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Tim Deveaux wrote: I think I love you
Tim,
What you are experiencing isn't love... it's called addiction. You should have asked the man at the airport for the blue car.
Best Wishes,
-David Delaune
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Google ‘thanos’ and press the hand.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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it's all gone! 
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Even works on Dutch Google 
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Press it again after it completes the removal cycle!
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity -
RAH
I'm old. I know stuff - JSOP
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Check this out,
Dmitry Grinberg has Linux booting on an ATmega644a. He says it takes over 2 hours to boot. 
Best Wishes,
-David Delaune
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I have been working on a basic 16 bit IDE port for my old computer. It's not much more than a 24 bit parallel port in bit mode. It takes the 8 bit processor several output instructions to emulate the signals on the IDE port and then several input instructions for each 16 bit word of the 'sector' that is being read from a device. At that rate it would take about four days to read a DVD without doing anything with all that data.
A PIC microcontroller to handle the IDE protocols would speed things up dramatically, some more microcontrollers as DMA and interrupt controllers would almost reduce it to the minimum time to transfer the contents of the sector buffers to and from memory, if you neglect the overhead to handle the interrupts.
So yes, you can teach even the oldest dog new tricks, but there are always limits. Tinkering with that sort of things still is much more interesting than simply buying my next little toy or yawning over the JavaScript network of the hour.
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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Back in the '90s, I had a friend who wanted to emulate an 80386 with a old PC-XT (8088 processor + 500 MB of disk space). He abandoned the effort when he realized how slow it would be...
This sort of emulator is more a tour de force than a practical project.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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I was in school before the IBM PC came out. Back then the school had a few big Control Data mainframes. They were 36-bit machines with a huge hard drive in a vat of oil. I wrote huge because of its physical size, not its capacity that was just a few megabytes. My friends told me that once they were messing around with the HD drivers and because of a bug they introduced, the drive started seeking back and forth so hard the oil started boiling. They shut it down before it was damaged and fixed the bug.
A few years after I was out of school, the AT was finally released. Those friends decided to write an emulator for the old CD mainframe. Their emulator was written in C and ran on a 8MHz 80826 in MS-DOS. They found some old programs they had written for the CD and were able run them on their emulator. The amusing thing was their emulator on the AT ran faster than the same programs did on the CD natively.
"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"
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Rick York wrote: My friends told me that once they were messing around with the HD drivers and because of a bug they introduced, the drive started seeking back and forth so hard the oil started boiling. They shut it down before it was damaged and fixed the bug.
There is an old story (I first read it in a "History of Computing Conference" proceedings) about that program who put the computer on fire, in another (but not too different) way:
This program and its data was a little too big to fit in the machine. But the machine had a tape drive, which could address the tape block by block. So the programmers decided to swap out some of the data to tape, and bring it in when needed - sort of similar to a paging system, but realized in software.
When the program was run, it ended up with fetching the same block from the tape again and again, thousands of times. Even a highly polished magnetic head gives some friction, and friction causes heat. The more or less constant spinning back and forth of the same short piece of magnetic tape heated it so much that the tape caught fire, causing severe damage to the entire data room, destroying the tape station completely.
I have seen this incident referred to several places; at least one claimed that the tape was made from nitrocellulose, just like photographic film until the "safety film" arrived on the market in the 1950s. Nitrate film was still in use in professional environments in the late 50s. Maybe an old roll of nitate tape was laying around in this computer center several years later - the problem with nitrocellulose is that as it ages, it becomes gradually chemically unstable, and may actually explode. It makes the story of a devastating fire more probable.
I don't have any web reference to this story (yet it might be true...). If anyone has a link and more details, I'd be curious!
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Now imagine Windows 10.
We'd probably need a new time measurement unit.
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dandy72 wrote: Now imagine Windows 10.
We'd probably need a new time measurement unit.
Windows 8 through Windows 10 with Fast Startup enabled should boot faster than all of the major Linux Desktop distributions.
Anyone complaining that a Desktop Linux distro is booting faster than a fresh Windows 10 installation is probably dual booting with the grub boot loader which will cause Windows 10 to boot with the legacy startup mode.
I can think of some other third-party software that could cause delay within the boot process. If your Antivirus software has implemented an ELAM that scans during the boot process. I guess other third-party device drivers could also influence the startup speed.
Best Wishes,
-David Delaune
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Don't forget the context. You think that mechanism will help when booting on an 8-bit microcontroller?
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Bragging rights...period.
I do all my own stunts, but never intentionally!
JaxCoder.com
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I've been making a new series of Youtube tutorial videos, which I think will really help a lot of people, and I'd love some feedback. The ones I've done so far are
"How to Throw Up Better"
"How to Rock a Missing Tooth"
"Sinks are Just Strangely Shaped Toilets"
"Are Stigmata for Me?"
"Will Blinding Myself Make Me a Better Musician?"
"How to Fart Louder by Accident"
"Is Drinking Bleach REALLY that Dangerous?"
"How to Love Your Porn Addiction"
"Is She Still My Cousin if Our Parents are Divorced?"
"Is Self Absorption the Path to Enlightenment"
"Google Just Wants to Love You Up"
"Dying Broke as a Life Goal"
"If God is Real, Why Isn't He on Facebook?"
"Without Goals, There is No Failure"
"What Shoes Go Well with a Court Ordered Tracker?"
Explorans limites defectum
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Helpful
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Speaking of such things, I just had one of those lovely "daddy can't crank the lawn mower" type moments trying to fix a dripping kitchen sink. Home Repairs Ain't Us.
Explorans limites defectum
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Dean Roddey wrote: Dying Broke as a Life Goal"
Well, I've got the second part nailed, just waiting for the first part to happen whiler I learn to write Java.
CQ de W5ALT
Walt Fair, Jr., P. E.
Comport Computing
Specializing in Technical Engineering Software
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Hmmm,
I'm disappointed. At first glance I thought this was a 15 step zebra logic puzzle.
Best Wishes,
-David Delaune
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I'd throw in a few intriguing titles, like "5 ways you can throw up better" :P
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Microsoft has been warning us for months now that the "old" Skype would eventually stop working, as it's being phased out by that redesigned atrocity that looks more at home on Win 8/8.1/10 (although they back-ported it to Windows 7).
That version gets installed by default under C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft\Skype for Desktop and bears the version of 8.43.*. That one works fine. That's the newer one with the dumbed down UI.
The older version (the last to still have a semi-usable UI) is version 7.41.*. That version installs itself under C:\Program Files (x86)\Skype (both can run side-by-side), and has been sitting all week on my system with the spinning blue arrows icon, which indicates it's trying to connect. It's been stopped/restarted many times, the system has been rebooted - and I just found out it's doing the exact same thing on a secondary system of mine.
All public Skype status pages I could find all show everything as normal.
I'm guessing I'm not the only one, and that this actually means MS has finally pulled the plug on it...
[Edit]
I see it's being called "Skype classic", and was actually supposed to get killed last year on November 1st. Somehow mine kept chugging along until early this week...
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Next up: Control Panel.
Just keep reciting the mantra "Best! Windows! Evah!"
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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You still use Skype?
cheers
Chris Maunder
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