RickRussell_CA

Currently, PopOS although I'm not really that enthusiastic about it.

What? Why would you choose that over Baptist Church of Missouri SynodOS, you heretic?

It will be interesting to see if it passes Constitutional muster. The Constitution only requires that "the people" choose the legislator. Previous attempts to regulate voting like this required amendments (e.g. elimination of the poll tax).

The relevant:

"I better win or you're gonna have problems like we've never had. We may have no country left," Trump said at his weekend swing-state rally. "This may be our last election. You want to know the truth? People have said that. This could be our last election."

Eh. The article goes on to quote pundits who claim he's threatening voters -- that if he doesn't win, he's gonna do something to end democracy.

Seems kind of overblown to me. First, Trump would have to do something (laugh) and second, this is normal posturing. If you elect the other person, it's doom and gloom, if you elect me it's 4 more years of good times. These folks would have watched LBJ's Daisy and concluded that LBJ was planning to nuke the country if he didn't win.

People trying to make sense of Trump's incomprehensible blather are always gonna come out looking silly.

Your AI is glitching

Supporting data from The Economist:

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/09/05/what-to-do-about-americas-killer-cars

Certainly, but Apple was comparing itself to other computer companies with international reach, not to the white box PCs coming out of the Floppy Wizard store in the strip center.

He came for a slice of cake.

I mean, Keiko.

The interaction between Jobs (Michael Fassbender) and Woz (Seth Rogen) pretty much sums up the Apple ][ era.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fweZsmH4Tw

I'll stand to it. See you in November.

So, I lived through that time, and I supported computers professionally during that time. I started working at a university help desk in 1989.

It's easy to go back and look at Apple products and white-box PCs of the era (or quasi-legit clones like Compaq, HP, Gateway, etc) and say, "oh, on specs, the Apples were MASSIVELY overpriced -- you can get a much better deal with the PC".

The problem was that PCs were nowhere near on par, functionally, with Macintosh.

• Networking. We were running building-wide Appletalk networks -- with TCP/IP gateways -- over existing phone wires YEARS before anybody figured out how to get coax or 10base-T installed. We were playing NETWORK GAMES (Bolo, anyone) on Mac in the late 80s.

• And when they did... what do you do with networking in DOS? Unless you ran a completely canned network OS (remember Banyan, Novell, etc. ad infinitum?) and canned apps specifically designed to work with it, you were SOL. Windows 3.0 and 3.1 were a joke compared to System 7.

I configured PCs and Macs for the freshman class in 1995. For the Mac? You plug the ethernet port in and the OS does the rest. For the PC... find a DOS-compatible packet driver that works with your network card, get it running, then run Trumpet Winsock in Windows 3.1, then... then... it was a goddamned nightmare. We had to have special clinics just to get people's PCs up and running with a web browser, and even then, there were about 10% of machines we just had to say "nope". Can't find a working driver, can't get anything working right. Your IRQs are busted? Who fuckin' knows. I ran the "Ethernet Clinic" until the late 90s, when Windows 98 finally properly integrated the TCP/IP layer in the OS.

• Useful software on the Mac had a pretty consistent look & feel. On the PC? Even in Windows 3.1, it was all over the map. You might have a Windows native program, you might have a DOS program that launches in a console window, you might have a completely different graphical interface embedded in the software (Delphi apps, anyone?). Games were using DOS into the mid 90s because getting anything working right in Windows 3.1 was a total fuckin crap shoot.

Windows 95 started to fix things, finally. And Windows XP would finally bring an OS with stability comparable to Mac (arguably WIndows 2000 as well, but it was never really offered on non-corporate PCs).

The short version is: that $3000 Mac could do a lot more than that $1800 PC, even if the specs said that the CPU was faster on the PC.

Does anyone think that RFK Jr would be any kind of spoiler? If he got as much as 0.5% of the vote in any state, I'd be floored. I mean, I guess it could be a super-close race, but I don't think it was a given that all of RFK's voters would turn Trump anyway.