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Seeking Drivers for Unknown Apple Ethernet Card?
rbanffy asks: "Does anybody know what this card is? I am resurrecting an old Macintosh LC II and would like to attach it to a network. The card was inside it, but the hard disk had no drivers. It is an LC-PDS Ethernet card with RJ-45 and BNC connectors. The important parts seem to be a SMC 91c92 chip and an EPROM (haven't seen one in years) labeled 'LC ROM 44F0'. Could one of you can identify this critter and point me to the correct drivers?"
News for nerd. Obscure stuff that matters to one person.
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Given that this would seem to be exactly what the concept of "Ask Slashdot" was invented for, I would hazard a reply of "Yes. Duh?"
Unless you're proposing that questions posed to the teeming masses of Slashdotia should be put where nobody will see them...
Actually, I'd say that those are mostly more sensible than this one.
/proc/pci for any information. There's probably some kind of equivalent for the LC.
The submitter committed a number of grievious violations of netiquette.
* The submitter already knows part numbers. This is a Google problem. He should have already looked these up and need no help with these.
* If the submitter is unable to find part numbers, software procedures should have been tried. I'm not sure (never owned an LC-era machine) but if I wanted to know what a strange PCI card was, I'd pop it in my x86 Linux box and check
* A picture is unlikely to help. Asking people to tear up their LCs for similar-looking cards is ridiculous.
* This question should, if the submitter could obtain *no* information at all themselves, then have gone to a classic Mac specific tech forum. Apple-based, one of the Usenet groups, IRC. All three should have been tried.
* In general, old hardware identification is a pretty drudge task. It's not something you ask other people to do. It's time-consuming, not particularly interesting, and a waste of time, since it's not going to be useful to other people. The kind of tech questions you want to ask (and gurus want to answer) are those that will help others as well. If you can't fix this yourself, instead of asking a quarter-million people to spend hours of skilled time solving your problem, buy a bloody used Ethernet card. I don't care who you are, you can afford it. People throw these things out.
The degeneration of Ask Slashdot is wildly frusterating to me. Ask Slashdot really is a useful feature, but it's incredibly abused. On the up side, it allows people to ask questions that require more feedback than just a poll. For example, "What is your favorite set of Google tricks?" or "What security procedures do you use for SSH key distribution?" Here we have something that will be useful and interesting to many techies, but will not be available on the Web. Furthermore, any of these are likely to produce futher conversation. This differs wildly from stories like the current one, which are of no use to anyoen but the submitter.
The other way Ask Slashdot is frequently abused is to post stories that are too uninteresting or biased to be accepted in the regular categories. Frequently, these take the form of "blah blah blah How do you feel about this? What suggestions do you have for SCO/Microsoft/etc?" This is simply not an appropriate forum for stories like this. If they aren't interesting enough for the proper categories, they aren't interesting enough to be on Slashdot.
The editors are also at fault for allowing so many poor Ask Slashdots to slip by.
May we never see th
"slashdot - news for nerds, stuff that matters"
On a website for nerds, an article about messing about with a 10 year old computer seems right as place. Perhaps you should try messing about with old kit and old operating systems. It's actually a huge amount of fun.
And in terms of job hunting, you are going to get hired based on commerical experience and qualifications rather that what you tinker with at home.
The Romans didn't find algebra very challenging, because X was always 10
I think that is an important part of the piece you have left out. I've found a TON of links for BSD and Linux drivers on Mac for the thing but if you want original Mac drivers you are probably better off asking on Usenet, a Mac forum, or IRC and see what you can find out. CliffH
sigs are like a box of chocolates, they all suck remove the underscores to email me
See, it is people like you who make "Ask Slashdot" suck. The guy asks a lame question, and (assuming your answer is correct), he immediately gets a great answer. This kind of positive reinforcement is only going to result in even more lame postings.
As long as people can ask lame questions and get decent answers, they're just going to continue asking them.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
I can usually tell by the subject line that it is spam and I just delete it.
I could tell from "Seeking Drivers for Unknown Apple Ethernet Card?" that this particular "Ask Slashdot" was probably about somebody with an old Apple ethernet card. The only Apple hardware I've got is an old IIe with no software but I still thought I might learn something from the replies, and I did.
Unfortunately part of what I learned (or re-learned, 'cause it seems every "Ask Slashdot" includes people complaining about the topic) is that a lot of people seem to have enough spare time that they can spare some to go into a thread in which they have no interest and complain about the topic.
I don't have time to read each and every last word posted to Slashdot in all the different categories so I generally only read the stuff in which I'm interested and leave the rest for those who care about that. If an "Ask Slashdot" about where to find great rap and hip-hop MP3s showed up in the list I probably wouldn't bother to click on the link, but if someone else gets some benefit out of it then good for them. I certainly wouldn't go into the thread just to post a bitch about the fact of its existence. I don't understand why that's such a difficult concept for others to grasp, and I really don't understand why there are so many people going through their lives desperately worried that someone, somewhere, is thinking about submitting an "Ask Slashdot" to which they might have found the answer elsewhere. Are there other, much more fascinating "Ask Slashdot" submissions going ignored by the editors in favor of the ones which are accepted?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.