Posts by bombastic bob 10944 publicly visible posts • joined 1 May 2015
Thanks. Unfortunately, the tax software (particularly the business version, which I have been told is written in Java) only installs on whatever version of Windows that Intuit "blesses". SO yeah.
Best I can manage is to buy the el-cheapo Win1.1 box and connect it to the KVM (once that is my only choice).
I am curous what windows version it reports itself as, and whether there are specific applications I might have to jump through hoops to have work properly on Wine in Linux. I'd set it up in a VM, probably.
Typical would be TAX SOFTWARE, which irritatingly requires newer and newer versions of windows to work. So far 10 is required but eventually I might actually need to go buy an El Cheapo CPU box with winders 11 on it JUST to do taxes (including corporate taxes, so there ya go). I guess I can try it, see what happens. But with latest/greatest MS shared components (read: CRAP) needed to run the latest version [probably] who KNOWS what incompatibilities lie in wait...
I still have the book. It came with the Windows 3.0 SDK.
Article mentions how nobody liked Windows 1 and 2.x as they were considered 'ugly', and of course 3.0's OS/2-like (CUA) appearance became VERY popular.
So, then, WHY did Micros~1 *ABANDON* something NICE for a FLATSO 1.0-like appearance,,,??? (i.e. TIFKAM/Ape/Win-10-nic/1.1)
Micros~1 should have STUCK WITH THE CUA. You know, like Mate and Cinnamon (etc.)
Here's the one word whose absence here is nothing short of deafening--and unconscionable:
nuclear.
If I assume that CO2-based climate change is real (which it is not), and I were asked to solve the problem, allow for all cars to become electric, all heating and cooking to be electric, and so on, there is only ONE solution to that problem: BUILD MORE NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS.
And yet; like you pointed out, this is NEVER discussed, unlike BANS, MANDATES, RATIONING, and "this is the NEW NORMAL".
Apparently the goal *IS* to lower our standard of living and limit our ability to travel, while (of course) THE ELITE can continue to fly LUXURIOUS PRIVATE JETS to Davos, so they can figure out what to tell us PEASANTS to do, and then FORCE OUR COMPLIANCE, in the name of "ending Climate Change" (which it never will). Meanwhile those "more equal than others" remain in power, and grow wealthier, while the PEASANTS get less and less.
NEO-Feudalism is what I call it. Time for a MAGNA CHARTA, a Declaration of Independence, and maybe a FRENCH REVOLUTION, I say, if this keeps up.
if the BOFH were involved, a system crash would accidentally delete all student OneDrive data, and would involve a Halon dump and some unusual spark patterns on the inside of the cabinet. The manufacturer and contractor that installed it would be blamed, and no evidence refuting the BOFH's claims would exist, giving them no reason NOT to believe it.
Then to save space and prevent further incidents, a backup would be loaded, but only the newest and/or most recently accessed 20GB of data for each student account. Fortunately, that backup was made minutes before the crash...
"20GB is more than adequate for .most students "
and a university can require a basic computing course and/or competency test [and allow challenging the course] to ensure that students have adequate skills and knowledge to make their own backups and limit the amount of unnecessary cloud data.
Although, In My Bombastic Opinion, trying to GUILT students (instead of appealing to intellect) by saying things like "carbon footprint" instead of "minimize costs so that your tuition and fees aren't increased" is at least a *bit* nauseating... I mean, COME ON what DO they teach in these schools? "Touchty Feely 101" and "Feelings over Thinking Seminar"?
apparently you do not understand the free market very much.
Stability would make you FAIL. To stay in business you need to adapt QUICKLY to rapidly changing conditions, especially true for tech and R&D stuff. If you get a contract from a customer, you hire TEMPORARY people (contractors) to make it happen or someone ELSE will do that FOR you and make the money you WOULD have made.
And then when the contract is complete, most of those employees go their own way, willingly.
It's not like the gummint is your only customer and has a steady demand. New products come and go all of the time, based on market demand. And if it does not sell the people who make it lose their jobs. It's just the reality of the world, and *NO* "pie in the sky" idealistic *FEELINGS* are gonna change that.
Before gummint got involved EVERYONE was (for the most part) an "independent contractor". Then gummint, like union bosses, realized their greedy ambitions through manipulation and power grabs, just like this LAST one by the Bidas administration, another RAW DEAL coming from the WORST president the USA has ever had (even worse than WOODROW WILSON) *JUST* to UN-do something GOOD that one of the BETTER presidents got RIGHT.
I've been doing mostly gig work for DECADES. Being "an employee" is HIGHLY overrated.
That being said I'll take a higher pay rate and intermittent work over "benefits" and layoffs ANY day
Gummint does NOT need to make my decisions FOR me, "For my own good".
And all *THEY* want to do is use regulations to FORCE you to buy what you do not want by having your employer buy it FOR you and then reduce your pay accordingly.
It's all a giant power grab and method of control, a way to transfer money out of OUR hands and into THEIRS.
Way around: create a corporation like S or LLC, bill customers and do your own pay-related stuff, manage expenses, etc.. Then of course you'll see just how deep into your pockets the GUMMINT hand goes...
[yet another Trump era "good thing" being RUINED by "KING BIDAS" (Biden) by using the 'Bidas Touch', i.e. everything he touches turning to CRAP]
decades ago PDP-11s running RSTS/E (this was at a college) had error messages stored in a disk file. One of the errors was "Program lost, sorry" and might happen if you tried to run a BASIC program without saving it first. This was generally VERY rare. As a prank "someone" (evil grin) changed 'sorry' to something in all caps with a colorful metaphor. WEEKS went by, and then the system operator asked ME to help him fix it. I wonder how he might have known that I could... (and I did, naturally - "Heh. That's pretty funny. Oh, you need help fixing it... You know the error messages are stored in this one file, right?")
"At home there are very few things other than games that *require* WIndows."
tax and accounting software, the occasional windows-related development (customer needs), and certain media creation (Cakewalk) for me. Otherwise, winders box just idles.
FreeBSD and Linux for everything else. And a lot of the above can be done in a VM.
Some windows games also work while running in a VM, especially older games.
"Vehicle makers will take note when it starts to affect the bottom line."
like EV mandates being threatened in the USA - even the UNIONS know it could result in the companies going titsup and them being out of a job.
I had already considered doing what I can to keep my 24 year old car going indefinitely. Add the tracking crap and I'll end up cruising the junkyards for ' fixers ' before I buy a NEW one...
RCA chose to purchase a patent for a 3-gun color TV picture tube to a man named Geer who constructed a prototype color picture tube that looked like a 3 legged octopus, though if I remember correctly his first conceptual prototype (showing the 'pyramids') was constructed with sugar cubes and mayonnaise. There was enough similarity that the RCA patent could have been challenged and they wanted to hedge their bets by buying the competing design.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geer_tube <-- a true hacker
patent trolls typically patent something that's not necessarily real tech, but looks good on paper and in a courtroom. get in first with your "design".
if you built one you were actually "inventing" or at least that's the story they're telling
IANAL - however this is what patents are supposed to cover, an actual invention you might have had along the way in your development work
First patent I was involved in was used for demos and was worked on for a year or so. never sold, though, but it definitely worked. Tech changed around it and it was just not enough to make its own niche in the market. (it was related to wifi and has my name on it). At this time there were a LOT of things getting quickly obsoleted and/or replaced with newer/better
economics drives hiring and layoffs. When there are layoffs, often these people hire contractors, so doing gig work may be the best opportunity.
If 'jobs created' are ONLY "permanent" positions (we know how 'permanent' that really is), what about 3-6 month contracts?
Economics does not determine whether or not the work NEEDS to be done, just the company's ability to hire people to do it (and then find things for them to do after)
AI cannot do everything. Once they figure this out, they'll hire more people to do things.
" plant life requires an abundant CO2 content, in fact higher than we presently have.."
Not exactly but you are close on this point.
At CO2 levels bnelow about 2%, plant life flourishes. At levels below about 0.02%, plant life dies. As far as I can tell, CO2 GHG effect SATURATES below about 0.02% but it is difficult to read from a chart. Increase CO2 to about 0.2% (10 times as much) reaches the peak for "diminishing returns" for plant growth, with little (if any) effect on climate. So at 0.04%, the current equilibrium level based on ocean temperature etc., plants do ok, but they would do better at 0.08% . And the climate would NOT CHANGE.
The whole idea of man made climate change from CO2 is a COMPLETE HOAX, from the assumption that 0.04% of the atmosphere being allegedly increased by 3% per year by human activity (when it is at chemical and biological equilibrium between the oceans and plant growth, meaning that if you add more CO2 it will be depleted quicky back to the equilibrium level) to the assumption that its greenhouse effect is anything significant (95% from water, and about 2% from CO2, which has already saturated, meaning that if you were to increase the level of CO2, even doubling or tripling, the additional effect is NEGLIGIBLE) and anyone who casually observes the REAL science would REALIZE this and not fall into the TRAP of DOOM-SCROLLING and being MANIPULATED through FEAR to give up your freedom, vote for EVERYONE ELSE to give up THEIRS, and irritate everyone else's life through "just stop oil" protests and various OTHER forms of virtue signalling while so-called "important" climate activists FLY IN PRIVATE JETS.
And when you add more CO2 to the atmosphere, you get more PLANTS.
(someone had to say it)
WHAT! GIVES! *THEM*! THE! RIGHT! TIO! DO! THIS!???
(ESPECIALLY when "up"grades are *FORCED*)
Dear Micros~1: ASK PERMISSION FIRST, at the VERY LEAST. Other kinds of things done WITHOUT PERMISSION like that can land a NORMAL PERSON in JAIL.
But YOU *FEEL* as if you are GOD don't you...?
I just skimmed through the video. got the gist, but the gist looked REALLY good.
Well played! THIS should be the design of "Next WIndows" - i.e. what the CUSTOMERS want, not what THEY want to shove ihto our orifices
And OPTING OUT of the cloudy .login and tracking and ads, while we're at it.
Denial is a river in Egypt
Also calling those who disagree "Deniers" (first done by the 'warmists') is a typical ad hominem attack method, an attempt to silence opposition rather than refute with logic.
Why is it that higher taxes, personal sacrifice by the masses (but NOT for the elites), mandates, regulations, and more control over our personal lives has ALWAYS been the "solution" ? To me this is evidence enough that it MUST be based on a lie. (of course the actual SCIENCE proves it beyond a shadow of a doubt, and I could write a THESIS on the subject - check my other posts in these comments if you want more, trying not to repeat myself too much)
carbon capture is as bad an idea as blotting out the sun (back to the article topic)
* CO2 is NOT the 'control knob' for climate. GHG-wise, 2% max. H2O is 95%. Humans contribute 3% of CO2.
* If CO2 were cut in half nearly all plants would stop growing. 200ppm means death for plants
* doubling CO2 would have little effect - along with H2O the narrow IR band covered by CO2 is already saturated
Best use for that CO2, if they insist on extracting it, is to find a way to spray it on crops to grow plants faster
It also is wasteful to convert energy forms, as the conversion process is inefficient
2nd Law of Thermodynamics and entropy are big reasons for this. It even limits potential efficiency of solar cells, thermocouples, and peltier devices, as well as any kind of engine, though conversion to pure heat energy is most likely 100% efficient.
Thermal, friction, and other losses are tiny by comparison.
nuclear physics. been there, done that. I still like to study it from time to time. And health physics is very important in the industry. "Time Distance and Shielding"
Nuclear fission reactors are an excellent idea. I think we need more of them. And CO2 is not the control knob of climate (the Sun is), so we should go ahead and cleanly burn whatever carbon-based fuels we can extract from the ground. There is a LOT more carbon in the mantle causing hydrocarbons to be created in the Earth's crust (so only a portion is actual 'fossil' fuel). After all, carbon is lighter than silicon so it 'floats', then works itself up through the crust into oil and coal deposits, as well as CFCs HCs and CO2 belching out of volcanoes.
Either that, or enrich the CCP after they cornered the market on the materials needed to make batteries, and use slave-wage labor (often children) to mine it. Ya think maybe if we followed the money you'd find the CCP funding a LOT of this anthro-climate-change NONSENSE...?
a falling blade of an exploding wind turbine
The materials they make those things out of are
* Impossible to recycle
* brittle, not ductile, and become weaker from cyclic stress
Therefore wind turbine blades will need to be regularly replaced
(as for the old ones, maybe we can grind 'em, up and mix with coal for making electricity...!)
Remember that mini sub made from carbon fiber composite materials? A few too many stress cycles visiting the Titanic and it added itself to the wreckage site (along with the occupants)
unless fissionable material comes from the sun
It does. Well maybe not OUR sun but one that went supernova a few gazillion years ago
It is extremely likely that molten Uranium etc. exist in the center of the earth's core, possibly enough to keep it molten. Stratification over 4.5 billion years would make the heaviest stuff go there
But in asteroids the incidence of Uranium would be higher. Heavy elements in Earth's crust were deposited by meteors after the crust hardened.
oh one more thing
Traditional Fission reactors only use ~2-3% of their fuel before it is considered "spent".
Not actually true. Burnable poisons (like Boron) are typically added with the fuel so you can greatly increase the fuel load, and poison chemistry control is used in part for the same reason. As the fuel ages you adjust the poison level in the coolant accordingly. There are also other ways to increase fuel load, like core geometry, different control rod configurations that change during core life and so on. You should be able to get 50% or higher utilization with a properly designed core, even low enrichment cores.
Not sure where you got your numbers. Thorium is interesting but apparently impractical.
But yeah I'd like to see more nuclear energy. It makes too much sense for the greenies to want it, though.
fusion produces its energy in the form of Neutron radiation, which destroys and makes radioactive almost every material there is
Well, not entirely. And neutrons are just one group of the radiated particles. I would expect gamma to exceed neutrons due to momentum conservation, even with 2H + 3H -> 4He + N reaction.
Even so collecting neutron energy is relatively easy. 1 meter thickness of water should absorb about 90% of it, 2 meters about 99% of it. Some materials can withstand very high neutron flux without significant activation (or depletion). So it's a problem, just not an unsolvable one. Just surround the reactor (protected by a metal shell) with the boiler water or a pressurized water vessel.
The sustained fusion reaction seems to be the biggest hurdle. I think they need higher fuel density. How about 'heavy oil' i.e. oil with heavy hydrogen? With carbon maybe you get CNO cycle too?
In any case the fact that the same people who want to reduce "carbon footprint" are ALSO trying to stop fission reactors from being used tells me that their agenda has NOTHING to do with climate. More than likely it is political, i.e. power, control, and money.
how long would the climate take to recover naturally?
The climate is already recovering from an ice age. About every 100-150k years or so we go through an ice age, which lasts for most of that time period. CO2 increases because it is actually too low and the oceans are apparently still warming, which causes the equilibrium concentration of atmospheric CO2 to increase as well. Humans' 3% of total CO2 every year, combined with the TINY fraction of effect CO2 has on GHG [2% vs 95% for water] means that even if it WERE being affected by accumulating human CO2 it would only increase temperature by:
(15C - -15C) * 2% * 3% or 0.018C per year, or roughly 1.8C per century. That is nothing to panic over, nor do eco damage to block the sun for. And CO2 does not accumulate because of plants and rain, so basically CO2 isn't the control knob for climate. The SUN is.
As for that rhetorical question 'What could possbly go wrong'...
How about these "scientists" being JUST PLAIN WRONG about the "settled science" - and then doing so-called "corrective" things that actually DO make everything worse...!
25,000 scientists know that if they say the right key words and tricky phrases, and then DEFECATE the right "analysis" to the right people, they'll get LOTS of FUNDING for their labs to do what they REALLY want to do. Get while the getting's good, right?
Dear "scientists" - do NOT mess with *MY* SUNLIGHT!!!
(Regardless, I happen to LIKE hot weather, CO2 is good for plants, and COLD WEATHER kills WAY more people than HOT weather!!!)
CO2 is responsible for around 2% of GHG effect (as opposed to WATER, which is around 95%). Given that the effect of CO2 has been saturated for quite some time (and is limited to a VERY small band of IR radiation, unlike WATER) and only about 3% of CO2 is put into the atmosphere by humans (which is at chemical and biological equilibrium ANYWAY as rain depletes the added CO2 and it winds up as carbonates in the ocean with atmospheric CO2 driven by water temp and NOT the other way around, and also algae and plant growth increases with increased CO2 and helps deplete it faster) and so for the 3% of the 2% "they" want to spend $ZILLIONS of OTHER PEOPLE's money to BLOCK THE SUN.
*FACEPALM*
FYI - if you are the original authotr of code you own it. If you have not added GPL contributions from others, it remains yours.
I often do "dual license" for that reason. Often I say things like "GPLv2 or BSD-like license at your discretion". Anyone who contributes would have to agree to this distribution method. It would allow for anyone to use it under BSD-like license which includes closed source and commercial use. And it would include GPL licensing to avoid any GPL-related incompatibility.
Open source with "paid for" licensing needs some kind of value added. Customization and support are traditionally the two best things you can charge money for.
The existing GPL is sufficient, In My Bombastic Opinion. What we need are some clever attorneys to take on IBM and get some judgements based on the INTENT of the GPL, and to clarify that preventing end-users from distributing the software (under contract or by other means) violates the end-user rights granted by the license. It would require a summary judgement against IBM and others that exploit this particular loophole. It only needs to happen in one jurisdiction, which would then allow the world to view the source.
almost 2 decades ago I was messing with open source databases (having once written one, wanted to use something with more/newer/better features and maybe just fix it if it is too slow) and I focused my attention on 2: MySQL and PostgreSQL.
I found PostgreSQL to be superior for a couple of reasons:
* it conformed better to SQL standard, particularly with respect to embedded quote marks in text data
* It was MUCH easier to just set up and start adding data
Basically I use PG for everything that requires SQL and make sure that it's supported with any system or ISP I need to work with. Now that it is the MOST popular this should become easier.
Did not want a laptop though.
I already have kb's and monitors. I might need an upgrade to the KVM, but with a small (possibly used or reconditioned) PC stand-alone I'd save the most $.
I have had pretty good success with used and re-conditioned PC boxen from E-bay and other places.
If your kiosk applictions have web interfaces, you should be able to port them to linux pretty quickly.
I recommend doing that. Chromium has "kiosk mode" and there may be something similar in Firefox. Worst case you can write a webkit-based browser in just a few lines of Python code. Good denough for a web-based touchscreen hierarchy, run Apache+PHP stand-alone on Linux. On an RPi even...
