was, the boost gauge would slam to the peg and acceleration would begin; not like the Bandit, more like you were Wile E. Coyote shooting yourself down the road with a giant Acme slingshot; a smooth rush that just got faster and faster, until you hit the rev limiter. The Bandit makes all kinds of commotion with the pipe and flatslides; the Turbo just had this crazy howl like a cello with a nicotine rasp. Some of it was probably the 10" glasspack I'd welded in place of the stock muffler, but the Turbo never sounded like it was working hard, and over 100 or so, you didn't hear anything but the wind.
I put close to ten years on that bike, then a long dry spell, and now six years on the Bandit. I still have a habit of cracking the throttle and waiting for the boost to come up. [sigh] Once you get hooked on boost it's forever.
That was just a piddly 650. The turbo Bandit guys are probably walking around with major wood.
-- (Terry Pratchett, Eric)
I keep forgetting you come from southern California. In 1960s Sacramento you would have been stoned for such perversions.
Of course, there's always Australia: "How about some pickled beets and carrots on your burger, mate?"
Tatra used eddy current couplers on some of their air-cooled V8s.
There are pictures and descriptions in Mackerle's book. Interestingly
enough, though all the engines were out of Commie-land, the eddy current
couplers said "Vertex" on the side - they were made, or licensed from, a
US company later famous for its racing magnetos. Which were externally
very similar to the eddy current couplers...
You're looking at something the size of an old-style generator or
starter, probably weighs 20 pounds.
Some high-end cars are, oddly enough, going to hydraulic cooling fans,
driven from the power steering pump. Like hydraulic wipers, it's one of
those ideas I'm not too sure about...
I'm not precisely sure *why* Thanksgiving is a national holiday. We get Robert E. Lee's birthday as a state holiday in Arkansas. Lee was a traitor who led a rebel army against his own government, and was defeated. It would make some sense if he'd actually *won*.
-- Uncle Martin, "My Favorite Martian"
There were a whole lot of times when a .357 Magnum, or even a sharp
stick, would have been pretty damned useful...
"And here are our programmers, shackled to their chairs to enhance
productivity."
"Why are they all wearing shorts and sunglasses?"
"We have ultraviolet floods to bring up their vitamin D level to reduce
time off for sickness, and it let us remodel the employee gymnasium into
a management-only leisure center."
"'Management-only leisure center?' What does that mean?"
"Oh, nothing special, just a sushi bar and Swedish masseuses."
"What do the employees get?"
"Well, they have their sunlamps in their cubicles, and we have a box by
the time clock collecting donations to buy them a picnic table to put
by the parking lot."
"I say, very progressive..."
The highway departments in most states could do a hell of a lot better
job on signs, lights, intersections, and general traffic flow.
The various police departments could spend a little less time with
their precious radar guns and a little more time ticketing dumb-ass
drivers, like the ones who run red lights, or run up to the head of the
line and try to horn in when the road narrows for a construction zone,
etc.
We all know licensing is a joke, but when I had to retake the
operator's license exam a few years ago after letting my motorcycle
endorsement expire, I failed the test. Why? Because almost the whole
test was "what is the penalty for when your blood alcohol level is
between .1% and .15%?" and "which of the following substances may cause
impaired driving..." but nothing whatsoever on the rules of the road.
There's a lot of stuff we could do before we start ramming a
State-backed safety religion down peoples' throats.
"Yes, it is. What's your point?"
-- Psi-Cop Alfred Bester and Sinclair, "Babylon 5", Mind War
My solution was a large Ziploc bag. I put my wallet, watch, and hankie in it. When it stopped raining, the wind blew me dry - shoes, socks, and all - in 15 or 20 minutes.
If you're zipping to work and don't want to arrive soggy, a rain suit isn't a bad idea. For long distance work, most suits leak enough that you'll get wet eventually. A Ziploc under the seat is easy enough, even on a sport bike.
"This will feel a little weird..."
- Dave "Matrix" Williams
Personally, I think the parents should be tried along with them; if they can't keep their feral children under control, they should keep them chained in the back yard.
If your dog gets out and bites someone, you're liable. But if your kid *kills* someone, you get off free? WTF?
Across the state line, Memphis has a "wheel tax" on vehicle
registration to help pay for their daycare system. The Arkansas
legislature is talking about adopting something similar; if passed, it
would quadruple my license fees.
*They* had the kids, let *them* pay for their damned daycare. Or
"education", as they insist on calling it.
There's a bill up right now to extend this "free" "education" to
college as well, hoo, boy.
Also, I object to the method they use to finance this "free" service;
it extracts tax money from a group that has no relationship to those who
benefit. In fact, I could make a point that it is an inverse
relationship - those with large broods of brats tend not to be in the
taxed group.
They get the benefit; tax the parents. That's fair. Taxing everyone
equally would be less fair, but a constitutionalist might make a strong
case for it.
Yes, if I was in the dock, I'd wear Goth makeup and dress like an extra from "Thunderdome" too... the "Ziggy Stardust" and "crack whore" looks are also popular.
Fletcher: There's another saying, Senator: Don't piss down my back and tell me it's raining.
- "The Outlaw Josey Wales"
From its earliest days, Rome was a slave state. The Senate pursued a
program of continual expansion to provide a continual flow of slaves and
prisoners of war. Slaves were used for farming; Rome sat on some hills
in a vast marsh, and the citizens stayed in the city because the marshes
and arable fields were full of malaria-bearing mosquitoes.
The Romans invented the concept of "entitlement" very early; a citizen
demanded and received free water piped at least to his block (free food
came later), and free entertainment. The largest single consumer of
slaves and prisoners were the coliseums (there were five to nine,
depending on exactly when) which killed off 40,000-odd people a year for
the entertainment of the citizens.
Rome built fine roads because they *had* to. As the frontiers
expanded, the supplies of slaves, grain, and other necessities got so
far away it became impractical to transport them. England was at the
very edge of their western expansion, and it took quite some time before
they gave up and built Hadrian's wall, which symbolized the furthest
western extent of Rome.
By that time it became unfashionable for Romans to fight for
themselves; freedmen soldiers from previously-conquered territory were
used to conquer successive territories. This finally bit them in the
ass when some of the Germanic tribes decided it would be more fun and
profitable to sack Rome than fight Englishmen.
To the east, Rome conflicted with its sister city of Byzantium, which
already controlled most of Asia Minor. Mountains and shortage of water
made eastern expansion difficult in any case. It's hard to sort out
exactly what was going on there; most of the sources I have read so far
simply say "Rome" when dealing with Rome, Ravenna, or Byzantium.
Sometimes I don't think the authors were too clear on the differences,
themselves.
Rome simply grew too large for central control, and as they turned
their attentions inward, the outermost territories broke off and began
raiding. And that was the end, though it took centuries.
Mostly, what's coming through is that from the very beginning the
Romans were not nice people at all, and they held most of the "known
world" of the day in a state of serfdom or slavery to support Rome and
its tributary cities, that is, the ones Rome founded to take surplus
population from the city of Rome; there was only so much malaria-free
land, and there were severe limits to water and sewage. Apparently
those were full citizens, though I don't think they had a voice in the
Senate.
We had "NO DEMEROL" written on the file folder with giant red felt tip. When the anesthesiologist started playing around with the IV, I asked him what he was going to use. He said Demerol. The folder was laying right beside him. I told him I was allergic to Demerol. He said he'd be very careful. I told him *NO DEMEROL*. He then asked, plaintively, what I expected him to use.
Not very reassuring... he wound up using pentothal and morphine, which merely made me want to puke myself to death. He was whining that he didn't like to use morphine since it was addictive. I asked him what he thought intravenous Demerol was, aspirin?
AB slept out in the hall, just to vet the medical staff to make sure they didn't do anything fatal while I was recovering. Meanwhile, I shared a room with a guy who'd shot his penis off while playing with his .357, and they were doing reconstructive surgery. Since he was there first, he had sole use of the TV remote. He would turn the channel to wrestling - I never knew you could get Gold Power Belt Death Match Buttkicker Wrestling 24/7 - turn the volume all the way up, and then pass out with his latest dose of whatver it is they were shooting into his IV.
But does Texas have towns named Blue Ball, Bald Knob, Oil Trough,
Hogeye, Greasy Corner, Piggott, Smackover, Fifty-Six, or Possum Grape?
Touring in Arkansas has its amusing moments, mostly passing city
limits signs...
Constantine, if I remember right, tried uprooting the whole bureaucracy
and relocating it to Ravenna; that didn't help either.
The decline of the Roman Empire was very gradual, and not always a
decline. There were occasional ups where people worked hard to try to
save it.
Rome was a grand thing, but I'm not sorry it passed. Being born into a
changeless society, or even something like ancient Egypt, ancient China,
or even Peru under the Inca, would be living hell. Stuck forever in a
shitty present, with no hope of improvement...
-- (Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters)
There were other problems. I had a *hell* of a time buying a copy of OS/2. IBM wouldn't sell it directly. No major software vendors carried it. I finally managed to mail-order a copy of 1.3, then did the upgrade to 2.0.
2.0 wouldn't talk to my LANtastic network, it couldn't see my CD-ROM drive, it couldn't deal with my Future Domain SCSI card, and it could only drive my $400 Super VGA card at 640x480. Almost everything I tried to run in the "DOS Compatibility Box" crashed - often locking up the whole computer. That was apparently unrelated to the "single message queue" problem in the task scheduler, which locked up native OS/2 programs. Oh, and it didn't support the 84-key keyboard. I have no use for the grossly asymmetrical right-handed 101-key surfboards. I dumped another $500 into a SCSI card OS/2 could talk to and made various other hardware changes. I spent a bunch more money on software and the Red Books. I still remember OS/2's plaintive error message, "Error in CONFIG.SYS - can't find COUNTRY.SYS." That was apparently the last string in the error message chain; whenever there was a problem it had no message for - and that was often enough - it would display that. I'd like to know how many man-hours were spent by confused users trying to figure WTF was going on...
Finally, I decided it was a piece of crap and went back to DESQview. At that time I was, oh, maybe $1400 into my OS/2 adventure.
At that particular time IBM *only* supported OS/2 on a narrow line of IBM PS/2 hardware, and they weren't in the least interested in hearing about any non-IBM hardware problems. I heard this changed somewhat in later years.
It coulda been a contenda. But IBM's fsck-you attitude sucked, and their marketing sucked, and their hardware support sucked. At that, OS/2 hung around for years after IBM sold their PC operations off to the Chinese... I guess not even the Chinese wanted OS/2.
Then came the guy who claimed to be channeling his answers via "psychic CB radio". He had a whole coterie of imaginary friends who were eager to help out, and he dutifully channeled their answers to the group.
The posts were highly entertaining, and bizarrely, they almost always answered the original poster's question in a satisfactory manner. But it drove some the the list.greybeards into paroxysms of wrath.
I remember when the Russians started appearing on the 'net. I chatted with several, who fiercely believed the 'net was built by American universities to promote the free flow of information. They usually got hostile when I told them it was developed for the US Army, and the reason for the 'net's adaptive routing was the Army figured when a node went down, it was due to some Soviet nuke taking it down permanently.
-- Londo, Nanylon 5, :A Voice in the Wilderness, Part II"
Seriously.
If it's tax, drug, child, or sex related, you're de facto guilty until proven innocent. And if it's anything Homeland Security has jurisdiction over, you're also guilty until proven innocent.
The judicial branch of the US Government is entirely out of control, but nobody cares unless they get caught in the gears.
If Britain hadn't committed socialist seppuku it would still control the Middle East, and we'd have a nice well-behaved western Raj that would speak the language of progress (that's English) and probably be a lot better off than they are now. At the very least they wouldn't be worldwide problem.
If Britain hadn't had its colonies, WWII would certainly have ended much differently as well. Not to mention former colonies turned allies.
Remove the iron boot of British oppression, and they go right back to killing. But yes! Now they're free and without oppression, so it's all righteous!
> Lean meat, broiled or grilled, on a whole wheat bun with plenty
> of tasty fresh tomaters, onion and raw spinach... mmm mmm good.
> Put some sliced avocado on there (good fat, mind you) and I'm all
> ecstatic.
Spinach and avocado on a hamburger?
> Avocado is very common on hamburgers and hot dogs over here.
> Some time ago there was even smashed avocado paste on McDonalds as
> a dressing just like ketchup.
Avocado is technically a food substance, but it's down there with beetles or snails as far as things I'm likely to eat short of starvation.
04/05/2010:
> > What I don't understand is why the electromagnetic clutch (like a AC
> > compressor clutch) idea is not used today on mechanical cooling fan and water
> > pumps.
It's still a friction clutch, and as it slips, it generates heat.
With the small disc area available, they'd burn right up.
04/06/2010:
> We don't have Thanksgiving over here, so I was thinking again in black
> helicopters and stuff like that ;)
Thanksgiving is an annual American feast and holiday, in celebration of a group of religious deviants who were exiled from England to the colonies, and managed to nearly starve to death due to lack of knowledge of agriculture, eating their seed grain, and so forth. The indigenes took pity on them and helped feed them through the winter. In typical European gratitude, the new colonists repaid their benefactors by waging a war of extermination against them.
04/07/2010:
"After all, as a very wise man once told me, the chicken is not infrequently the true dove of peace."
04/08/2010:
-> I always noted that the phasers never did jack against another
-> ship...
"Just once, I'd like to come up against something that wasn't immune to
phaser fire." I don't remember which episode it was, but I almost fell
out of my chair laughing.
-> "Take me hooooommmmeee agaiiiiinnnnn,
-> Kathleeeeeeeeeeeeen..........One....more....time!!!!!"
I flash back to that episode every time I am exposed to
overly-aggressive Muzak...
04/09/2010:
-> I am pudgy and pasty faced, I sit all day in front of a PC, those who
-> can spend time in leisure tend spend it in the gym and on holiday,
What you need is sunlamps in your cubicle or office!
04/10/2010:
-> As long as injuries in crashes are more severe from lack of belts,
-> insurance costs are higher as a result.
My insurance costs would be lower if there were fewer crashes to start
with.
04/11/2010:
"That's a lie."
04/12/2010:
My brother and I did an Iron Butt 1000 a few years ago. He brought his rain suit. We hit a deluge near the Arkansas-Missouri state line. We had to pull over under a bridge and wait for him to put on his suit, then pull over later for him to take it off after it stopped raining - the temp was near 100F.
04/13/2010:
-> Sometimes, I think I am hearing the voices in other peoples' heads.
-> I hear something about a Pantera on an almost daily basis, but that
-> couldn't be in _my_ head! Or could it?
Oh, must be crosstalk; you're still plugged in! Let me help.
I threw a whole lot of hardware money down the OS/2 rabbit hole. IBM's answer to any support question was "we only certify OS/2 to run on IBM PS/2 computers."
04/14/2010:
> Someone in my city Edmonton, Alberta, Canada cut a hole in a
> protective fence on an over pass and dropped a boulder. The
> boulder went through the window of a school bus and killed
> the driver. They still have not found the guy. It's been 3
> years now. I'm sure the person never expected to do such harm.
We had one of those in Little Rock a few years ago. A 15-year-old and a cinderblock; killed a girl in a car. He's being tried as an adult, and he's going to the Big House.
04/15/2010:
> > The voucher program would end that Hobson's choice for you. You take your
> > tax-paid voucher. You spend it anywhere. It's your kid. It's your money.
Well, no. In the local scene, anyway, it's *my* money paying for their
public daycare system. Arkansas supports its schools by taxing real
estate; I have the bill right here on the desk. Because it's an
uninhabitable slum crack house, the tax is only $236 - but $178 of that
goes to the Pulaski County Special School District. Though I never
figured out what was "special" about it, even when I was incarcerated
there.
> > **But since you DO have to pay CURRENTLY via the clear original intent of
> > the Arkansas Constitution, you ought to want the bill to be as low as
> > possible. Yes?
You're making the unwarranted assumption that "public school" has any
relationship to "education." I maintain it's just free daycare. Any
"education" is probably accidental.
04/16/2010:
> Well said. As I have commented in the past, where are all the ugly
> people? Any alien intercepting our TV signals is likely to have
> entirely the wrong idea of what most human beings look like.
My wife is addiect to those "court TV" shows. She will call me in to the living room to see some of the... ah... beings in the courtroom. I'm pretty sure the studio has something to do with how they look, or else most Californians get their clothes from the local dumpster, and I find it hard to believe hair grease has made such a giant comeback.
04/17/2010:
Senator: There's a saying, Fletcher: To the victor belongs the spoils.
04/18/2010:
I've been reading some more about Rome.
04/19/2010:
> I start to understand all the people who write on themselves with
> indelible markers before they go into surgery. Sounds like it would
> be a good idea to take the Sharpie and at least write your name on
> your chest.
When I had my leg operated on some years back, they wheeled my gurney into the wrong operating room. It wasn't until they asked me to turn over and rise up on my knees that I suspected this wasn't exactly the procedure I was expecting...
04/20/2010:
> > drove through a little town in Illinois this week called El Paso and
> > couldn't help but laugh about the fact that is is further from my
> > house in Dallas to El Paso, Texas than it is from my house in Dallas
> > to El Paso, Illinois!
El Paso, Arkansas is even closer!
04/21/2010:
> SWMBO's Virago
And what else would an SWMBO ride?!
04/22/2010:
> > But not for a while.
> > What would be the most rational thing to do? Let's say you
> > intended to live a long time.
> > Just a purely hypothetical question, of course.
Lay back and enjoy it?
04/23/2010:
The duke had a mind that ticked like a clock and, like a clock, it regularly went cuckoo.
04/24/2010:
> Latin can be used to mean many things, similar in thought, but the same in
> words. This means 'Who will watch the watchers' or 'Who will guard the guard
> the guards'. Thoughts like that.
English slices finer than Latin. Even if the slices wiggle, sometimes.
04/25/2010:
>> I was looking at OS/2 seriously about the same time linux came out.
> There was but it was very limited. Gates had almost everyone convinced, and
> still does, that Windows is the way to go.
Gates bought the media whores; when CMP and Ziff became Microsoft pimps, all of a sudden Microsoft was the One True Way.
> If Linux could become what OS/2 was it would be great. That was a really
> secure OS.
It's easy to be secure when you only run on a handful of computers, support no common hardware, have virtually zero software availability, and only network via IPX and proprietary IBM protocols.
04/26/2010:
> Karl showed up on the list several months ago. His first post was so odd,
> so weird, that I accused him of being a troll. Many on the list jumped to
> his defense and attacked me. That mindset has changed a lot. ;-)
Back in the early '90s, there was a newsgroup called misc.rural. It was about rural and off-the-grid living, and was mostly about wells, generating electricity, and septic systems. This was in the pre-commercial days, so there was considerable animosity toward the guy who answered almost every question with a long diatribe about how whatever problem would be solved if they bought his Nubian goats. Some of that was entertaining.
> Most ignore him and his off-the-wall posts now. The bad thing is that he
> offers bad, or flat out wrong, advice and suggestions to question all
> posters but the concern is that obvious Newbies will listen.
I've seen similar things on other lists. And some of those people obviously put a lot of time into their drivel. Bizarre.
> No one will read the Release Notes. No one will read the docs. No one will
> read the wiki pages. *Most* of these questions are already answered there.
*I* read the release notes and docs. As for having to go online and stumble through some demented wiki... piss on it. If they were too lazy to put important information into the original package, the people who put the package together are the ones who screwed up.
04/27/2010:
> In the early days, before the suits took over, we used to get our
> USENET feed via a uucp dialup with an old AT+T 3B2 acting as a gateway.
> That little unix box later developed into the first ISP in South
> Africa, run by a friend of mine, who later sold out to the suits for megabux.
I bet I saw some stuff coming out of that box, back in the day.
04/28/2010:
"Now, landing thrusters.. landing thrusters, hmm. Now if I were a landing thruster, which one of these would I be?"
04/29/2010:
> So, umm, whatever happened to "innocent until proven guilty"?
A quaint legal fiction, no longer in effect in the USA.
04/29/2010:
> I freely admit that Britain made some very serious mistakes
> in Empire-building, colonisation and the inappropriate imposition
> of our cultural traditions on nations that had perfectly good
> cultural traditions of their own - and we are still suffering the
> consequences of those disastrous decisions.
I think Britain's imperial policy was just fine - without it, my country wouldn't exist. I'm sort of fond of America, warts and all.
04/30/2010:
> Mountbatten and Nehru and Jinnah were brilliant men who'd not
> only experienced a great deal; they'd done a great deal, and
> yet they did not know that the Subcontinent--which each in his
> own way, and sometimes it was an odd way, loved--would explode
> in violence, that bloodlust would rule as soon as the Union Jack
> was lowered."
I can't see why not; before the Raj, the principal entertainment of the zillion-odd clans, tribes, empires, kingdoms, pashanates, and gangs in the subcontinent was killing each other in various enthusiastic and innovative ways.