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No, but I'm willing!

www.glowingplate.com/gnujobs_resume.html

For sure!

I built a server once for a guy who didn't want to replace an old case he had kicking around. It wasn't quite of this class, it was a really nasty old 486DX-25 fullsize tower generic clone. But he *loved* that case, and wanted it to have a little more oomph.

Into that case, I was able to stuff an Asus ATX motherboard with a Pentium II 350 (back when they were still current), with many of the same obstacles this guy had in building his Barney case.

In the end, the ole 486 looked completely original. Keyboard adapter to get a Compaq Deskpro 286 keyboard (the old two-tone brown one) connected to it, and an NEC Multisync 3D. He used it more as a lightweight server, but especially enjoyed the look of the front LED display on the case still set to 25MHz.

One of my favorite pastimes is working on old cars, and this is very much the high-tech equivalent to stuffing a 7.2L Chrysler big-block V8 into a four door 1970 Dodge Dart. It's a Granny Car with an attitude. And I think a Celeron under the hood of an original PC certainly qualifies - especially with more attention to having it look dead original.

Here's my own sleeper. It's a Chevette with a Buick 231 V6 stuffed under the hood. It looks crusty, with faded paint and a cheesy hood scoop on it. But it pulls 12.8 seconds on the 1/4 mile, which is faster than the 13.1 the guy in the Camaro beside me pulled. Heheheh.

I love sleepers, whether they're computers or cars.

That's a nice workshop, but I don't think they do much prototyping there - it looks great for small assembly runs.

Wanna see what a real radar prototyping and development workshop looks like? Check this out.

Without a hot air rework station, it's pretty hard to do SMT by hand... it's possible, though. I did several video buffer circuits by hand, then I contracted out the rest because it was cheaper than my time.

I once knew a guy who could solder a surface-mount 486 into place with an ordinary soldering iron. It was terrifying to behold.

Even worse. Since the Canadian government has decided that we citizens of the great white arctic hell aren't smart enough to choose our own music, the CRTC (Canadian equivalent to the FCC) forces it on us with the Canadian Content act.

All Canadian radio and television broadcasters must play at least 40% Canadian content.

That was bumped up nationally, from 35%, in response to the fact that Q107 Toronto started syndicating the Howard Stern Radio Show.

And the media tax goes to support all those Canadian "artists" who are being "robbed" by piracy. The talented Canadian musicians get Green Cards and get the hell out pretty quickly, leaving only the chaff. Last time I checked, Rita McNeil and Buffy St-Marie weren't too popular on Gnutella.

Ah, I love my government. I get to listen (WAV, others available) to the Tragically Hip's Bobcaygeon twice a day on my local radio station because they can't play what people want to hear.

Further, American TV networks are frequently censored on Canadian cable systems, based on Canadian broadcast law. Here's what you get when they do that.

I feel so trapped by my government.

I wonder if the lack of a free Canadian broadcast media is grounds for me to claim refugee status in the United States...

Quoting from article:

Scenario. Some idiot is driving a poorly-maintained car which was ill-conceived at the design stage. Maybe he didn't even know he was driving...

A wheel breaks off and his car plays Guardrail Ping-Pong on the turnpike.

The ensuing traffic jam shuts down the city's busiest artery, halting all commerce in the city. Your newspaper doesn't arrive as a result.

Multiply that by many, many cars at the same time.

Why don't we go after the bigger problem and charge the jackasses who designed perpetually failure-prone cars and the jackass owners who don't maintain them?

Going after them instead of the local highway contractor seems like a better idea to me.

Especially since these drivers have no excuse for not knowing how dangerous their flawed little cars are.

Oh yeah. I have a 1947 Hallicrafters S-40 shortwave radio. It's an *ugly* beast, but since I've replaced all the capacitors in it and realigned it with the original shop manual, man, it is stable and clean and it can suck in stations from anywhere.

I used to have a balanced rhombic antenna attached to it, and that really helped it. The antenna was aimed right across the American heartland from Ottawa, Canada, and it would pick up Aussie shortwave services without a problem.

Between my old Dodge Ram, my Hallicrafters radio and my old TI-99/4A, I can tell you for sure, they don't build 'em like they used to. [sigh]

Nope, and Philadelphia isn't running the same software that I know of.

But, the same software was running on these:

A Windows 95 blue screen that we got to see fairly often when the fans in the machine failed and it overheated. Looks like Heathrow.

And then, there's London Gatwick. Notice the script that was supposed to relaunch the program if it failed; in this case a memory leak probably ate all the machine's resouces. I discovered a bug in this FIDS software that ate a 64k page of memory every second. Of course, Windows diligently swapped that out to the hard drive, so it took a few hours before the hard disk was full and the system crashed.

Now, you have to understand that the guy who wrote this software is the company's *only* programmer, and is responsible for the servers and all the clients, and customizing displays, configuration and stuff for each of several very large airports. I think he's a gifted programmer under tremendous pressure from his company. (If you're looking for a C++ programmer in a Windows environment who has over ten years of experience with designing and building custom database and display software, e-mail me and I'll forward it to him. He's in England, but might be persuaded to relocate.)

Disclaimer: These photos were e-mailed to me by friends and I don't mean to violate any copyrights which may be in force. Further, neither one of these photos identifies the software company involved.

Looks almost like they had the cute autologin setup when the box crashed, but it looks like the server did too! One of my more humorous photos ;)
I couldn't believe they used 95 instead of NT or 2000 for this.

Well, a lot of the problem is as follows. Airports are very conservative. Their equipment is usually old, tried and true, serial interfacing everywhere. And when you're trying to integrate serial data streams from about 14 different machines - which is what they seem to feed flight information display servers - you need a heck of a lot of serial ports - a multi-IO serial card. And you usually need to be able to manually control the DTR/DSR and other serial handshaking lines, because Arinc, Infax, airports and airlines all seem to do different things with them. We've had more success with some serial cards than others. The solution was basically to write specific drivers for each one, and using the 16 bit subsystem (available in Windows 95/98 only) allowed more precise hardware-level control. Toggle an address, and the DTR light comes on. You know the drill.

You're also often interfacing the computer to bizarre display devices, which often take the data in their own ways - LED pixelboards, flip down clapperboards, etc. Generally, the old-fashioned way - poking data into a memory location - has been the simplest way for a small company to control them.

In a closed, trusted LAN, with good hardware and stable software, there's no problem with Windows 95. I've had Windows 95 machines crash out with the 49.7 day memory leak problem, and with that fixed (M$ patch), I've had them die out like UNIX machines: hardware or power failures are the limiting factors. The biggest warning with this, though, is once the machine is starting up and reading data off the network properly, you *don't touch it*. A card house can stand indefinitely if there's no wind.

Nope, and Philadelphia isn't running the same software that I know of.

But, the same software was running on these:

A Windows 95 blue screen that we got to see fairly often when the fans in the machine failed and it overheated. Looks like Heathrow.

And then, there's London Gatwick. Notice the script that was supposed to relaunch the program if it failed; in this case a memory leak probably ate all the machine's resouces. I discovered a bug in this FIDS software that ate a 64k page of memory every second. Of course, Windows diligently swapped that out to the hard drive, so it took a few hours before the hard disk was full and the system crashed.

Now, you have to understand that the guy who wrote this software is the company's *only* programmer, and is responsible for the servers and all the clients, and customizing displays, configuration and stuff for each of several very large airports. I think he's a gifted programmer under tremendous pressure from his company. (If you're looking for a C++ programmer in a Windows environment who has over ten years of experience with designing and building custom database and display software, e-mail me and I'll forward it to him. He's in England, but might be persuaded to relocate.)

Disclaimer: These photos were e-mailed to me by friends and I don't mean to violate any copyrights which may be in force. Further, neither one of these photos identifies the software company involved.

Looks almost like they had the cute autologin setup when the box crashed, but it looks like the server did too! One of my more humorous photos ;)
I couldn't believe they used 95 instead of NT or 2000 for this.

Well, a lot of the problem is as follows. Airports are very conservative. Their equipment is usually old, tried and true, serial interfacing everywhere. And when you're trying to integrate serial data streams from about 14 different machines - which is what they seem to feed flight information display servers - you need a heck of a lot of serial ports - a multi-IO serial card. And you usually need to be able to manually control the DTR/DSR and other serial handshaking lines, because Arinc, Infax, airports and airlines all seem to do different things with them. We've had more success with some serial cards than others. The solution was basically to write specific drivers for each one, and using the 16 bit subsystem (available in Windows 95/98 only) allowed more precise hardware-level control. Toggle an address, and the DTR light comes on. You know the drill.

You're also often interfacing the computer to bizarre display devices, which often take the data in their own ways - LED pixelboards, flip down clapperboards, etc. Generally, the old-fashioned way - poking data into a memory location - has been the simplest way for a small company to control them.

In a closed, trusted LAN, with good hardware and stable software, there's no problem with Windows 95. I've had Windows 95 machines crash out with the 49.7 day memory leak problem, and with that fixed (M$ patch), I've had them die out like UNIX machines: hardware or power failures are the limiting factors. The biggest warning with this, though, is once the machine is starting up and reading data off the network properly, you *don't touch it*. A card house can stand indefinitely if there's no wind.

If Paul Nixon comes from the TI school of design, it will be built to last.

Remember, TI makes more chips than Frito-Lay.

Imagine having several hundred flight information displays around a major international airport. These are just the computers that drive the monitors all over the place.

Bone-head decision number one: All the machines are running Windows 95. They won't run under NT or 2000. And the programmer won't port it to Linux or BSD - I tried to convince him, but he didn't have the time, and he thought the airports would balk at it.

Bone-headed decision number two: My fault. ATI Xpert@Play 98 video cards because they have an NTSC video output which can be fed to each of the old displays in the building. Boss really liked the choice - they're a hometown company, and the scan conversion is in hardware; the drivers don't need to load to enable the NTSC video output.

Problem:

All the machines are identical. All the drives were mirror images of each other - same software and ATI drivers, same hardware, same BIOS settings. Windows 95.

Approximately 25% of the machines, upon rebooting, stop at the "New Hardware Found! PCI Display Adapter" message, even though the Xpert@Play 98 drivers are properly installed.

Imagine the fun one can have with a ladder, a keyboard, and suspended ceiling panels after engineering does any electrical work in the building...

Now, do I make a voodoo doll of the guys who designed M$'s crappy Plug and Pray, or do I make a voodoo doll of ATI's incredibly bad programmers?

Whichever, the voodoo doll will take a ride through Bobo.

Already got one! Remember, the list, including fully-qualified hostnames, is for _educational_ purposes only. I've made it available so that we can study how this thing moves, not for such purposes as mass-spamming postmaster@$IIS-INFECTED-HOSTNAME with flames reminding him that he is a bliterhing idiot, nor for other untoward activities which may be performed on a machine with a shell in a webserver's public directory.

Already got one! Remember, the list, including fully-qualified hostnames, is for _educational_ purposes only. I've made it available so that we can study how this thing moves, not for such purposes as mass-spamming postmaster@$IIS-INFECTED-HOSTNAME with flames reminding him that he is a bliterhing idiot, nor for other untoward activities which may be performed on a machine with a shell in a webserver's public directory.

Already got one! Remember, the list, including fully-qualified hostnames, is for _educational_ purposes only. I've made it available so that we can study how this thing moves, not for such purposes as mass-spamming postmaster@$IIS-INFECTED-HOSTNAME with flames reminding him that he is a bliterhing idiot, nor for other untoward activities which may be performed on a machine with a shell in a webserver's public directory.

My ISP (www.dsl.ca) specifically allows you to run servers - and even rents a static IP. Then, one day recently, they surprised me by firewalling all outgoing SMTP. Of course, this coincided with a BIND change on my nameserver, and so when my mail spool started to fill up, my first assumption was that I'd killed the reverse lookup! I spent an hour or so trying to figure out how I'd gone wrong, but I didn't think I did. Finally, I contacted 'em about it. They just shut it off because there were too many spammers and they didn't want to do a mass-mailing, which would become a tech support nightmare ("uhh... this port 25 thing, do I need it?").

Anyway, I'm started to get really annoyed by Code Red II. My webserver log file is full of IIS crap. I hold Microsoft responsible for marketing a faulty product.

You are lame, for sure. You know, it's really not that much work to set up an old 486 or something with FreeBSD and NAT, add Apache from the ports collection, and laugh at all the IIS lusers. Please ditch IIS; I'll provide a helping hand if I can.

For sure! Take a look at my webserver (which pioneers the great new feature of a "Log File Chat Room" (tm 2001 Lawrence Wade)).

This new variant seems to have been especially active, it's eating up a lot of my bandwidth. Last time, my IP address wasn't getting scanned as much as many other people I spoke with; I'm wondering if this one includes a better random number seed. I'm also seeing IIS victims from my ISP.

Also, I wonder if a disclaimer stating that infected IIS servers are not allowed to visit my website would be sufficient to work towards suing Microsoft for their ongoing gross negligence and complicity causing material and financial damage.

Speaking of neat junk I've scrounged, anyone want three Eimac 450TH transmitting tubes? 450 watts RMS in class A mode (lots more in class C), thoriated filament directly heated. Filaments are good, no shorts with an ohmmeter, were replaced from a big Toronto radio station as part of a normal maintenance cycle.

Want 'em? Visit my site!

Quoted from Cringely:

But can't sysadmins sue Microsloth for the gross negligence that consumes our bandwidth?

I know the license agreement that I made when I opened my Windows 2000 CD only affected my Windows 2000 desktop. It has *nothing* to do with the bandwidth - which I pay for - that this stupid [expletive deleted - Ed.] worm has consumed.

I'm not normally litigious, but Microsoft needs to clean up their act.

Anyone know a good class-action lawyer?

Quoted from Cringely:

But can't sysadmins sue Microsloth for the gross negligence that consumes our bandwidth?

I know the license agreement that I made when I opened my Windows 2000 CD only affected my Windows 2000 desktop. It has *nothing* to do with the bandwidth - which I pay for - that this stupid [expletive deleted - Ed.] worm has consumed.

I'm not normally litigious, but Microsoft needs to clean up their act.

Anyone know a good class-action lawyer?

As posted to microsoft.public.win2000.general:

Come on, Bill.

I know you've got this great vision for a wonderful Internet and a computer on every desktop and all that stuff. I've met you in person on two occasions, and found you to be friendly, personable, brilliantly intelligent, and I know you believe very strongly that your vision of the computer industry isn't flawed. I even grudginly like you for your passion, courage, vision, strength and business acumen. Most damningly towards wanting to hate you, I also believe you and Melinda are true philanthropists.

But I'll still bet money that I had an e-mail address before you did. And you and I both know that this has to stop. At this point, I tell my consulting customers that running IIS is as irresponsible as drinking and driving. My procmail filter automatically sends all e-mails from Outlook mail clients to /dev/null. Like drinking and driving affects all road users, the many blatant security flaws in Windows and related programs affect all Internet users.

Please make it stop.

Copied and pasted from my (Apache on UNIX) webserver log:

(D'oh! Slashdot Lameness filter sees all the capital Ns of the Code Red worm buffer overflow and won't let me paste, so you'll have to see it here.)

As posted to microsoft.public.win2000.general:

Come on, Bill.

I know you've got this great vision for a wonderful Internet and a computer on every desktop and all that stuff. I've met you in person on two occasions, and found you to be friendly, personable, brilliantly intelligent, and I know you believe very strongly that your vision of the computer industry isn't flawed. I even grudginly like you for your passion, courage, vision, strength and business acumen. Most damningly towards wanting to hate you, I also believe you and Melinda are true philanthropists.

But I'll still bet money that I had an e-mail address before you did. And you and I both know that this has to stop. At this point, I tell my consulting customers that running IIS is as irresponsible as drinking and driving. My procmail filter automatically sends all e-mails from Outlook mail clients to /dev/null. Like drinking and driving affects all road users, the many blatant security flaws in Windows and related programs affect all Internet users.

Please make it stop.

Copied and pasted from my (Apache on UNIX) webserver log:

(D'oh! Slashdot Lameness filter sees all the capital Ns of the Code Red worm buffer overflow and won't let me paste, so you'll have to see it here.)

Maybe there'd be more demands for Linux on Dell desktops and notebooks if I could actually select it on their website. If it was available as an option on that machine, I couldn't find it.

As it was, I was hunting around for a Dell desktop for a friend of mine. Nothing spectacular, but he didn't want to pay the Microsoft tax, and liked the look of Linux on one of my machines.

We chose the link to customize the machine, and Linux wasn't on the list. In the end, he went with a generic clone because he could get it without the liability of a copy of Windows Me. Oh, and we downloaded an RH 7.1 ISO from their website.

Wanna hire a computer geek who can configure BIND and whip out a soldering iron to hack a monitor? www.glowingplate.com

Thanks! So do you, apparently, judging from the cute little workshop fire.

I've yet to have one of those. Anywhere I break out breadboards, so too do I break out the fire extinguisher. :)

www.glowingplate.com

Nope, I used to set up video projectors for a living.

Next time you get a BSOD on a Windows 9x box, take a look at the sync rates. The blue screen, if I recall, runs at normal VGA - 640x480x16 with a horizontal sync of 31kHz and a vertical sync of about 60Hz. As far as a video projector is concerned, that's quite different from the scan rates most people keep their desktops at.

As the video scanning speeds change, it will take a moment for the horizontal and vertical oscillators in the video projector to lock onto the new rate. Hence the little burble and roll.

When you change the scanning rate on a normal monitor, you'll often hear little clicks from relays switching windings in and out of the flyback transformer and the deflection yoke. Since the flyback and yoke must resonate (like tuning forks) pretty closely to the vertical and horizontal frequencies, these relays cut windings in and out like cutting the end off a tuning fork, or adding length to it to change the resonant frequency.

Lots of cheap monitors don't do this. This is why they're cheap, why they often run hotter, and why they more often seem to blow flyback transformers and horizontal output transistors.

Finally, with a video projector - and in 1998 it would have been a three-tube CRT projector for a screen of that size - the deflection currents and second anode voltages are higher. Generally, that would mean bigger deflection yokes and flyback transformers, with more ferrite or iron laminate core to saturate with magnetic flux. When you change the sync rate, the hysterisis of the core will cause its magnetic properties to have a little bit of inertia to the change.

You can hire me! Imagine a computer geek who knows how to configure BIND and can also whip out a soldering iron and hack a monitor! www.glowingplate.com

I beg to differ. Here's a picture of the 32K RAM expansion card (and a few other cards) in a 1981 Texas Instruments TI-99/4A Peripheral Expansion Box. Yes, they're clad in cast aluminum. Yes, the steel chassis is stamped of far thicker metal than the unibody of a Toyota Tercel.

On the other hand, I could beat someone over the head with a stick of SDRAM, but it would be more memorable to the DIMM than to the individual requiring the physical behavior modification.

For all those Slashdotters who don't have access to webserver logs and therefore can't see the Code Red worm searching for victim hosts, check out this dynamically created view of my log file. For legibility, a reverse lookup is done on the incoming visitors.

The party should start shortly after 8:PM Eastern time tonight.

I bow to the master. I thought I was crotchety, talking about my new-fangled UUCP e-mail address and teletype conversion kits for IBM Selectrics. But you are the master.

www.glowingplate.com

Heh. Remember speed tweaks for 300 baud?

300 / (1 start + 7 data + 0 stop) = 37.5

Back then there was no need for anything greater than 128 ASCII characters.

Of course, with an acoustic-coupled FSK modem, handshaking was non-existant and Mom would break the silence by calling you for dinner. Her voice would always leak past the seal around the telephone handset and interrupt the 2 hours you'd already devoted to downloading *one* GIF. So keeping the stop bit probably wasn't much of a performance penalty if it helped with stability. 33.3cps. Wow.

Then again, that was lightning fast compared to the DEC LA-36 teletype and 110 baud modem that someone gave me when I was about 12. At the time, there were rules about not connecting anything but phone company property to telephone lines, so acoustic coupled modems were de rigeur. I even remember seeing an acoustic couple 1200 baud once. My 110 baud modem was junked Bell Telephone equipment, so it was apparently exempt from the telephone line rules, and I used it when I didn't want to be interrupted. That was the slowest thing in the world. But when you were reading your e-mail (on 17" wide paper!), at least there was _never_ any spam. You could put your e-mail address up on your Archie server, or even post it in newsgroups, and there was never any spam.

[hums theme from All In The Family]

Every now and then, I'll fire up my old VT-100 and login to my FreeBSD box. I'll use vi at 300 baud just for the nostalgia.

Got a job for a Toronto computer geek who used to have a UUCP e-mail address? Click here!

And a lot more! Three voice sound chip with a noise generator while most computers simply used a flip-flop to toggle the speaker on and off.

I made a touch-tone dialer program for it back when I was in elementary school. Loading the program from cassette kind of defeated the speed and convenience purpose of the dialer, though.

A friend of mine at the Ottawa TI User's Group took my idea a step further. The Speech Synthesizer was a common TI accessory, and he incorporated my program as a subroutine into an application that would read a diskette or cassette tape file of telephone numbers and call them. The program would dial, wait 30 seconds for the call to be picked up, and then start reading a message. Usually, it was used to broadcast meeting reminders in the days before e-mail.

Heh. I had a chunk of core memory kicking around. I pitched it when I moved to Toronto in 1996, but I'd really love to have it back so I could build a bunch of vacuum-tube sense amplifiers and actually interface it to an ISA bus. I'd need to sit down and get good at assembly language again before I could actually use it for anything. Maybe cache a very small HTML page in it just to have something cool on my webserver.

Oh yeah, it was about 256 bytes of 12 bit wide core memory. (12 bits wide, it was probably off a 1960s PDP-11, but I don't know for sure.)

Hmm... 12AX7s are common and cheap dual triode tubes. I must have a hundred of them; that collection should handle almost all of address bus side of the matrix. [Does quick calculation of heater voltage (12 volts) times 600mA heater current per tube times 128 tubes = 9,216 watt space heater, just for the address bus logic. Shelve that idea.]

Sure! Rockwell 6809 processor, same as the Vectrex vectored video arcade system. That was a pretty cool processor, it blew the 6502, 6510 and 8088 right out of the water. Very cool little chip. It was thge predecessor to the Motorola 68000.

I wanted a CoCo 50, which was the little micro Color Computer. Tiny thing with chicklet keys, but unlike the Timex-Sinclair 1000, the CoCo 50 had color and 5k of RAM. But I got the TI-99/4A for my 10th birthday instead, and never looked back.

Not the PEB or the expansion cards!

Having worked on a lot of industrial and military computer systems, I have yet to see another computer that has cast aluminum cases around its expansion cards.

32k of RAM in a cast aluminum card.

And that was mounted in a card cage that is stamped of thicker steel than the side impact beams in a Ford Explorer. (No kidding.)

The TI-99/4A came with a really bad BASIC. TI-BASIC was interpreted at runtime into "GPL" - Graphics Programming Language. It was a TI proprietary language that was used for most cartridges and stuff.

TI had decided in 1979, when they released the predecessor, the TI-99/4, that home users wouldn't be interested in programming, so BASIC was poor, and an Assembler wasn't available until 1981. TI also thought that they'd sell the consoles for $99 each, at a loss, and make their profits on the peripherals.

The processor was the same TMS9900 that was used in Patriot guided missiles. It was a real 16 bit CPU at a time when everything else had 6502s. They were really cool, too, because the CPU registers weren't actually on the CPU - they were in RAM. "Workspace Pointers" pointed to the location in RAM, and you could do a lot of really neat early multitasking tricks by using a routine called from the video interrupt to move the workspace pointer to a different location and therefore change your context in about 3 CPU cycles, versus the time it would take to move the information in all those registers. No protected mode, though. :(

All the stock RAM was addressed through the video controller, a TMS9918, which had really cool features like 32 automatic sprites and a video overlay and genlock feature that TI never used in the home computer. The shared RAM was cheap at a time when 16K of RAM was a lot of money, and they felt no one would ever see the difference.

The 32K RAM expansion and almost all of the other peripherals ran off the system bus, and had plug and play support that remains unmatched today. You plug in the card, and the drivers for the peripheral device are read from the ROM chip on the card at boot time.

The TI User's Groups are still quite active for a machine that was discontinued in 1983. You can actually get a couple of TI links from my webpage at www.glowingplate.com.

The TI-99/4A wasn't portable like the TRS-800 Model 100, but it was a highly cool little machine in its own way. Especially with that neat 1970s futuristic black and brushed aluminum case.

Not the PEB or the expansion cards!

Having worked on a lot of industrial and military computer systems, I have yet to see another computer that has cast aluminum cases around its expansion cards.

32k of RAM in a cast aluminum card.

And that was mounted in a card cage that is stamped of thicker steel than the side impact beams in a Ford Explorer. (No kidding.)

The TI-99/4A came with a really bad BASIC. TI-BASIC was interpreted at runtime into "GPL" - Graphics Programming Language. It was a TI proprietary language that was used for most cartridges and stuff.

TI had decided in 1979, when they released the predecessor, the TI-99/4, that home users wouldn't be interested in programming, so BASIC was poor, and an Assembler wasn't available until 1981. TI also thought that they'd sell the consoles for $99 each, at a loss, and make their profits on the peripherals.

The processor was the same TMS9900 that was used in Patriot guided missiles. It was a real 16 bit CPU at a time when everything else had 6502s. They were really cool, too, because the CPU registers weren't actually on the CPU - they were in RAM. "Workspace Pointers" pointed to the location in RAM, and you could do a lot of really neat early multitasking tricks by using a routine called from the video interrupt to move the workspace pointer to a different location and therefore change your context in about 3 CPU cycles, versus the time it would take to move the information in all those registers. No protected mode, though. :(

All the stock RAM was addressed through the video controller, a TMS9918, which had really cool features like 32 automatic sprites and a video overlay and genlock feature that TI never used in the home computer. The shared RAM was cheap at a time when 16K of RAM was a lot of money, and they felt no one would ever see the difference.

The 32K RAM expansion and almost all of the other peripherals ran off the system bus, and had plug and play support that remains unmatched today. You plug in the card, and the drivers for the peripheral device are read from the ROM chip on the card at boot time.

The TI User's Groups are still quite active for a machine that was discontinued in 1983. You can actually get a couple of TI links from my webpage at www.glowingplate.com.

The TI-99/4A wasn't portable like the TRS-800 Model 100, but it was a highly cool little machine in its own way. Especially with that neat 1970s futuristic black and brushed aluminum case.

Nahhh... Wuss. I grew up in Ottawa and Montreal, Canada. I know a thing or two about driving in snow.

For one thing, you need rear wheel drive. Four wheel drive and front wheel drive just don't do the same thing. A rear wheel drive car or truck will actually take corners faster on snowy roads than it will on dry pavement... assuming the driver is well versed in the judicious use of the fishtail.

'Nother thing: 4x4 doesn't help you steer or stop. Too many car accidents that I've seen on 401, 417 and Decarie ("of the cavity") expressways have been caused by invulnerable Yentas on cellphones in their Lincoln Navigators. Gimme a break.

Finally, and most importantly, snow is soft, so when you hit that car in front of you, at least you're padded. [grin]

Seriously, winter driving is an art, and if the conditions are right, 55MPH in a snowstorm is no big deal - but I wouldn't go any faster than that.

Novel use for an old power steering pump.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I'm not sure why one would want to implement .Net without needing to. Sure, the collaborate concepts behind it are great... but if we think Outlook is dangerous now, what does the future bring with the .Net strategy? Lost privacy? Stupid security bugs everywhere? Pay-to-play software?

Similar to the way that Outlook's address book vulnerabilities put at risk everyone with an e-mail address, what are the chances that .Net vulnerabilities will have reprocussions across all Internet services and platforms?

I'm hoping that .Net will finally mobilize the consumer to ditch Windows and get some competition back into the OS field. After all, Microsoft apparently can't even get IIS right, and that sounds a lot less sophisticated than what .Net attempts.

Bobo hates cans.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I'm not sure why one would want to implement .Net without needing to. Sure, the collaborate concepts behind it are great... but if we think Outlook is dangerous now, what does the future bring with the .Net strategy? Lost privacy? Stupid security bugs everywhere? Pay-to-play software?

Similar to the way that Outlook's address book vulnerabilities put at risk everyone with an e-mail address, what are the chances that .Net vulnerabilities will have reprocussions across all Internet services and platforms?

I'm hoping that .Net will finally mobilize the consumer to ditch Windows and get some competition back into the OS field. After all, Microsoft apparently can't even get IIS right, and that sounds a lot less sophisticated than what .Net attempts.

Bobo hates cans.

Now, believe it or not, if you're running well-written programs (flight information system at Pearson International Airport), Windows 95B has served me well. Record uptime was in the 60-day range (after fixing the dreaded 49.7 day memory leak). I think the relative simplicity of Windows 95 versus NT 4 gives it less points of failure.

Besides, our software wrote directly to hardware, Windows NT/2000 doesn't like it when you do that, so we were pleasantly surprised with Windows 95's performance.

MODERATORS: I have yet to find a version of Windows that rivals Linux, Solaris or *BSD for stability. This posting is not pro-Microsoft.

Ooh. I have. Always double-check your hardware settings before insmoding a piece of ISA hardware. [grin]

Bobo hates cans.

I'm still worried!

Write your congressman. I want to see using a Microsoft server being treated as an act of criminal negligence, like drunk driving.

Haven't we all had enough of this bullspit?

My own webserver had been hit by several thousand of these attempts. When I got Slashdotted for putting up pictures of Bobo, it was bad. But this worm has been saturating my DSL with HTTP GET requests.

Oh, that's a really cool idea! Yeah, if you wanna send me the source, that'd be great, thank you.

I use my Winblows 2000 box as my primary machine (mostly because PuTTY is a really good Telnet/SSH client and my *NIX boxes are headless). My video card dumps NTSC into my VCR, and from there, it goes off to my antique TV collection. It's really cool watching DVDs on a 1951 Motorola. :)

And I thought I was high tech because my answering machine automatically e-mails me my incoming messages.

:)

Too much technology, too many dubious projects:

www.glowingplate.com/bobo.shtml

Like they say, "The blade of grass that bends with the wind will bring a thousand happiness to the potter who also breeds chickens".

The DSL Slashdotting continues!

Heh. Well, my download is 1.2Mbps, from a Nortel DSL modem. With PPPoE (yuck!) overhead, I've capped out at 1Mbps. But not with GET requests...

My upload speed is allegedly 320kbps - that's how my ISP advertises it - but I know it's capped out at 15kbps. With PPPoE overhead, I usually cap out at about 13kbps. About 3 times the upload of a 56k modem, but not stellar.

Now that the dust has cleared, and going through my server logs, I see that from 5:PM to 7:PM EST, I was averaging over 30 requests per minute, but topped out at over 250 requests per minute for about 15 minutes.

It seems that Bobo attempted to crush my webserver.

That was fun. Can we do it again sometime? :)

'a 56K dial-up modem can at times be faster than a cable modem and access can be more reliable' due to neighborhood bandwidth hogs, billing system bottlenecks server overloads, and various other problems, many of which apparently also apply to xDSL

Wow. I pity the other users of my ISP right now. My DSL's upstream bandwidth is *pegged*, simply by putting a link to details of my Junkyard Wars application up on Slashdot.

If you can't be part of the solution, at least be part of the problem. (My ISP needs to improve its infrastructure a bit, anyway...)

How about the gasoline costs of leaving the engine idling to keep that world-record uptime? Ouch.

www.glowingplate.com

Yeah. And for the service to become more widespread. Like, Toronto area. And a static IP would be a nice feature, but not absolutely essential.

Then, I can move my webserver to the trunk of my 1970 Dodge Dart and get Slashdotted while I'm driving to work!

More technology = more dubious projects for me.

Here's a couple of stills from my Junkyard Wars application, if you like dubious projects.

While it may be true, Bobo resents that. He's built with junk, but he's definitely not crap.

Remember, to apply to get onto Junkyard Wars, you have to submit a videotape of you and your team explaining how a machine works. What better machine to explain than something built in the Junkyard Wars tradition?

You'll like Bobo. He's very strong. You can see him here.