My grandfather died (ostensibly) from Parkinson's. My other grandfather died (also, ostensibly) from a stroke. I say "ostensibly" because neither of these things were capable of killing the men by themselves.
In the first case, the man's wits were always totally about him, but his communication and motor skills dropped to such a useless extent that he plainly felt he was a burden. He was very intelligent, and a quiet thinker: Someone you listened to when they talked, no matter how lengthy or succinct the conversation. My family kept him alive for years too long -- he was only going to get worse, not better.
In the latter case, the man's wits weren't always about him, but he was plainly aware that he was on his last legs and wouldn't be long in this world. He was an intelligent, outgoing, and very lucky reactionist who thrived on stress: Someone you listened to very intently, even if you thought they were wrong, because their thoughts were still very useful to absorb. My family kept him alive for years too long, as well -- he had more than one stroke in the nursing home, and had a long history of cardiac problems before then.
Both were accomplished (in terms of family reverence and fiscal good fortune). They lived good, honest lives, had their shit together, and were completely loved by those around them.
But, they lived too long. They were all used up.
Death is as natural as life itself is. It is an eventuality. One can either go out on one's own terms, or one can sap the Estate for all that its worth as the State sucks it all in to maintain "healthfulness" at everyone's (including the patient) detriment.
I hope your Grandpa-in-law does well with whatever comes.
(And for a disclaimer: No, death and suicide aren't always fair, and aren't always the fair means to an end. My own sister, whom I was also very close to, killed herself while she was still young and in rather good physical health about three years ago. Something about a hose, some duct tape, a 1996 Chevrolet Monte Carlo, a secluded garage, a bunch of cocaine, a lot of unhelpful friends, and an undiagnosed case of schizophrenia combined to make this happen. I wish I could've done more for her, and will probably regret that I hadn't for the rest of my own life.)
Just round up two similar people (height, weight, overall build, fat percentage, bone density, ethnic background, facial structure, gender), put a helmet on one of them, give neither a parachute, and throw them both out of an airplane with instructions to land face down and flat on a given section of pre-inspected and consistent grassy dirt. A sod farm in an area without many rocks near the surface, for instance, would seem to be an appropriate target.
In my experience, the consumer Dells are a little bloated (though perfectly useable), and the more corporate-oriented models are quite stark.
Neither, though, is as barren as an Alienware box (note: Alienware is owned by Dell). These things come up, out-of-the-box, with only a proper install of Windows, a couple of tech support links on the desktop, and licensed/legit/nonexpiring PowerDVD and Nero preinstalled. They're just about as bare as they would be if I'd built the machine myself and installed a couple of light-weight, essential programs.
Alienware includes an OEM OS disk, a driver disk, and a disk which allows you to recover that particular computer to its factory as-shipped status.
(I'm not sure why I felt this was relevant, since we're mostly talking about corporate machines, but...)
I live in Ohio. We have asphalt roads, and the major ones get replaced often due to freeze/thaw cycles in the winter just ruining them, so a lot of them are pretty much black in color. They are, therefore, probably fairly efficient at converting sunlight into heat. Snow still piles up on them, though, since it's usually not very sunny when it's snowing. And then, once it is sunny again, the roads are covered in highly-reflective snow.
So, that's roughly how things work today, minus all that fancy math which you helpfully provided.
IF the solar cells are 100% efficient, then there's no waste heat at all to help melt the daytime snow. Which means it'd need melted off using electricity. Which takes away from the electricity that they're trying to store using unobtanium capacitors for night-time use running homes, LED lane markers, and (the expensive part) melting snow.
Right. So, since the roads will be covered in crap, the plows will need to get busy or people will start dieing. So out they come, scraping giant steel shovels over the glass panels, and throwing behind them a mixture of salt and sand.
Following that, is a seemingly endless supply of cars and trucks. Which will grind up the top side of the glass using the sand. And never mind the salt, with it's obvious corrosive qualities and the rapid temperature changes it introduces.
I've driven nails with a screwdriver. And I've driven screws with a hammer. (And no, I'm not speaking metaphorically -- I really have done both. But if metaphors are in order: Given a problem, one uses the tools that one has, doesn't one?)
I've been on antidepressants of various description before. I've learned, through them over time, how to cause myself to "feel normal." I've weaned myself from them properly over the course of months. Things seemed just fine for a long time -- most of a decade, in fact.
And now, years later, I've failed. Suicide became, and was, a realistic option until quite recently, for me. So real that I've openly discussed the topic with my wife and a few very close friends. (No, none of them had the sense to admit me, because they realize that doing so would be deadly in that fragile state. Suicide watch at the looney bin doesn't keep a smart person from killing themself.)
So, my point, however meek it is: Knowing what "well" feels like isn't always a cure. I've been well, I've been depressed, I've been treated, I've re-learned what "well" means, and I've gone backward.
I'm beginning, slowly, to get back toward "well." Medication seems to be helping, but it took most of a year for it to begin doing so. I'm finally at a stage now where I'm finally going back to work on a regular basis (thanks, Boss, for not firing me for my months of dispondancy!), and I'm learning (again!) how to feel decent about myself.
It's hard, though. Drugs aren't a cure-all. They help, sure, but it's not always a permanent fix.
I miss a dose, I realize what hell things are, and I regress very rapidly. For fuck's sake: I called off work on Monday, after spending an hour and a half in the shower thinking about my dead sister and the daughter and blood family that I don't get to talk to, and it's like: Fuck! I'm broken! *revert* *revert* *revert*
I woke my wife up on her day off, and told her I wasn't going to go to work today, because I forgot to take my meds and was thinking about all kinds of things that needn't be thought about.
And yeah, she was all cool and understanding once I explained it, and I got to chill for a day. But now, she wants money to pay for new plates for the cars, and I need money to pay for my (stupidly inexpensive) Dreamhost acccount which is a couple of months past-due, and it's like: Fuck! I should've worked Monday even if it hurt so badly that I might've not lived through the day.
It's an ugly hole. Some folks might find it easier than others to dig their way out of it, but it's still ugly and often quite deep. And sometimes, even after you think you're free and clear, it sucks you back in for more.
Today, I feel alright. My meds are straight, and I got a few difficult things accomplished today while I was at work.
Tomorrow, who knows? I've already eaten my daily dose, but that's no reason to suspect that I might not decide to run the car into a bridge abutment at 160MPH after carefully sabotaging the seatbelt to make sure the insurance pays out for those I love.
Yay, depression. It's an ugly deck, but that's all the cards I've got to play.
(I'd post anon, but there's no useful way to get this account traced back to a real person.)
Only if there's a market for it -- just because there's ample supply of ugly watermelon, doesn't mean that anyone's currently buying it.
I can count on one hand the number of times I've knowingly ingested industrially-processed watermelon.
Most of the packaged salads and fruit trays that include watermelon are produced relatively locally, if not in the very grocery store where they're sold. I'd hazard a guess, based on the markup of such items, that there's no reason in these cases to bother to ask the produce distributor for less-than-perfect-looking fruit for these items, and that they go ahead and use their already-in-house consumer-grade pretty melons for salads and such.
So, it seems realistic to me that, perhaps, 20% of the crop really does get left on the field to rot. Using this malformed fruit for ethanol, if it is indeed efficient to do so, sounds like a perfectly fine idea to me.
If you look at the actual video output during the Betamax-vs-VHS era, porn was about all that was commercially available. Practically everything else was recorded at home, either with a camera, from TV, or from a rental tape.
There were no video sections at department stores because there weren't any videos to sell at a reasonable cost. Hollywood movies were typically $100 or so, and only the rich and/or fanatical had any at all.
It's generally not all that hard with most modern cell phones to back up the phonebook to a PC.
Why hadn't you done this? I also have a work phone that I use for personal stuff, and I back the thing up. It also prevents losing the phonebook in case the phone blows up one day, or gets lost, stolen or whatever.
(And before anyone thinks I'm being mean: This is Slashdot, where anyone who fails to back up important data is a moron.)
I tried to read your link, but the glaring colors, uselessly columnar formatting, and religious-zealotesque phraseology left me looking for something with more teeth and less flair.
Perhaps I'm just one-too-many 250th-anniversary-Guiness's away from being able to comprehend such inscrutably meandering dribble, but I can't stand to read it.
SATA has only been popular for a few years. It is, I'd say, too early to tell how well it will survive, no matter what its specifications are. IDE's various limitations also seemed very far-fetched at the time they were established. 128PB seems like a lot, sure -- more than anyone will ever need. We used to feel the same about 8 gig IDE drives.
And remember: Firewire seems to be on life support these days, too, despite being superior in every way to USB.
Personally, I'm looking for a unified portable/internal interface to pop up and become immensely popular any time now. It's dumb that we have SATA, eSATA, and USB for storage. The world needs one small connector, with power by default, to transfer data with whatever, that is perceived to be both fast and usable within an enclosure or on a keychain.
With VMware under Windows, I get a bar at the bottom-right of the VMWare window, with various devices displayed. I can click on the one related to my old Visor, tell it to connect that device to the VM, and the virtualized Windows starts loading drivers for it. I recall it being a non-obvious process until I figured it out.
There's only a few different variations on USB in existence, and they're all about identical once the OS has homogenized them. It seems to me that VMWare should work fine.
(This is old, and you'll probably never read it. Took me awhile to notice the new replies. If you ever see this, please let me know...)
I don't want to buy American parts for my German automobile.
When I have the time do so, I buy OEM German parts. I buy Mahle filters, and Bosch wipers, Lemfoerder chassis parts, and, and, and... The prices, from places like pelicanparts.com, are generally very cheap for proper replacement parts. But it takes forever for them to ship to Ohio.
Every now and then, BMW makes bad parts. The coolant expansion tank, the cap for that tank, the thermostat housing, the radiator plastic bits, the mechanical fan, and the water pump on this car at this vintage are all known for sudden catastrophic failures. But BMW also have since improved their parts so that these are no longer real issues. So, I prefer to buy the real thing whenever possible, at least to support this mentality of continuous product improvement, and also to make my repairs last longer. And since BMW builds very few of their own parts, buying German parts from their OEM suppliers ensures that I get replacement parts with improved quality. (I like having a reliable car, even if it does have 180k miles on it.)
Meanwhile, the car was broken. And I needed it to be un-broken. The nearest BMW dealer is 45 miles from here, and for a variety of reasons you don't care about, I couldn't get there. But I'd previously researched the problem, and knew which Advance Auto Parts stores carried a suitable replacement thermostat, and the next day I found myself a few blocks from one.
So, I bought it. It does work fine.
It's not politics. I have a "buy American" 1979 Firebird that I'm working on, which I use to shore up the Stateside economy -- there's no reason to do this for the BMW. And I don't particularly care about the country of origin in these urgent instances -- I just needed a car that worked.
I do care, though, that the parts are as advertised. It said 176 degrees, and Made in USA. It was 180 degrees, and Made in China. I don't care in the practical sense about the small temperature difference (I was looking for a low-temp thermostat, and both 176 and 180 are lower than the stock 190). I simply care that the part didn't match the description, including country of origin.
I'm happy to feed my car parts from random nations when it's not working properly at all. I just want to know in advance that I'm doing so.
I have run Vista 32-bit since a couple of months after its release, at that time on an old laptop maxed with a couple of gigs of RAM. It always worked fine.
A year or so ago, I got a proper, new desktop machine (quad-core, SLI, blah-blah-blah). It came with Vista 32-bit. Later, I installed 64-bit. Both have worked fine.
The old laptop is currently running Windows 7 32-bit RTM. It works fine, too.
I'm not sure what glitches you're referring to. The old laptop was always happier with Vista and/or 7 than it ever was with XP Pro.
Because servers aren't inundated with vast amounts of shitty software ("software," in this context, to include those programs known as "drivers".)
Nobody gets upset because their vintage Ensoniq AudioPCI sound card or antique Hauppage capture card doesn't work in Server 200x, but everyone pisses and moans when it doesn't work with Vista (hence, all the hating on that particular OS).
MFM, RLL, and ESDI all died within about that timespan. Nobody missed them, and nobody (other than a few frail old geeks) has hardware to work with them.
Hard drives don't last forever, and nor do their interface standards.
I wonder how well your calculator would work with Windows 7's virtualized XP environment, or under Vista with something like VMWare.
I have a similar problem: I have an old Handspring Visor running an old version of PalmOS, and there's no obvious way to make it work under Vista. It works fine using the free VMWare stuff in a virtualized XP, though.
Slashdot Mirror
My grandfather died (ostensibly) from Parkinson's. My other grandfather died (also, ostensibly) from a stroke. I say "ostensibly" because neither of these things were capable of killing the men by themselves.
In the first case, the man's wits were always totally about him, but his communication and motor skills dropped to such a useless extent that he plainly felt he was a burden. He was very intelligent, and a quiet thinker: Someone you listened to when they talked, no matter how lengthy or succinct the conversation. My family kept him alive for years too long -- he was only going to get worse, not better.
In the latter case, the man's wits weren't always about him, but he was plainly aware that he was on his last legs and wouldn't be long in this world. He was an intelligent, outgoing, and very lucky reactionist who thrived on stress: Someone you listened to very intently, even if you thought they were wrong, because their thoughts were still very useful to absorb. My family kept him alive for years too long, as well -- he had more than one stroke in the nursing home, and had a long history of cardiac problems before then.
Both were accomplished (in terms of family reverence and fiscal good fortune). They lived good, honest lives, had their shit together, and were completely loved by those around them.
But, they lived too long. They were all used up.
Death is as natural as life itself is. It is an eventuality. One can either go out on one's own terms, or one can sap the Estate for all that its worth as the State sucks it all in to maintain "healthfulness" at everyone's (including the patient) detriment.
I hope your Grandpa-in-law does well with whatever comes.
(And for a disclaimer: No, death and suicide aren't always fair, and aren't always the fair means to an end. My own sister, whom I was also very close to, killed herself while she was still young and in rather good physical health about three years ago. Something about a hose, some duct tape, a 1996 Chevrolet Monte Carlo, a secluded garage, a bunch of cocaine, a lot of unhelpful friends, and an undiagnosed case of schizophrenia combined to make this happen. I wish I could've done more for her, and will probably regret that I hadn't for the rest of my own life.)
You don't remember the Internet, prior to somewhere around the September that never ended, very well, do you?
Not really.
Just round up two similar people (height, weight, overall build, fat percentage, bone density, ethnic background, facial structure, gender), put a helmet on one of them, give neither a parachute, and throw them both out of an airplane with instructions to land face down and flat on a given section of pre-inspected and consistent grassy dirt. A sod farm in an area without many rocks near the surface, for instance, would seem to be an appropriate target.
It should be pretty easy to prove.
Pro tip: Real flamebait isn't posted anon.
In my experience, the consumer Dells are a little bloated (though perfectly useable), and the more corporate-oriented models are quite stark.
Neither, though, is as barren as an Alienware box (note: Alienware is owned by Dell). These things come up, out-of-the-box, with only a proper install of Windows, a couple of tech support links on the desktop, and licensed/legit/nonexpiring PowerDVD and Nero preinstalled. They're just about as bare as they would be if I'd built the machine myself and installed a couple of light-weight, essential programs.
Alienware includes an OEM OS disk, a driver disk, and a disk which allows you to recover that particular computer to its factory as-shipped status.
(I'm not sure why I felt this was relevant, since we're mostly talking about corporate machines, but...)
The snow melt thing screws me up, too.
I live in Ohio. We have asphalt roads, and the major ones get replaced often due to freeze/thaw cycles in the winter just ruining them, so a lot of them are pretty much black in color. They are, therefore, probably fairly efficient at converting sunlight into heat. Snow still piles up on them, though, since it's usually not very sunny when it's snowing. And then, once it is sunny again, the roads are covered in highly-reflective snow.
So, that's roughly how things work today, minus all that fancy math which you helpfully provided.
IF the solar cells are 100% efficient, then there's no waste heat at all to help melt the daytime snow. Which means it'd need melted off using electricity. Which takes away from the electricity that they're trying to store using unobtanium capacitors for night-time use running homes, LED lane markers, and (the expensive part) melting snow.
Right. So, since the roads will be covered in crap, the plows will need to get busy or people will start dieing. So out they come, scraping giant steel shovels over the glass panels, and throwing behind them a mixture of salt and sand.
Following that, is a seemingly endless supply of cars and trucks. Which will grind up the top side of the glass using the sand. And never mind the salt, with it's obvious corrosive qualities and the rapid temperature changes it introduces.
Good, great. Fantastic ideas.
Now, let's take all of them, and put them off the side of the road somewhere: In the median, or on the berm.
And then, we don't need to make them strong enough to drive on. And we don't care about traction. And we don't care about...well, lots of things.
WTF was the advantage of driving on the bloody god-damn expensive solar panel in the first place, anyway?
I've driven nails with a screwdriver. And I've driven screws with a hammer. (And no, I'm not speaking metaphorically -- I really have done both. But if metaphors are in order: Given a problem, one uses the tools that one has, doesn't one?)
I've been on antidepressants of various description before. I've learned, through them over time, how to cause myself to "feel normal." I've weaned myself from them properly over the course of months. Things seemed just fine for a long time -- most of a decade, in fact.
And now, years later, I've failed. Suicide became, and was, a realistic option until quite recently, for me. So real that I've openly discussed the topic with my wife and a few very close friends. (No, none of them had the sense to admit me, because they realize that doing so would be deadly in that fragile state. Suicide watch at the looney bin doesn't keep a smart person from killing themself.)
So, my point, however meek it is: Knowing what "well" feels like isn't always a cure. I've been well, I've been depressed, I've been treated, I've re-learned what "well" means, and I've gone backward.
I'm beginning, slowly, to get back toward "well." Medication seems to be helping, but it took most of a year for it to begin doing so. I'm finally at a stage now where I'm finally going back to work on a regular basis (thanks, Boss, for not firing me for my months of dispondancy!), and I'm learning (again!) how to feel decent about myself.
It's hard, though. Drugs aren't a cure-all. They help, sure, but it's not always a permanent fix.
I miss a dose, I realize what hell things are, and I regress very rapidly. For fuck's sake: I called off work on Monday, after spending an hour and a half in the shower thinking about my dead sister and the daughter and blood family that I don't get to talk to, and it's like: Fuck! I'm broken! *revert* *revert* *revert*
I woke my wife up on her day off, and told her I wasn't going to go to work today, because I forgot to take my meds and was thinking about all kinds of things that needn't be thought about.
And yeah, she was all cool and understanding once I explained it, and I got to chill for a day. But now, she wants money to pay for new plates for the cars, and I need money to pay for my (stupidly inexpensive) Dreamhost acccount which is a couple of months past-due, and it's like: Fuck! I should've worked Monday even if it hurt so badly that I might've not lived through the day.
It's an ugly hole. Some folks might find it easier than others to dig their way out of it, but it's still ugly and often quite deep. And sometimes, even after you think you're free and clear, it sucks you back in for more.
Today, I feel alright. My meds are straight, and I got a few difficult things accomplished today while I was at work.
Tomorrow, who knows? I've already eaten my daily dose, but that's no reason to suspect that I might not decide to run the car into a bridge abutment at 160MPH after carefully sabotaging the seatbelt to make sure the insurance pays out for those I love.
Yay, depression. It's an ugly deck, but that's all the cards I've got to play.
(I'd post anon, but there's no useful way to get this account traced back to a real person.)
Hey, pal - I know you mean well.
Your writings cause me grief that I don't know how to deal with.
WTF? Over.
Only if there's a market for it -- just because there's ample supply of ugly watermelon, doesn't mean that anyone's currently buying it.
I can count on one hand the number of times I've knowingly ingested industrially-processed watermelon.
Most of the packaged salads and fruit trays that include watermelon are produced relatively locally, if not in the very grocery store where they're sold. I'd hazard a guess, based on the markup of such items, that there's no reason in these cases to bother to ask the produce distributor for less-than-perfect-looking fruit for these items, and that they go ahead and use their already-in-house consumer-grade pretty melons for salads and such.
So, it seems realistic to me that, perhaps, 20% of the crop really does get left on the field to rot. Using this malformed fruit for ethanol, if it is indeed efficient to do so, sounds like a perfectly fine idea to me.
If you look at the actual video output during the Betamax-vs-VHS era, porn was about all that was commercially available. Practically everything else was recorded at home, either with a camera, from TV, or from a rental tape.
There were no video sections at department stores because there weren't any videos to sell at a reasonable cost. Hollywood movies were typically $100 or so, and only the rich and/or fanatical had any at all.
It's generally not all that hard with most modern cell phones to back up the phonebook to a PC.
Why hadn't you done this? I also have a work phone that I use for personal stuff, and I back the thing up. It also prevents losing the phonebook in case the phone blows up one day, or gets lost, stolen or whatever.
(And before anyone thinks I'm being mean: This is Slashdot, where anyone who fails to back up important data is a moron.)
They usually aren't.
go fuck yourself.
thx!
I tried to read your link, but the glaring colors, uselessly columnar formatting, and religious-zealotesque phraseology left me looking for something with more teeth and less flair.
Perhaps I'm just one-too-many 250th-anniversary-Guiness's away from being able to comprehend such inscrutably meandering dribble, but I can't stand to read it.
It's still an ugly bet. :)
SATA has only been popular for a few years. It is, I'd say, too early to tell how well it will survive, no matter what its specifications are. IDE's various limitations also seemed very far-fetched at the time they were established. 128PB seems like a lot, sure -- more than anyone will ever need. We used to feel the same about 8 gig IDE drives.
And remember: Firewire seems to be on life support these days, too, despite being superior in every way to USB.
Personally, I'm looking for a unified portable/internal interface to pop up and become immensely popular any time now. It's dumb that we have SATA, eSATA, and USB for storage. The world needs one small connector, with power by default, to transfer data with whatever, that is perceived to be both fast and usable within an enclosure or on a keychain.
If this happens, SATA will die.
Just an idea.
With VMware under Windows, I get a bar at the bottom-right of the VMWare window, with various devices displayed. I can click on the one related to my old Visor, tell it to connect that device to the VM, and the virtualized Windows starts loading drivers for it. I recall it being a non-obvious process until I figured it out.
There's only a few different variations on USB in existence, and they're all about identical once the OS has homogenized them. It seems to me that VMWare should work fine.
Keep trying.
(This is old, and you'll probably never read it. Took me awhile to notice the new replies. If you ever see this, please let me know...)
I don't want to buy American parts for my German automobile.
When I have the time do so, I buy OEM German parts. I buy Mahle filters, and Bosch wipers, Lemfoerder chassis parts, and, and, and... The prices, from places like pelicanparts.com, are generally very cheap for proper replacement parts. But it takes forever for them to ship to Ohio.
Every now and then, BMW makes bad parts. The coolant expansion tank, the cap for that tank, the thermostat housing, the radiator plastic bits, the mechanical fan, and the water pump on this car at this vintage are all known for sudden catastrophic failures. But BMW also have since improved their parts so that these are no longer real issues. So, I prefer to buy the real thing whenever possible, at least to support this mentality of continuous product improvement, and also to make my repairs last longer. And since BMW builds very few of their own parts, buying German parts from their OEM suppliers ensures that I get replacement parts with improved quality. (I like having a reliable car, even if it does have 180k miles on it.)
Meanwhile, the car was broken. And I needed it to be un-broken. The nearest BMW dealer is 45 miles from here, and for a variety of reasons you don't care about, I couldn't get there. But I'd previously researched the problem, and knew which Advance Auto Parts stores carried a suitable replacement thermostat, and the next day I found myself a few blocks from one.
So, I bought it. It does work fine.
It's not politics. I have a "buy American" 1979 Firebird that I'm working on, which I use to shore up the Stateside economy -- there's no reason to do this for the BMW. And I don't particularly care about the country of origin in these urgent instances -- I just needed a car that worked.
I do care, though, that the parts are as advertised. It said 176 degrees, and Made in USA. It was 180 degrees, and Made in China. I don't care in the practical sense about the small temperature difference (I was looking for a low-temp thermostat, and both 176 and 180 are lower than the stock 190). I simply care that the part didn't match the description, including country of origin.
I'm happy to feed my car parts from random nations when it's not working properly at all. I just want to know in advance that I'm doing so.
As long as we're being honest...
I have run Vista 32-bit since a couple of months after its release, at that time on an old laptop maxed with a couple of gigs of RAM. It always worked fine.
A year or so ago, I got a proper, new desktop machine (quad-core, SLI, blah-blah-blah). It came with Vista 32-bit. Later, I installed 64-bit. Both have worked fine.
The old laptop is currently running Windows 7 32-bit RTM. It works fine, too.
I'm not sure what glitches you're referring to. The old laptop was always happier with Vista and/or 7 than it ever was with XP Pro.
Please don't water down the FUD with your facts.
Thanks!
Because servers aren't inundated with vast amounts of shitty software ("software," in this context, to include those programs known as "drivers".)
Nobody gets upset because their vintage Ensoniq AudioPCI sound card or antique Hauppage capture card doesn't work in Server 200x, but everyone pisses and moans when it doesn't work with Vista (hence, all the hating on that particular OS).
Is it too large?
MFM, RLL, and ESDI all died within about that timespan. Nobody missed them, and nobody (other than a few frail old geeks) has hardware to work with them.
Hard drives don't last forever, and nor do their interface standards.
I wonder how well your calculator would work with Windows 7's virtualized XP environment, or under Vista with something like VMWare.
I have a similar problem: I have an old Handspring Visor running an old version of PalmOS, and there's no obvious way to make it work under Vista. It works fine using the free VMWare stuff in a virtualized XP, though.
Apparently, your comment was so sarcastic and dry that even after about four hours, the mods still haven't noticed the humor of it.
Sheesh. I thought this was Slashdot, too.
You know, if I had six hundred and forty megabytes of RAM back in the DOS days...