Posts by Dr. Ellen

XT-286

I had a blind friend with a speech-output computer - an XT-286. (I don't know how many people have told me there is no such thing, but there was.) There was a special board that handled it all, and a special word-processing program that fed it. The manual (and the company that produced it, the program, and the board) were lost to the mists of time. I decided the easiest thing to do was simply to keep the thing running, and with the occasional part replacement it did. Worked for about thirty years, and in fact outlived the friend (may he rest in peace).

Offensive?

These notes contain tallow, and are therefore offensive to vegetarians, Hindus, and a whole other bunch of people. Why not do it thoroughly? Use pork fat. That way you can offend everybody.

Every Cloud has a silver lining

Yet another reason to stay with Windows 7 - Microsoft has stopped improving it.

Windows 7 unpatched is better than Windows 10 for security

Office 2010 is dying? I was using Office 07 until Windows 7 came along and I migrated to Office 2003. If it does the job, why throw it out? People kept sending me DOCX files though, so I switched to LibreOffice (which could read them).

LibreOffice. Just saying.

*Somebody* at 1&1 was available on the phone.

I'm sitting here in Minnesota, not having any trouble with my site. Used it for almost twenty years. But as an interesting sidebar, they telephoned me just last Tuesday trying to talk me into upgrading.

Old kit, old data

I have data on my computer that is almost forty years old. It's still valuable. I've had to go through a ridiculous number of format conversions to keep it that way. Some of it started out saved on TRS-DOS cassette tapes. Some started out on Commodore Scripsit cassette tapes. It's gone through TRS-DOS floppy disk to CP/M to MS-DOS, and I had to keep at it as the programs I used to record it went quietly into the sunset. Right now it's on a NTFS hard drive, and if I take it any further, it'll all be saved as RTF.

The thing is, I still use that data (I am, and live with, a novelist. They're word-processing files.) Some of the conversions it went through were only possible with a specific machine (Commodore 128) which was only available for a few years. If I'd missed out on that machine, the files would be gone.

So give some consideration to a bloke who wants his old kit back. Who knows how long it'll be for the files to become the digital equivalent of cuneiform? That can happen rapidly and surprisingly.

Hands-Off

Definite problem with the hands, especially near the face.

Pessimist? No.

I am not a pessimist. I am paranoid. My major jobs have required paranoia.

I ran and helped maintain a large Van de Graaf generator. It had high voltages all over the place. Bad things could happen if those voltages got loose. The machine even gave me electric shocks when I wasn't careful to keep me alert.

And then I joined the museum world. Let me put it straight: entropy is out to get your stuff. Your job is to find all the ways entropy can get in, and block them.

As for the glass being half full, or half empty? Forget it. The glass is twice as large as it needs to be to handle the drink.

What? More Windows 10 bumf?

I don't plan on using Windows 10, but Microsoft plans on my using it. They seem to think they're in charge. Google has redefined "evil". Apple is just as bad, and twice as expensive. I hope Linux doesn't catch the disease ....

And now for something completely different:

I had an inverse experience of this sort. Way back in the 1960s, I had a night shift on the CDC 3100. (It had a magnificent 12K of 24-bit words!) It wedged. Nothing I could do made it work again. Frustrated, I began pouring curse-words into the console typewriter. Somewhere in all this foulness I must have done something right, because it began working again -- properly. The digital gods answered my prayer.

They really shouldn't stick grad students with the night shift, but I came out okay that time.

What about the type K stars?

We live on a planet circling a type G main-sequence yellow dwarf star. In our region of space, about 7.5% of the stars are type G. Everybody talks about the type M red dwarfs. That's reasonable: there are a lot of them, about 76% of the stars in our neighborhood. But they don't give out much light. For a planet to be in the Goldilocks Zone, it has to be quite close to the star. It's probably tide-locked. Worse, red dwarfs are given to tantrums, with flares and radiation. I wouldn't want to live next to one.

Why is nobody talking about the type K orange dwarfs? They make up about 12% of the stars in our neighborhood. They're heavier than the red dwarfs, and give off more light -- and they're not nearly as excitable as the red dwarfs. There'd be more mass in the system, the planets would probably be larger, and they'd have more of a chance to keep their atmosphere. Why, they might not be tide-locked, even!

I certainly hope it's because everybody is so busy talking about the planets they don't bother going into fine detail about the stars.

UBI is not a good idea.

There is an old saying: "Idle hands are the devil's workshop." I don't know if that's one of the official Gods of the Copybook Headings, but it should be. Busy people, people with a job, don't have time to cause trouble. (Politicians and bureaucrats don't count there.) People who have nothing useful to do, will do SOMETHING. Some on the UBI will sit there watching TV. Some will be busily making more people to go on UBI. Some will discover an interest in painting and literature, or perhaps invention. And a lot of the rest will make trouble. Multi-generational welfare is not a pretty sight, and that is, at heart, what UBI would be.

Paper ballots?

Don't trust paper, either. Al Franken lost his election to the senate until somebody "found" a box of ballots in the recount.