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(also an MD) I've always conceived of it as a good NP will have been around long enough to know you usually do X when Y, but they don't know the reasoning for X or the pathophysiology underlying Y, and they don't always know when you shouldn't do X.

That said, especially in primary care, give me an NP over a PA anytime. Primary care is a numbers game and NPs roll the dice better. Specialty PAs are great; I learned some of my best ortho from ortho PAs. But generalist PAs scare me and have been the source of some horrific consults in the past.

Nah, let's let Dan Neil defenestrate it in grand form. "Yugo. Or not."

https://content.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,...

Yes, but you'll still need the Toolbox ROM.

I enjoyed Portal on the C64, so much so that I actually wrote Rob Swigart when I was toying with making a recreation of the virtual world it depicted. He thought it sounded like a fun project and even sent me a copy of the book. Probably should dust that idea off sometime.

You'll love G-BASIC on the Tomy Pyūta then, because its very primitive BASIC is indeed katakana: https://www.floodgap.com/retrobits/tomy/pyuuta/pyuuta1.html

Yet people love them, especially the PC-6. It has to be the form factor.

Meanwhile, my PC-4 (Casio PB-100) was far more useful to me and they seem much more durable.

Is that on highway 168? Beautiful drive. Always loved the Westgaard Pass.

My wife and I got into fountain pens recently. We're starting with the Pilot Metropolitan, since it seems like a quality pen that's not too expensive. We both like it (she's settled on a medium nib, I prefer the fine). If we get hooked we'll look at something fancier, though we're pretty happy with the pen already.

Oh, I bet you'd have loved the TMS 9900. Tons of registers with switchable windows, mini-computer oriented ... and big-endian.

As you say, COVID was an outlier because of the urgency of the situation and the newness of it. We don't have either situation with OR hygiene, and if we're wrong and OR masks actually are doing something preventive, then we would be doing harm to the patients involved relative to the inconvenience to the surgeon.

The vaccine question was about vaccines in general, much as RFK Jr is talking about doing. Again, with the weight of long experience on how well they prevent diseases in mind, it would be unethical to expose a kid to that by giving them a placebo shot. Measles is pretty benign but not totally so. See a case of SSPE in your career and you'll never forget it.

The specific claim quoted was for surgeons, though. I don't see how this can be tested without having them mask off in the OR.

But you can see this go both ways. Ortho surgeons in total procedures have full air filtering due to the large amount of bone dust that's liberated, some of which are very fine particles. No one wants to breathe that in.

Meanwhile, I'll be in TB clinic shortly with an N95 mask on. I've yet to convert my TB test in 17 years.

We absolutely rely on surgical masks not to contaminate the field. But they don't have one way valves, so if we trust the airflow one way, it's logical to trust them for airflow going the other.

Are you actually suggesting we should have surgeons unmask in an operating theatre and see if the rate of post-op infections go up? I'd like to see that get through an IRB. This is the same mentality that says every current vaccination should be compared against saline placebo.

Not Collabora. Collabra was a groupware company Netscape acquired to shore up the E-mail portion of Communicator. It didn't work and ended up substantially delaying future development of the browser suite.

Collabra, per jwz. See "groupware bad" (not direct linking in case he still has the referer block up).

No. At times intermittently maintained, but definitely not dead.

Thanks for being there for A/UX! Proud to still maintain a mirror of jagubox on the Gopher server, and my clock-chipped Q800 runs it splendidly.

gopher://gopher.floodgap.com:70/1/archive/jagubox-gsfc-nasa-gov-aux

They did. The original plan was a PowerPC native version of A/UX "4.0." This was the PowerOpen idea, in which both A/UX and IBM AIX were to be personalities and value-adds on a central OS. This new A/UX would still have been able to run Macintosh applications natively. Eventually it faltered because of second-system effect from Pink/Taligent running at the same time, as well as Spindler's brief flirtation with NetWare. This is the reason the Apple Network Server ended up running vanilla AIX.

(disclosure: my work. https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2023/11/the-apple-network-server... )

I think this is true only up to a point. The sets of Gopher enthusiasts and Gemini enthusiasts surely overlap, but they are not coterminous (disclosure: I administer gopher.floodgap.com).

From my view in Gopherspace, Gemini is a better fit for the Gopher+TLS thing people keep trying to do which is both incompatible and doesn't square with Gopher being an ultra-light protocol, and thus most appealing to those people who thought Gopher would be the "new smol web" but found it's more its own thing. In particular, Gopher's signature strong menu-document hierarchy that a lot of us Gopher nerds like doesn't have any true parallel in Gemini.

I started gopher.floodgap.com back when it was gopher.ptloma.edu in the late 1990s largely as a historical preservation because I remembered all the cool stuff you could get there. Back then the Web hadn't metastasized to the Tetsuo blob it is today, so that obviously wouldn't have been the reason. I can't speak for the later adopters, but Gemini doesn't scratch my Gopher itches fully (see also https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2020/11/a-gopher-view-of-gemini.... , my notes on this from 2020).

At least on the C64, I use BASIC as largely a scripting language and master scheduler, calling 6502 machine language subroutines with SYS, and reserving BASIC for the very highest level main loop or non-speed-sensitive tasks that would be inconvenient, bulky or unnecessary to write in assembly. It gives me a scaffold to hang things off.

The BeOS loader was a little trickier: that one actually managed to enter supervisor mode, which shouldn't have been possible, and was why BeOS wasn't supported on Mac OS 9 (only 8.6 and earlier).

(author) Pretty much that, since Mac OS didn't have much concept of memory protection. MkLinux on NuBus Power Macs had to do the same thing, and even current NetBSD/mac68k still does. The PDMLoader in this article works on the same notion as well.

As it happens, you can snoop on the output of voice 3, and in noise mode it could indeed be used for random numbers. It generates a new value about every 26 processor cycles.

Suspect this line:

  uint32_t y = ((UINT64_C(0x640a0100) * digits.as_int)>>32)&0xff;

This makes assumptions about how a 64-bit int is laid out in memory. Not near a big endian system right now (I know, right?) but I'm pretty sure this is the problem.

NSFW on one of the images.

Pretty good, I think! (Maintainer.)

What I liked best about it is the portability, the scoping, and the preprocessor, which I prefer in particular to how many other assemblers do macros, and that's why I ended up taking it over (though Andre still did a lot of the code in this release too). The linking is not something I personally use much but other people do, and the O65 binary object format it uses covers a lot of use cases.

A C benchmark on the 6502 seems suspect to me given that the 6502's architecture tends to make writing stack-based language compilers for it more complicated than other platforms. Some of the difference may be just because the object code generated for the 6502 isn't efficient.

That said, any 16-bit optimizations the 8088's compiler could take advantage of, well, that's fair game.

(author) Yes, exactly. Star Trek got a lot of heat at the time for being a bad idea and at the time it probably would have been a real strategic blunder (Spindler was right to kill it IMHO), but it really worked, and Marklar ended up being analogously the same thing.

(author) Was this PIN or Portable NetWare? How did it look on the ANS? Same interface as regular NetWare?

That CD would also be very interesting to run on real hardware. ckaiser at floodgap dawt com if you're willing!

Of course. There are many such examples of homebrew kits with tape and TTY; I routinely use a serial port connection as TTY over the 20mA current loop with my briefcase KIM that also has the tape lines brought out to a 1/4" TRS jack, though uploading binaries over the serial link is more handy for testing. The TVT 6 5/8 was an easy to assemble video board, or the cool kids had an MTU 8K RAM expansion that emitted the contents as a 320x200 composite image.

In fact, the AIM-65 was basically a heavily expanded KIM with a LED screen, printer, keyboard and tape all in one box from the factory.