I have a job, a wife, two dogs, eleven cats, and 5 acres of land to keep the weeds from taking over. I just drive up to Frys every once in awhile and buy whatever mainboard combo they're blowing out at $79 that week. It works pretty good, too.
He means that he's finally had to give up. For years, he kept using his original full-footprint PC-AT motherboard (one of the big boys that used almost all TTL chips) by shoehorning in a little daughterboard with a 386 processor on it. Then he finally was able to locate a 486 daughterboard to plug into the 386 socket. He also probably still uses Intel Inboards to keep the machine well stocked with 16 megs of RAM. The four ISA slot 4MB Inboard cards take up a lot of slots, but with the Video Card (a Paradise enhanced-CGA card- it does 640 lines!), and by using a special card he found that does serial/parallel/floppy/hard drive all in one, it fits okay, even using the Microsoft Bus-mouse card that he favors (first edition Microsoft mouse- the one with the uncoated steel ball that screams-like-hell for a mousepad.) Also, he's holding onto his Seagate ST255 drives (two of 'em) because he has a pair of those ancient ST-506 to IDE adapters that were all the vogue and allowed him to not be forced to abandon any of his old 'sockets' to 'the man.'
Needless to say, the system all runs a little hot, with all those DRAM chips and all that bipolar TTL silicon, which is what he's complaining about mostly. But with a flip-top full-AT style case, he can keep a window fan blowing across it and it only overheats and crashes on the warmest days.
When I started gathering parts for the first PC I built (parts bought at a swap meet) the processor names weren't the biggest obstacle. I had the choice of a 4.77 MHz 8088 main board or a 'turbo' main board at 8 MHz. I think they had started making the rocket fast 10 MHz boards by then, but not for sale at a swapmeet. My first machine had a second hand 'original' IBM PC power supply. The ones that were 63.5 watts. I also achieved all 640K of RAM quickly, by purchasing used (solder pull) 256Kx1 DRAM chips cheap for like $8 apiece.
In the DX nomenclature, 2 means 'half-speed bus', 3 means 'one-third speed bus' and 4 means 'one-quarter-speed bus.' As the numbers grew, the turgidity of the processor when not running in primary cache became obvious.
Not to be overly pedantic, but many of us felt the Pentium 4, at least in it's early incarnations, was a step down from the Pentium III. Intel is still having to overcome that perception in parts of the tech community. When you see one of those P4 stickers on a box, you reflexively hold your nose.
My point was that you seem to believe that government should be actively using tax policy for something other than raising revenues. My point was that you should also be in favor of government stepping in to mess around with people in even more intrusive ways.
My opinion is that taxes should be to fund the government, and have as little meddling impact on the economy as possible.
the simplest of which was like 80486-66 or 80486-SX15 or 80486DX-50
It was even deceiving back then. The 486DX-50 has a 50 MHz bus. The 486DX2-66 has a clock doubled 33 MHz bus. The 486DX4-100 had a pitiful 25 MHz bus. (or was it a tripled 33 Mhz bus?)
There were lots of weenies throwing around their 'numbers' back then. And people with their AMD parts, which they called 'DX' but had the weak AMD math co-processor of the time.
When that happened to me, it was that weird Bass player in the room above mine in the rooming house where I lived at the time. He had an 8-Track tape of the Grateful Dead's "Steal Your Face" playing on repeat over and over and over and over.
It turned out, though, that he'd OD'd and it was when they finally broke down the door and found his body that the music stopped.
Ready to be pushed out of the server room, where it cannot be trusted, and onto the desktop, like some dodgey mini-tower 'server' that has something wrong with it but is good enough for an intern to run Word on??
It's also the case, though, that when a company goes in and cleans up, unifies, and replaces all that third-party croft, they come out with an improved product. Sadly, it isn't the kind of 'improvement' (i.e. eye candy and more 'features' on a bullet list) that the people who hold the purse strings in a company often acknowledge.
Incompetence. Apple hasn't done anything really clever technically in a long, long time. They rely on 'creative design,' attractive appearances, and heavy heavy marketing.
They weren't even able to turn MacOS into a modern pre-emptive multitasking OS. They ended up having to buy in a third party OS from NeXT, after spending many millions in failed attempts.
One of the most difficult things to engineer into a portable device is a robust battery compartment that can use commercial off-the-shelf _standard_ batteries. It's a lazy cop-out to seal the batteries into a product. I know, because I worked for years at a medical device manufacturer where we struggled with a design to let the customer use a simple off-the-shelf 9v battery. It's an EXPENSIVE and difficult undertaking. Again, Apple really isn't competent enough to design a robust battery compartment. My Newton, which is fine in other regards, has a botched battery compartment.
There's no getting around the fact that Apple has decided to be the opposite of "open".
They decided that decades ago. The Apple 2 was open. The Mac was 'closed' and Steve Jobs got up on a lectern during the product launch hubbub and boastfully called the Mac a 'hacker proof' sealed box. Like that was something frickin' wonderful.
There's a reason some of us have despised Apple for decades. It used to be completely wrong to have anything to do with Apple products if you were any kind of a nerd at all. (it still is, on a certain level) Apple stuff is for fashionable people.
I have standardized on the Palm III. It's the most rugged Palm ever. I had Handspring Visor for a time, and aa Titanium for awhile, but they couldn't survive in my pocket. So I am back to the Palm III. I've bought enough of them used on eBay to last a long, long time, esp. since I haven't 'killed' the first one I started carrying full time a few years ago yet. You can get used Palm III's on eBay for $5 now, and it's not difficult to get the ones that somebody bought to be 'trendy' and stuck in a drawer and never used. I have the Code Warrior for PalmOS for creating the apps that I need, and there are still plenty of Palm III apps out there to do most of what a PDA is appropriate for.
I actually LIKED the MS Word for DOS 5.5 interface. Better than the classic 5.0 interface. Both were okay, though. Both were better than WordPerfect, IMO, though I know I am in a minority there.
I just clicked on your 'homepage' which I hope is the site you're posting stats about, because it's just pathetic that all you're getting are 'doze and Linux clicks. You should have a NetBSD/i386 in your next stats. Unless you're stuffing that in the 'other' slot in which case never mind.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a job, a wife, two dogs, eleven cats, and 5 acres of land to keep the weeds from taking over. I just drive up to Frys every once in awhile and buy whatever mainboard combo they're blowing out at $79 that week. It works pretty good, too.
He means that he's finally had to give up. For years, he kept using his original full-footprint PC-AT motherboard (one of the big boys that used almost all TTL chips) by shoehorning in a little daughterboard with a 386 processor on it. Then he finally was able to locate a 486 daughterboard to plug into the 386 socket. He also probably still uses Intel Inboards to keep the machine well stocked with 16 megs of RAM. The four ISA slot 4MB Inboard cards take up a lot of slots, but with the Video Card (a Paradise enhanced-CGA card- it does 640 lines!), and by using a special card he found that does serial/parallel/floppy/hard drive all in one, it fits okay, even using the Microsoft Bus-mouse card that he favors (first edition Microsoft mouse- the one with the uncoated steel ball that screams-like-hell for a mousepad.) Also, he's holding onto his Seagate ST255 drives (two of 'em) because he has a pair of those ancient ST-506 to IDE adapters that were all the vogue and allowed him to not be forced to abandon any of his old 'sockets' to 'the man.'
Needless to say, the system all runs a little hot, with all those DRAM chips and all that bipolar TTL silicon, which is what he's complaining about mostly. But with a flip-top full-AT style case, he can keep a window fan blowing across it and it only overheats and crashes on the warmest days.
When I started gathering parts for the first PC I built (parts bought at a swap meet) the processor names weren't the biggest obstacle. I had the choice of a 4.77 MHz 8088 main board or a 'turbo' main board at 8 MHz. I think they had started making the rocket fast 10 MHz boards by then, but not for sale at a swapmeet. My first machine had a second hand 'original' IBM PC power supply. The ones that were 63.5 watts. I also achieved all 640K of RAM quickly, by purchasing used (solder pull) 256Kx1 DRAM chips cheap for like $8 apiece.
In the DX nomenclature, 2 means 'half-speed bus', 3 means 'one-third speed bus' and 4 means 'one-quarter-speed bus.' As the numbers grew, the turgidity of the processor when not running in primary cache became obvious.
I have no doubt that was true, many years ago, when it was competing against 486s.
At least, when it was competing against 486 processors shoehorned into the plodding 8 MHz ISA bus. Times rapidly changed, however.
AMD only did it as a marketing gymic, mainly because their processors had features that made raw cpu clock speed numbers meaningless.
Not to be overly pedantic, but many of us felt the Pentium 4, at least in it's early incarnations, was a step down from the Pentium III. Intel is still having to overcome that perception in parts of the tech community. When you see one of those P4 stickers on a box, you reflexively hold your nose.
My point was that you seem to believe that government should be actively using tax policy for something other than raising revenues. My point was that you should also be in favor of government stepping in to mess around with people in even more intrusive ways.
My opinion is that taxes should be to fund the government, and have as little meddling impact on the economy as possible.
the simplest of which was like 80486-66 or 80486-SX15 or 80486DX-50
It was even deceiving back then. The 486DX-50 has a 50 MHz bus. The 486DX2-66 has a clock doubled 33 MHz bus. The 486DX4-100 had a pitiful 25 MHz bus. (or was it a tripled 33 Mhz bus?)
There were lots of weenies throwing around their 'numbers' back then. And people with their AMD parts, which they called 'DX' but had the weak AMD math co-processor of the time.
When that happened to me, it was that weird Bass player in the room above mine in the rooming house where I lived at the time. He had an 8-Track tape of the Grateful Dead's "Steal Your Face" playing on repeat over and over and over and over.
It turned out, though, that he'd OD'd and it was when they finally broke down the door and found his body that the music stopped.
Ah, the olden days....
You seem really into the idea of using tax enforcement as a tool to push people around and force changes in how people do things.
Do you equally feel that if there's a 'blight area' in a city, they should build a road through it to obliterate it?
Should medical care be reduced in areas where it is deemed that people should no longer live?
Where does your concept of 'government using side-effects to meddle' end?
Ready to be pushed out of the server room, where it cannot be trusted, and onto the desktop, like some dodgey mini-tower 'server' that has something wrong with it but is good enough for an intern to run Word on??
I'm not sayin', I'm just saying....
It's also the case, though, that when a company goes in and cleans up, unifies, and replaces all that third-party croft, they come out with an improved product. Sadly, it isn't the kind of 'improvement' (i.e. eye candy and more 'features' on a bullet list) that the people who hold the purse strings in a company often acknowledge.
The sad thing is, there are fewer and fewer of us every day in this modern packetized world who even know what you mean by 'line noise.'
You can draw all the energy out of that sort of battery at once, particularly if it's lithium-bearing, by simply rupturing it.
Incompetence. Apple hasn't done anything really clever technically in a long, long time. They rely on 'creative design,' attractive appearances, and heavy heavy marketing.
They weren't even able to turn MacOS into a modern pre-emptive multitasking OS. They ended up having to buy in a third party OS from NeXT, after spending many millions in failed attempts.
One of the most difficult things to engineer into a portable device is a robust battery compartment that can use commercial off-the-shelf _standard_ batteries. It's a lazy cop-out to seal the batteries into a product. I know, because I worked for years at a medical device manufacturer where we struggled with a design to let the customer use a simple off-the-shelf 9v battery. It's an EXPENSIVE and difficult undertaking. Again, Apple really isn't competent enough to design a robust battery compartment. My Newton, which is fine in other regards, has a botched battery compartment.
That's right. If you don't like us lynching, er... people different from us, er... don't move into our town!!
There's no getting around the fact that Apple has decided to be the opposite of "open".
They decided that decades ago. The Apple 2 was open. The Mac was 'closed' and Steve Jobs got up on a lectern during the product launch hubbub and boastfully called the Mac a 'hacker proof' sealed box. Like that was something frickin' wonderful.
There's a reason some of us have despised Apple for decades. It used to be completely wrong to have anything to do with Apple products if you were any kind of a nerd at all. (it still is, on a certain level) Apple stuff is for fashionable people.
a couple amp-hours of battery in a handheld?
You're talking about an electronic hand grenade. No thanks on the possibilities of something like that 'shorting out' while in my pocket.
I have standardized on the Palm III. It's the most rugged Palm ever. I had Handspring Visor for a time, and aa Titanium for awhile, but they couldn't survive in my pocket. So I am back to the Palm III. I've bought enough of them used on eBay to last a long, long time, esp. since I haven't 'killed' the first one I started carrying full time a few years ago yet. You can get used Palm III's on eBay for $5 now, and it's not difficult to get the ones that somebody bought to be 'trendy' and stuck in a drawer and never used. I have the Code Warrior for PalmOS for creating the apps that I need, and there are still plenty of Palm III apps out there to do most of what a PDA is appropriate for.
When 'the current state of the law' crashes into 'I don't think that's the way it should be' there is often a certain outcome...
I actually LIKED the MS Word for DOS 5.5 interface. Better than the classic 5.0 interface. Both were okay, though. Both were better than WordPerfect, IMO, though I know I am in a minority there.
That was a rather dull link, since Flash isn't available for this machine I use to browse the web.
I just clicked on your 'homepage' which I hope is the site you're posting stats about, because it's just pathetic that all you're getting are 'doze and Linux clicks. You should have a NetBSD/i386 in your next stats. Unless you're stuffing that in the 'other' slot in which case never mind.
Euros are redeemable at the bank for silver??
I didn't think so.
Either are Dollars, of course.
I believe we were talking about silver dollars. Not a mythical thing at all. Just not something governments promote any longer.