#affected programs at St. Clair

[inc-immigrationnewscanada]

St. Clair College Slashes 18 Programs Amid International Student Cap

St. Clair College in Ontario, Canada, has announced the suspension of 18 of its programs starting this fall due to new federal restrictions on international students. This decision marks a significant shift in the educational offerings of the institution as it adapts to a changing landscape shaped by immigration policies. Here, we explore the ramifications of these changes, the programs…

[phawareglobal]

Cam Wells - phaware® interview 457

Stroke survivor and journalist, Cam Wells, discusses his mission to change the way disability stories are portrayed in the media.

Cam also discusses his work in the disability community, including his involvement with the Italian Canadian HandiCapable Association, which provides sports and recreation opportunities for people with disabilities.

Cam believes that disabilities and rare conditions affect everyone in some way and advocates for inclusivity and respect. #RareDiseaseDay

My name is Cam Wells. I am a stroke survivor and I hold four diplomas from St. Clair College. After getting the first one, which is journalism, I came to realize there's a great imbalance in the way disability stories are typically portrayed in the media. Portrayed as either really bitter or really inspirational. You don't often see the middle ground. I figured after graduating, I could set myself the task of trying to change all that. I've been actually doing a show [Handi Link].  for 15 years now. As a person with a disability myself, I've come to appreciate that there are so many beautiful shades out there to be appreciated. I've actually been honored both locally and nationally. I'm a nominee for Canada's Disability Hall of Fame. God willing, I'll actually get it sometime. I've interviewed everyone from a cast member of TV's Breaking Bad to a couple from Corner Gas, but really the best stories are the ones that come totally out of the blue. Like during the opening of the pandemic, there's a quadriplegic pilot, a friend of mine who had lost I think it was his home and his vehicle to a fire. The health restrictions didn't allow people to do very much, but this town got together and they said, "We want to rebuild for this guy. He's part of our community." So they took it upon themselves and did what they could to help him out. I was your typical kid. I didn't know much about the world beyond just your typical kid. You go to school, you spend time with your friends and family. That was my world. September 29th, 1995, I was eating a can of frozen juice, I remember. I was at school having lunch and I thought I was having a brain freeze. Must've been the world's biggest brain freeze, because it resulted in a first round of neurosurgery and six days in a coma, which is I might add, the only time in my whole life I got enough sleep, but I couldn't move my left side. For 35 days, I was in the hospital and went through various rehab procedures only to find that part of the anomaly in my brain had been left behind. They couldn't get it. I had what was essentially an experimental procedure at that point. I was the youngest kid they had ever done it on at this hospital. It wasn't available where I was, so thanks to a long and tedious insurance battle, ultimately, we were able to get what was called gamma knife surgery and successfully remove the anomaly. I came back a different person. The truth is, I would not change it for anything. I basically discovered who and what I am spending time among people with disabilities and various rare conditions. In an academic sense, yeah, you can learn the medical model of this condition may be this or that, but you can't learn the strength factor. For every condition out there, there's always that one unaccountable person who's defied the odds. The best way of learning about such people, just spend time with them. Share a meal, share some time, tell them a bad joke, what have you. Probably the biggest moment for me was... and I’m not real proud of this, but I chose entirely the wrong program my first year of college, entirely the wrong thing. I figured because I was working in a job related to the field, I'd be good at the academic side. I was not. I actually found myself academically dismissed from the college. Through various acts of misunderstanding, I was basically forced out and spent an entire summer begging to get back in. But when I found myself doing the correct field of study, something I could do, a journalism scholarship was granted to me by a disability group that I now work for. That's where I met Egidio Novelletto, a man who was advocating for his people. I grew more and more fascinated by the work they were doing, and I started writing articles on the subject and even did a field placement doing public relations materials for them. I realized that so many stories are just not shared. You look at a traditional sports page and you'll see some great athletics, but every night of the week, there's disabilities athletics. There's people who medically complex. They're out there doing it. They're putting on a great show, playing a great game, but where is the representation of that? Now, it was a long gap between my years in elementary school, which I was in when I had the stroke and my years in college, but the funny thing is the reporter who did the story on the experimental surgery I alluded to was actually later one of my professors. As a graduation gift, I gave her what may be the only surviving copy of that footage. I became more and more fascinated by the world of disabilities, and since I was doing PR for them, I wasn't able to do anything with the radio station at the time, but the program director, she left the door open. She basically said, "If ever you want to do anything, come and pitch a show for us." Basically upon graduating, I went to them and I said, "Hey, can I do something on disability issues?" Well, the rest is history. However, I realized that there were others involved in similarly interested stuff. I actually worked with a team in 2013 to release a guide for radio stations on accessibility. Some of the things people don't think about like adapting your physical space, or some of the language you use. Even things as simple as the lighting for people with seizure disorder. I'm coming to realize that I wasn't the only person who actually wanted to see the best in people, wanting to see them living up to their own strengths. It was really an eye-opening experience. One thing I always have maintained, when a person with a disability gets up and they make toast, that is not inspirational per se. That is called breakfast. That is a very human thing. But really people with disabilities, they do what they do just to live the best life they can. That is the principal reason behind my work. As a trained reporter, I love a good story. I love hearing tales of what society doesn't think is possible. I thrive on that. But yeah, in a way, owning it for myself is part of the process. One thing that I've shared any number of times, I had a childhood bully, horrible, horrible experience, I might add. He used to try and stick magnets to my leg to see if it was real, and as I do the show sometimes when I'm interviewing somebody working with younger kids, I think to myself, "I don't want anyone to have those feelings that I experienced in my own youth. I don't want anyone to ever ask the question, am I good enough?" Knowing that you're rare, knowing that you're unique is a way of owning it. I have a friend, Daniel Brenner, great, great guy. He's actually a robbery survivor. He was shot as a child and witnessed several people in his family being essentially murdered in front of him. He was told he'd never walk again, but he picked up a guitar and he used a form of self-healing. He actually gets by just fine now. In fact, I have another friend named Renee who runs a music studio, and she was looking for a teacher, so I introduced them and now they're working together. One of my primary roles in the disability community is working for the Italian Canadian HandiCapable Association, which is an organization that does sports and recreation for persons with disabilities. It's my honor to work alongside them as they provide things like yoga, tae kwon do, soccer, all manner of things for people with disabilities who might not necessarily have any other athletic opportunity. Fact is, when you're out there and you're an athlete with a disability or anything medically complex, you're not thinking about the factors that might hold you down. You're not thinking about somebody telling you you're not good enough or you'll never do that. You're just living in the moment and enjoying the game. The ICHA was founded by a man named Egidio Novelletto, whose son wasn't allowed to participate in a traditional soccer program, which was a very eye-opening experience for him. He decided to found a charity, and working with various levels of government, he was able to build a complex and establish something meaningful for persons with disabilities to be a part of. Normally, that's where it comes from. Having somebody personally connected, it's usually the gateway. Truth is, when it comes to disabilities, rare conditions, they affect us all. There's a term I heard in my work once, not disabled yet, meaning we prepare terms of respect and inclusion. We're only making our own futures better in so much as we're all affected. If you pass 10 people in the street, somebody's got some factor that makes them unique. Somebody has a mental health concern or an emotional disability, or maybe somebody in a wheelchair. One of my primary sources of information is NORD, the National Organization for Rare Disorders. I consult them on an almost weekly basis to reach out to disability and rare disease groups around the world. My thinking is if it's affecting one person here, it's affecting others out there. I figure it's a universal concept, or rather a series of universal concepts. Yeah, you can solve the problem for yourself at home. That's great, but if others around the world don't have the same access to medical information or don't have the same resources or even wherewithal to ask those questions... A few years ago, I actually interviewed an accessible theater in China and I might add I had a very difficult time placing that call due to various satellite connections, but they actually have this great thing where they have a sign language interpreter in stage productions. However, they're an acknowledged character. They're part of the show. Are they providing a service for the audience? Sure they are, but they're actually included. It's shown me what the world really is, if that makes any sense. I've met people and learned things I never would have otherwise. Honestly, one of the greatest people I ever knew, Dr. Marcia Rioux, she was the head of Disability Rights Promotion International, God rest her soul. She introduced me actually to one of the UN Representatives who was involved in writing some of the disability legislation that has now been embraced pretty much the world over. The work I do, there is no end, honestly. It's a stepping stone, but it's incumbent on everyone to try and take that step forward. I always say on the air, it's not about an immediate cure, but it's about the work towards getting there and disability, rare conditions, they affect us all. Maybe you're not the one affected directly. Maybe you're friends with a caregiver, or maybe you just happen to have a friend of a friend. It's the degrees of separation. You can't look at any family. You can't go back all the way or as far back as humanly possible and not find some factor that makes a person unique or rare. As we go, we gain understanding. Look at things like chronic fatigue syndrome. That's a big one. 20 years ago, doctors would argue, "No, that's not a thing. You're just getting old. Just go home, get some sleep. These days, we look at it and we recognize this is a condition. It's about taking the next step forward. It's not about listening to anyone who says, "There is this glass ceiling. This is as far as you can go." Progress is built on the idea that a person will test it for themselves. I had a professor once, a lady I actually have a lot of respect for now who told me it was physically impossible for me to pass some speed drills in my college days, because I only type with one finger. My exact response, "Watch me." And I got through it. There's one story I would like to share as a shout-out to some of the people that I've had the pleasure of meeting over the years. You never know who's going to be connected to who, so keeping an open mind and supporting others. 27 years prior to this, I remember there was a cartoon I loved watching. After the stroke, it was part of my rehab. It was my one half-hour during the week that I didn't have to think about the rehab or the pain. An organization I worked with provided some promotion for Easterseals. They happened to have two of the voice actors from that show speaking at an event in Windsor. So I called in a favor, got photos with them, autographs, and just got to share a little bit of their story. After all those years, I was able to say, "Your show saved my life, so thank you for that." It was actually the 90s X-Men. I was a bit of a comic enthusiast. I actually got to meet Gambit and Rogue, nicest people in the world. They were so kind to me, I cannot stress that enough. But the fact that I had a chance to actually tell them what their work had meant to me. It's important in any condition, any rare disease, just to acknowledge when somebody is there, when somebody does some good. Yeah, there's a lot of hardships people have to endure, but there's always support and if you find the right people and you show them that you appreciate what they do, it just stays with them. My name is Cam Wells and I'm aware that I'm rare.

@RareDiseases @DRPI_global @EasterSeals @CJAMFM 

Learn more about pulmonary hypertension trials at www.phaware.global/clinicaltrials. Follow us on social @phaware Engage for a cure: www.phaware.global/donate #phaware Share your story: info@phaware.com 

Listen and View more on the official phaware™ podcast site

[liss-99]

From the Romantic Prompt list if you're still doing them! #468 for Hyacinth/Gareth and #488 for Polin!

These romantic prompts have me so soft :) here are some little drabbles for these! From this list!!

#468 For Hyacinth/Gareth

As the youngest of 8 siblings, Hyacinth Bridgerton was perhaps the wittiest and wiliest girl around. She knew how to get what she wanted and she also knew how to keep people on their toes, especially young men who had affection for her. Not only did she have seven protective older brothers and sisters, but she also would not allow anyone to toy with her. When she met Gareth St. Clair however, things were different.

He was just as witty and wily as she was and his seeming desire to always do better than her in their philosophy course drove her insane. Gareth was tall and sat directly in front of her in the lecture hall, often choosing that seat over the many other open ones. At first, it annoyed her, but then, whenever he'd turn around and ask her opinion during a discussion, she'd find a little piece of her giving herself over to him. They became friends, both in real life and on social media. She hated how much she checked his profile, how often she stared at his profile picture and admired him holding a dog. She hated how this man made her feel like she was a girl of 15 with a little crush. And yet, their banter and discussions were one of her favorite things.

"You really think fate exists?" he asked as he twisted around one day.

Hyacinth scoffed and rolled her eyes.

"Of course fate exists," she replied.

"Okay but what about free will? Do we not have the ability to decide our own fates?"

"Well, yes, I suppose, but fate is a part of that. Like when you use free will to decide something, the consequences of that are fate."

Gareth smirked at her mischievously.

"So, if I asked you on a date, would that be fate or free will?"

Hyacinth stared at him, her mouth agape, unsure whether he was serious.

"A date? Between me and you?"

"Yeah. Friday night. You gonna decide or let fate do it?"

She twisted her lips into a smile and thought about how she could take back the upper hand from him.

"If I go on a date with you, will you bring the dog from your profile picture?"

"Seems like you're more interested in my dog?" Gareth winked. "But sure, yeah, if you freely and willingly decide to go on a date with me, I'll bring Winston."

"Okay," Hyacinth smiled, genuine and sincere, "You, me, and Winston. Friday night."

Months later, when they were admittedly in love with each other, they still fought over whether it was because of fate or free will.

~

#488 for Polin

It just happened one night, there was a change in the air and suddenly her lips were on his. They'd been hanging out, watching a movie, when all of a sudden, Penelope just knew she had to kiss Colin. She turned her head to face him and admired the way the tv was glowing in his eyes, how his small smile was indicative of what he thought of the program, and how his face was stubbly. Gently, she'd placed a hand on his cheek and turned his face to hers, and before losing all her confidence, she kissed him. At first, he didn't respond, but after a couple of seconds, she felt his hands in her hair and his mouth engaging in the kiss just as much as she was.

It was the most wonderful feeling she'd ever experienced, sitting there on the floor of her flat, kissing Colin Bridgerton like there was no end in sight. All of a sudden, he pulled back. He looked as if he wanted to say something, but he simply licked his lips and then rushed out.

Penelope sat frozen on the floor, feeling as though the world was collapsing underneath her. She had kissed Colin, and he had kissed her back, but then he'd run out. There were few things Penelope feared more than losing her friendship with him. She wasn't sure how much time had passed when she heard the knock on her door.

When she opened it, Colin was standing there, drenched from the rain that was pouring outside.

"Hi," he said.

"Hi," she replied.

"You kissed me."

"You kissed me back."

"And I'm not here to apologize."

Then in a matter of seconds, she was pinned up against the door with his lips on hers.

"I've wanted to do this for a long time," he said in between kisses. "I just got so damn scared when you actually kissed me."

Penelope smiled, loving that she had that effect on him.

"I was scared too, but I'm so glad I did it," she replied.

"I'm glad you did too," he smiled before capturing her lips once again.

And then there wasn't very much talking for the rest of the night...

Bridgerton Drabbles

[cry-witch]

Have you written a back story for your DWD OCs? They look really cool :0 Also you're art slaps dude

Thank you so much!!! And yes!! I have their backstory, here it is!      All the characters exist in the universe of the animated series "Darkwing Duck". These girls live in St. Canard and go to a regular school. All girls are members of the video games club in their school, where they like to hanging out together. However, this is not the main reason that united them. Who’d have thought that their carefree life would grow into something extremely dangerous, like time leaps, changing of the past and future, time loops, alternative universes, interaction and confrontation with dangerous criminals, and etc. but in fact, all this started with a noble desire to fix everything and save everyone. I’ll tell you about each of them in more detail from left to right: Brooklyn has a really rich family because her mother is official and her father owns Whiffle boy company. That's right, that the same one which kicked Quackerjack out the business. Brooklyn wants to continue this business in the future, but it's getting harder due to hater, which blows offices and does some kind of thing. She is extremely hot-tempered, rude and serious. However, Brooklyn is the creator of the video games club, and ofcourse, whiffle boy is payed with attention, Despite her rude nature, she has an addiction to care about someone. That's proved by her tamagotchi existence, which she really love to take care of. In the story she is also falling in love with one of the members of the club. Lera is a flamingo, who moved to Saint-Canard thanks to exchange program. She is an artist, who really likes to draw a lot. Lera lives with Claire (yep, quackerjack's ex-girlfriend), because Claire has a good relationship with Lera's mother. But this flamingo girl has dark secrets. Once Brooklyn invited Lera to her Whiffle boy 15 years anniversary party. Everyone on this party, including lera, have died because of the building explosion. Lera woke up and realised, that she got back in time by some hours ago, and it's not too late to predict everybody's death. That wil be the beginning for irreparable consequences and constant leaps in time. Every time Lera dies, she gets back in time for several hours. Her memories are saved, but her health getting worse with every time leap. She is really nervous and stressful person, who tends to panic. Rachel is a charismatic, self-confident person with a good sense of humor. She is addicted to alcohol and drugs. Extreme and memorable sensations - this is all about her. Besides video games, she is interested in theater art. Her parents are divorced. Mother took away the youngest sister and left Rachel with her dad. She has affection for Savannah, another member of club, who reminds Rachel her sister. Rachel also interested in magic, she is really superstitious. Savannah is a Quiet, shy mouse with great knowledge in physics. While of her studying she loved to play video games. But one day everything have changed. Her dad worked in Quackerjack's factory, and then it gone awry, her family became poor. Her brother drug addicted, her mother requires a good marks from daughter, father beats her. Savannah doesn't like to be with her family. However, she wasn't invited to the anniversary party, so she hasn't died. She joins the club later. The main antagonists in this story are the fearsome five. Because of noble desire to fix everything and save everyone girls were ruining criminal plans. The first reason to rewind time was the building explosion. It is not hard to get that Quackerjack was the one who blowed it because of Whiffle boy anniversary. Second reason was the Savannah mother's death in the store. Megavolt had electrocuted her while his robbing and e.t.c. till it gets to the Negaduck. He won't endure this, so the fearsome five will search for these "heroes" to exterminate them once and for all. Thanks to Lera's time rewind power, they will escape from deaths not for once. When fearsome five will know about their power, Negaduck would like to take this power. Soon, only Negaduck will be interested in this process.   

[technato]

Carnegie Mellon is Saving Old Software from Oblivion

A prototype archiving system called Olive lets vintage code run on today’s computers

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Illustration: Nicholas Little

In early 2010, Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff published an analysis of economic data from many countries and concluded that when debt levels exceed 90 percent of gross national product, a nation’s economic growth is threatened. With debt that high, expect growth to become negative, they argued.

This analysis was done shortly after the 2008 recession, so it had enormous relevance to policymakers, many of whom were promoting high levels of debt spending in the interest of stimulating their nations’ economies. At the same time, conservative politicians, such as Olli Rehn, then an EU commissioner, and U.S. congressman Paul Ryan, used Reinhart and Rogoff’s findings to argue for fiscal austerity.

Three years later, Thomas Herndon, a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts, discovered an error in the Excel spreadsheet that Reinhart and Rogoff had used to make their calculations. The significance of the blunder was enormous: When the analysis was done properly, Herndon showed, debt levels in excess of 90 percent were associated with average growth of positive 2.2 percent, not the negative 0.1 percent that Reinhart and Rogoff had found.

Herndon could easily test the Harvard economists’ conclusions because the software that they had used to calculate their results—Microsoft Excel—was readily available. But what about much older findings for which the software originally used is hard to come by?

You might think that the solution—preserving the relevant software for future researchers to use—should be no big deal. After all, software is nothing more than a bunch of files, and those files are easy enough to store on a hard drive or on tape in digital format. For some software at least, the all-important source code could even be duplicated on paper, avoiding the possibility that whatever digital medium it’s written to could become obsolete.

Saving old programs in this way is done routinely, even for decades-old software. You can find online, for example, a full program listing for the Apollo Guidance Computer—code that took astronauts to the moon during the 1960s. It was transcribed from a paper copy and uploaded to GitHub in 2016.

While perusing such vintage source code might delight hard-core programmers, most people aren’t interested in such things. What they want to do is use the software. But keeping software in ready-to-run form over long periods of time is enormously difficult, because to be able to run most old code, you need both an old computer and an old operating system.

You might have faced this challenge yourself, perhaps while trying to play a computer game from your youth. But being unable to run an old program can have much more serious repercussions, particularly for scientific and technical research.

Along with economists, many other researchers, including physicists, chemists, biologists, and engineers, routinely use software to slice and dice their data and visualize the results of their analyses. They simulate phenomena with computer models that are written in a variety of programming languages and that use a wide range of supporting software libraries and reference data sets. Such investigations and the software on which they are based are central to the discovery and reporting of new research results.

Imagine that you’re an investigator and want to check calculations done by another researcher 25 years ago. Would the relevant software still be around? The company that made it may have disappeared. Even if a contemporary version of the software exists, will it still accept the format of the original data? Will the calculations be identical in every respect—for example, in the handling of rounding errors—to those obtained using a computer of a generation ago? Probably not.

Researchers’ growing dependence on computers and the difficulty they encounter when attempting to run old software are hampering their ability to check published results. The problem of obsolescent software is thus eroding the very premise of reproducibility—which is, after all, the bedrock of science.

The issue also affects matters that could be subject to litigation. Suppose, for example, that an engineer’s calculations show that a building design is robust, but the roof of that building nevertheless collapses. Did the engineer make a mistake, or was the software used for the calculations faulty? It would be hard to know years later if the software could no longer be run.

That’s why my colleagues and I at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, have been developing ways to archive programs in forms that can be run easily today and into the future. My fellow computer scientists Benjamin Gilbert and Jan Harkes did most of the required coding. But the collaboration has also involved software archivist Daniel Ryan and librarians Gloriana St. Clair, Erika Linke, and Keith Webster, who naturally have a keen interest in properly preserving this slice of modern culture.

Bringing Back Yesterday’s Software

The Olive system has been used to create 17 different virtual machines that run a variety of old software, some serious, some just for fun. Here are several views from those archived applications

1/8

NCSA Mosaic 1.0, a pioneering Web browser for the Macintosh from 1993.

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Chaste (Cancer, Heart and Soft Tissue Environment) 3.1 for Linux from 2013.

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/image/MzEzMTUzMg.jpeg&quot; data-original="/image/MzEzMTUzMg.jpeg" id="618441086_2" alt="The Oregon Trail 1.1, a game for the Macintosh from 1990.”> 3/8

The Oregon Trail 1.1, a game for the Macintosh from 1990.

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/image/MzEzMTUzNQ.jpeg&quot; data-original="/image/MzEzMTUzNQ.jpeg" id="618441086_3" alt="Wanderer, a game for MS-DOS from 1988.”> 4/8

Wanderer, a game for MS-DOS from 1988.

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/image/MzEzMTU1MA.jpeg&quot; data-original="/image/MzEzMTU1MA.jpeg" id="618441086_4" alt="Mystery House, a game for the Apple II from 1982.”> 5/8

Mystery House, a game for the Apple II from 1982.

6/8

The Great American History Machine, an educational interactive atlas for Windows 3.1 from 1991.

7/8

Microsoft Office 4.3 for Windows 3.1 from 1994.

8/8

ChemCollective, educational chemistry software for Linux from 2013.

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Because this project is more one of archival preservation than mainstream computer science, we garnered financial support for it not from the usual government funding agencies for computer science but from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Institute for Museum and Library Services. With that support, we showed how to reconstitute long-gone computing environments and make them available online so that any computer user can, in essence, go back in time with just a click of the mouse.

We created a system called Olive—an acronym for Open Library of Images for Virtualized Execution. Olive delivers over the Internet an experience that in every way matches what you would have obtained by running an application, operating system, and computer from the past. So once you install Olive, you can interact with some very old software as if it were brand new. Think if it as a Wayback Machine for executable content.

To understand how Olive can bring old computing environments back to life, you have to dig through quite a few layers of software abstraction. At the very bottom is the common base of much of today’s computer technology: a standard desktop or laptop endowed with one or more x86 microprocessors. On that computer, we run the Linux operating system, which forms the second layer in Olive’s stack of technology.

Sitting immediately above the operating system is software written in my lab called VMNetX, for Virtual Machine Network Execution. A virtual machine is a computing environment that mimics one kind of computer using software running on a different kind of computer. VMNetX is special in that it allows virtual machines to be stored on a central server and then executed on demand by a remote system. The advantage of this arrangement is that your computer doesn’t need to download the virtual machine’s entire disk and memory state from the server before running that virtual machine. Instead, the information stored on disk and in memory is retrieved in chunks as needed by the next layer up: the virtual-machine monitor (also called a hypervisor), which can keep several virtual machines going at once.

Each one of those virtual machines runs a hardware emulator, which is the next layer in the Olive stack. That emulator presents the illusion of being a now-obsolete computer—for example, an old Macintosh Quadra with its 1990s-era Motorola 68040 CPU. (The emulation layer can be omitted if the archived software you want to explore runs on an x86-based computer.)

The next layer up is the old operating system needed for the archived software to work. That operating system has access to a virtual disk, which mimics actual disk storage, providing what looks like the usual file system to still-higher components in this great layer cake of software abstraction.

Above the old operating system is the archived program itself. This may represent the very top of the heap, or there could be an additional layer, consisting of data that must be fed to the archived application to get it to do what you want.

The upper layers of Olive are specific to particular archived applications and are stored on a central server. The lower layers are installed on the user’s own computer in the form of the Olive client software package. When you launch an archived application, the Olive client fetches parts of the relevant upper layers as needed from the central server.

Illustration: Nicholas Little

Layers of Abstraction: Olive requires many layers of software abstraction to create a suitable virtual machine. That virtual machine then runs the old operating system and application.

That’s what you’ll find under the hood. But what can Olive do? Today, Olive consists of 17 different virtual machines that can run a variety of operating systems and applications. The choice of what to include in that set was driven by a mix of curiosity, availability, and personal interests. For example, one member of our team fondly remembered playing The Oregon Trail when he was in school in the early 1990s. That led us to acquire an old Mac version of the game and to get it running again through Olive. Once word of that accomplishment got out, many people started approaching us to see if we could resurrect their favorite software from the past.

The oldest application we’ve revived is Mystery House, a graphics-enabled game from the early 1980s for the Apple II computer. Another program is NCSA Mosaic, which people of a certain age might remember as the browser that introduced them to the wonders of the World Wide Web.

Olive provides a version of Mosaic that was written in 1993 for Apple’s Macintosh System 7.5 operating system. That operating system runs on an emulation of the Motorola 68040 CPU, which in turn is created by software running on an actual x86-based computer that runs Linux. In spite of all this virtualization, performance is pretty good, because modern computers are so much faster than the original Apple hardware.

Pointing Olive’s reconstituted Mosaic browser at today’s Web is instructive: Because Mosaic predates Web technologies such as JavaScript, HTTP 1.1, Cascading Style Sheets, and HTML 5, it is unable to render most sites. But you can have some fun tracking down websites composed so long ago that they still look just fine.

What else can Olive do? Maybe you’re wondering what tools businesses were using shortly after Intel introduced the Pentium processor. Olive can help with that, too. Just fire up Microsoft Office 4.3 from 1994 (which thankfully predates the annoying automated office assistant “Clippy”).

Perhaps you just want to spend a nostalgic evening playing Doom for DOS—or trying to understand what made such first-person shooter games so popular in the early 1990s. Or maybe you need to redo your 1997 taxes and can’t find the disk for that year’s version of TurboTax in your attic. Have no fear: Olive has you covered.

On the more serious side, Olive includes Chaste 3.1. The name of this software is short for Cancer, Heart and Soft Tissue Environment. It’s a simulation package developed at the University of Oxford for computationally demanding problems in biology and physiology. Version 3.1 of Chaste was tied to a research paper published in March 2013. Within two years of publication, though, the source code for Chaste 3.1 no longer compiled on new Linux releases. That’s emblematic of the challenge to scientific reproducibility Olive was designed to address.

Illustration: Nicholas Little

To keep Chaste 3.1 working, Olive provides a Linux environment that’s frozen in time. Olive’s re-creation of Chaste also contains the example data that was published with the 2013 paper. Running the data through Chaste produces visualizations of certain muscle functions. Future physiology researchers who wish to explore those visualizations or make modifications to the published software will be able to use Olive to edit the code on the virtual machine and then run it.

For now, though, Olive is available only to a limited group of users. Because of software-licensing restrictions, Olive’s collection of vintage software is currently accessible only to people who have been collaborating on the project. The relevant companies will need to give permissions to present Olive’s re-creations to broader audiences.

We are not alone in our quest to keep old software alive. For example, the Internet Archive is preserving thousands of old programs using an emulation of MS-DOS that runs in the user’s browser. And a project being mounted at Yale, called EaaSI (Emulation as a Service Infrastructure), hopes to make available thousands of emulated software environments from the past. The scholars and librarians involved with the Software Preservation Network have been coordinating this and similar efforts. They are also working to address the copyright issues that arise when old software is kept running in this way.

Olive has come a long way, but it is still far from being a fully developed system. In addition to the problem of restrictive software licensing, various technical roadblocks remain.

One challenge is how to import new data to be processed by an old application. Right now, such data has to be entered manually, which is both laborious and error prone. Doing so also limits the amount of data that can be analyzed. Even if we were to add a mechanism to import data, the amount that could be saved would be limited to the size of the virtual machine’s virtual disk. That may not seem like a problem, but you have to remember that the file systems on older computers sometimes had what now seem like quaint limits on the amount of data they could store.

Another hurdle is how to emulate graphics processing units (GPUs). For a long while now, the scientific community has been leveraging the parallel-processing power of GPUs to speed up many sorts of calculations. To archive executable versions of software that takes advantage of GPUs, Olive would need to re-create virtual versions of those chips, a thorny task. That’s because GPU interfaces—what gets input to them and what they output—are not standardized.

Clearly there’s quite a bit of work to do before we can declare that we have solved the problem of archiving executable content. But Olive represents a good start at creating the kinds of systems that will be required to ensure that software from the past can live on to be explored, tested, and used long into the future.

This article appears in the October 2018 print issue as “Saving Software From Oblivion.”

About the Author

Mahadev Satyanarayanan is a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh.

Carnegie Mellon is Saving Old Software from Oblivion syndicated from https://jiohowweb.blogspot.com

[mattkennard]

African Governments Are Paying for the World Bank’s Mauritius Miracle

Published: Foreign Policy (18 October 2018) w/ Claire Provost

PORT LOUIS, Mauritius—The security guard at Malawi Mangoes’ registered address at an office at the St Louis Business Centre in downtown Port Louis is not sure if we’re in the right place. The staff at the front desk are bewildered by our request to speak to someone from the company. The otherwise modest office block has flat-screen televisions on the walls and glossy magazines with titles like Savile Row and Family Business on a table in a small waiting area.

After about 20 minutes, a woman in a suit appears, bearing apologies—she had been out to lunch. At first, she seems to mistake us for investors in Malawi Mangoes. We jump in to clarify: We’re journalists looking to talk to someone from the company, which in 2014 received a $5 million loan from the private investment arm of the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation (IFC). Our interlocutor appears confused, as if she knows little about the business, or why we might be attempting to learn more about it in Port Louis, Mauritius.

She confirms that Malawi Mangoes, a company whose plantations and juice-making operations are located over 1,500 miles away in Malawi, is indeed registered at this address, but she declines tell us anything else. There is no one from the company here to speak to, no one to interview, no pamphlets or brochures we can read.

Mauritius sits 1,200 miles off the eastern coast of southern Africa, in the Indian Ocean. It’s an isolated island, without an endowment of exploitable natural resources like oil or minerals. Simon Springett, the United Nations resident coordinator for the island, told us that when the country became independent from the United Kingdom in 1968, “economists basically said there’s no way Mauritius can survive as an independent nation-state.”

Sugar cane had been the country’s core crop for centuries. Sugar is still produced in Mauritius, but the island owes much of its modern prosperity to the development of another more controversial industry.

In 2018, Mauritius has an international reputation built around extremely low taxes—a flat corporate tax rate of 15 percent and an effective rate as low as zero to 3 percent for offshore companies—as well as high levels of financial secrecy. Global businesses registered in Mauritius have assets valued at more than $630 billion, almost 25 times the country’s own GDP of $26 billion. Its offshore financial industry includes more than 21,000 registered businesses —almost 70 times the number of primary schools in the country. However, these firms don’t take up a lot of space; many of them exist only on paper, set up to benefit from the island’s cut-rate taxes and its “ask no questions” attitude.

Since the early 1990s, Mauritius has remade itself into an African tax haven, where multinational corporations and ultra-rich individuals can stash their cash and profits and minimize their tax bills, away from the prying eyes of other governments and the public.

As the private investment arm of the World Bank, the IFC is tasked with investing in businesses in developing countries to help “end extreme poverty and promote shared prosperity,” while also making money to support the bank’s other programs. Despite its mandate to help the world’s poorest people, it seems to have largely turned a blind eye to the controversial role Mauritius plays in the global tax system—and, in some cases, it has likely profited from the country’s remoteness and opaque financial services itself.

The IFC has approved loans and investments in more than 1,600 companies since 2012. According to our analysis of their project disclosures, at least 50 of these were for companies registered in Mauritius but operating elsewhere. Many of these companies, including Malawi Mangoes, are based in sub-Saharan Africa, and their registration in Mauritius may be depriving African governments of much needed-tax revenue.

Last year, the African Business Review reported that nearly 60 percent of investments made by international companies registered in Mauritius were destined for mainland Africa. Mauritius has been accused by civil society groups such as Oxfam of draining public resources from poorer countries by allowing multinational investors to shift their profits here, enabling them to pay much less than their fair share of taxes in the countries where they actually operate. And in 2013, the U.N. Economic Commission for Africa criticized the island as “a relatively financially secretive conduit” that facilitates illicit financial flows across the continent.

Malawi Mangoes is one of the companies in which the IFC has invested. It was founded in 2009 by a pair of British entrepreneurs, Jonathan Jacobs and Craig Hardie. From the Salima district in central Malawi, it produces mango and banana puree and fresh fruit for export around Africa, to the Middle East, and to Europe.

When the IFC approved its $5 million investment in Malawi Mangoes in 2014, it was described as an agribusiness project in the soft drink sector, with the loan going to support the company as it tried to establish itself in the country. This would create much-needed rural jobs, the IFC argued, “thus injecting money to the local economy through wages and benefits paid.” Economic growth in poorer countries like Malawi is being held back, the IFC contends, by “the lack of risk capital” needed to “build the dynamic, job-creating companies that drive prosperity.”

To even be eligible for its support, projects must be located in a developing country and “have good prospects of being profitable”—but also “benefit the local economy; and Be environmentally and socially sound.” And though the IFC’s investment location is listed as Malawi, the funds actually go to “Malawi Mangoes (Mauritius) Limited.”

Company records in Mauritius and the United Kingdom, where the owners have filed paperwork, reveal that Malawi Mangoes moved its business to Mauritius after it had already started working in Malawi. This is significant because it appears to contradict claims that Mauritius is encouraging investment in Africa that wouldn’t otherwise happen.

Malawi Mangoes was incorporated in the United Kingdom in 2009, according to financial records filed in London. This U.K. entity was dissolved in 2015. By then, Malawi Mangoes had incorporated two companies in Mauritius (in 2012 and 2013), under the island’s global business system. In other words: Mauritius didn’t facilitate the company’s entrance into Malawi. It had already happened.

This suggests that Malawi Mangoes was attracted to Mauritius by something else: not the chance to move into Africa for the first time, but more likely its low taxes, high secrecy levels, and what the World Bank touts as its “ease of doing business.”

Despite the IFC’s poverty-reducing mandate and its requirement that projects benefit the local economy, the institution, and the World Bank as a whole, has been criticized for years for investing in commercial projects with dubious impacts on poor communities, including five-star hotels, upmarket shopping malls, and even agribusiness projects that have displaced hundreds of thousands of people.

On its website, the IFC explains how potential investments are reviewed, with proposals that are supposed to contain information such as the company’s finances and expected profits. IFC teams assess whether projects will comply with environmental and social performance standards, which cover issues such as labor conditions, land acquisition, and biodiversity—but not taxation, let alone tax justice.

The IFC’s disclosure explains that Malawi Mangoes is majority-owned by BXR Group, a private investment group in Amsterdam, and that the second-largest shareholder is “well-known fund manager and philanthropist” Stewart Newton. The project’s environmental and social review says Malawi Mangoes (Mauritius) Limited is “a holding company that runs an operation in Malawi.” No explanation is provided in the disclosure, however, as to why a company structured like this was deemed a suitable investment for the IFC, or why the entity receiving IFC money would be based on the Indian Ocean island.

Because this company is registered in Mauritius, where such information is not disclosed, we could not determine its annual revenues, profits, or how much tax it pays. However, it was reported locally in Malawi earlier this year that the company had secured 1,700 hectares of farmland near its existing plantations to expand its operations, and that its mango exports so far have already been worth more than $1.4 million.

The IFC’s disclosures also hint at possible problems on the ground in Malawi. In 2014, it said Malawi Mangoes had more than 600 employees, with the lowest-paid workers making just $35 a month. Though this is described as 20 percent higher than Malawi’s minimum wage, the company has also subsidized maize purchases for its workers during periods of the year when they could not afford it. And while the company does buy fruit from small-scale farmers through so-called outgrower schemes, it does not appear that local farmers or the Malawian economy are the main beneficiaries of the company’s activities.

Last year, a report in Malawi’s Maravi Post claimed that a senior chief in the Salima district “made shabby land deals” with Malawi Mangoes for which she allegedly pocketed proceeds and left “affected families” largely uncompensated.

Vigils were reportedly organized for 18 days at Salima District Commission offices to demand her removal as chief. “This land was sold dubiously to foreigners, without consultations but only telling us that it was government which allocated it,” one of the demonstrators, Muhamad Chingomanje, was quoted as saying. “We are not against developmental projects on our land, but … we want to benefit from its proceeds.”

The U.N. Economic Commission for Africa says illicit financial flows from Africa could be worth as much as $50 billion per year—double the amount of official international aid budgeted for the continent—with impacts including drained foreign exchange reserves and worsening poverty. Tax havens enable this, it explains, by allowing for the creation of “disguised corporations, shell companies, anonymous trust accounts, and fake charitable foundations.”

The secrecy afforded in places like Mauritius may facilitate illegal practices—though the real story is how tax havens enable aggressive tax practices and legal tax avoidance on a massive scale, with companies taking advantage of gaps and mismatches in tax rules to shift their profits and declare them not where their real business is, but where they’ll pay less. This is part of a larger story about how countries have been sucked into competing with one another to offer the best deal to corporations, regardless of the impacts on their economy and their citizens. Then there is the impact on countries like Malawi, which is even worse for the public purse.

According to the IMF, developing countries’ revenue losses from what’s called “base erosion and profit-shifting” may exceed $200 billion.

This issue has been acknowledged at the very top of the World Bank as well. In 2015, World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim said: “Some companies use elaborate strategies to not pay taxes in countries in which they work, a form of corruption that hurts the poor. More equitable taxation could easily eclipse official development assistance received by countries.”

Mauritius is an epicenter of this sort of profit-shifting. In addition to its flat tax rate of 15 percent, there is no capital gains tax and no tax on dividends or interest paid to nonresidents. Companies don’t even need to have a direct physical presence with staff on the island: This can also be outsourced to agents of financial services firms, whose employees may act as representatives for many companies at a time—just like those we met in Port Louis, at Malawi Mangoes’ registered address, who appeared surprised to be asked questions about the firm.

Once in Mauritius, it also helps for a business to have more than one subsidiary to take advantage of different incentives offered to different types of companies. Malawi Mangoes’ company records list two businesses in the country: Malawi Mangoes (Mauritius) Limited, incorporated in April 2012, and Malawi Mangoes Management (Mauritius) Limited, set up in January 2013. Both are incorporated as offshore companies within the island’s global business system and registered to the same address: “St Louis Business Centre, CNR Desroches & St Louis Streets, Port Louis.”

This is where we went in Mauritius, to ask about the company’s business and why it was running an operation in Malawi from an island so far away. But it’s just a care-of address, at the offices of a financial services firm called Rogers Capital, which helps its customers set up and manage offshore entities, lends its address for their registration forms, and keeps their details under wraps.

That pattern holds for other IFC investments in sub-Saharan Africa, made via Mauritius instead of directly in the countries of operation. In the capital of Port Louis, we had more Kafkaesque experiences. In one small office, on a narrow road in the city’s Chinatown, we found the registered office of CSquared, a broadband internet infrastructure business operating in several countries including Ghana and Uganda that counts Google among its investors. There, the man we spoke to would not even confirm the address of the building we were sitting in.

The IFC says clearly on its website that “tax evasion is unacceptable in any part of a transaction in which the World Bank Group is involved.” It insists that it “exercises due diligence to confirm that the structures in which it invests are chosen for legitimate reasons” and that it’s “committed to advancing the international tax transparency agenda.”

This sounds serious, but the language used also carefully limits the problem to illegal activity. Tax evasion is the illegal nonpayment or underpayment of tax. But for multinational companies, there are many strategies to limit tax bills that may be currently legal but still highly questionable—particularly for an institution, backed by the world’s governments, with an explicit mandate to help end poverty and boost “shared prosperity.”

Anti-poverty and tax justice nongovernmental organizations have argued for years that the IFC shouldn’t be investing in companies using tax havens at all, as such structures enable information on money made and taxes paid to be hidden from governments as well as the public. Legitimate reasons for companies to incorporate in tax havens may be a matter of interpretation, but it cannot be publicly scrutinized or debated if businesses’ information is never disclosed.

In 2016, Oxfam accused the World Bank of “turning a blind eye” to the use of tax havens by the companies that the IFC invests in. It also scrutinized IFC disclosure information and found that 25 percent of all of the organization’s investment projects in sub-Saharan Africa in 2015 were directly allocated to companies incorporated in tax havens, with almost 9 percent of the projects in Mauritius. What’s more, it found that a large majority of firms receiving IFC financing use tax havens, apparently unconnected to their core business, at some point in their corporate structure.

Oxfam demanded that the World Bank “ensure that its clients can prove they are paying their fair share of tax” and confirm that these businesses aren’t taking “advantage of the weakness of the system to reduce their tax bill to the minimum, especially through the artificial shift of profits” to countries like Mauritius. The organization suggested specifically that “responsible corporate tax considerations—beyond legal compliance” should be incorporated into the IFC’s environmental and social performance standards immediately and used to review and monitor their array of investments.

At the time, an IFC spokesperson responded by inaccurately characterizing the NGO’s criticisms as focused on illegal tax evasion, again stressing that “there are legitimate uses for offshore structures.”

This week, an IFC spokesman told Foreign Policy that the organization would only invest in a company if it was “satisfied with the integrity of the client and that the structure of the transaction is legitimate and not designed to be used for tax evasion.” The spokesman reiterated the argument that “Offshore Financial Centers can play a key role in cross-border investment,” especially when a host country lacks certain laws, contract enforcement mechanisms, or shareholder protections. “Appropriate use of intermediate jurisdictions,” he argued, “enables increased mobilization of private capital for investment that helps the poor.”

According to the spokesman, the IFC’s investment in Malawi Mangoes was “to support rural incomes through development of commercial production and processing of mangoes and bananas in a region where poverty is high” and that it was subject to the “policy on use of intermediate jurisdictions” and found to be acceptable. The IFC also pointed out that its performance standards “were developed before some of the public focus on tax and illicit financial flows” and that it was now updating its policies based on new and evolving international standards. It is unclear if Malawi Mangoes would qualify under the new standards.

According to the IFC, Malawi Mangoes has failed to ramp up its production and never generated any profits. This, of course, does not alter the nature of the tax arrangements the company set up for that eventuality.

Malawi Mangoes did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Last October, the prime minister of Mauritius, Pravind Jugnauth, revived the old narrative of the island’s dim economic prospects in an interview with the Financial Times. “We are a small island that is limited in many ways. We don’t have any natural resources,” he told the newspaper.

“We need to have an edge over others to be attractive,” Jugnauth added. “I think the advantage in taxation is important.”

At the World Bank office in Port Louis, the argument is much the same. Alex Sienaert, the country representative for Mauritius, said the offshore industry has benefited the island, providing a source of foreign exchange and encouraging kids to stay in school and work hard to get offshore office jobs. He said there is a sense among young people in the country that if “I can qualify as an accountant or a lawyer, there’s a good job for me, an office job, on the island. … That’s been going on for well over a generation now.”

But he acknowledged that “you do hear some concerns.” The offshore industry in Mauritius employs a surprisingly small fraction of the population—just 5,000 workers directly in a country of over 1 million people. And not all boats have been lifted equally by the island’s transformation into a corporate utopia. In March, the World Bank warned in a new 147-page report that inequality among Mauritians has “widened substantially” over the last 15 years, “threatening the standards of living of the poor.”

According to the report, the gap between the incomes of the poorest and the richest 10 percent of households increased by 37 percent from 2001 to 2015. One of the report’s authors attributed this to structural changes, including a “progressive shift from traditional and low-skills sectors to services, notably professional, real estate, and financial services,” which not all workers benefited from. Women, in particular, did not share in the gains, with only 57 percent of them in the labor force by 2015, and women in the private sector have been paid on average about 30 percent less than men.

Sienaert at the World Bank told us, “there’s no question that the tax appeal of Mauritius is an important part of the story,” acknowledging that this is “an increasingly less sustainable way to go.” It would be better for Mauritius to become “a conduit for international companies to come into Africa perhaps for the first time, facilitating new activity that wouldn’t otherwise exist,” he said. “Then you’re in win-win territory.”

“That’s not to say it’s going to be an easy transition,” Sienaert added. Like the March report from the World Bank, he had nothing to say about the IFC’s investments via Mauritius and gave the impression that he didn’t know they existed. And much like the staff at the office where the headquarters of Malawi Mangoes is registered on the island, he appeared surprised by our questions on the topic.

Last weekend, the World Bank brought together country delegations and development experts at its annual meetings in Indonesia. The IFC was there, too. At such conferences, grand statements are made while attendees tend to mill around banners bearing pledges to better the world.

Rather than repeating tired mantras about job-creating companies bringing prosperity to the poorest corners of Africa, these powerful international institutions—whose mandates are built around expanding shared prosperity and alleviating poverty—should be asking about the mango farmers in Malawi’s Salima district, and who profited (or didn’t) from the IFC’s support.’

[underscore-ne-blog]

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[tollisonsoberlivinghome]

Sober Living Home near Eau Claire WI

If you are looking for a Sober Living Home near Eau Claire, WI, you have come to the right place. This article will provide you with some important information about rehab facilities in this area. Listed below are the top three options available in your area. There are several different ways to locate one of these centers. Just be sure to do some research before you make a decision. Then, once you have made your decision, you can begin your recovery process.

The Darjune Recovery Center: This residence is a place for adults with chemical dependency and alcoholism who want to live in a sober environment. To apply, you must be ambulatory and have a functioning electric fire alarm system. You can even apply if you are homeless, as these facilities give priority to women who have been homeless. The Darjune Recovery Center operates two sober living homes: Spoehr Sober Living Home for Women and Derge Sober Living House for Men. Women can choose the home that best fits their needs. The program is supervised 24 hours a day.

Recovery from addiction often requires rebuilding relationships. The most damaging aspects of addiction are within the intimate relationships, and professional help may be required to repair and rebuild trust. Intimate relationships with family and significant others are also often compromised when someone suffers from addiction. During treatment, you may receive couples therapy in order to help rebuild trust and joy. Addiction affects the entire family, and roles can change drastically. Intimate relationships should be reestablished if you want to decrease the likelihood of relapse.

After obtaining a degree in social work, Lydia Bethmann went on to seek treatment for alcoholism. Her sober living home in St. Paul was the closest to the Chippewa Valley. Lydia Bethmann has since acquired a downtown home and will host women in a drug and alcohol-free home. Sober Living Homes near Eau Claire WI will help these women to achieve a new life without alcoholism.

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[outoftowninac]

YES, MY DARLING DAUGHTER

1938

Yes, My Darling Daughter is a three-act comedy by Mark Reed. The  play was originally titled All About Love, but Mother’s Day was also considered. 

The play takes place in the living room of the Murray summer home, in New Canaan, Connecticut.  The title was based on a familiar rhyme: 

"Mother, may I go out to swim?"  "Yes, my darling daughter.  Hang your clothes on a hickory limb,  But don't go near the water."

The story tells of a sophisticated woman revealing to her mother (who herself has a morally complicated past) that she is going to elope. Mother has to quell the outrage of her banker husband while manipulating her daughter into doing what she wants.  

Although there was early talk of an out-of-town tryout, none materialized and the play opened cold in New York. 

The production was produced and staged by Alfred de Liagre, Jr. It opened on Broadway on February 9, 1937 at the Playhouse Theatre. A success, it moved to the Vanderbilt Theatre in November to complete a run of 405 performances, closing on January 22, 1938. 

The back cover of the souvenir program sold when the show went on tour with Florence Reed (no relation to the author) as the star-attraction. The play was also produced in London, but met with raised eyebrows and quickly closed. 

The play hit the road before the Broadway production closed. Darling Daughter finally got “near the water” in August 1938 at the Garden Pier Theatre in Atlantic City.  The cast of seven was Ruth Paxton, Marie Gilbert, Jack Hartley, Dorothy Elder, Winifred St. Claire, David Morris, and Charles Campbell. 

This was one of a season of recent Broadway hits at the Garden Pier Theatre that began in July 1938 with Brother Rat. With other theatres in Atlantic City (including the venerable Apollo) given over to movies or burlesque, the Garden Pier was looking to legitimize. The effort lasted until 1940. 

Today, the Pier is a mere severed branch of the Great Wooden Way, with neither Garden nor Theatre. 

Naturally, a hit play was fodder for Hollywood - despite conservative eyebrows being raised. 

In the end, it was Warner Brothers, not MGM, who got the rights to scrub the play clean enough for cinematic release. The film was still banned in several parts of the United States due to the subject matter. This also affected productions of the stage play.  

"The City Welfare Board has voted unanimously to ban 'Yes, My Darling Daughter' here. The film was scheduled to open tomorrow at the Brandeis. Action of the board followed a preview of the picture. Members reported there was a general objection to the theme of the movie. A small group of women representing church and other organizations attended the meeting. The stage version of the play is now in rehearsal at the Omaha Community Playhouse, scheduled to open March 6. The board will review it on March 2 at a Playhouse rehearsal. Reports from the Playhouse are to the effect that the play has been considerably altered." ~  Omaha, Nebraska, March 1, 1939

Surprisingly, in the same city the play premiered, New York, censors forced the removal of an entire scene of the film that showed the daughter and her boyfriend kissing behind a screen. Although Canadian distributors insisted on its re-insertion, it was the censored cut that was seen in New Jersey.

The film version had its Atlantic City premiere in early March 1939 on the Boardwalk at the Stanley, not far from where its stage counterpart played. 

The Stanley was one of Atlantic City’s largest movie palaces at 2,000 seats. It opened in 1925 and was re-named the Roxy in 1958. The exterior of the building is still present, but it is no longer a theatre. 

Shortly afterward, the film was at the Virginia, a cinema on the Boardwalk at Virginia Avenue. 

The Virginia Theatre opened in 1916. It was later Atlantic City’s premiere theatre for roadshow features.

As its popularity waned, the film moved off the Boardwalk to Atlantic Avenue, where it was at the Colonial Theatre and the New Astor. The Colonial opened in 1914, and was later named the Center Theatre. The Astor opened in 1914 as the Liberty, and was subsequently renamed the Towne. It was destroyed by fire in the 1970s. 

By July 1939, the film was at the Palace, a ten cent cinema showing double features. The ‘New’ refers to the fact that the theatre was totally renovated and reopened four months earlier after a devastating fire destroyed all but the building’s frame. 

Finally, the play itself returned to Atlantic City in August 1954 in a summer stock production at the Quarterdeck Theatre, in residence at the Morton Hotel. But that’s another blog!  (Which you can read by clicking here!)

[micahrodney]

Thread; Chapter 3 - Over The River

The following is a commission for Matthew Caveat Zealot.  Neil screamed, and started forward.  His head collided with something hard, but it wasn't his claustrophobia-inducing ceiling. As the foam-padded leather made contact with his face, he realized he was no longer in bed.  The young man was sitting upright, belted into the rear passenger seat of his father's Plymouth Voyager.  

“Whoa-” Neil's father cried in response, nearly losing control of the vehicle.  “Are you okay?”

Taking stock of his new reality required some mental recalibration.  Last he remembered was spending the evening with Damian.  The people-pleasing and worldly youth had been attempting to get Neil to broaden his horizons – and more relevantly his palate – by eating some chicken dish called Tom Kha Gai.  Afterwards they went back to Neil's place and may have had a bit to drink.  He vaguely recalled getting a voicemail from his father.  His dreams were vast and vivid, but as he tried to scrape together the scattered fragments of his vision they faded away.  More importantly was the rather noticeable gap in events.  

Neil took a deep breath as his father began to steer the vehicle towards the side of the highway. The digital clock above the tape deck read 5:45 PM. A large highway sign revealed that they were just 60 miles outside of St. Clair, Michigan.  They were 300 miles from his dorm room.  

To his left was his sister, Dawn. She was the younger of his two sisters, but she still had two years on him.  While the older sister, Kim, had been the spitting image of their mother, Dawn looked more like their father.  Her hair was naturally chestnut brown, though it was presently dyed black with electric yellow streaks, the better to match her grunge aesthetic. Dawn's usual attire was comprised of leather jackets and jeans, though she was wearing black sweats for the road trip.  

Occupying the passenger seat, into which Neil had just rammed his head, was his brother Travis. His beard seemed to have grown two inches since they had last spoken.  The boisterous one in the family was oddly quiet today, wearing a plain forest green sweater.   This was also a far cry from his Hawaiian shirt obsession.  

“Neil?” His father asked, after putting the car in park on the shoulder. “You good?”  

“I'm sorry, I just had a nightmare I think,” Neil explained. Maybe he was still having a nightmare.

That, or he had somehow lost several days of his life. They were on their way to his mother's memorial, which meant he had somehow fast-forwarded his life by about three days.  Which begged the question:  how the hell did that happen and why could he not remember any of it?  

“It's a nice change of pace, dude,” Dawn said, her attention split between her Gameboy, Walkman and the stick of gum she was chewing on. “Honestly you've been kind of a zombie since we picked you up.”

“Oh yeah, says the Borg,” Travis teased.  

“Don't hate my tech.  It makes the real world way more bearable,” Dawn retorted, resting her temporarily-misplaced headphone back over her ear.  

Neil took special notice of the word 'zombie' and decided to expand on that thought. “Have I been acting weirdly?”  

“I mean I figured you were just sad because of... you know,” Travis gestured towards the others in the car.  

It had to be especially hard for him, now sitting in the spot where their mother had for most of their lives, until the accident.  Three years had passed by in a miserable blink.  What were three days in the grand scheme of things?

“This is gonna sound weird,” Neil began, and that was putting it mildly. How exactly did one ask the question he was going to ask?  

“That would be a first,” Dawn quipped sarcastically.  Clearly The Smashing Pumpkins were not excluding her from the conversation.  

The proud patriarch Kevin Brown turned to Neil and gave him that same kind and understanding gaze that he always did.  His gentle eyes, that distinctive cleft in his chin, and a soft smile that won over even his mother. Neil could trust this man, out-of-touch as he was, with anything.  

“What day is it?” Neil asked.  

“Neil, you're scaring me now.  Are you okay?”

“Dad, please.  What day?”  Neil insisted.  

“It's Friday.  We picked you up from your dorm this morning,” Kevin said. “Neil... you're not on drugs are you?”  

“No, dad it's not like that,” Neil scoffed.  “I just-  I don't know, I haven't been sleeping right lately and everything is all... hazy.”

“Dude, it's dad.  If you're on something he won't get mad at-”

“I'm not on anything!” Neil shouted.  The confusion had devolved into frustration and Travis's well-intentioned comment was doing nothing to abate it. “Just because you fucked up your scholarship-”

“Hey!” Kevin interjected soothingly, reaching back to place a bracing hand on his shoulder.  “Easy now, there's no need to go off on your brother like that.”

Travis had turned back to face the road.  A few cars passed them, one even blaring on its horn unhelpfully.  Dawn popped a bubble between her teeth.  

“Now listen, son. If you say you're not, then you're not.  I trust you completely,” Kevin said.  “We'll take you to a hospital when we get to St. Clair and have the doctor check you out, okay?”  

“A hospital,” Neil nodded.  “Yeah, that's probably a good idea.”  

“Maybe they'll put you in a straitjacket,” Dawn smirked.  

There was no malice behind the comment.  Underneath the would-be nihilist's harsh exterior was a tiny grain of affection for her family, especially her younger brother.  This was her twisted way of trying to calm him down and make him feel at home.  And, oddly, it was working.  

“Sorry, Travis,” Neil said.  “I'm just really... I don't know.”

“You don't have to apologize,” Travis said, still not turning around. “It's a hard time for all of us.”  

He had the biggest heart of any of them, but it was also the most easily wounded.  When they were younger, Neil had been intensely jealous of the theater kid brother of his.  He was the center of attention, and by a wide margin the “favorite” child of their father.  As a result, the two boys fought constantly and viciously.  

Things only started to change when Travis left for college and started to mature.  But with the maturing mind came evolving tastes. He was a self-described “party animal”.  And one night he had partied too hard on the wrong side of LA.  Within a few weeks he was absent to all of his classes, and a no-call no-show termination at work.  

They found him on the UCLA campus between two bushes.  It had taken a lot of work, but their father had managed to turn a five-year jail sentence into two months of rehabilitation.  Being a lawyer's son had its perks.  The true penalty was the loss of his football scholarship.  That and the expression on their mother's face when he confessed to her he was an addict.  

Neil regretted his words now.  Apart from being the one big taboo in the otherwise accepting family, making such a cheap shot at his brother made him feel unclean.  When Neil had first found out, he was a little too keen to finally have something to one-up the perfect son with.  Teenage hormones were no help, and he hadn't developed a proper sense of empathy yet.  

“There but for the grace of God go you,” their mother would always tell Neil.  

That was bullshit as far as Neil was concerned, in the infinite wisdom of a adolescent.  He was better than Travis.  He was smarter. He didn't fall into the stupid obvious traps that all drug users did.  The mandatory D.A.R.E. Program had done a number on his concept of nuance.  But even as Neil railed on his brother, all their parents could do was just shake their heads with a mixture of disappointment and sad amusement.  

Disappointment.  That was a potent word. And that's what Neil felt like:  The family disappointment.  In spite of Dawn's fashion sense, Travis's past, and Kim's taste in men, Neil was the one who didn't fit in.  And it was nobody's fault but his own.  

---

St. Clair, Michigan was the homestead of their mother.  It was as far removed from Voxton as you could be.  The scenic town was nestled in the isthmus between Lake Erie and Lake Huron.  It was founded along the St. Clair River which flowed somewhat unimaginatively into Lake St. Clair.  

The river was one of the geographical borders which marked the edge of the continental United States.  Across the river to the east was Canada, should one feel inclined to attempt a crossing in the frigid waters.   Neil had only been here a few times in his life, and never while his mother was alive.  For some reason it was her dying wish to be interred in the family plot a few miles up-river, but she'd never expressed any interest in visiting the place.  

This was their fourth trip to the charming post-card worthy dell, where every street corner looked ripe for a postcard and every citizen seemed to come straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting. The skies were blue, the horizon dotted with lighthouses and the only noise was the sound of motorboats gently cruising down the river.

“How are you feeling, Neil?” His father asked, when they parked the car outside their hotel.  While Kevin Brown dressed to the nines when he was with clients or in court, he preferred a casual look; khaki's with a crimson-and-grey striped cardigan.  

“I think I'm okay for right now.  Still a little fuzzy on the past few days,” he replied.  

Fuzzy, but details were coming back to him.  It was rather odd, more like he was recalling an episode of a television show which he'd fallen asleep during.  He seemed to have some vague idea of stumbling  to his classes for the week, but there was something hollow and robotic about the memories.  They had no spark to them, no authenticity.  It was like he was on auto-pilot, which may have very well have been the case.

For a moment he did consider the possibility that he had been drugged.  But the only people he had been with in the past week were Damian and his classmates, none of whom had the means or motive to do so.

“We'll have a doctor check you out anyway,” Kevin said, in the way that brokered no argument.  “There's a nice new facility just south of here in East China.  Only opened up a couple years ago.”  

Modernity was Kevin Brown's sole rubric for quality.  

“Daddy!” Came an overeager feminine voice from the opposite end of the parking lot.  

Kim, the oldest child, was eternally dressed like was late for a board meeting.  Straight out of the 80s with a shoulder-padded salmon pantsuit and her dyed-blonde hair in a perm that framed her slightly chubby face.  She had come a long way from the auburn-haired teen in overall's Neil had a vague memory of from his childhood.

She was tailed by her current boyfriend, a middle-aged trucker who chose to mark this momentous occasion by putting his least-stained plaid shirt.  The corners of his stubbled mouth were still dripping with chewing tobacco residue.  

“Honey!” Kevin said, embracing his daughter.  “And this must be uh...”

After disentangling herself from her father, Kim lifted a hand gesturing vaguely in the direction of the gentleman.  “This is Rocky.”

“Pleased to meet ya, sir,” said the trucker, taking Kevin's hand.  

“Uh, likewise Rocky,” Kevin replied, shaking it hesitantly.  He was presently engaged in trying to calculate the staggeringly narrow age-difference between him and the man now dating his first child.  

“Guys how are you all!” Kim said, pulling all of them in a group hug.  

Only Travis truly returned the hug.  Neil was trying not to suffocate under the noxious fumes of whatever perfume she was wearing, and Dawn with her slender frame had managed to slip out of the grasp entirely.

“Glad to see you haven't changed, sis,” Travis teased. “Still pushing papers?”

“Papers nothing, little bro.  Real estate has never been this good.  You know I don't know what that guy in the White House is doing right now, but if keeps it up, I'm gonna be filthy rich,” Kim laughed in a way that she surely thought was musical.  

“Maybe you can buy some clothes that come in colors  that don't belong in an old folk's home,” Dawn remarked, her attention somehow still fixed on the Gameboy which should surely have been running out of battery by now.  

“Oh you,” Kim sighed, giving Dawn her own special hug.  A sour-sounding electronic chirp seemed to indicate the gesture had cost Dawn a life. “I love your hair!  I bet this is such a fun time in your life.”

That was the saccharine-sweet way of saying “this is just a phase”. There was definitely a wide line between the two older children and the two younger.  Travis had been made humble by his fall from grace. Had he not, he would have turned out exactly like Kim.  Brimming with sunshine and not a drop of it genuine.

“So,” Kevin said, cutting in.  “The ceremony begins at noon tomorrow.  We have to run Neil to the hospital real quick.”

Kim let out a dramatic gasp.  “Oh no!  What's wrong, little man?”

“It's nothing big,” Neil replied, dodging another attempted hug.  “And it's kind of a private matter.”

Kevin caught the comment and nodded his approval.  “Dawn, Travis are you two going to be okay here at the hotel by yourself?”

Dawn nodded and began walking towards the hotel.  If she had enough AA batteries, she could have survived in a cardboard box.  

“I think we'll be okay, Pops,” Travis said.  “I hope you feel better, Neil.”  

Neil patted Travis's shoulder in a conciliatory way, and the two parted.  He was unable to dodge the second attempt at a hug from Kim, who pushed her head into his shoulder, even though she had to lean down slightly to do it.  

“Feel better, buddy!”  

“Thank you, Kim,” Neil grunted, more than a little embarrassed.

---

The doctor's visit was about what could be expected.  There was nothing wrong with his brain, according to a CAT scan and an MRI.  Kevin Brown's money always did the talking about both procedures were tackled over a five-hour period, despite a warning from the doctor of potential complications with the readings.  

His father was brilliant and humble, but he knew exactly how to get what he wanted. To benefit his children he would go to any lengths.  After Neil had been poked, prodded and had an unseemly collection of fluids removed from and added to his body, the final diagnosis was remarkably unhelpful.  

“Stress-induced narcolepsy?” Kevin asked.  “My son wasn't asleep, he just doesn't remember anything.”  

“That's the best conclusion we have right now.  Some patients with narcolepsy can also experience somnambulism; sleep-walking.  It's uncommon, but it has happened,” replied the stoic, but clearly annoyed Dr. Faust.

“I just,” Kevin sighed in frustration. “I don't understand.”    

“Sir, your son's brain chemistry is fine,” Dr. Faust explained. “Apart from a little sleep deprivation his scans are perfectly normal. Furthermore the toxicology reports show a clean bill of health.  Only that came back was a little bit of underage drinking.  It's not drugs, it's not some form of mental disorder.  The truth is, sir, I don't know what happened to your son.  The best thing we can do is keep an eye on him and if he has another attack like that, bring him right in so we can examine him.”  

“This is unbelievable,” Kevin fumed, his docile nature slowly ebbing away from stress.

“It's okay, Dad,” Neil said, placing a hand on his father's shoulder. “Let's just go, it's midnight and we have the memorial tomorrow.”

Kevin was willing to stay there all night if he had to, but Neil's pleading had worked. He put his jacket back on, without bothering to roll up his sleeves and straightened his tie.  Ever requiring the last word, he turned back to Faust.

“I hope you're right, Doc,” Kevin declared.  “Come on, Neil.”  

[olko71]

New Post has been published on All about business online

New Post has been published on http://yaroreviews.info/2020/12/gift-cards-are-go-to-holiday-gifts-of-2020

Gift Cards Are Go-To Holiday Gifts of 2020

Gift cards could spur sales next year as shoppers return to stores or redeem them online.

Photo: Jeff Greenberg/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

By

Suzanne Kapner

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Suzanne Kapner

Dec. 23, 2020 8:32 am ET

It isn’t just the PlayStation 5 and Lego Star Wars sets that are in high demand this year. Gift cards are one of the hottest holiday presents.

Shoppers worried about visiting stores, as Covid-19 cases surge, and unwilling to risk gifts arriving late because of shipping delays are snapping up the prepaid debit cards, according to companies that measure gift-card sales.

Gift-card purchases in the first week of December were twice the rate in the same period last year, according to InMarket, a data-analytics company. Gift card sales jumped 48% last weekend, compared with earlier in the week, as deadlines for free shipping with guaranteed Christmas delivery expired, according to Rise.ai, which manages electronic gift card programs for more than 5,000 brands, including Allbirds and Milk Bar.

Tim Maynard has already spent nearly $300 on gift cards this year at retailers ranging from Amazon.com Inc. AMZN -0.66% to Target Corp. TGT 1.49% to Home Depot Inc. HD -0.09% In past years, the 32-year-old financial analyst said he shied away from giving the cards because they felt impersonal.

“It was sort of a last resort this year,” said the St. Clair, Mo., resident. “Not having the ability to get in stores and see things makes it hard to buy gifts.”

The gift-card boom might not help holiday sales. Retailers can’t record the revenue until the cards are redeemed, according to Nathan Ehrlich, chairman of the Retail Gift Card Association.

The cards could spur sales next year, though, as shoppers return to stores or redeem them online. “We believe a boom in gift cards will lead to a shift in spending in the first quarter of next year and beyond,” said Todd Dipaola, InMarket’s chief executive.

There are two types of gift cards. So-called closed-loop cards are issued by banks and branded merchants including Macy’s or Amazon. They typically have no fees and don’t expire but can only be used at the retailer with its brand on the card, according to David Nelyubin, a senior research analyst at Mercator Advisory Group Inc., a payments consulting firm.

Open-loop cards operate on card networks such as those run by Mastercard Inc. and Visa Inc. These cards can be used anywhere those brands are accepted but typically hit recipients with fees. “If you don’t use the money, the fees will eat away at the balance,” Mr. Nelyubin said.

How will the pandemic affect America’s retailers? As states across the nation struggle to return to business, WSJ investigates the evolving retail landscape and how consumers might shop in a post-pandemic world.

The top-selling gift cards this year are Visa, Amazon, Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox, Kohl’s Corp. and Lowe’s Cos., according to InMarket.

The average shopper is spending 17.6% more on gift cards in 2020, compared with 2019, while the average number of gift-card transactions per shopper is up 12.3% compared with last year, InMarket said.

A sizable portion of gift cards go unused, allowing merchants and card issuers to later book some of those funds as revenue under accounting rules. Mercator estimates merchants keep roughly $3.5 billion of unredeemed balances annually.

Share Your Thoughts

Are you giving more gift cards this year than in the past? Join the conversation below.

A portion of unused balances goes back to the states. Some states assume responsibility for returning the funds to consumers. In cases in which consumers can’t be located, the money goes to the state where the issuing company is domiciled, according to Mr. Ehrlich of the gift-card association.

Concerned about rising Covid-19 cases, Debika Sihi has stopped going to stores and is instead buying her friends and family electronic gift cards from local shops this year.

“With UPS and FedEx under so much pressure, I’m worried that if I mail a gift, it might not get there before Christmas,” the 38-year-old Austin, Texas, resident said.

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Holiday Shopping Upended

Write to Suzanne Kapner at Suzanne.Kapner@wsj.com

Copyright ©2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the December 24, 2020, print edition as ‘This Year, Gift Cards Are Hot Item.’

[technato]

Carnegie Mellon is Saving Old Software from Oblivion

A prototype archiving system called Olive lets vintage code run on today’s computers

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Illustration: Nicholas Little

In early 2010, Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff published an analysis of economic data from many countries and concluded that when debt levels exceed 90 percent of gross national product, a nation’s economic growth is threatened. With debt that high, expect growth to become negative, they argued.

This analysis was done shortly after the 2008 recession, so it had enormous relevance to policymakers, many of whom were promoting high levels of debt spending in the interest of stimulating their nations’ economies. At the same time, conservative politicians, such as Olli Rehn, then an EU commissioner, and U.S. congressman Paul Ryan, used Reinhart and Rogoff’s findings to argue for fiscal austerity.

Three years later, Thomas Herndon, a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts, discovered an error in the Excel spreadsheet that Reinhart and Rogoff had used to make their calculations. The significance of the blunder was enormous: When the analysis was done properly, Herndon showed, debt levels in excess of 90 percent were associated with average growth of positive 2.2 percent, not the negative 0.1 percent that Reinhart and Rogoff had found.

Herndon could easily test the Harvard economists’ conclusions because the software that they had used to calculate their results—Microsoft Excel—was readily available. But what about much older findings for which the software originally used is hard to come by?

You might think that the solution—preserving the relevant software for future researchers to use—should be no big deal. After all, software is nothing more than a bunch of files, and those files are easy enough to store on a hard drive or on tape in digital format. For some software at least, the all-important source code could even be duplicated on paper, avoiding the possibility that whatever digital medium it’s written to could become obsolete.

Saving old programs in this way is done routinely, even for decades-old software. You can find online, for example, a full program listing for the Apollo Guidance Computer—code that took astronauts to the moon during the 1960s. It was transcribed from a paper copy and uploaded to GitHub in 2016.

While perusing such vintage source code might delight hard-core programmers, most people aren’t interested in such things. What they want to do is use the software. But keeping software in ready-to-run form over long periods of time is enormously difficult, because to be able to run most old code, you need both an old computer and an old operating system.

You might have faced this challenge yourself, perhaps while trying to play a computer game from your youth. But being unable to run an old program can have much more serious repercussions, particularly for scientific and technical research.

Along with economists, many other researchers, including physicists, chemists, biologists, and engineers, routinely use software to slice and dice their data and visualize the results of their analyses. They simulate phenomena with computer models that are written in a variety of programming languages and that use a wide range of supporting software libraries and reference data sets. Such investigations and the software on which they are based are central to the discovery and reporting of new research results.

Imagine that you’re an investigator and want to check calculations done by another researcher 25 years ago. Would the relevant software still be around? The company that made it may have disappeared. Even if a contemporary version of the software exists, will it still accept the format of the original data? Will the calculations be identical in every respect—for example, in the handling of rounding errors—to those obtained using a computer of a generation ago? Probably not.

Researchers’ growing dependence on computers and the difficulty they encounter when attempting to run old software are hampering their ability to check published results. The problem of obsolescent software is thus eroding the very premise of reproducibility—which is, after all, the bedrock of science.

The issue also affects matters that could be subject to litigation. Suppose, for example, that an engineer’s calculations show that a building design is robust, but the roof of that building nevertheless collapses. Did the engineer make a mistake, or was the software used for the calculations faulty? It would be hard to know years later if the software could no longer be run.

That’s why my colleagues and I at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, have been developing ways to archive programs in forms that can be run easily today and into the future. My fellow computer scientists Benjamin Gilbert and Jan Harkes did most of the required coding. But the collaboration has also involved software archivist Daniel Ryan and librarians Gloriana St. Clair, Erika Linke, and Keith Webster, who naturally have a keen interest in properly preserving this slice of modern culture.

Bringing Back Yesterday’s Software

The Olive system has been used to create 17 different virtual machines that run a variety of old software, some serious, some just for fun. Here are several views from those archived applications

1/8

NCSA Mosaic 1.0, a pioneering Web browser for the Macintosh from 1993.

2/8

Chaste (Cancer, Heart and Soft Tissue Environment) 3.1 for Linux from 2013.

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/image/MzEzMTUzMg.jpeg&quot; data-original="/image/MzEzMTUzMg.jpeg" id="618441086_2" alt="The Oregon Trail 1.1, a game for the Macintosh from 1990.”> 3/8

The Oregon Trail 1.1, a game for the Macintosh from 1990.

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/image/MzEzMTUzNQ.jpeg&quot; data-original="/image/MzEzMTUzNQ.jpeg" id="618441086_3" alt="Wanderer, a game for MS-DOS from 1988.”> 4/8

Wanderer, a game for MS-DOS from 1988.

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/image/MzEzMTU1MA.jpeg&quot; data-original="/image/MzEzMTU1MA.jpeg" id="618441086_4" alt="Mystery House, a game for the Apple II from 1982.”> 5/8

Mystery House, a game for the Apple II from 1982.

6/8

The Great American History Machine, an educational interactive atlas for Windows 3.1 from 1991.

7/8

Microsoft Office 4.3 for Windows 3.1 from 1994.

8/8

ChemCollective, educational chemistry software for Linux from 2013.

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Because this project is more one of archival preservation than mainstream computer science, we garnered financial support for it not from the usual government funding agencies for computer science but from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Institute for Museum and Library Services. With that support, we showed how to reconstitute long-gone computing environments and make them available online so that any computer user can, in essence, go back in time with just a click of the mouse.

We created a system called Olive—an acronym for Open Library of Images for Virtualized Execution. Olive delivers over the Internet an experience that in every way matches what you would have obtained by running an application, operating system, and computer from the past. So once you install Olive, you can interact with some very old software as if it were brand new. Think if it as a Wayback Machine for executable content.

To understand how Olive can bring old computing environments back to life, you have to dig through quite a few layers of software abstraction. At the very bottom is the common base of much of today’s computer technology: a standard desktop or laptop endowed with one or more x86 microprocessors. On that computer, we run the Linux operating system, which forms the second layer in Olive’s stack of technology.

Sitting immediately above the operating system is software written in my lab called VMNetX, for Virtual Machine Network Execution. A virtual machine is a computing environment that mimics one kind of computer using software running on a different kind of computer. VMNetX is special in that it allows virtual machines to be stored on a central server and then executed on demand by a remote system. The advantage of this arrangement is that your computer doesn’t need to download the virtual machine’s entire disk and memory state from the server before running that virtual machine. Instead, the information stored on disk and in memory is retrieved in chunks as needed by the next layer up: the virtual-machine monitor (also called a hypervisor), which can keep several virtual machines going at once.

Each one of those virtual machines runs a hardware emulator, which is the next layer in the Olive stack. That emulator presents the illusion of being a now-obsolete computer—for example, an old Macintosh Quadra with its 1990s-era Motorola 68040 CPU. (The emulation layer can be omitted if the archived software you want to explore runs on an x86-based computer.)

The next layer up is the old operating system needed for the archived software to work. That operating system has access to a virtual disk, which mimics actual disk storage, providing what looks like the usual file system to still-higher components in this great layer cake of software abstraction.

Above the old operating system is the archived program itself. This may represent the very top of the heap, or there could be an additional layer, consisting of data that must be fed to the archived application to get it to do what you want.

The upper layers of Olive are specific to particular archived applications and are stored on a central server. The lower layers are installed on the user’s own computer in the form of the Olive client software package. When you launch an archived application, the Olive client fetches parts of the relevant upper layers as needed from the central server.

Illustration: Nicholas Little

Layers of Abstraction: Olive requires many layers of software abstraction to create a suitable virtual machine. That virtual machine then runs the old operating system and application.

That’s what you’ll find under the hood. But what can Olive do? Today, Olive consists of 17 different virtual machines that can run a variety of operating systems and applications. The choice of what to include in that set was driven by a mix of curiosity, availability, and personal interests. For example, one member of our team fondly remembered playing The Oregon Trail when he was in school in the early 1990s. That led us to acquire an old Mac version of the game and to get it running again through Olive. Once word of that accomplishment got out, many people started approaching us to see if we could resurrect their favorite software from the past.

The oldest application we’ve revived is Mystery House, a graphics-enabled game from the early 1980s for the Apple II computer. Another program is NCSA Mosaic, which people of a certain age might remember as the browser that introduced them to the wonders of the World Wide Web.

Olive provides a version of Mosaic that was written in 1993 for Apple’s Macintosh System 7.5 operating system. That operating system runs on an emulation of the Motorola 68040 CPU, which in turn is created by software running on an actual x86-based computer that runs Linux. In spite of all this virtualization, performance is pretty good, because modern computers are so much faster than the original Apple hardware.

Pointing Olive’s reconstituted Mosaic browser at today’s Web is instructive: Because Mosaic predates Web technologies such as JavaScript, HTTP 1.1, Cascading Style Sheets, and HTML 5, it is unable to render most sites. But you can have some fun tracking down websites composed so long ago that they still look just fine.

What else can Olive do? Maybe you’re wondering what tools businesses were using shortly after Intel introduced the Pentium processor. Olive can help with that, too. Just fire up Microsoft Office 4.3 from 1994 (which thankfully predates the annoying automated office assistant “Clippy”).

Perhaps you just want to spend a nostalgic evening playing Doom for DOS—or trying to understand what made such first-person shooter games so popular in the early 1990s. Or maybe you need to redo your 1997 taxes and can’t find the disk for that year’s version of TurboTax in your attic. Have no fear: Olive has you covered.

On the more serious side, Olive includes Chaste 3.1. The name of this software is short for Cancer, Heart and Soft Tissue Environment. It’s a simulation package developed at the University of Oxford for computationally demanding problems in biology and physiology. Version 3.1 of Chaste was tied to a research paper published in March 2013. Within two years of publication, though, the source code for Chaste 3.1 no longer compiled on new Linux releases. That’s emblematic of the challenge to scientific reproducibility Olive was designed to address.

Illustration: Nicholas Little

To keep Chaste 3.1 working, Olive provides a Linux environment that’s frozen in time. Olive’s re-creation of Chaste also contains the example data that was published with the 2013 paper. Running the data through Chaste produces visualizations of certain muscle functions. Future physiology researchers who wish to explore those visualizations or make modifications to the published software will be able to use Olive to edit the code on the virtual machine and then run it.

For now, though, Olive is available only to a limited group of users. Because of software-licensing restrictions, Olive’s collection of vintage software is currently accessible only to people who have been collaborating on the project. The relevant companies will need to give permissions to present Olive’s re-creations to broader audiences.

We are not alone in our quest to keep old software alive. For example, the Internet Archive is preserving thousands of old programs using an emulation of MS-DOS that runs in the user’s browser. And a project being mounted at Yale, called EaaSI (Emulation as a Service Infrastructure), hopes to make available thousands of emulated software environments from the past. The scholars and librarians involved with the Software Preservation Network have been coordinating this and similar efforts. They are also working to address the copyright issues that arise when old software is kept running in this way.

Olive has come a long way, but it is still far from being a fully developed system. In addition to the problem of restrictive software licensing, various technical roadblocks remain.

One challenge is how to import new data to be processed by an old application. Right now, such data has to be entered manually, which is both laborious and error prone. Doing so also limits the amount of data that can be analyzed. Even if we were to add a mechanism to import data, the amount that could be saved would be limited to the size of the virtual machine’s virtual disk. That may not seem like a problem, but you have to remember that the file systems on older computers sometimes had what now seem like quaint limits on the amount of data they could store.

Another hurdle is how to emulate graphics processing units (GPUs). For a long while now, the scientific community has been leveraging the parallel-processing power of GPUs to speed up many sorts of calculations. To archive executable versions of software that takes advantage of GPUs, Olive would need to re-create virtual versions of those chips, a thorny task. That’s because GPU interfaces—what gets input to them and what they output—are not standardized.

Clearly there’s quite a bit of work to do before we can declare that we have solved the problem of archiving executable content. But Olive represents a good start at creating the kinds of systems that will be required to ensure that software from the past can live on to be explored, tested, and used long into the future.

This article appears in the October 2018 print issue as “Saving Software From Oblivion.”

About the Author

Mahadev Satyanarayanan is a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh.

Carnegie Mellon is Saving Old Software from Oblivion syndicated from https://jiohowweb.blogspot.com

[riverdaleroundup]

Riverdale Roundup: 2x06 “ Death Proof”

Okay so here we are, back at it.

So first of all does Jughead just live in that white tank top now? I just don’t dig it and I honestly need him to put a proper shirt on. I get that he lives in a trailer park or whatever but it’s just trying too hard for me.

So Betty is racing down the street to the five seasons and you know she’s frazzled because her hair is down. She arrives to the St. Clair suite to see Nicky just chillin in a bathrobe with his fucked up face and she’s honestly shook that he isn’t dead yet. I don’t get what her plan was here? Did she think she was going to burst in to find his dead body or like the black hood mopping up blood stains? If she was going to stop the murder wouldn’t the first step to have been to call Sheriff Keller? Thankfully Sheriff Silver Fox is already on the premises ready to take names. Despite the drama of this whole scene I just can’t get past Nick in the bathrobe, he looks like such a little bish. He should not be brooding with that much ankle exposed so casually, it’s just not fitting.

By some mercy of God Betty has learned how to put her phone on silent and I am so very very grateful. I could not take one more round of “ lollipop”.  Archie texts betty “ You up?”  like the true Fuck Boy he is but honestly it’s like mid morning at this point so like what’s the game arch?

We see Penelope sitting down with the Lodge Loons to discuss the Nicholas issue and she’s such a stone cold bitch and like not in an iconic Alice Cooper way. What a heartless Wench. Also how is her face not fucked up? How is she not completely messed? From the first episode I thought that she was going to be bedridden but like she’s fine. Not even a scratch. Okay we see that her arm is burned later but like come on? Did Mark Sloan himself come back from the grave to reconstruct her horrible burned face back to sheer perfection?  

Toni and Jughead are having breakfast and she’s all like “ Yeah we aren’t going to happen. I don’t want to be your rebound” even though the second that Jughead was like “ Betty isn’t in the picture anymore “  she was all up in his business. So like what’s the truth Toni?

Archie and Betty are coming to Pops and Betty claims she won't be answering the blackhoods calls anymore but I mean come on that sounds fake. She also claims that the people “ at the farm” are going to help Polly disappear for a while. What kind of farm is this that they take in Wayward pregnant teens and also double as a projection program? They see Toni and Jughead eating breakfast together and it’s honestly drama.

There’s an emergency meeting at the cooper house where Alice basically tells everyone that their kids are trash and huge whore’s but that Betty is an angel. Kevin learns that Bughead is no more and is honestly shook. It’s so going in his blog.

Josie’s mom is ready to lock her in a tower for taking “ jj” and decides to clear out the south side in retaliation. Archie races to South Side high to be Jugheads knight in shining armour, but Jughead just assumes he’s there to break up with him again and is v pissy about it. The cops burst into the school ready to arrest anyone wearing leather and Archie basically has to drag jughead out of there by his ear.  Also Sheriff Keller and his boys are pure fashion in those hats.

Veronica doesn’t want to tell her dad about Nick getting handsy with her because she knows that Daddy will straight up murder him and not even think about it. Kevin is very disloyal to Betty honestly. I get that he’s friends with Veronica as well and that Betty was super bitchy to her but he’s only known V a few months and Betty is supposed to be like his ride or die. Could he not at least hear her out for a minute before slaying her with alliteration?

Black hood calls Betty and she obviously picks up even tho she said she wouldn’t because she’s a fucking liar. Black hood is like “ Infiltrate the dealers. Find the supplier.” sending betty out in search of the Sugar Man.  For once Betty realizes that she isn’t in the FBI and is literally a fresh 15 and reminds BH that she’s “ Just a high school reporter” and he’s like “ I don’t give a single fuck. Infiltrate the dealers. Find the supplier.”

Archie is willing to break up with Jughead for Betty but he wouldn’t get back together with him for her so he tell’s Jughead to go talk to her.

Betty rolls up to the new Thorn Hill to find Cheryl lounging in a bathing suit, reading a book and enjoying a little spread. Here’s the thing. What month is it? There was literally just snow everywhere and Sweetwater River was frozen. School hasn’t been in session that long. In theory is should be like November/ December ish if that.  But here Cheryl is in a bathing suit, everyone's walking around without jackets,  and everyone shows up to the race in like tanktops and shorts. What is good!?! What month is it? On the subject of months how many months pregnant is Polly? She was with the sisters for like 5 months right? And she’s been home for a good while so when are the children of incest going to vacate her womb and enter riverdale where they will probably be accused of murder or something by the time they’re 6 weeks old.

Betty asks Cheryl about the Sugar man and Cheryl is like “ Duh Betty he’s a scary story my crazy ass mom created. Try to keep up.”  Cheryl proceeds to rip Betty a new one about trying to ruin literally all of her childhood memories and shoos her away so she can enjoy her trail mix in peace.

Papa Andrews tries to make sure that Archie is taking care of Jughead and Archie is like “ yas i’m trying but it’s fucking hard”, meanwhile Jughead is slithering into the Goolies lair where Tall Boy  is chilling saying they should all be BFFs.

Cheryl goes through a box of her and Jason's old stuff and finds a crayon drawing of Sugar man and decides that he’s real. But like??????? How is that proof?

Betty and Keller chit chat about the Sugar Man and Sheriff says that Old Clifford was the Sugar Man so now it could be anyone and  they are shit out of luck.  Veronica is lurking in the background so she and Betty share some milkshakes and Betty comes clean about the black hood calls. She enlists Veronica to help her find the Sugar Man and now they’re tight again.

Jughead is pacing the trailer ranting about the Goolies and it’s really dark so I did not see Archie sitting there and I honestly thought he was just ranting to Hot Dog and I was like okay how very relatable. I bitch at my dog all the time. He’s a great listener. Archie suggests they go to FP for advice and i’m like yas I miss you come back.  He says they should challenge them to a street race and i’m like are you sure we shouldn’t just have another rumble at midnight. That worked very well the first time.

Cheryl tries to talk to her mom about the sugar man but her mom just calls her a crazy bitch and reminds her that she literally burned down their house so maybe she should just shut up.

The gang has to clean up this nasty ass park and Kevin is so disgusted by it that even he wouldn’t troll for stray dick there. Reggie and Josie awkwardly flirt and i’m like ohhh this is a thing now? Veronica ruins their romantic banter by demanding the number of Reggie's dealer. Infiltrate the dealer, find the supplier.

So Veronica rolls up to the south side to get the JJ from one of the Goolies goons. I get that both gangs couldn't just wear straight leather but having the Goonies wear studs and animal print really just makes them look like jokes.

“ What about my change Asshat?” This wouldn’t happen if the dealers were kind enough to take credit.

So we see some of the Jingle Jangle production and they’re literally putting these things together with hot glue and i’m dying.

There’s a truly tragic exchange of Veronica, Betty, Archie, and Jughead all saying each other's names and then saying “ what are you doing here “ in unison and i’m like again with the scooby doo?

Jughead and Archie gotta take their bitches and skanks and get the fuck out, but Jughead having been a serpent for a solid 45 minutes decides he has the authority to bet the family farm and offers up their bar and the trailer park as collateral on this race. A bitch is ballsy.

Nick shows up at Pops and calls Nick “ Sharon” and I literally want to vom. Nick tries to play all innocent.  Although the “ Desperate tart from a truck stop town” was a pretty solid insult he’s still a huge douche canoe. At least he paid for her lunch.

Betty is helping Jughead fix Reggie's car and I know she said she used to help Hal fix cars but I have a ton of trouble picturing Hal in his tight sweaters fixing a car. Oh shove it Hal. Jughead calls Betty out on being heartless and  dumping him via Archie and she’s like “ Ohh i can explain but like not now” and i’m over here being frustrated as hell like bitch you’ve been sitting in awkward silence just tell him it won’t affect his driving skills. You know what will tho? THE FACT HE’S 15 AND DOESN’T KNOW HOW TO DRIVE.

Cheryl finds the hush money cheque in her mom's room and i’m like yass that’s what people do with cheques for large amounts of money. They hide them in their underwear drawer and hope that the cash just magically appears in their account. So more likely Mrs Blossom is above going to the bank and took a picture of the cheque to deposit it and now Cheryl is just holding a piece of meaningless paper hostage.

Veronica and Archie are lounging in bed together and i’m like where is Fred? Does he allow this sin under his roof? Cheryl kills the mood by telling Veronica that the St.Clairs are still investing in SoDale so she goes to Daddy and Daddy promises that he’s going to fuck shit up.

So we come to the drag race and everyone has put on their fourth of july best. Kevin is pissed that Ru Paul isn’t there but is glad that there is a lot of eye candy. He clearly has a thing for gang members.

Instead of offering Jughead a lock of her hair Betty gives Juggie her declaration of love and some driving advice. Cheryl tells Toni/Cha Cha  to stuff it because this is her moment and the race is on. In what world would the Goolies  race that old ass car that was never made to go more than 25 miles an hour?

Archie is a little baby and pulls the E break which should basically guarantee that they lose but Archie called Sheriff Keller with a hot tip ahead of time. Everyone is pissed at Archie but I mean they won so……

Penelope threw that cheque that i’m convinced now that she already cashed in the fire and finally spills the tea to Cheryl. Cheryl calls Betty with the intel about who the sugar man is and like a fucking sane normal girl who doesn’t live in fucking Rosewood she calls the police. The Black Hood is pissed and we find out the Sugar Man is Charles Fucking Percy, whose name in this is like Mr Phillip or some bullshit I really don’t care.

Betty is threatening the black hood being like I’ve solved all these mysteries so I can totally catch you and i’m like Betty maybe like back the heck up, I say again you are 15.

So does Fred pop pills on the regular now? Is this going to be a story line?

So the Lodges ran the St. Clair car off the road  and they all sit around and smile about it while playing chess. Not at all menacing.

Despite all Betty's best efforts, the Black Hood is still putting a hit on Percy/ Aka Robert Phillips/ Aka The Sugar man. So sad… but….not really.

That’s it.