Signatures.

This has been going on across our lifetimes, and sometimes across our own personal information.

Barro revives a clever Sailer tweet —— One that might be useful when people you like start whining about Hillary's supremacy in the popular vote.

(As if that could excuse her failure. She's probably known about the EC since 1955. I wouldn't be surprised if Trump first learned of it sixty years later.)

This has been going on across our lifetimes, and sometimes across our own personal information.

Crid, my fave quote from the article: "But it's not just 'bitrot', or damage to media themselves, that makes old media unreadable says McCarthy. 'The number of machines and the spare parts are falling off incredibly rapidly.' Paper is, ironically, more stable.[emphasis added]"

Across our lifetimes? Yeah, I think I've still got some 3.5" disks around, which probably contain old term papers. Happily, I have no desire whatsoever to read them, even if I had a disk reader and software that could translate an old WordStar document.

Indeed it is... Verbal humor is the best.

> Paper is, ironically, more
> stable.[emphasis added]

Yep, and this applies, perhaps most importantly, to balloting systems.

Someone once played this game with a bunch of college students using the opening passages of books by Obama and Palin.

Macro retraction for microbeads.





A great guy, a huge achiever... Big Success.

Imagine their reaction to those horny Garnier shampoo ads

https://mobile.twitter.com/Sami_3w/status/859684802286452736

"Yeah, I think I've still got some 3.5" disks around, which probably contain old term papers. "

I've still got some 9-track tape reels. Most of the interesting stuff, I copied from them years ago. It's gone through several other media and now resides on a USB disk drive. I wouldn't mind being able to look at the tapes one more time, but even if I found someone with a 9-track drive, the tape is probably too brittle to play now.

The same thing is happening in the music industry. People are trying to play master and multitrack tapes from the '50s and '60s so they can re-master them, and the tapes are very difficult to play. They bake the tapes to try to ease the brittleness in the backing, but then the oxide sheds. I saw an interview with Edgar Froese about a decade ago where he talked about trying to copy old Tangerine Dream multitrack tapes. He said it was a one-chance-only deal since the tapes fell apart as they went through the machine.

> even if I had a disk reader
> and software that could translate
> an old WordStar document.

You apparently got into it a few months or years earlier, but my first WP program was PC-Write. It had its difficulties, but the graceful integration of help into the operation of the program made a strong impression.

I work with a lot of technozoid software and networked applications. For as many men and woman move through their lives imagining themselves blessed with Steve-Jobs-level insight about design, most programs and devices are incredibly unpleasant (or even data-destructive) to use.

Even over the past ten years, as homebrewing boys & girls in kitchens and bedrooms have built thoughtful and convenient (and profitable) programs for the cell phones in all our pockets, the big-ticket interfaces remain clumsy and wretched.

I've been doing a lot of rentals lately: Car software is a nightmare. I was in a Hyundai Sonata this past weekend... I want to fly back to that airport and hit it with a stick.

As far as 9 track tapes...never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck load of tapes hurtling down the road at highway speeds.

Despite these narrow networks, insurers still have had to impose substantial deductibles and jack up premiums by double digits, and are still losing money on ObamaCare. Having an ObamaCare card, in other words, is no guarantee that health care will be affordable or high quality.

Would Billy Kimmel have fared as well had his parents been stuck in one of these ObamaCare HMO plans? Maybe, maybe not.

http://www.investors.com/politics/commentary/what-jimmy-kimmel-left-out-of-his-newborns-heart-surgery-story/

More evidence that most people consider history to start the day they're born:

https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/264028/

Those damn party lines.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-caused-massive-delays-at-delta-1493834473?mod=trending_now_4

Among gay men aged 18 to 29, support for Le Pen surges to 43.5 percent, behind Macron on 56.5 percent.

http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2017/05/04/a-third-of-french-gays-are-voting-for-marine-le-pen-who-will-abolish-same-sex-marriage/

"the big-ticket interfaces remain clumsy and wretched."

Yeah, I was a WordPerfect fan back in the day. Even now, twenty years later, MS Word's user interface seems ass-backwards to me. And with every revision, they make it worse.

My mother always thought I was cute, but buying her a late release of WP sealed my membership in the family.

> Among gay men aged 18 to 29,
> support for Le Pen surges
> to 43.5 percent

Trump called for women who have abortions to be punished; he was was then found to have made comments about grabbing them by the genitals.

He won anyway... Women voted for him.

Keegan convincingly argued that Clausewitz was wrong: People will go to war for any number of purposes not aligned with their political interests.

It's at least possible that these years are showing us that people will vote by any number of enthusiasms not aligned with their simplistic identity politics.

We might be pleased generally, if not by the specific electoral victors, with this evidence that the most proficient pandering will eventually collapse; that voters recognize that sometimes there are bigger fish to fry.

About Le Pen: she will only ban gay marriage. She will also tighten the borders against people who think throwing gays off buildings to be not only great fun, but also their civic duty.

Some people think short term. Some long term.

Yeah, I was a WordPerfect fan back in the day. Even now, twenty years later, MS Word's user interface seems ass-backwards to me. And with every revision, they make it worse. ~ Cousin Dave at May 4, 2017 11:08 AM

I grew up professionally using WordPerfect and loved it. I delayed switching to MS Word as long as I could.

As a pure text editor, it had no equal. The Reveal Codes function allowed my to troubleshoot my text like a coder.

Once I started using more graphics in my write-ups, however, I found MS Word's better ability to integrate non-text items to be handy and WP's integration of non-text items to be clunky.

Nonetheless, WP will be missed by those of us who grew up using it.

Yeah, I think I've still got some 3.5" disks around, which probably contain old term papers. Happily, I have no desire whatsoever to read them, even if I had a disk reader and software that could translate an old WordStar document

Once a year I set aside a weekend to do a thorough back up. I go thru all my old docs open them and save them into an updated format, plus a keep a pdf and jpeg copy of them all as well.

I've still got all my old high school and some middle school writting assignments.

I read them every now and again to see how I used to view the world

More evidence that most people consider history to start the day they're born:

https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/264028/

I R A Darth Aggie at May 4, 2017 8:43 AM

In August was the Jackal born;
The Rains fell in September;
"Now such a fearful flood as this,"
Says he, "I can’t remember!"

Rudyard Kipling

A nice comic on confirmation bias

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe

A little something for the sisters.

I hate the sixclaws oatmeal comic. Hate it hate it hate it.

It's all over the internet from people I love and people I admire and I still hate it up and down and sideways.

Smug used to be a sin.

Cosh is spanking this this woman pretty hard, but at least she comes out and admits her belief is a religious faith rather than a reasoned position.

"More evidence that most people consider history to start the day they're born:"

Yeah, that broad seems to have some serious emotional issues.

"Yeah, I was a WordPerfect fan back in the day. Even now, twenty years later, MS Word's user interface seems ass-backwards to me. And with every revision, they make it worse."

Perhaps you think that software is written for you. A sizable amount of coding is merely to keep the programmer employed.

Taste 1.0, a page layout program from Deneba for Apple, would do 32-bit color on pages to 13" x 19" edge/edge and used 32 fonts (a limitation for artsy types, but not a layout obstacle). It did layers and color gradients and imported pix from assorted other programs. You could put out a detailed copy of any magazine (think Newsweek, or Time), and it used ONE MB of RAM. It didn't swap to disk while running, either. It couldn't. As it is, it was running on a chip about 125,000 times SLOWER than an i5.

I have a copy of Excel v0.0B. It's 367KB in size. Most people can do everything they do now with Excel, as it had over 250 math functions.

Word 5.1B would actually browse the Web in addition to generating and editing documents, a feature advertised as "new" for Microsoft Edge.

All of these things are for Mac, but I bet you can get people to talk about Quattro Pro.

Software is just like the hardware market: there's a lot of duplication of effort, which liars call "choice". Beyond some point fairly close to you, it's just not all that useful. You start approaching the "broken window" parable...

If you were allowed to run some of these old programs, built when speed had to be in software because processors were slow, you'd be shocked at how fast they run. Run robocopy in DOS sometime and see what I mean.

Talk to the Linux or OS/2 people and see what they can let you run on older stuff.

"Ivanka Trump Wrote a Painfully Oblivious Book for Basically No One"

By Jia Tolentino.

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/ivanka-trump-wrote-a-painfully-oblivious-book-for-basically-no-one

First paragraphs:

Ivanka Trump, a daughter of and aide to the man whose election drove women to mount the largest protest in American history, has published a new book. It’s about how women can best achieve personal satisfaction and professional success. This is an ill-advised endeavor, in theory. In practice, it is an even worse idea than it seems.

In the preface to the book—titled “Women Who Work,” after an “initiative” she launched, in 2014—Ivanka emphasizes that she wrote it before Donald Trump became President. She has since announced that she will donate the profits and refrain from publicizing the book “through a promotional tour or media appearances,” in the hopes of avoiding the appearance of ethical conflicts. (Instead, she has been shilling for the book on Twitter, where she has nearly four million followers.) Nonetheless, it is immediately obvious that circumstances have gotten entirely away from her. When Ivanka published her first book, “The Trump Card,” she was twenty-eight, and her air of oblivious diligence was a reasonable fit for her position as a hardworking heiress, the favored child of a celebrity tycoon. Now that her father is the President and she has assumed a post in the White House, it feels downright perverse to watch her devote breathless attention to the self-actualization processes at work in the lives of wealthy women while studiously ignoring the political forces that shape even those lives...

> First paragraphs:

As at May 4, 2017 5:38 AM above, they might just as well be writing of Chel.

Thanks for the blog post, Lenona, I hadn't had the thought until 40 seconds ago:

What appointment would Chelsea now hold had Mom been elected?

What appointment would Chelsea now hold had Mom been elected? ~ Crid at May 4, 2017 5:22 PM

And how many people in the media would then be crowing about how wonderful it is that such a qualified and dynamic woman is in the president's inner circle? You know, instead of someone who is merely the "favored child of a celebrity tycoon."

If Democrats want four more years of Trump, this is the way to go about making that happen.

More Hollywood vs. America:

Celebrities Rage at House Obamacare Repeal: ‘F*ck All Y’all’

> He said it was a one-chance-only
> deal since the tapes fell apart as
> they went through the machine.

The Zappa family used to "bake" the reels before digitizing them. His earliest multitrack stuff was on a Frankenstein 5-track machine... Can't imagine what they did Cridabout that.

> He said it was a one-chance-only
> deal since the tapes fell apart as
> they went through the machine.

The Zappa family used to "bake" the reels before digitizing them. His earliest multitrack stuff was on a Frankenstein 5-track machine... Can't imagine what they did about that.

Because keyboard macros. All of life's a circle.

"Once I started using more graphics in my write-ups, however, I found MS Word's better ability to integrate non-text items to be handy and WP's integration of non-text items to be clunky."

That's true. Because WP was trying to remain multi-platform, it never really got integrated with COM/DCOM in Windows.

"His earliest multitrack stuff was on a Frankenstein 5-track machine... "

George Martin did a lot of the early Beatles stuff on 3-track machines. The center track wasn't really intended for high fidelity audio; it was meant for recording timing tones. But Martin made it work. Geoff Emrick went back in the early '80s and digitized it all onto a Sony F1, which was basically a VCR with an A/D interface added. I presume it's been copied to more modern media since then.

I remember the F1.

dbx made an a digital audio encoder for video (VHS?) as well... I can't remember the details except that it was delta modulation instead of PCM.

Ah, here

Tuck Andress did a lot of work with one, and I presume he had to transcode his old tapes sometime in the 1990's... I've always wondered if he paid a programmer to write a codec, or just went through a short analog cable from the decoder to a DVD recorder or something.