We don’t discriminate – we give everyone hell without regard to the marital status of their parents or their investment portfolio worth. We are Equal Opportunity Kvetchers.

will do!!

I had to get up (it’s about 2:15 AM) to take a couple oxycodone. Pain being something of a sleep inhibitor! 😉 Thought I’d have a quick peek while I wait for them to do their thing.

You all brighten my day also (even Badtux 😛 😉 Kidding of course, you are a very decent example of Humanity IMHO). And you are very switched on. It would have been a pleasure to work with you when I was at my best. You have my sincere respect. As do you all. 🙂 This is the only place on the ‘net I visit now, let alone bother posting. Because, well, you guys make it worth the effort. Whatever happens, you are all good people. Truth. Thank you.

Reason I’ll be away is that these oxycodone pain killers aren’t really doing it for me. So I am going into a palliative care facility for a few days to a few weeks (depends how long it takes to manage the pain etc.) where I can get a morphene drip and finally get some decent sleep! LOL Once I am through the surgery late Sep. (and after recovery, however long that takes), all these med’s should be a thing of the past (in theory!) 😉 😀

And just maybe… after I am off all these *dopey* pills… maybe my mind might get back to somewhere approaching my old self, It’s the only reason I am putting up with all this actually. 🙂 *shrug* I guess I will see soon enough. 🙂

Sorry I’ve been rambling and repetitious of late (and my spelling has become atrocious). Hopefully all that will be a thing of the past come end of year. (I spell checked most of this. It was pretty bad).

OK. Time to pull the plug, and see you all when I see you!

Stay safe, be well, and be happy! Oh… and *PLEASE* whatever you do… DON’T be good!! Give the bastards hell!! 😈

Thank you.

Agree (and thanks for the links hipparchia. I see what you mean!) 😀

Well, I am sorry to say that I will be AWOL for awhile. Not sure how long exactly. More than a few days, less than a month (I hope)! 😀

Thanks all. 🙂 It’s been a blast. 😀

Stay safe, be well, and be happy! Cya soon(ish) 😉 😀

And how long was Twitter down when its ‘neato, super-reliable, dual parallel systems’ managed to both crash within seconds of each other?

Of course, we should ignore what happened to all of the people who used the T-Mobile Sidekick when the Microsoft data center had a glitch, because the ‘cloud’ will keep your data as safe as all that data stored on the Megaupload site when the Feds shut it down for ‘piracy’.

My host has had problems over the years, including an episode when a contractor killed all power while the systems were up and functioning. During those years, to the best of my knowledge, they have never lost any data that belonged to me. That said, I still back-up this site on a regular basis to my own machine, as a prudent guarantee that it won’t disappear.

I won’t bore you with the gruesome details, but ‘it turns out that our back-up system hasn’t been working for some time, and no one checked to see if there was anything on the media’ is not exactly an uncommon thing to hear after a major disaster.

The reason to have your own computers is so you don’t have to depend on other people for access to and protection of your data. The only reason ‘cloud computing’ sounds good, it that is resonates with outsourcing in the minds of MBAs.

ha. a lot of people where i work are enamored of The Cloud and when i point out some of the disadvantages, i’m accused of being stuck in the bad old days. 😀

I can remember when the lab i was working in at the time transitioned from terminals and The Mainframe to Personal Computers. there was a lot of grumbling, like with any big change, but some of us were sure looking forward to not having to depend on [be chained to] the mainframe and its keepers.

Reminds me of when my boss started talking about “the cloud” as the future blah de blah. I pointed out to him that “the cloud” was basically 1970’s timesharing service “utility computing” and suffered the same problem with security camera data that eventually resulted in the demise of those timesharing services, i.e., limited bandwidth between the customer site and the “cloud” and the question of how to secure things in the cloud and what happens to your data if your cloud provider goes bankrupt. He was somewhat annoyed that I was pointing out that his Brave New Thing was actually a Back To The Past thing.

The reason for lockstepping the 68000, BTW, was not because of any bug or flaw in the chip. It simply had not been designed to have a memory management unit and there were no provisions within the processor for having a page fault stack to handle spilling microcode state to, and restoring microcode state from, upon being signalled by the MMU that there was a page fault. I was frankly amazed when Bill Joy and his team at U.C. Berkeley managed to prototype a graphics workstation using two lock-stepped 68000 processors, because the CPU simply had never been designed for that application (Bill and friends of course then took their prototype, went out and found some cash, and founded Sun Microsystems… I still remember playing with the Sun 1, it was slow but basically if you wanted to do R&D at a university, you had to have one, because it came with a number of computer language compilers for free while computer language compilers for other workstations cost big money). Apollo charged big money for development software, and besides all the interesting stuff research-wise at the university level was being done on BSD Unix which of course is what Sun used as their OS, so the academic market pretty much standardized on Sun and that ended up driving the industry. Just another case where vendors made short-sighted decisions to increase short-term cash flow (e.g. by charging big money for development tools) that ended up destroying the company in the long term (by ceding the academic market to Sun… BTW, this is also what eventually destroyed Sun when they did the same thing in 1993 with Solaris).

The 68010 was basically what Motorola released at the request of Sun, Apollo, etc. once it became clear that the basic 68000 architecture was suited for the application, but that was a couple of years later. Being designed for a MMU was one of the big advantages of the 16032 compared to the (even more buggy) Z8000 and the (somewhat less buggy) 68000 — the 16032 was designed from day one to have a MMU. It annoyed me greatly that National Semiconductor could not make it work right until everybody had already adopted the 68000 or, worse yet, the atrocity that was the 8086. “Nobody will ever need more than 640k” indeed… even in 1982 where 64K of memory was a lot of memory, I could see that such thinking was ridiculously short-sighted, I did not consider the 8086 a serious chip and was flabbergasted when IBM adopted the 8088 as the basis of their PC. The only thing Intel had that was worth anything was the 8087 floating point math coprocessor. Perhaps IBM was thinking that their “microcomputer” would be used for low-end scientific processor and thus needed a good FPU (National Semiconductor’s was *much* faster than Intel’s but also late just as the processor was, and Motorola didn’t even have one at the time). It’s the only thing I can think of that can justify foisting that atrocity onto the industry. Though calling the 8087 a “good FPU” is an atrocity in and of itself — the thing took longer to load and store registers to memory than it took to multiply two 80-bit floating point numbers together!

if all the disaffected moderates and liberals and lefties had a little more incentive to get up off their apathies and at least mindlessly vote for the slightly evil lesser of two evils, maybe we’d have fewer far right radicals and idiots in office.

Perhaps. But 50% of the American public is below average, and in this day of 24-hour Faux News average ain’t so bright nowadays. It’s like when GWB got re-elected in 2004. My friend from Lebanon ranted, “How could Americans re-elect that IDIOT?!” When I pointed out that 50% of all Americans were below average and it took just 50%+1 votes to win… he got real quiet. Probably started reconsidering his citizenship too (he’d gotten his U.S. citizenship just in time to vote for Kerry).

Hipparchia is right, in the US too many of those who do vote are less informed than the people who don’t. There is a long history of electing dead people in the US. Some times because the surviving candidate(s) are real morons, but often because a significant number of voters were unaware of the change in status of the winning candidate. Of course in some areas we have dead people voting, so it sort of makes sense. It’s hard to be more uninformed than dead, well, unless you watch Fox News.