Darth Fluffy

... you're getting interested in the story ...

I understand. China's initial response was sub-stellar as well. But our toddler in charge is very visible and vocal and incredulous about anything that affects cash flow. It is being weirdly politicized, but not by one party; although the right seems to take it far more lightly. One article cites golf courses, where young liberals follow the social distancing as they play, renting multiple carts for example, and the conservative old cronies sharing a cart, shaking hands, and so on. Please people. This virus does not care what you believe. It just wants to eat you, one cell at a time. This article was interesting, a positive correlation between wealth and being a dangerous vector. I'm glad we are doing what we are doing. I fear that it will not be enough.

I've heard surgeries are being curtailed to temporary quick fixes, to be revisited later.

Yeah, sorry about that. Hopefully, we'll fix it this November.

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-cats-do-the-slow-blink-at-their-owners?utm_source=pocket-newtab I love the last lines:

Still good, you don't have to interact with them.

Well, yeah, it is surprising, because it is the beginning of pollen season and allergies. Maybe too early further north, we are already getting the chartreuse dust on cars. I don't think they're particularly at risk doing lawns, except maybe from each other. Do they bill electronically, or do you have to hand the boss cash each time? The thing I would not want to be right now is a retail worker. Too strapped to not work, and in close proximity to too many people all day. Can't be good.

Yeah, don't try using that without investing five points in numeracy. Or do you get to count three for free?

Websites are detecting ads being blocked and popping up warnings, some block contents. Does your ad blocker spoof past that? I think it should be fairly easy to do so, to make it seem from across the Web that you are rendering ads that you are discarding.

Uh, ANY other non x86 of the era? The Amiga? The Mac?

I seem to recall we had money problems in our arithmetic homework. I could be wrong. In any case I agree with you, it should be a thing. I am amazed at how often cashiers cannot figure out back change unless the register tells them the amount.

Soylent green? I was so surprised the one class reunion that I managed to get to how much I enjoyed the people. They basically grew up, and were nothing like I remembered. Well, a few were, but still.

Seriously. My school taught keypunch (punch card) data entry and secretarial type writing as marketable skills. I did scientific calculations on a slide rule. We finished our Civil Technology curriculum (roughly, like a 2 year associates) a quarter early, and our teacher asked us what we'd like to learn. "Teach us programming." ... "I've never used a computer ... tell you what, I'll learn with you." He finagled time on the school districts anemic pre-360 IBM laughably called mainframe (to be fair, the enclosure was roughly a desk, and yes, just one) and we learned rudimentary Fortran, turning in our programs on punch cards to be picked up later in the day. They had the old school barely legible line printer that sounded like a machine gun. There was JCL, IBM Job Control Language, which no one knew nor could explain. "Just put this card at the front, this after your program, and this at the end of your data." This set me up to love UNIX years later, with it's online manuals. The next year, the college I attended had a few teletypes hooked up to their computer (yes, just one) that had interactive BASIC. OMYGODWHYDOESN"TEVERYONEUSETHISITSSOMUCHLESSHASSLE! I never had a course on it, but I bought the book anyway and learned to use it; it was such a refreshing change from the batch jobs.

I've driven through it several times, stopped to look around a couple of times, and visited for business a couple of times. Oh, and of course, connected through the airport back in the day when Delta was a decent airline. I would not hate living there. But I would want to be close to commuter rail service, the traffic got incredibly horrible at times, and it took over an hour to go through once, not a record, but bad enough. I had an invite from a business buddy to attend Dragon Con, and never did. Kind of sorry I didn't go when it was smaller.

I do not recall which class, maybe civics and government but we covered federal income tax in high school, for maybe a week; we even filled out forms for practice. That may have been a non-standard teacher innovation. We had various curriculum, on the low end was 'general education', and I believe the general math focused on stuff like this, not sure; but there's just so much 'not algebra' you can do, right? I picked up a textbook in a yard sale long ago that would have been this. We also had a business curriculum that was slanted this way, how to do common business things, but also expected behaviors and how to present yourself. But you're right, those of us who were there to learn things and, oh, move on to college, for example, did not get this training. 'How not to be an ass in public', high school kind of teaches you the opposite. Seems though, that we got a bit less douchey each year, almost borderline human by graduation.

Yes, that was it. The DLCs aren't cheap, but just like books, you don't need them all, and the books aren't cheap either, you're already investing quite a bit. Disclaimer, I haven't purchased it.

My Tuesday night board game group did an online night this past Tuesday, it went well. We had voice through Google Groups, and our venue was Yucata, which has some connection to BoardGameGeeks. There are also some board games on Steam. Steam had a D&D pen and paper framework, I don't remember what it's called. I've seen it on sale frequently, cheap, but it does have the pay for DLC thing going on, which has its upside (more content) and downside (cost, but if you buy RPG books, it's still cheap).

She was missing you.

In some sense, I miss '98. It ran everything I had at the time, mostly. XP was not heinous, it still ran most stuff; backward compatibility was still a thing. Win 10 reached new depths of breaking the existing software. The death of real mode is not a bad thing. Frankly, if needs a stake through its heart, just to be sure. DOSBox does a good job, but not as good as XP. I, among many am a fan of MOO2, still a fan, and have played it within the last year. All of the bells and whistles worked under XP, a couple of them are broken under DOSBox. It is getting better. I can attack Antares now.

The early PC was pathetic, and did not deserve the success it had. IBM had no understanding of their market (I'm looking at you, CGA), and picked the worst 16 bit chip from what was available, based on it was the earliest, but wasn't 16 bit in the address space. Fortunately, we seemed to have evolved beyond that early legacy. I don't know that "real mode" is a thing any more, in the hardware. There's many good reasons to have abandoned it, and little call to run the old software as such. I suspect it died when XP went away. The emulators like DOSBOX still have to deal with all the crappy decisions, like the various memory extension systems.

I believe the original bottom end TRS-80 had 4K of memory. 16K was the top end, if I recall correctly. I never owned one. It was temping, in the day. You could have a working computer for $500. I had friends that had spent far more on kits that they barely got working. My first computer was an Exidy Sorcerer. It was fairly well designed for its day but corners were cut on the hardware, and Exidy had little commitment to it. 48K memory, although, that was a bump, maybe 16K or 32K was standard? Why not 64K? Well the upper 16K was used for several machine functions and rom packs. I bought chips to make it 64K, then realized it would be counterproductive to install them. They all had weird graphics at the time, if they had graphics at all. My Exidy only had character graphics, but I could define the upper set of characters, down to the pixel. The TRS 80 did something similar with their upper set, not definable, but predefined blocky graphic elements, blocks of white or gray on a 2x3 grid. I think memory mapped video was standard at the time.

... almost sounds like a Microsoft rant.

Well, yes, I got the sarcasm part.

That detail I missed. I did not get the impression from what I read that was even the case, but I'll check out the comic.

USB is a good example of what you are talking about, so, yeah, I can see what you are saying. My impression is that manufacturers still try to distinguish their products with extra bells and whistles which only their drivers can activate, but I could be wrong. I am aware if Gibson's work, but have never read any of them. Back in the primordial days, one of the 'how computers work" column in some magazine was cast in the framework of Sherlock Holmes solving his latest crime of interest using the Analytic Engine. The lesson of the article was in the format of Holmes explaining to Watson what he was doing. It was a clever presentation; I think it may have been bundled as a loose volume. No great lessons, and apparently forgotten. I doubt if anyone foresaw how much we'd be living our lives online. Now ++, courtesy of COVID-19.