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Thursday, April 30, 2020

Vintage Photos - Oestreicher (683-686)


See the previous post in this series here.

I had the opportunity to pick up a huge batch of slides a while back. These are pictures span from as early as the late 1940s to as late as the early 1990s (maybe earlier and/or later but these are what I have sampled so far). These came to me second (third?) hand but the original source was a combination of estate sales and Goodwill. There are several thousand...maybe as many as 10,000. I will be scanning some from time to time and posting them here for posterity.

Apparently, getting your pictures processed as slides used to be a fairly common thing but it was a phenomenon I missed out on. However, my Grandfather had a few dozen slides (circa late 1950s) that I acquired after he died. That along with having some negatives I wanted to scan is what prompted me to buy a somewhat decent flatbed scanner that could handle slides and negatives, an Epson V600. It can scan up to four slides at a time with various post-processing options and does a decent enough job.

This set continues a rather large batch of slides that originally came from an estate sale and appear to have belonged to a locally well known photographer (or perhaps a close family member) from the Spokane Washington area and later Northern Idaho named Leo Oestreicher. He was known for his portrait and landscape photography and especially for post cards. His career started in the 1930s and he died in 1990. These slides contain a lot of landscape and portrait photos but also a lot of photos from day to day life and various vacations around the world. Here's an article on him from 1997 which is the only info I have found on him: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/1997/jan/04/photos-of-a-lifetime-museum-acquisition-of-leo/

Many of these slides had the date they were processed (presumably) stamped or printed on them. I've found that in cases where I could verify the date, either because a more specific date was hand written or there was something to specifically date the photo in the photo itself, that this date has typically been the same month the photos were taken. In other words, I expect that in MOST cases these photos were taken relatively near the processing date. No doubt there are some exceptions.

Click on one of the images or the link below to also see versions processed with color restoration and Digital ICE which is a hardware based dust and scratch remover, a feature of the Epson V600 scanner I am using. There are also versions processed with the simpler dust removal option along with color restoration.

Pictures from a wedding in February 1958. A number of previous sets have included photos from this wedding as well.




Processed February 1958


At the reception - Hal, Ollie Del "Fromees" (Hal's secy) - Processed February 1958


Del - Processed February 1958


Del - Processed February 1958



The entire collection that has been scanned and uploaded so far can be found here.

Coronavirus Crisis Exposes a Devastating Consequence of Fed Policy: Americans Have No Savings

During a March 17 address to the nation in response to the COVID-19 outbreak, President Donald Trump asked that Americans work from home, postpone unnecessary travel, and limit social gatherings to no more than 10 people. Ten days later, Trump signed a stimulus package of more than $2 trillion to provide relief to an economy on the precipice of collapse. The aid package includes handouts and loans to individuals, small businesses, and other distressed industries. Despite Trump “having created the greatest Economy in the history of our Country,” when the markets tanked, massive and immediate government intervention was the only thing left to forestall a total collapse. So why can’t the greatest economy in the world handle a temporary shock without needing trillions of dollars injected to stay afloat? The Federal Reserve and its vicious and ongoing war on savers are to blame. Using the Federal Reserve Note—commonly (but incorrectly) referred to as the dollar—introduces a dilemma. Because of inflationary monetary policy, Americans have long been forced to select among three undesirable options:

A) Save. Hold Federal Reserve Notes and be guaranteed to lose at least 2 percent in purchasing power every single year.

B) Consume. Spend Federal Reserve Notes on immediate goods and services to get the most out of current purchasing power.

C) Speculate. Try to beat the Fed’s deliberate inflation, seeking a higher return by investing in complicated and unstable asset markets.

With businesses and Americans defaulting on their rent and other obligations only days into the collapse, the problem is clear: Few have any savings. And why should they when saving their money at negative real rates of return has been a sucker’s game? Lack of sound money, or money that doesn’t maintain its purchasing power over time, has discouraged savings while encouraging debt-financed consumption. American businesses and individuals are so overleveraged that once their income goes away, even briefly, they are too often left with nothing. Fiat money is especially pernicious in the way it harms its users. To some, two percent losses can go easily unnoticed, year to year. Over 100 years, the loss has been well over 97 percent. And who can save for emergencies when you’re being forced to work and spend more—simply to maintain the same quality of life? Over 100 years, the Federal Reserve has destroyed more than 97 percent of our currency’s purchasing power. With the Fed slashing short-term rates to zero, the US Federal Reserve Note has been further destroyed as a method of preserving savings. (And negative nominal interest rates could be coming next.) Inflationary economic policy, absent the guardrails of sound money, has created a situation with an obvious and deadly conclusion: that many Americans lack savings to protect themselves against downturns. This situation isn’t necessarily the fault of the people, but rather the fault of a system in which discouraging and punishing savers is a crucial tenet of the entire framework. The Federal Reserve, the US Treasury, and the White House are trying to reassure the public that everything is “under control,” that “the US economy’s fundamentals are still strong,” and that the economy will skyrocket once COVID-19 is taken care of. What if they’re wrong? Maybe the greatest monetary experiment in history is coming to an end. Maybe sound money can still save the day, but we must not waste any more time in restoring it.
Jp Cortez
Jp Cortez is Policy Director for the Sound Money Defense League, a non-partisan, national public policy organization working to restore sound money at the state and federal level and which maintains America's Sound Money Index.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Monday, April 27, 2020

Computer Gamer (June 1987)

Computer Gamer (June 1987)

Computer Gamer was a relatively short lived computer gaming magazine from the U.K. It was published from 1985 to 1987. The July 1987 issue includes:

Features

  • Sentinel - A golden game from Firebird
  • Doc the Destroyer - Melbourne's punchy adventure
  • Shadows of Mordor - The saga of the Ring continues
  • Colonial Conquest - SSI are out to win you over
  • Nemesis - Konami strike gold at last
  • The Way Ahead - Activision on the move
  • Delta - A nemesis clone or an innovation?
  • Enduro Racer - Gamer rids into the sunset
  • Bismarck - Hunt for the pride of the fleet
  • Stifflip & Co. - As always, Palace go for gold
  • C16 Top Five - Games you can't live without
  • Cyborg - Was it worth a year of hype?
  • Sequels - One good return deserves another.
  • Voidrunner/Hellgate - Minter's C16 games par excellence
  • Bride of Frankenstein - Ariolasoft makes you a new man

Regulars

  • Previews - A look into the colorful future
  • mEDitations - The Editor has the last word
  • News - Roundup of teh latest chat
  • Talkback - What your letters say to us
  • Scoreline - How we rate the games
  • Fresh Out - The latest games grilled
  • PBM Update - Mike McGarry plays the last post
  • Top Notch - The ST rises higher
  • Unsung Heroes - The leading light at Starlight
  • Get Out Of That - Play the game Kird Rutter's way
  • Cheap Thrills - Budget bargains reviewed
  • Competition Results - Do you feel lucky?
  • Argus Declares War - Wargame special offer from APS
  • Duffers - The worst games of the month
  • Caves of Hell - A devil of a game for the C16
  • Professional Programming - A mixed bag of chips

...and more!

Saturday, April 25, 2020

Big K (April 1984)

Big K (April 1984)

Big K was a relatively short lived gaming magazine that focused on computers and was published in the 1980s in the U.K. The April 1984 issue includes:

Games Programs

  • Rocket for VIC-20
  • Bomb Run for Oric
  • Demon Driver for Commodore 64
  • Down Fall for BBC Model B
  • Escape for Spectrum

Software Reviews

  • Charlie Nichols reviews for us.

Hardware

  • Wonderful Widgets
  • Brilliant Bodges - A Cheapo Epro
  • Goad Your Code the 6502 Way
  • Squaring Up - Atari v. Acorn

Features

  • Do you Sincerely Want to be Rich?
  • Another Day, Another Subroutine
  • Wozniak: Mr. Apple talks to Big K
  • Romeo Foxtrot, Break Left
  • When Access is a Little Too Random
  • Mind Games
  • A Big Hand for the Little Tin Guy

Regulars

  • On-Line News
  • Charts
  • Arcade Alley

Competition

  • Win a Coleco Module 3

...and more!

Vintage Photos - Oestreicher (679-682)


See the previous post in this series here.

I had the opportunity to pick up a huge batch of slides a while back. These are pictures span from as early as the late 1940s to as late as the early 1990s (maybe earlier and/or later but these are what I have sampled so far). These came to me second (third?) hand but the original source was a combination of estate sales and Goodwill. There are several thousand...maybe as many as 10,000. I will be scanning some from time to time and posting them here for posterity.

Apparently, getting your pictures processed as slides used to be a fairly common thing but it was a phenomenon I missed out on. However, my Grandfather had a few dozen slides (circa late 1950s) that I acquired after he died. That along with having some negatives I wanted to scan is what prompted me to buy a somewhat decent flatbed scanner that could handle slides and negatives, an Epson V600. It can scan up to four slides at a time with various post-processing options and does a decent enough job.

This set continues a rather large batch of slides that originally came from an estate sale and appear to have belonged to a locally well known photographer (or perhaps a close family member) from the Spokane Washington area and later Northern Idaho named Leo Oestreicher. He was known for his portrait and landscape photography and especially for post cards. His career started in the 1930s and he died in 1990. These slides contain a lot of landscape and portrait photos but also a lot of photos from day to day life and various vacations around the world. Here's an article on him from 1997 which is the only info I have found on him: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/1997/jan/04/photos-of-a-lifetime-museum-acquisition-of-leo/

Many of these slides had the date they were processed (presumably) stamped or printed on them. I've found that in cases where I could verify the date, either because a more specific date was hand written or there was something to specifically date the photo in the photo itself, that this date has typically been the same month the photos were taken. In other words, I expect that in MOST cases these photos were taken relatively near the processing date. No doubt there are some exceptions.

Click on one of the images or the link below to also see versions processed with color restoration and Digital ICE which is a hardware based dust and scratch remover, a feature of the Epson V600 scanner I am using. There are also versions processed with the simpler dust removal option along with color restoration.

The first photo was processed in June 1960 and appears to be of a 50th birthday party (or else a 50th anniversary party). Assuming a 50th birthday party, it would have been for someone born in 1910. The second photo looks like a lake or river somewhere and was processed in September 1961. The third photo is at a beach somewhere. It's unlabeled and undated but appears to be from the late 1950s or early 1960s. The final photo is of a party of some kind. Based on the decorations I would guess a Christmas party but there are a lot of kids so it could be a kid's birthday party too. It's undated but probably from the late 1950s or early 1960s.




Processed June 1960


Processed September 1961




Steve + Sharon - Ship's party



The entire collection that has been scanned and uploaded so far can be found here.

Friday, April 24, 2020

America’s Hyper-Regulated Health Care Industry Has Been Exposed by COVID-19

It doesn’t take much searching to come up with dozens of examples of private companies stepping up to help provide our beleaguered medical professionals with desperately needed protective equipment and tools to save lives. Textile companies churning out face masks and protective clothing for doctors. Manufacturers switching their assembly lines to produce ventilators. Distilleries making hand sanitizer. Lots of companies are stepping up in other ways too, figuring out ways to serve their communities and protect their workforces as best they can, or diverting production to replenish items that panicked buyers have stripped store shelves of. Some people, though, can’t seem to see past their general disdain for big companies, which they see as merely exploiting people for wealth. Take the reaction to President Trump inviting a number of major corporate CEOs to the White House briefing to talk about how their companies are working to help fight the pandemic. This Vox reporter’s tweet is pretty representative of a widespread reaction by left-leaning talking heads on social media:   I suppose a cynic can question these companies’ motives, whether they’re truly being altruistic or merely using this opportunity to boost their brand. But the fact is, their motivations don’t matter. None of this private effort to step up and combat the pandemic should surprise anyone who understands what free markets are and how they work—where there’s demand, entrepreneurs will figure out how to fill it, if they’re allowed to. It doesn’t matter if these companies are motivated by charity or merely the opportunity to increase their market share if the end result is people getting what they desperately need as fast as possible. That is the beauty of free people being allowed to associate and transact freely—capitalism helps connect people who have what others want or need, without judgment. As Walter Williams bluntly stated, “Capitalism made it possible to become wealthy by serving one’s fellow man.” Not that all these companies are making bank helping ease this crisis; many aren’t. Value is subjective, after all, and plenty of CEOs value the lives of their fellow man over money. Naturally, Marxists like New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio see this, and any crisis, as an opportunity not to be wasted to command and control the economy in proper, Soviet fashion. DeBlasio and others have called on Trump to use the government’s sweeping powers to effectively nationalize companies and their output under the Defense Production Act (DPA). Although the president has been fairly reluctant to use it so far, his recent appointment of the astonishingly economically retrograde trade hawk Peter Navarro to head the use of the DPA is alarming, as is his use of the DPA to attempt to block 3M from shipping any respirators overseas. Trump’s DPA saber rattling and threats to commandeer an empty GM plant to produce more ventilators made for good press but bad policy, especially when, as previously mentioned, companies like Ford are already stepping in to fill that exact need. How much do you want to bet that the several companies already producing ventilators voluntarily are likely to outperform those who are conscripted? Moving forward, there will be a focus on trying to ensure that our health care system has everything it lacked to combat this disease, and probably more besides. Very likely there will be a push to build more health care infrastructure with federal dollars. In the minds of many, government investment will be needed to fill in where the “market” failed. That notion rests on the pretense that there was a free market to fail in the first place. Even a cursory glance at regulations and laws surrounding health care reveals a tremendously complicated web of layered restrictions on the practice of medicine that Dr. Robert Graboyes has rightly dubbed “Fortress Health Care,” so named because the legal walls erected around it prevent all manner of newcomers from accessing the field without due permission. Why do so many hospitals lack the necessary number of beds? Why do they not have enough ventilators, CT scanners, and other essential equipment? Why is there a shortage of medical professionals, and why are doctors retiring at rates that cannot be replaced? A goodly chunk of the answer falls upon this fortress, erected at the federal, state, and local levels. Certificate of Need laws let existing providers deny competitors the ability to purchase health care infrastructure in their area. Scope of Practice laws lock highly trained physicians’ assistants and nurses into tightly defined roles that leave patients waiting for scarce doctors. Tax advantages for employer-sponsored health plans and restrictions on the individual market tie health care benefits to people’s jobs and obscure price incentives as people become dependent on third-party payment systems. The anti-competitive regulatory pressures on health care are profound. Everything from the licensing of medical professionals to the building of new facilities is regulated; prices are manipulated and fixed by subsidies and entitlements and middleman payers. The best thing the government could possibly do to provide health care is to unshackle it. Set it free, and the market will provide—if we let it.
Josh Withrow
Josh Withrow is a Senior Policy Analyst at FreedomWorks.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Thursday, April 23, 2020

Commodore Power Play (August/September 1984)

Commodore Power Play (August/September 1984)



Commodore Power/Play was one of Commodore's two official publications that eventually merged into one to become Commodore Magazine. Power/Play was the publication targeted towards home users. In 1984, the Commodore 64 was still working its way towards becoming the world's most popular computer and the VIC-20 was fading away. The November 1984 issue includes:

Features

  • Computers, Computer Groups and Who Needs Them
  • Confessions of a User Group Newsletter Editor
  • Incorporating Your Group as a Non-Profit Corporation
  • Jim Butterfield: Commodore User Par Excellence
  • A User Group Software Library
  • Profile: The Cal Poly User Group

Games & Recreation

  • Game & Recreation
    • Kid Grid
    • Moon Shuttle
    • One-on-One Basketball
    • Repton
    • DROL
  • Joystick Lunatic - A Trend Indeed
  • For Gamers
    • Children of Kong
    • Game Gripes
  • High Scores - How do you measure up in our ongoing competition?
  • Game Programs
    • Tic Tac Toe for Two
    • Traffic in the Fast Lanes

Computer Know-How

  • No More Pencils... - Write Your Own "Pick-A-Path" Adventures
  • Kids' Corner
    • Dear Kids
    • Kids, Commodores and - Robots!
    • KODRAWLA
    • Everything You Wanted to Know About Sprites
    • Obfuscode
    • How to Submit Things to Kids' Corner
  • Computer Tutor
    • Letter to My Grandchildren, Part 2: Finger Multiply
    • All You Need to Know to Begin Programming in Machine Language, Part 2
  • Jiffies - MERGER: A Disk Utility

Departments

  • Letters
  • Braindrops - From the Editor
  • News From the Front - What's happening in the world of micros? Find out here.
  • Product Review
    • The MicronEye Digital Imaging System
    • PowerPad
  • Book Review - Three From Birkhauser Boston
  • User Groups - A complete list of Commodore user groups around the world
  • Glitch Fix - When we make a mistake this is where we fix it
  • Advertisers Index

Wednesday, April 22, 2020

D (3DO)


D (3DO) 



"D" is a horror themed adventure game that was first published by Panasonic on the 3DO in 1995. This was an "interactive movie" with lots of full motion video. If you like that sort of thing, then this is a pretty good game, especially if you are looking for something to play on your 3DO.


While D was first released on the 3DO, it was later also ported to the PlayStation, Sega Saturn and DOS based PCs. It was very well received at the time and was among the first mature horror games of its kind though the much more popular Resident Evil would soon be along. In D, The player plays the role of Laura Harris. She receives a call from the LAPD with news that her farther, a well respected doctor, went on a murder spree and has barricaded himself in a hospital. Laura, of course, wants to figure out what is going on so she goes to the hospital. After discovering numerous bodies she suddenly finds herself in a medieval castle. Makes perfect sense, right? Undeterred, Laura keeps searching for her father. From then on, it's lots of disturbing flashbacks and encounters until the mystery is solved.


While D doesn't hold up as well today as some games, it is still worth playing. Even those that didn't like FMV games at the time seemed to like this one and it ranks very highly among 3DO games. It's a relatively short and easy game though so it might not keep you busy for all that long.


While originally developed for the 3DO, the PlayStation and Saturn ports are just as good (and have shorter load times) so pick your favorite version to play. I assume it would work on an emulator as well. However, it's probably easiest (and reasonably cheap at $5.99) to just download it via Steam. An interesting side note... The FMV scenes were all created using an Amiga 4000 computer.

There are also two sequels: Enemy Zero and D2. They feature the same character (or "digital actress" anyway) but the stories are unrelated. Still, they are similar games and if you enjoy the first one there's a good chance you will enjoy these as well.

The ad above is from the October 1995 issue of Video Games: The Ultimate Gaming Magazine and the screen shots are from the DOS version of the game.

Vintage Photos - Oestreicher (674-677)

See the previous post in this series here.

I had the opportunity to pick up a huge batch of slides a while back. These are pictures span from as early as the late 1940s to as late as the early 1990s (maybe earlier and/or later but these are what I have sampled so far). These came to me second (third?) hand but the original source was a combination of estate sales and Goodwill. There are several thousand...maybe as many as 10,000. I will be scanning some from time to time and posting them here for posterity.

Apparently, getting your pictures processed as slides used to be a fairly common thing but it was a phenomenon I missed out on. However, my Grandfather had a few dozen slides (circa late 1950s) that I acquired after he died. That along with having some negatives I wanted to scan is what prompted me to buy a somewhat decent flatbed scanner that could handle slides and negatives, an Epson V600. It can scan up to four slides at a time with various post-processing options and does a decent enough job.

This set continues a rather large batch of slides that originally came from an estate sale and appear to have belonged to a locally well known photographer (or perhaps a close family member) from the Spokane Washington area and later Northern Idaho named Leo Oestreicher. He was known for his portrait and landscape photography and especially for post cards. His career started in the 1930s and he died in 1990. These slides contain a lot of landscape and portrait photos but also a lot of photos from day to day life and various vacations around the world. Here's an article on him from 1997 which is the only info I have found on him: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/1997/jan/04/photos-of-a-lifetime-museum-acquisition-of-leo/

Many of these slides had the date they were processed (presumably) stamped or printed on them. I've found that in cases where I could verify the date, either because a more specific date was hand written or there was something to specifically date the photo in the photo itself, that this date has typically been the same month the photos were taken. In other words, I expect that in MOST cases these photos were taken relatively near the processing date. No doubt there are some exceptions.

Click on one of the images or the link below to also see versions processed with color restoration and Digital ICE which is a hardware based dust and scratch remover, a feature of the Epson V600 scanner I am using. There are also versions processed with the simpler dust removal option along with color restoration.

None of the photos in this set are labeled or dated. There is a photo of an old church (maybe someone can identify?). Then there are a couple of roadside photos and finally another photo that someone else might be able to identify. There is a plaque that is only partially readable (by me anyway). It says "The \ Center of the United States. The best I can come up with is "Clockaphic" except that doesn't make any sense and is clearly wrong.











The entire collection that has been scanned and uploaded so far can be found here.

The Soviet Union Began as a Democratic Experiment in Socialism

When Bernie Sanders made his debut on the national stage in 2016, most Americans had never heard of democratic socialism (the idea that the government controls the means of production but we all get to vote). But in the four years following his loss to Hilary Clinton, it’s become a major topic for American politics. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) party has seen an explosion in membership and openly socialist politicians like Bernie and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez are occupying some of the highest positions in our government. The democratic socialism these politicians promote are radical ideas by traditional American standards, but they are far from new. They have been theories that were put into practice a century ago on the other side of the world in the now defunct Soviet Union. In Russian, Soviet means "council." In theory this system was going to create a voice for every member of the proletariat (working class) to be heard and guide their destiny by voting for their own representatives from their local areas to make their voices and choices recognized by the larger government. Factories and small villages were their own soviet group at the lowest and most local level. They chose and voted for representatives to serve in the larger town soviet. The town soviet would elect representatives from their group to serve in the regional soviet which then elected members for the provincial soviet. From there, members would be elected to the Soviet of Constituent Republic, which was the soviet in charge of the specific member country within the Soviet Union. That group would then send representatives to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. In the 1940s there was an estimated one million USSR citizens participating in the Soviet System. In theory, anyone could rise through the soviet system to one day be in the Supreme Soviet. On paper this was the ultimate system of representative government serving its citizens. The small local soviets would make a list of what they wanted from the larger government and that list would move up the food chain. And if the soviet didn’t think their representative was doing a good job, they had the power to recall him and send someone else. Soviets practically had complete autonomy over their jurisdictions, in theory. They could utilize any resources from the larger government to their own liking. They could also govern themselves at a local level. The only catch was that their choices could not conflict with the interests of the nation. While this system of government sounds very nice, the truth was that the Supreme Soviet would rarely meet and when they were not in session they abdicated their power to the Presidium of the Soviet Union. This body was like all three branches of the US government rolled into one. The Soviet Union was a state with only one legal political party, the Communists. At the head of the party from the early 1920s through the 1950s the top man in that party was Joseph Stalin (1878-1953). During his first years in the office, he consolidated his power, outmaneuvered rivals, and eventually became arguably the most repressive dictator of the 20th century. As head of the party, Stalin’s interests were the national interests. As such, anyone who went against him was, in a sense, going against the national interest—which meant they could expect to find themselves, and perhaps their families, tortured and shot. The enforcers of the national interest was the NKVD, better known as the secret police. These were spy plants in the society keeping an eye out for anyone who could be a remote threat to the will of the party’s leader. You know, like anyone with relatives living abroad or the ability to speak more than one language. And to keep everyone in line even further there were mandatory purges at all levels of government and society with quotas. Citizens were executed, punished, and exiled not because they committed crimes but instead because the upper leadership wanted 20,000 “anti-revolutionaries” punished in a random city and to please the national bosses the regional bosses would give them 25,000. Life under Stalin in the great Democratic Communist USSR was pure terror. When we look back on the 20th century we tend to think of Adolf Hitler as the most-evil man of his day. An estimated 14 million people were killed by his direct actions. Stalin has him beat with an estimated 20 million. If any members of the Democratic Socialists Party of America have read any of this article, then they’re most likely going to instantly dismiss it as a hit job on their cause. They’ll protest that communism is not the same as socialism. While that’s technically true, the differences between the two are not apples and oranges; they’re Cortland and Winesap apples. Socialism is when the community controls the means of production. Communism is when the community controls the means of production and consumption. But command control of production cannot co-exist with market control of consumption without the result being shortages. The inevitable result, as seen in many other countries where this system is tried, will be that “the community” will take control of consumption. And unfortunately, no one person or group is smart enough, wise enough, or capable to micromanage a society. Some theories sound great but when put into practice they get proven to be wrong. With so many historic examples documenting the failures of communism and socialism it’s baffling that so many people in America seem to want to give it a try. In our modern age of information it’s very easy for us—and very important—to examine the past mistakes of others so that we don’t repeat them.
Daniel Kowalski
Daniel Kowalski is an American businessman with interests in the USA and developing markets of Africa.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Tuesday, April 21, 2020

Crash (March 1984)

Crash (March 1984)

It seems that in the U.K., every 8-bit computer had a gaming magazine dedicated to it. Crash was dedicated to the ZX Spectrum, one of the most popular 8-bit computers in the U.K. Crash was published from 1984 all the way until 1992. The second issue from March 1984 includes:

Features

  • Below Us The Shadow, Above Us Stars - Profile on Starzone and on Steven Turner.
  • Flying High! - We look at computer retail outlets in this, the first of an occasional series, the CRASH team checks out W.H. Smith.

Articles

  • Pardon Me, I'll Say That Again - Franco Frey interfaces with the Currah Microspeach unit.
  • Learning At Play - We begin an occasional look at educational software and some reviews.

Regulars

  • Editorial & Your Letters - Plus Advertisers Index and Reviews.
  • News Input - A brief roundup for the month.
  • Run It Again - In our second comparison we Roll Out The Barrel and take a look at Kong games.
  • The Terminal Man - Comic Strip excitement as shipwrecked Arcadians discover the true identity of Gross.

D.I.Y.

  • Fantasy/Crash Super Quiz
  • Crash Hotline Charts - The phones have been buzzing! This month we publish Britain's first ever top selling software chart compiled from votes.
  • Crash Quiz - Test your knowledge of Adventure games.

Guide

  • Froggy - Pick of the month from among the established games that are available.
  • Spectrum Software Guide - Pages and pages reviewing both old and new games.

Reviews

  • Reviews In This Issue - Include games from Ultimate, Imagine, Silversoft, Mikrogen, Rabbit, Microsphere, Software Projects, Micromega, C.D.S. and many, many others.

...and more!

Friday, April 17, 2020

MEGA (December 1992)



MEGA (December 1992)

MEGA was a Mega Drive (or Sega Genesis as is called in the U.S.) specific magazine published in the U.K. I've often wondered how they chose what system name goes with what country. These days system names seem to be universal but that wasn't always the case. Anyway, the December 1993 issue of MEGA includes:

  • Mega City - So when is the Mega CD really going to be released? We've got the facts. We've also got all the latest game news from Japan, the USA and around Europe as well as all the news, stories, scandals and gossip from the Sega world. Mega City is hotter than a rhino sprinting in a wet suit. Plus! More Qs in the News, "Bull" Durham and Voyage to the Bowels of the Back Catalog.

  • Charts - What goes up, must come down: any pole-vaulter could tell you that. But to work out which are the climbers and which are the plummeters takes more than a lycra jock-strap and a length of whittled plank - it takes the MEGA charts.

  • So Who Exactly Is Jimmy? - Sega re planning to spend 12 million (of what used to be your money - it's strange, but that always makes the sums involved seem so much larger) keeping Jimmy alive in 1992. So who is he? Where di he come from? And does he really prefer playing Game Gear to "getting saucy" with his girlfriend? Neil West totally fails to track down the guy with the cybor-razor cut, so instead talks to the people who perhaps know Jimmy best.

  • So When Did You Get Yours? - The Mega Drive has only been with us for 25 months - but with an estimated one million Mega Drives in the UK by Christmas, we've all witnessed the "console explosion." But which games were released when? And how did it all happen? We get all nostalgic and almost start blubbing (almost).

  • Competition! - John Madden '93 is in town, and to celebrate the fact, EASN are spending some serious dosh on you lot. We've got a complete Satellite TV and video system up for grabs (essential for following American Football on BSkyB)...

  • Previews - This month we preview Mic and Mac (Global Gladiators), Terminator 2, WWF, Gods (and we''ll tell you the real story), Andre Agassi's Tennis and Universal Soldier - to name just five. PLUS! Your complete and comprehensive guide to EVERY Mega Drive release planned for the future.

  • Reviewed This Month
    • John Madden '93
    • Joe Montana 3
    • Bio-Hazard Battle
    • Batman Returns
    • Corporation
    • Lotus Turbo Challenge
    • World of Illusion
    • King Salmon
    • James Bond
    • Wonderdog
    • World Class Leaderboard
    • Wheel of Fortune
    • Home Alone
    • RBI Baseball 4

  • Mega Play - Paul Mellerick (or MEGA Mellerick as a few of our more "creative" or, erm, "gormless" readers have chosen to address him) is the man with the terrific tips and the dirty cheats. If you're stuck in a game, this is the place to try first.

  • Rip 'N' Tip - Sonic 2 busted! OK, so the game may have been in the shops for only a few days... but if you want any help cracking it, this is your essential Rip 'N' Tip six-page guide to success. PLUS! How do you turn Sonic into Super Sonic? All is revealed...

  • Mega Medic - You got a gaming problem that's been getting you down? Having trouble killing the final boss on Tommy Cooper's Attack Force Nine-Iron (or whatever)? Then the Mega Medic could be the answer to your prayers...

  • Arena - Hidden levels, secret endings, wacky challenges, it's all here. Come with MEGA as we boldly go where no playing tips have gone before...

  • Top 100 (Co-Starring Reader Ads and Past Masters) - Yes, the all-time Mega Drive Top 100 games return, but with some shockingly useful additions. Reader ads point you in the direction of that second-hand cart you've always promised yourself, while Past Masters re-reviews some of the best games from the last two years.

  • Subs and Back Issues - Fancy a FREE Japanese animated video? Then subscribe to MEGA - Britain's best-selling, super soaraway Mega Drive mag (well, we would say that wouldn't we?). PLUS! Your chance to buy back issues of MEGA. Bargains ahoy!

  • Purchase - The pick of Mega Drive add-ons and accessories (all recommended by our humble selves) offered to you, the reader, at a discounted price.

  • Hot Slots - FACT: A large percentage of Mega Drive games are coin-op conversions. EXCUSE FOR PAUL TO TAKE A DAY OFF: A feature on the coin-ops that may appear on your Mega Drive.

  • Mega Mouth - Your letters, and Neil's answers. Potentially a lethal combination. You've been warned.

  • Shut Down - Your chance to win a coin-op (courtesy of Domark) and a quick run down of all you can expect in next month's edition of MEGA.

...and more!

Thursday, April 16, 2020

Vintage Photos - Oestreicher (669-672)


See the previous post in this series here.

I had the opportunity to pick up a huge batch of slides a while back. These are pictures span from as early as the late 1940s to as late as the early 1990s (maybe earlier and/or later but these are what I have sampled so far). These came to me second (third?) hand but the original source was a combination of estate sales and Goodwill. There are several thousand...maybe as many as 10,000. I will be scanning some from time to time and posting them here for posterity.

Apparently, getting your pictures processed as slides used to be a fairly common thing but it was a phenomenon I missed out on. However, my Grandfather had a few dozen slides (circa late 1950s) that I acquired after he died. That along with having some negatives I wanted to scan is what prompted me to buy a somewhat decent flatbed scanner that could handle slides and negatives, an Epson V600. It can scan up to four slides at a time with various post-processing options and does a decent enough job.

This set continues a rather large batch of slides that originally came from an estate sale and appear to have belonged to a locally well known photographer (or perhaps a close family member) from the Spokane Washington area and later Northern Idaho named Leo Oestreicher. He was known for his portrait and landscape photography and especially for post cards. His career started in the 1930s and he died in 1990. These slides contain a lot of landscape and portrait photos but also a lot of photos from day to day life and various vacations around the world. Here's an article on him from 1997 which is the only info I have found on him: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/1997/jan/04/photos-of-a-lifetime-museum-acquisition-of-leo/

Many of these slides had the date they were processed (presumably) stamped or printed on them. I've found that in cases where I could verify the date, either because a more specific date was hand written or there was something to specifically date the photo in the photo itself, that this date has typically been the same month the photos were taken. In other words, I expect that in MOST cases these photos were taken relatively near the processing date. No doubt there are some exceptions.

Click on one of the images or the link below to also see versions processed with color restoration and Digital ICE which is a hardware based dust and scratch remover, a feature of the Epson V600 scanner I am using. There are also versions processed with the simpler dust removal option along with color restoration.

None of the photos in this set are labeled or dated. All are pictures of buildings including what looks to be a warehouse under construction. I suspect this particular batch dates to the 1970s because the building in the last photo has the United Technologies name and logo. This company was known as United Aircraft before 1975. The cars I see in the second photo would seem to back that up.













The entire collection that has been scanned and uploaded so far can be found here.

The COVID-19 Crisis Is the Result of Decades of FDA Misrule



The COVID-19 pandemic is exposing how the US Food and Drug Administration puts Americans at increased risk of sickness and death. Decades of killing medical innovation and forcing industries offshore made this inevitable. Rightfully, many are questioning how things got this bad. As political stock rises in calls for change in Washington, Americans must watch out for any false debate that merely aims at rearranging deck chairs.
The real debate should be over how best to downsize or abolish the FDA, which contributed greatly to the vulnerable state in which America now finds itself. The FDA is one of those many creatures of Congress that effectively wields legislative, executive, and judicial power, with almost no real accountability. It has grown mightily since its inception in 1906. Yet, thanks largely to its treatment in the media, many Americans have never imagined how the country might benefit from doing away with the bureaucracy. That may change now. The FDA’s most public failure is its most recent, the blocking of any private production of coronavirus test kits during the initial outbreak. How many Americans will pay the ultimate price for this policy remains to be seen.
It wasn’t until March 16, over two weeks after the first American diagnosed with coronavirus died, that the FDA allowed private labs to have their testing kits approved by state agencies. By that time, about 5,145 people in the US had been infected, and at least 91 died. Sadly, the only test kits available before then were produced by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They didn’t work, but luckily for the CDC, government agencies are never held to the same standard the private sector is. Intrepid journalist James Bovard has documented for decades the FDA’s fatal flaws that pushed much of the American healthcare sector to foreign countries or out of business entirely. He traces this back to at least 1990, when Dr. David Kessler was made commissioner. As enforcer, Kessler employed tactics familiar in communist countries. His top enforcer of the Drug Surveillance Branch was quoted in a Washington University scholarly paper, saying,
The old way is over. We used to say that if a company made certain changes, then we would probably not take any action. Now, we won't. Now, even if they make the changes, they might end up in court. We want to say to these companies that you don't know when or how we'll strike. We want to eliminate predictability.
Bovard notes the medical device industry was hit hard by Kessler’s FDA, citing an American Electronics Association survey that showed "40% [of medical device companies] reduced the number of U.S. employees because of FDA delays, 29% increased their investment in foreign operations, and 22% moved U.S. jobs overseas." Securing those foreign-produced devices for Americans has not been easy. Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk took it upon himself to have around 1,000 respirators flown into Los Angeles from overseas, but their delivery was held up by the FDA. Despite the FDA’s best efforts, there are still incredibly productive companies making medical devices in America. The San Francisco-based company Nurx, Inc. announced a $181 coronavirus home test and a plan to send out 10,000 of them just four days after the FDA lifted some of its restrictions on private tests. However, Nurx was forced to cancel its product release, because the FDA so far refuses to curtail its restrictions on home tests. The lack of test kits are only half the story of America’s prolonged struggle with COVID-19. The other half is the over-regulation of medical treatments and medicines, which also dates back to at least the 1990s under Kessler.
Kessler ordered that approved drugs should only ever be used for their original purpose. Even if the approved drug was found to cure or treat another ailment, the manufacturers were prohibited from informing doctors of the fact. It should be clear now why the mainstream media so reflexively maligned President Donald Trump for suggesting the anti-malaria medicine hydroxychloroquine could be used to treat coronavirus. The media has a long history of cheerleading for increased government intervention or simply running cover for the regulators. Take for instance this March 31 Bloomberg article with the headline: “Coronavirus Forces Cancer Trial Changes Patients Long Sought.” You have to read nine paragraphs before learning the FDA eased up on its clinical trial regulations. Is that what the headline suggests? “Coronavirus forces regulators to cut their own red tape to save face.” That’s the real narrative of the whole government response to coronavirus. Reporters aren't lazy. Telling the truth would be easier than lying.
The failures of the regulatory bodies and the media are piling up, but Americans may still recoil at the thought of outright ending the FDA. Any political leader who cares at all for public health must, at the very least, call for a drastic downsizing of the runaway bureaucracy. The types of prohibitive powers that the FDA exercises were once thought to require a constitutional amendment. Alcohol prohibition, after all, wasn’t instituted by a simple act of Congress, but instead was enacted through the Eighteenth Amendment. Shortly after the failure and repeal of alcohol prohibition, there was a dangerous shift in how Congress interpreted its powers under Article I Section 8 of the Constitution. The FDA might be the most egregious example of the consequences of this disastrous turn in history. The Congress cynically touted the Commerce Clause as a mandate to legislate beyond their limited, enumerated powers. As a result, the original purpose of the Commerce Clause, to ensure free trade between the states, was flipped into an unlimited power to prohibit commerce. This is how the FDA grew into its current monstrous form. In order to overcome the coronavirus crisis and to be fully prepared for the next public health episode, America must rid itself of the bureaucracy that has slowly choked out the greatest medical industry in the world. If Americans want to live in a truly free country, then there must be internal reform before any meaningful external reform. It begins with rolling back the FDA.
Gavin Wax
Gavin Wax is president of The New York Young Republican Club, an Associate Fellow at the London Center for Policy Research, and publisher of The Schpiel. His work has appeared in Townhall, The Daily Caller, The Hill, The Washington Examiner, The Federalist, Human Events, and Newsmax. He is a frequent guest on Fox News. You can follow him on Twitter @GavinWax
This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

ACE (December 1990)


ACE (December 1990)

Tuesday, April 14, 2020

Rambo (NES)



Rambo (NES)



Rambo was released by Acclaim for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1987. It is a side-scrolling action-adventure game that is loosely based on the plot of the movie Rambo: First Blood Part 2. Like the vast majority of games based on movies, this one isn't really all that great.



I say that this game is "loosely" based on the movie in part because there are an awful lot of bugs involved. A large portion of the game involves fighting spiders, insects and other forest creatures (and even flamingos). Eventually, you find a cache of weapons and do reach the P.O.W. camp but this is relatively late in the game. Until then...lots of bugs.



Rambo features a complex map and requires accurate navigation to get where you need to go. While this seems like a pretty good idea, in practice the game ends up being frustrating because figuring out who you need to talk to and where you need to go is difficult. Game play tends to become quite repetitive. While Rambo has a nice soundtrack and some good ideas, at the end of the day, it just isn't executed very well.



While there have been a variety of Rambo games for various systems over the years, this particular iteration is unique to the Nintendo. It has never been re-released and isn't likely to be so you'll have to track down an original or use emulation. I recommend the second option unless you are just a die-hard collector.

The review above is from the September 1988 issue of Electronic Game Player.

Vintage Photos - Oestreicher (665-668)


See the previous post in this series here.

I had the opportunity to pick up a huge batch of slides a while back. These are pictures span from as early as the late 1940s to as late as the early 1990s (maybe earlier and/or later but these are what I have sampled so far). These came to me second (third?) hand but the original source was a combination of estate sales and Goodwill. There are several thousand...maybe as many as 10,000. I will be scanning some from time to time and posting them here for posterity.

Apparently, getting your pictures processed as slides used to be a fairly common thing but it was a phenomenon I missed out on. However, my Grandfather had a few dozen slides (circa late 1950s) that I acquired after he died. That along with having some negatives I wanted to scan is what prompted me to buy a somewhat decent flatbed scanner that could handle slides and negatives, an Epson V600. It can scan up to four slides at a time with various post-processing options and does a decent enough job.

This set continues a rather large batch of slides that originally came from an estate sale and appear to have belonged to a locally well known photographer (or perhaps a close family member) from the Spokane Washington area and later Northern Idaho named Leo Oestreicher. He was known for his portrait and landscape photography and especially for post cards. His career started in the 1930s and he died in 1990. These slides contain a lot of landscape and portrait photos but also a lot of photos from day to day life and various vacations around the world. Here's an article on him from 1997 which is the only info I have found on him: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/1997/jan/04/photos-of-a-lifetime-museum-acquisition-of-leo/

Many of these slides had the date they were processed (presumably) stamped or printed on them. I've found that in cases where I could verify the date, either because a more specific date was hand written or there was something to specifically date the photo in the photo itself, that this date has typically been the same month the photos were taken. In other words, I expect that in MOST cases these photos were taken relatively near the processing date. No doubt there are some exceptions.

Click on one of the images or the link below to also see versions processed with color restoration and Digital ICE which is a hardware based dust and scratch remover, a feature of the Epson V600 scanner I am using. There are also versions processed with the simpler dust removal option along with color restoration.

The first and last slides in this set were taken at Ft. Rock in Oregon. The other two photos were also likely taken in Oregon but I don't know exactly where. The 2nd and 3rd photos also contain Leo Oestreicher, the presumed photographer of most of the slides I have been posting. They are not dated but were likely taken in the late 1950s or early 1960s.




Ft Rock


Us + Cart Wheels at Homestead


Leo + Juniper Tree at their old homestead


Ft Rock



The entire collection that has been scanned and uploaded so far can be found here.

MegaCon 2009: R2D2


R2-D2 wandering around at MegaCon 2009 in Orlando, Florida. These days hobbyists build far more realistic droids than were remotely possible when the original Star Wars movies were filmed.

https://dai.ly/x7t6nl1
https://lbry.tv/@Megalextoria:b/r2d2:2

MegaCon 2009: R2D2

Monday, April 13, 2020

Why Taiwan Hasn’t Shut Down Its Economy


As the Austrian school of economics demonstrates in the calculation theory of socialism, no central planning body has the capacity to organize society based on coercive mandates. The main reason is that the central planner is unable to obtain all the necessary information to organize society in this way, as information has subjective, creative, dispersed, and tacit qualities. This principle is fully applicable to the containment of a pandemic. Individual responsibility along with transparency of information are crucial to stopping a pandemic. Taiwan makes a very good case for how individualism and voluntary cooperation work effectively in resisting the coronavirus pandemic.
At the moment in Taiwan, the infection has been completely contained despite being one of the countries with the highest risk of suffering a pandemic, given that the Republic of China (ROC) is very close to the Chinese mainland (the People’s Republic of China (PRC)). Until January there were flights between Taiwan’s capital, Taipei, and the epicenter of Wuhan, China. However, as of March 21 there were only 153 infected at the same time that Europe, far away from the Chinese mainland, has more than ten thousand affected by the coronavirus. However, in Taiwan and other parts of Asia, including Singapore and Hong Kong, no massive mandatory quarantine or containment has been applied so far.

How did Taiwan achieve this?
The first cause of Taiwan's success is the transparency of information, which stopped the rapid growth of infection. The containment in Taiwan has been carried out with relatively high transparency. As early as December 31 of last year the Ministry of Health and Welfare of Taiwan began to take serious the potential danger of the Wuhan pneumonia, informing citizens every day about the developing trends of the infection and its status. The information provided by the Taiwanese authority also includes whether the infected in Taiwan contracted the illness from overseas input, which helps people take measures to protect themselves in a timely manner. In the constant press conferences, the Taiwanese government provides different options and recommendation that people can choose to adopt voluntarily but are not imposed coercively. The abundant information provided continuously has allowed individuals to make their own informed and balanced decisions under conditions of uncertainty. In contrast, the governments of the European Union countries reacted slowly and as late as February did not provide sufficient information about the potential pandemic, making the situation difficult to handle.
The type of quarantines established by the Taiwanese government are mostly self-quarantines. The Taiwanese government acknowledges that it is crucial to rely on people’s voluntary actions to resist the pandemic. As we have noted above, most cases of contagion in Taiwan come from outside and are almost always detected at the border.Taiwanese people’s voluntary self-protection is effectively suppressing the spread of the coronavirus in their country, and forced quarantines are usually for the most serious cases, for example, the infected Taiwanese evacuated from the Chinese mainland.

One of the problems with the coronavirus has been maintaining a balance between economic activity and containing the infection. In this regard, different from what the southern European countries such as Italy and Spain do, the Taiwanese government's policy is not to take preventive measures to stop the outbreak by impeding economic activities. Taking the schools as an example, the beginning of the course was delayed for two weeks at first. Currently schools' policy is to take students, teachers, and workers' temperaturesIf fevers are detected, classes in that school are suspended, but massive class suspensions do not occur. At the same time, online teaching is being encouraged, but is not being forced by the government. In many Taiwanese universities, online teaching is being promoted in order to let those who are not able to attend class in person to take courses. Although it is true that online education as a way to avoid infections has already been adopted in other countries, the peculiarity of Taiwan lies in the fact that it has not been imposed by government order. Not everyone is required to study online or telecommute, but there has been strong encouragement to do so. The government’s transparency of information has also given the Taiwanese enterprises the time they need to voluntarily prepare and adopt teleworking progressively. Other countries instead suddenly shut many businesses down through mandatory government orders, as Spain did on March 13, without giving enterprises and their workers time to prepare for quarantine.

The Taiwanese government is controlling the spread of the infection with flexible policies, which leave much room for individuals to take initiative and make their own decisions. Each individual can take the most appropriate measures for their own situation, having their own incentives to be cautious. Likewise, the fact that the Taiwanese citizens have been warned since the beginning of the infection has created a generalized awareness to make the necessary preparations and has given citizens enough time to assume that they must make changes in their lives in order to avoid being infected.

This flexibility in containment and transparency policies has led to a high degree of individual responsibility. Proof of this is not only in the population's tendency to wear masks that the Taiwanese population, which can be observed in any means of communication, but also in the adoption of new ways of continuing daily activities so as to avoid contagion. Private sectors have also taken quick actions to protect their clients. Most residential buildings have at least one ethyl alcohol dispenser so that everyone who enters can disinfect his or her hands. For example, ethyl alcohol has been available in Uber cars for several weeks.

To conclude, with transparency and diligence the Taiwanese government has avoided many problems. The key is that the Taiwanese government and the Taiwanese people understand that the individual's own responsibility and actions are essential to suppressing the coronavirus pandemic, not a mandatory massive shutdown. This is what the world needs to learn.

This article was reprinted from the Mises Institute. 



Javier Caramés Sanchez
Javier Caramés Sanchez is a PhD candidate in Chinese Literature at the National Taiwan University and a Spanish language teacher who lived in Taiwan for more than seven years. He received one master’s degree in Classical Philology at Salamanca University, Spain, and another one in Chinese Literature at National Taiwan University. He also taught courses at Tamkang University and National Taiwan University in Taiwan and at IE University in Spain.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Sunday, April 12, 2020

Amiga Power (January 1992)



Amiga Power (January 1992)

Amiga Power is an Amiga specific gaming magazine that was published in the U.K. in the early 1990s. The January 1992 issue includes:

  • True Stories - New games - Eye of the Beholder 2 and John Madden American Football amongst others - and loads more, including five Bug joysticks to win and all your 'favorite' regulars. Plus! We ask the burning question - what'll be the Christmas Number One?

  • The Charts - Going up, coming down and all that jazz - will Lotus 2 cruise straight into the top slot, or what?

  • Complete Control - Britain's favorite Amiga tips section really kicks into gear, with giant Blues Brothers maps, Cruise For a Corpse - the solution, and the complete Amiga Power guide to Rodland...

  • Games of the Year - Coups in Russia, civil war in Yugoslavia, Maggie 'graciously' bows out, and Amiga Power is born - that was 1991 for you. it was also a year when plenty of ground breaking new games were released - not to mention a whole host of stinkers. We pick through the rubble for our personal favorites...

  • Definition of Sound - Continuing our new series of Buyer's Guides. This month: football games, a field dominated by two small words...

  • Win! Five Remote Control Planes! - AP teams up with EA to bring you a Birds Of Prey compo - if we can keep our hands off the prizes, that is...

  • Do The Write Thing - Your letters, now a giant three pages long (special bonus size), and featuring Stuart N. Hardy's brother, Paul!

  • The Bottom Line - Bigger, better, brighter, more!

  • Second Opinion - Domark's John Kavanagh, the man behind MiG-29 and... STUN Runner!

  • Magic And Mystery Tour - A new age of FRP games is upon us. Eye of the Beholder showed the way, but the best - Beholder 2, Ultima VI - is just around the corner. Mark Ramshaw investigates.

  • Darlings! - The lovable computer whiz kids are still with us - and selling more games (and making more money!) than ever. What? You want games with puzzles and character - and at a cheap price? You don't care too much for fancy parallax scrolling - or scrolling at all, even - if decent gameplay is there? Then who you gonna call? (Code Masters!)

  • Games of the Month
    • Smash TV - Total Carnage - we love it! Well, we did in the arcades...
    • Birds of Prey - Blimey! 40 - r0! - birds in one game!
    • Battle Isle - Wargames get friendly (stranger things happen at sea...)
    • Celtic Legends - Hex-based strategy meets Chaos
    • Bonanza Bros - What, a Sega game with character?
    • Moonstone - It's a first! The innovative gore on/gore off option(!)
    • Oh No! More Lemmings! - The name says it all really...
    • Realms - And suddenly, out of the blue, Powermonger gets a rival...
    • Fuzzball - Furry, fun and - wow! - look at the speed blurs on that...!
    • Barbarian 2 - Or, gameplay-by-numbers if you're feeling cynical!
    • Knightmare - Captive Pt2 - but aimed at 8-year olds? We have our doubts...



...and more!

Friday, April 10, 2020

Vintage Photos - Oestreicher (661-664)


See the previous post in this series here.

I had the opportunity to pick up a huge batch of slides a while back. These are pictures span from as early as the late 1940s to as late as the early 1990s (maybe earlier and/or later but these are what I have sampled so far). These came to me second (third?) hand but the original source was a combination of estate sales and Goodwill. There are several thousand...maybe as many as 10,000. I will be scanning some from time to time and posting them here for posterity.

Apparently, getting your pictures processed as slides used to be a fairly common thing but it was a phenomenon I missed out on. However, my Grandfather had a few dozen slides (circa late 1950s) that I acquired after he died. That along with having some negatives I wanted to scan is what prompted me to buy a somewhat decent flatbed scanner that could handle slides and negatives, an Epson V600. It can scan up to four slides at a time with various post-processing options and does a decent enough job.

This set continues a rather large batch of slides that originally came from an estate sale and appear to have belonged to a locally well known photographer (or perhaps a close family member) from the Spokane Washington area and later Northern Idaho named Leo Oestreicher. He was known for his portrait and landscape photography and especially for post cards. His career started in the 1930s and he died in 1990. These slides contain a lot of landscape and portrait photos but also a lot of photos from day to day life and various vacations around the world. Here's an article on him from 1997 which is the only info I have found on him: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/1997/jan/04/photos-of-a-lifetime-museum-acquisition-of-leo/

Many of these slides had the date they were processed (presumably) stamped or printed on them. I've found that in cases where I could verify the date, either because a more specific date was hand written or there was something to specifically date the photo in the photo itself, that this date has typically been the same month the photos were taken. In other words, I expect that in MOST cases these photos were taken relatively near the processing date. No doubt there are some exceptions.

Click on one of the images or the link below to also see versions processed with color restoration and Digital ICE which is a hardware based dust and scratch remover, a feature of the Epson V600 scanner I am using. There are also versions processed with the simpler dust removal option along with color restoration.

None of the photos in this set are labeled or dated. The first is a landscape photo, the second is a distant shot of the Statue of Liberty and the last two are of people. These were likely taken in the late 1950s or early 1960s.






Statue of Liberty







The entire collection that has been scanned and uploaded so far can be found here.

Thursday, April 9, 2020

Big K (November 1984)

Big K (November 1984)

Big K was a computer gaming magazine published in the U.K. in the mid 1980s. It covered gaming on popular 8-bit computers of the time including the Commodore 64 and VIC-20. The November 1984 issue includes:

Games Programs

  • Turnpike Toad for Oric
  • Simon for Spectrum
  • Cavern Bomber for BBC
  • Maze of Gold for VIC-20

Utility Programs

  • Designer for Electron
  • SID for Commodore 64
  • Graf-Pac for BBC
  • Screen Poke Grid for CBM 64

Software Reviews

  • Pick of the Month and Review Pages

Toolkits/Hardware

  • Protector for Spectrum
  • The Trail of the Bounty Hunter
    • It's A Dog's Life
    • Strontium Dog: The Making of a Game
    • 2000 AD: Crucible for Superheroes

Features

  • Great Video Diseases/Collapseware
  • Robots on the Move
  • The Fall Guy
  • Hacking

Regulars

  • On-Line News
  • Zip Code
  • Classic Games
  • They Wrote One
  • Dorkslayer
  • Arcade Alley
  • Charts
  • Taylor-made Graphics
  • Letterbase

Competition

  • Win an Enterprise Computer

Wednesday, April 8, 2020

An Alternative to the Lockdown Strategy in the Fight Against Coronavirus



The current coronavirus strategy of most governments is a recipe for a worldwide economic disaster. In many countries, the strategy of confinement and forcing shops to close is a sure-fire path to large-scale business failures. The cascade of economic and financial repercussions to come is likely to lead to another Great Depression.
Italy, for example, already had a 135 percent debt-to-GDP ratio before the crisis. It is hard to imagine how it will be able to borrow more without a commitment from other European countries to jointly be responsible for more Italian debt—something the northern European countries are still strongly opposed to. The ECB is already printing money like crazy, and another Greece-like situation will make it ramp up the printing presses even more. We have been down this path many times before, where the cure is clearly much worse than the disease. The German hyperinflation of 1921-1923 created a resentful, impoverished middle class which ultimately led to Hitler’s rise to power.

The coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) that originated in China is highly contagious. More than 80 percent of the patients show only mild flu-like symptoms but for the remaining 20 percent, mostly the elderly or people with preexisting conditions, the virus can be life-threatening. To save lives short term, the entire population in Europe is currently being held under house arrest and many businesses have been put into a pre-liquidation state by no longer being able to realize a profit due to inactivity.

The current strategy is not to stop the virus in its tracks but to spread out the contagion so that the peak is a level that will be more manageable for the health care system. Governments took the biased advice of health care professionals without a real weighing of all the pros and cons. This prolongation in time, however, will come at a steep economic and human cost.
In the longer term, more lives will be lost if we continue this strategy. How many victims of financial ruin will end their own lives? In the modern era, for every one percent increase in the unemployment rate, there has typically been an increase of about one percent in the number of suicides. A study conducted by Brenner in 19791, found that for every 10 percent increase in the unemployment rate, mortality increased by 1.2 percent, cardiovascular disease by 1.7 percent, cirrhosis of the liver by 1.3 percent, suicides by 1.7%, arrests by 4 percent, and reported assaults by 0.8 percent (see here). How many lost lives out of 300 million in the USA does a 10 percent, 15 percent, 20 percent unemployment rate represent?

The use of the free market gives another strategy to control the spread of the coronavirus. For example, we now have strong evidence from trials in France and China that in 75 percent of the cases a combination of two extremely well-known antimalarial drugs (hydroxychloroquine in combination with the antibiotic azithromycin) can bring the viral load down to nearly zero after just six days (complications usually arrive after the 6th day). These drugs could make the latent effects of the Wuhan virus as mild for 20 percent as the other 80 percent, and they were recently cleared for use.

There are many other possible drug combinations that might offer similar results, but FDA and EMA regulations requiring long term testing make it much more difficult for these drugs to be available in time to treat the virus. Yet the world economy is at stake and we cannot sit and argue on the quality of the water while our house is burning down.

An obviously better solution than sinking the world economy into a great depression is a greater use of “laissez-faire.” The current lockdown strategy is a bleak choice of (allegedly) fewer short term deaths against a much larger long-term death toll. We must return to a business-as-normal situation as soon as possible. We need to free drugs from overbearing drug regulations and make them widely available (with appropriate dosages and warnings) everywhere at a market price without the need for a prescription. We need markets to be free so they can provide a wide choice of medications.
The argument is not for a non-strategy; it is for allowing the markets to define the strategy. For example, the elderly might consider taking chloroquine preventively; it has a long history of being taken to prevent malaria in Africa. It is naïve to think that people can’t inform themselves and take appropriate actions for their own health benefits.

It is also naïve to think that businesses and people won’t adapt to the perceived threat. Restaurants can seat patrons several meters apart. Waiters and cooks can wear masks and gloves. There is an infinite number of innovative ways people will adjust. Just because we cannot imagine a voluntary market solution does not mean one does not exist. South Korea is an example to emulate. Instead of an authoritarian locking down of its people, it took a much more libertarian approach to the problem and is already showing promising results.

This market-oriented strategy is obviously not without risks, but we must move away from the current defensive 16th-century bunker mentality and consider less disastrous economic alternatives.

1. Brenner, M. Harvey (1979). "Influence of the Social Environment on Psychology: The Historical Perspective". In Barrett, James E. (ed.). Stress and Mental Disorder. New York: Raven Press. ISBN 978-0-89004-384-4.

Frank Hollenbeck
Frank Hollenbeck is a financial consultant who worked for the State Department as senior economist, Caterpillar overseas as chief economist, and Director of Research at the Banque Eduard Constant in Geneva.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.