Trademarks can be copyrightable, if the mark is sufficiently complex and original. A simple wordmark like the FedEx logo is under the threshold of originality, but a complex logo like the Starbucks mermaid is absolutely copyrightable.
> I imagine the microchips in the dogs would make a great tracking device.
They don't. The range of a typical chip reader is a few inches - reading one requires handling the dog (and can be tricky if the chip's migrated from its expected position). It's not something that can be done covertly, or from a distance.
What you're describing is a lab power supply. (The "instantly disarm on short circuit" is overcurrent protection, which is a standard feature.) The name brands like Keysight or Rigol are kind of expensive, but there are a lot of no-name models on Amazon which will do the job well enough.
Thanks! I had a BK Vision or something similar at some point and it just blew up. I will give it a search for these brands, sometimes I find a well-cared used one from the more expensive brands at good prices so that’s what I will look for first. :)
Oh right. There's a bunch of panicky news stories in India about that right now. Fake video calls from your nephew in the UK or whatever needing money for an emergency
It certainly runs 16-bit Windows games better than Windows 11, which can't run them at all. Not that there are a ton of those, but it's still pretty neat that they work.
The thing that you're missing is that Microsoft used to ship that emulator with Windows. Then they stopped doing that.
AFAICT, Wine can run WIN16 programs. I don't know if it can run DOS programs. There's a WineHQ wiki page that says it can load DOS programs, but various internet fora seem to believe that Wine's DOS support is pretty broken. I've never tried it, and have no DOS programs handy, so I can't verify those claims.
There is also a port of Wine’s VDM back to Windows called otvdm or winevdm that is able to run 16-bit programs on Windows. It is surprisingly capable, I was able to run a 16-bit VB program that used a serial based optical modem without issue.
"DOS support" is tricky inasmuch as a lot software from that era - especially larger and more complex packages - interacted with hardware directly. In a sense, they weren't really DOS applications so much as they were bare-metal PC applications which were booted from DOS. It'd be difficult for WINE to support those, and other projects like DOSbox / 86box / etc do a better job of it.
Time to dust off my cd copy of Stars! (From the disk backup, the cd had terminal illnesses and has died). The only win16 game I've ever seen distributed on CDROM. Wine already ran it ok (iirc there were some issues but nothing gamebraking), but now it can do so without i386 libs.
One bit of magic you may be interested in is pivot_root, which allows another filesystem to take the place of the root filesystem (e.g. / and /mnt become /old and /). It's usually used during startup, to allow the "real" root filesystem to take the place of the initrd, but could have other uses.
Last time I tried to use it though I just could not get it to let go of the main filesystem even after repeatedly killing the processes I could and restarting the rest.
Taking control at the initrd stage, as in the second page of the article, is significantly more reliable.
But have busybox in your initrd so you don't have to suffer. It takes up 0.5% of the size of my initrd file.
If I had a nickel for every AI-poisoned "researcher" I'd seen with a preprint full of nonsense buzzwords like "quantum fractal holographic resonance matrix"... well, I wouldn't be rich, but I'd probably at least have enough to buy a coffee.
The Art of Electronics, by Horowitz and Hill, is aimed at a university or professional audience, but could also be an incredible learning resource for a younger student (or older hobbyist!) interested in learning more about the field.
Speaking for myself, I would have loved to read something like this when I was first experimenting with electronics as a child. A lot of the details would have gone over my head, but even just knowing the general outlines of the topics it covered would have been a huge step up.
A lot of modern SUVs have "360° backup camera" features which work similarly - the car uses footage from cameras mounted around the vehicle to synthesize a top-down view. It's great for backing out of tight parking spaces, and I can only imagine it's even more useful on a bus.
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