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Messages - Macallan

2
DnD Central / Re: The Awesomesauce of the American 2020 Presidential Elections
I honestly wish they would change Macallan.
I think I owe you some context.
I grew up ( for small values of 'grew up' ) in eastern Germany. When the wall came down I was 15. After finishing school I ended up in West Berlin. Then, after some university and such, thanks to shenanigans at the old Opera Forum, I ended up in Florida, and then Tennessee. I've been living in the US for 14 years now, married to a fellow former Opera Forum user.
I had no idea how fucked up and downright ridiculous things are around here. A lot of what I thought of as eastern bloc propaganda Way Back When actually turned out to be true, at least since the 1980s, and especially since 2017.
That said, a lot of younger Americans just about had it with the old crap. And hopefully they will vote.
4
DnD Central / Re: "Scientists Say" blather
Earth's rotation doesn't speed up. Lunatic tidal forces slows it down.
I've heard it said that some earthquakes might speed up the earth as much as 3 µs per day.

Possible reference here: https://www.livescience.com/38083-earth-core-day-length-pattern.html

What I meant above is that I wouldn't know if there's been any recent adjustment to the common knowledge that the long-term trend is down. I phrased that badly.
There is a mailing list which discusses just that, adjustments to time zone data and the like. Every halfway decent operating system keeps time zone data, for obvious reasons, and on NetBSD I see the occasional commits regarding changes to that. The change logs are ... interesting.
5
DnD Central / Re: Gun Control - Should Ordinary Citizens Own, Carry, & Use Firearms?
Not going to get an argument from me about television programming. Although, I'm comfortable removing the "American" qualifier from it and running with that too.
Agreed. I didn't own a TV in .de, on purpose, and I'd do the same in the US if it was just me. That said, there are a few gems in the oceans of crap that is US cable television. We DVR a few shows ( John Oliver, Samantha Bee, Jim Jefferies, Steven Colbert... ) and watch them on my weekend ( which is Wednesday through Friday, strangely enough ).
I pretty much never watch live TV these days.
8
DnD Central / Re: The Awesomesauce of the American 2020 Presidential Elections
Doesn't matter who is in the White House the massive poverty numbers in the country the jail records regular school massacres, violent police and the world corporate imperialism will continue. Wish our television news dealt much less with the nutjob corner. Might as well put another damn star on their flag!
Rjhowie's got a point, depressing as it is.
But maybe things they are a-changin...
11
DnD Central / Re: Best language resource(s) to use?
Quote
The global historiography simply can not permit the very thought that the Slavs (and, in particular, Russian) were not simply the inhabitants of Pripyat marshes in the early Middle Ages, but the direct co-tribesmen of the ancient tribe of the Etruscans, who lived in Italy in the II millennium BC, whose culture, as is commonly believed, laid the foundation for the Ancient Rome.
Boy, someone's got an inferiority complex. Inventing a direct lineage to Rome is so a thousand years ago. :P
Some wacko tribes in western/central Europe tried that, didn't end well.
13
Browsers & Technology / Re: The Hardware Thread
Older ( or rather, ancient ) Apple laptops have downright nice keyboards. I've got a mid-1990s PowerBook 3400c here, the keyboard is almost Model M decent. Of course that makes the machine rather fat, but probably less than you'd expect.
Looks nice, except for the 3.3 kg weight. Almost three times as much as the 1.1/1.2-ish on my new laptop. :P
Well, a full-sized keyboard does need some room. Probably takes up half of the volume.
15
Browsers & Technology / Re: The Hardware Thread
PS Obviously the keyboard is rubbish too. But you know, for a laptop keyboard it's not bad. For a thin laptop it might even be outstanding. Much better than Apple, for example.
Older ( or rather, ancient ) Apple laptops have downright nice keyboards. I've got a mid-1990s PowerBook 3400c here, the keyboard is almost Model M decent. Of course that makes the machine rather fat, but probably less than you'd expect.
17
DnD Central / Re: The American 2016 Presidential Elections & The Ongoing American Saga
I see no option but to the US to turn part of Canada.
That way, all problems would be solved and no need for such ridiculous candidates and elections.
Civilization would finally cover the entire North America.
So we're back at the United States Of Canada vs. Jesusland map? You'd probably have to throw Alberta to Jesusland though, remember the guy they had as prime minister before Trudeau?
18
Browsers & Technology / Specs vs. Reality
As noted elsewhere, there's plenty of hardware where specifications on the box don't agree with actual hardware capabilities. Apple is a serial offender here - many Power Macs for example, can take much more memory than Apple says they do. In this case it's understandable, assuming they only want to guarantee what they could test, but designed the hardware to take whatever the standard allows ( example - the iBook G4 has a single SO-DIMM slot, supposedly takes up to 512MB DDR modules. I stuck a 1GB one into mine, just works. )
Slightly more sneaky ( but still Apple ) - the PowerBook 3400 has two PCMCIA slots which are keyed for 16bit cards. The hardware behind it is a CardBus bridge though, and if you can get the card into the slot ( many newer CardBus cards, if you can still find them, don't bother with the keying ) and actually set up the CardBus part ( which the firmware won't, but for example NetBSD will ) then these cards will work. Very useful for adding USB ports to something that old.
A more egregious example - Gdium. The overpriced MIPS-based netbook that hardly anybody wanted to buy. Comes with 512MB RAM, supposedly not user upgradeable. In reality it's a bog standard 512MB DDR2 SO-DIMM, I stuck a 2GB one into mine and guess what, it works. The memory controller is part of the CPU, so the netbook design should have zero influence on what memory modules work.
I'm sure there's plenty more.
19
The Lounge / Re: What have you just bought?
Another 4GB RAM for my Sun Blade 2500. It needs registered DDR1 DIMMs that can handle at least 266MHz, with ECC. In other words, server memory. Apparently demand for this particular type has died down so there's plenty on ebay for cheap.
Well, cheap as long as you don't go around looking for 'Sun' in the item description.
Oddly, I've seen only 1GB modules. The machine can take at least 2GB ones, in pairs, up to 8GB per CPU. But that's the documented maximum, if they're anything like, for example, Apple, that's the maximum they actually had hardware to test with but designed it for whatever the standard allows ( examples for that - my 1st generation beige G3 supposedly takes up to 128MB modules. 256MB ones Just Work. iBook G4, supposedly takes modules up to 512MB. A 1GB one Just Works. And my PowerBook G3 has 1GB RAM even though it supposedly maxes out at 512MB. And so on. )
Either way, 8GB will do for the time being.
22
DnD Central / Re: The American 2016 Presidential Elections & The Ongoing American Saga
Of course, you know that even with Hillary's rise the polls, more people are planning on voting against Trump than actively for Hillary.
She's been some kind of republican lite until Sanders pushed her to the left anyway. And she'll probably revert to that once elected.

Also, I heard some noise about the #nevertrump Republicans putting together a campaign, caring more about keeping a potentially dangerous man out of the office than getting the Republican candidate elected (or maybe they realize he's going down in landslide so badly that it actually won't matter for the final results...) and supposedly they have big money backers. But I guess we'll see what happens with this. If this pans out, it at least gives you somebody sane to support.
They probably think the backlash against senate and house republicans if drumpf got elected would be worse than clinton getting the job.
25
Browsers & Technology / Re: Less obvious Android uses
emergencies
It's quite trivial here. I could have in my smartphone[1] some stuff to present in a meeting at work, in a fairly large room, no big screens available, and a projector ready to use. No need to connect to another computer to present that stuff; no pendrives etc. A simple USB or HDMI cable should suffice, or better, a Bluetooth connection. But I haven't seen such uses actually, so far.
Bluetooth is too slow to transfer graphics.
Some phones do have something called MHL - basically a stealth HDMI output hidden in a micro-USB connector. Needs a dongle with its own power supply to provide a full-sized HDMI connector.
Also, there are USB graphics devices ( basically a graphics processor with its own memory which receives commands via USB ), but wether android would support any of those is an entirely different question.
Actually, I don't own one.