Re:does anyone actually use Windows Me?
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QuickTime 6 Is Out
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Well my father uses Win Me and he knows the difference between it and Win 2000 and he has known since the day he bought his PIII 733. He also has a serious dislike for it, but he showns no inclination to install XP or 2000. He is the kind of person who was worried about how adding a CD-RW drive would affect the stability of his computer only to hook it up as the slave drive on the same chain on his hard drive.
What will the story be for ep. 7-9? Okay, the universe is saved, now what do we do? Hey we could fight remnants of the Empire, or add a new enemy to fight. Hey wait a minute, they already did that in the books and in any case seems to me to be about as tacky as Cinderella II or Terminator III. The best thing that Steve could do is would be to collaborate with a good sci-fi writer and come up with a another series of movies inspired by Star Wars, but much different in plot and setting.
Mouse mods aren't that hard to do. You can get a multi-button ADB mouse if you make a solder bridger and switch out the IC, the cable, and the through hole resistors of a Logitech made Apple branded mouse, with those of a Logitech made PS/2 mouse. The mouse automatically works as a multi button mouse in OS X and Linux, but to get the other button to work in older versions of the MacOS you can use a shareware program or you can hack up the MouseKey control panel from Logitech so that it works with the mouse. The PS/2 mice that work for this are non-scroll wheel Logitech mice made from 1994 to 1998. You can tell if the Apple mouse will work for this if the first two letters of serial number starts with LT or LC and the third character is a number four to eight. Inside the PCBs of both mice should look very similar.
Well you could get a USB to ADB converter and use an old Apple Extended Keyboard on your Mac or if you feel like it on a PC. I think the problem with bringing back a keyboard like that is that the Apple Extended Keyboard is contructed totally different from current keyboards. It uses keyswitches soldered on a PCB instead of a membrane design like the keyboards in the article. The keyswitches were made by Alps and I'm not sure if the keyswitches are even manufactued anymore. Northgate Computer Systems manufactured the OmniKey models of keyboards with Alps keyswitches which are AT keyboards so they would work on a PC. However some of them had nonstandard key layouts and on all of them you have to watch out for how the DIP switches in back are set because incorrect settings can cause the keyboard to act unexpectedly. Another problem is that the Northgate keyboards do not have rubber bumpers and are kind of noisy. Alps also made at least one line of keyboards using their own keyswitches about seven years ago for both Macs and PCs. Nearly of them had a trackpad built into them and on all of them the space bar is split into two keys. The right key acts like a normal space key, but the left key acts like a delete key by default, but it is software remappable. However, Alps no longer has the drivers for Windows or MacOS 8 available for download so the keyboard is somewhat hard to use.
have a question about the Xbox and booting into Linux that the little checking around that I have done has not been addressed. What if the bootloader sort of worked like the Linux bootloaders for older Macs like BootX for older PPC Macs and the Penguin bootloader for 68K Macs? Which is to say that a Linux Xbox bootloader would consist of a signed executable containing the Linux kernel inside of it. The Xbox would start up and the normal motions of booting the Xbox would occur until the Linux bootloader started up. At which point the executable would overwrite the standard Xbox kernel with the Linux kernel and execution would continue with the start up code in the Linux kernel.
Another place to check is your local library. No really stop laughing I mean it. The Hennepin County Library system in Minnesota has a small anime selection on DVD. The best selection to be found at the smaller city libraries as opposed the larger regional libraries. The obvious benefit of this is that it is free to borrow them.
Or for that matter a machine all put together and configured with a PPC motherboard and an IDE card for an x86 PC with a hard drive connected to it with Red Hat for an Alpha installed on it.
Try running "fink configure". Or make a new file named.cvspass in your home directory containing only the line ":pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/f ink A" without the quotes of course, its all my.cvspass file contains.
More potential uses for this cooler: Overclock your graphics card. Buy two and overclock a Dual G4 Tower. Use several to cool some RDRAM. Cool the Northbridge on your motherboard. Overclock your Pentium 60. Make your old 2GB Seagate Barracuda more reliable. Clamp one onto an unsuspecting sleeping victim. Overclock your brain.
Ahh yes and just for fun even if you bring along a nuclear reactor how do you propose refuel it? I don't know whether the processes on the Earth that concentrated Uranium would have occurred on Mars. The best deposits on the Earth are found where first, under anoxic conditions like before oxygen was a primary component of the atmosphere, granite was eroded away leaving Uranium bearing minerals behind. Then when the oxygen content of the atmosphere increased and the Uranium minerals became soluble and the water was transported away. Then, the water with Uranium had to encounter anoxic conditions where the uranium would precipitate out. Granted the first step could have happened on Mars, but even if it did, you would have to find these deposits and they would be pretty low grade. However the operating theory we have for the creation of granite could not have happened from what we can see of Mars. However there is some Uranium in basalt, which probably is on Mars, but the resultant deposits would probably be even lower in concentrations of Uranium than with granite.
Well you could always do something to your finger that permanently changes its fingerprint. Like giving yourself a nice deep slashing wound to your finger at a low angle and not stitching it up. At least some of you have probably done this before and bear the scars from it. I have two fingers and part of my palm I must have done this to. The tip of my left index finger has an area with a fair amount of scar tissue underlying it where the print is interrupted which must have occurred when I was young because I don't know what I did to get it. I figure my left index finger probably would have given a noticeably different print before the wound. So you can cancel your old fingerprint by running a sharp knife across your compromised finger at a low angle. I say low angle because I think it would have a better chance to scar and to change the print. Just do this by a sink because fingers have a habit of bleeding profusely. Granted you will probably lose a some feeling in that finger after it heals due to the scar tissue. Also watch out for infection.
You know the disturbing thing is we were pretty well on out way to patching up our relationships with North Korea and for that matter Iran until Bush became President. Then, Bush withdrew from essentially all of the foreign policy initiatives that Clinton had been working on and did some other things like calling Iran, Iraq, and North Korea an axis of evil. Now due to the inaction of the US both the Israel/Palestinian peace process and US relations with North Korea and Iran have been set back years. I mean before the State of the Union Address this year Iran had offered to let the US fly troops over itself and had offered sanctuary to US troops too. Keep up the good work Bush, maybe next you can instigate a nuclear war between Pakistan and India.
It sounds like NCDOT suffers from the same problem that Minnesota's DOT (MNDOT) suffers from. There is a section of freeway in Minneapolis where you have state highway 62 and I-35W share about a mile worth of freeway. Highway 62 is an east/west highway and I-35W is officially a north-south running highway, not that it does a very good job of this in all sections. Going northbound to this horrifying section of pavement, I-35W goes pretty much straight north until it curves rather abruptly to the east where you enter the commons area. Then highway 62 joins up and you enter the I-35W/62 commons area and you start going east for about a mile before I-35W splits off and it decides to go north again. I would imagine this occurred since any four given townships will not meet a point. Instead two meet in the middle of the border of a third. At any rate before entering this monument of bad planning I-35W goes from three lanes each direction to two lanes each direction. Thats not the worst of it though, Highway 62 goes from two lanes each direction down to one lane before entering the commons area. The actual commons section is three lanes each direction and after separating, each highway returns to its original number of lanes. The most joy that is to be had before and during and after that section of highway is by starting out about five miles west of the I-35W/62 commons area, driving westbound on 62 where 62 merges into US-212 and becomes 62. This is very bad as US-212 handles about the half traffic of 62. As you continue on west you move into the left lane because the signs say that it is the way to continue on highway 62. Now at this point 62 is two lanes. Then a MNDOT paint crew put down a double white line before the commons area and posts two signs. IIRC one sign is "Right lane Lyndale Ave. exit only" and the second is and I'm serious "Do not cross double white line." Now I'm serious when I say that there are many people who cannot comprehend this, cross the white lines, and slow traffic down. These people cause traffic to become stop and go on westbound 62 reaching back three or four miles. The jam then merges with the US-212/62 jam to become a horrifying mess. This happens every day. This section of highway is one of the worst in the nation. Now the politicians in Minnesota have tried to allocate funds to fix this section of highway, but until the last plan which appears to have been shelved, none of the plans seemed to address the problem that even when separated from I-35W, 62 still needs two lanes. This is maybe more than you needed to know. At any rate don't get me to describe in detail the I-94 east exit from I-394 eastbound which goes into downtown Minneapolis. The exit has only one lane for an exit ramp that is shared with another exit for about 500 feet and divided only by another magical double white line. Where almost all of the traffic of a reasonably busy I-394 east funnels onto I-94 east. Where at night the I-394 eastbound traffic can have a longer back up that takes more time to clear up than the back up of the westbound traffic out of downtown.
The problem with white LED's is that they can be inconsistent in their color. If you will recall they are made by placing a small amount of white phosphorus on the light emitting element of a high powered blue LED. When the phosphorus is bombarded by blue photons it emits photons that make up the rest of the visible light spectrum. The issue with manufacturing white LED's is that it is difficult to make white LED's that are consistent in their color and brightness. Too little phosphorus and the LED's light can look a little blue. Too much phosphorus and the LED is dimmer than a good white LED. If the phosphorus is placed off center the light produced by the LED varies in color and brightness. Of course their are grades of LED's, but the higher quality LED's cost more. Some people in developed nations might find these quality variations unacceptable. Now don't get me wrong there are some places where I could stand the inconsistencies of white LED's, like in a garage, a hallway, or some other room where tasks are done that do not require the color to be consistent. I would find it annoying to have inconsistent light in some place where I would be reading though. For that matter while I cannot be sure as I do not use makeup, applying makeup might be difficult in light that has color and intensity variations.
Mac PCI is pretty much the same as PC PCI, the only important place it differs is in the boot ROMs and a special case for video cards. For PowerPC machines which include Macs and for Sun machines the boot ROMs are written in Forth and is platform independent. However, I am not aware of any Mac/Sun cross-platform cards. However, I believe this is possible. For x86 machines the boot ROMs are written in x86 assembly. For Alpha based machines the ROMs are written in Alpha assembly. IIRC Alphas can emulate, though not very well, an x86 so that x86 PCI cards with boot ROMs can be used in an Alpha. The boot ROMs are really only necessary on those cards that need to be set up before boot up of the OS. These cards include video cards, SCSI cards, IDE cards, or network cards that are to be used to netboot need boot ROMs. Otherwise they are not needed. Now if the card is intended for a Mac or Sun it helps to have a ROM that tells the BIOS its name and address ranges. This method is also helpful to force users of Macs and Suns into using a card intended for their platform as opposed to a generic and potentially much cheaper x86 card. I personally have used an OEM Adaptec SCSI card from a Mac in an x86 PC. Granted the drives hooked up to it are non-bootable, but it works. I have also put the same DEC tulip ethernet card in both a Mac and a PC and it worked both times. The important case where this is not true in video cards is because a graphics controller intended for Macs and PCs has to deal with an issue in bit depths in either in hardware, which is faster, or in software, which is slower. In Macs at 16 bits per pixel, five bits are for blue five are for green, five are for red and one is for transparency. In x86 machines at 16 bits per pixel, five are for blue, six are for green, and five are for red. To the best of my knowledge every video card that has a boot ROM for the Mac except the 3dfx Voodoo 3 can do 16 bpp the Mac way in hardware.
Well you could always do something goofy like using an Acard UW SCSI to IDE bridge. It allows the use of IDE drives with Ultra Wide SCSI controllers. Unfortunately the bridge only supports UDMA/66 on the IDE side and only 40MB/s for SCSI, so it isn't as fast as it could be.
I don't know, I did 1600x1200 on a 15" monitor once. It was unpleasant to say the least. Thats not as bad as it could be though. You could get a 10"(9" viewable) Trinitron CRT from a Mac Color Classic and plug it into the electronics of a 21" or larger Sony Trinitron monitor and run the abomination at 1600x1200 or higher. Hmm, I have an extra one of those 10" CRTs. Maybe I should try that.
Heh, be glad your not me. I live in Minneapolis, Minnesota and I could never stand having a winter without snow or sub-zero temps. Though having several inches of snow over the last two weekends in April is a bit much. For that matter I'd have trouble living as far south as Des Moines, Iowa. For a few years I lived in Duluth, which is about 200 miles north of Minneapolis, on the shore Lake Superior and I loved it. The lake with its 50 or 60 degreee water temperature does wonderful things to the summer weather in Duluth.
You know what would be a really useful program for the Start menu? One that got rid of that god damned one pixel border around the bottom and left edge of the Start button. The result would be that you would not actually have to aim for the Start button. Instead you would just have to go to the lower left hand corner of the screen and click and the Start menu would appear.
You know it wouldn't surprise me if the only reason Apple put an ADB port on the Blue and White G3, the first candy colored tower, was for Xpress users. Quark probably initially refused to make a USB dongle. They did this even though Apple owns the patents on ADB and at one time you had to ask Apple nicely to make ADB devices. The licensing agreement that Quark has with Apple for ADB probably made it impossible for Apple to force Quark to make a USB dongle initially at least. For that matter the latency timer for the ADB bus on the Blue and Whites is very high and makes devices such as keyboards, mice, or drawing tablets useless. Apple probably would have been happiest if they could have left ADB off those machines. Also anyone know how many years it took for Quark to make at least some parts of Xpress run as PowerPC native code?
Just to nitpick, but those sounded like 6400, which are second generation PPC Macs and those aren't too bad, what really would have been bad would be a 6200/75 with 8MB of RAM. You just needed to add more RAM to get much of anything done. When it comes to booting though, on the 6400, leave a small MacOS partition and use BootX for booting linux. If you were doing this using Open Firmware and bootvars you were just asking for trouble. Unless you were doing this before BootX was released, in which case, I feel your pain. I had to go that route with a 6500, its successor. Also, you were wrong, those BIOSes are "b0rked" pretty well. For instance you can't boot from any SCSI device using Open Firmware. They also don't like to work with PCI to PCI bridge chips. Additionally all those extra boot arguments you had to pass are totally unnecessary on the non-consumer grade machines of that generation like the 7600 or the 8500.
In fact, during the Permian era mammal-like reptiles made up a significant number of the reptile species. This came to an end after the Permian-Triassic extinction when most of the mammal-like reptiles went extinct. Interestingly enough the Permian-Triassic extinction was a much more massive extinction than the extinction at Cretaceous-Tertiary boundry, which killed the dinosaurs off. We have little evidence and are unsure as to what caused the Permian-Triassic extinction.
Heh, reminds me of two things. I have an Apple Laserwriter 16/600 and it uses an AMD 25MHz AM29030 to render Postscript and an Intel 80186 to control the I/O ports. The other computer it reminds me of is the Mac IIfx, the Mac Quadra 900 and the Quadra 950, which all use similar design to each other. First, there is the main CPU which is a Motorola 68030 in the IIfx and a 68040 in the Quadras. Next there are two 6502 processors to control the floppy drive, serial ports and keyboard and mouse bus. Then on top of that there is a Z80 for the two serial ports. Then on the Quadras you could buy a card from Apple with a 486DX on it to run Windows. If you were feeling even more insane you could buy a NuBus card from a company that had a 68040 on it. This would allow you to boot it with another copy of the MacOS. Since there were four Nubus slots free if you put the 486 card in you could have put for of these cards in. So in total on a Quadra 900 or 950 the CPUs that you could have had would be five 68040s, a 486DX, two 6502s, and a Z80.
For the Mars Polar Lander to have destroyed a hypothetical face on Mars, NASA would have had to launched something with the size and the mass of the Sears Tower at it. If NASA could launch an object like that from the surface of the Earth with the technology we have today or for that matter, that we might have in fifty years, I'm almost totally certain that NASA would find something better to do with its time and money. It would have been even more stupid if NASA had built such an object in orbit and launched it at Mars. Seriously, there is no face, there never was a face and what you thought you saw was just the interaction of light and shadow off of an interestingly shaped mountain.
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Well my father uses Win Me and he knows the difference between it and Win 2000 and he has known since the day he bought his PIII 733. He also has a serious dislike for it, but he showns no inclination to install XP or 2000. He is the kind of person who was worried about how adding a CD-RW drive would affect the stability of his computer only to hook it up as the slave drive on the same chain on his hard drive.
What will the story be for ep. 7-9? Okay, the universe is saved, now what do we do? Hey we could fight remnants of the Empire, or add a new enemy to fight. Hey wait a minute, they already did that in the books and in any case seems to me to be about as tacky as Cinderella II or Terminator III. The best thing that Steve could do is would be to collaborate with a good sci-fi writer and come up with a another series of movies inspired by Star Wars, but much different in plot and setting.
Mouse mods aren't that hard to do. You can get a multi-button ADB mouse if you make a solder bridger and switch out the IC, the cable, and the through hole resistors of a Logitech made Apple branded mouse, with those of a Logitech made PS/2 mouse. The mouse automatically works as a multi button mouse in OS X and Linux, but to get the other button to work in older versions of the MacOS you can use a shareware program or you can hack up the MouseKey control panel from Logitech so that it works with the mouse. The PS/2 mice that work for this are non-scroll wheel Logitech mice made from 1994 to 1998. You can tell if the Apple mouse will work for this if the first two letters of serial number starts with LT or LC and the third character is a number four to eight. Inside the PCBs of both mice should look very similar.
Well you could get a USB to ADB converter and use an old Apple Extended Keyboard on your Mac or if you feel like it on a PC. I think the problem with bringing back a keyboard like that is that the Apple Extended Keyboard is contructed totally different from current keyboards. It uses keyswitches soldered on a PCB instead of a membrane design like the keyboards in the article. The keyswitches were made by Alps and I'm not sure if the keyswitches are even manufactued anymore. Northgate Computer Systems manufactured the OmniKey models of keyboards with Alps keyswitches which are AT keyboards so they would work on a PC. However some of them had nonstandard key layouts and on all of them you have to watch out for how the DIP switches in back are set because incorrect settings can cause the keyboard to act unexpectedly. Another problem is that the Northgate keyboards do not have rubber bumpers and are kind of noisy. Alps also made at least one line of keyboards using their own keyswitches about seven years ago for both Macs and PCs. Nearly of them had a trackpad built into them and on all of them the space bar is split into two keys. The right key acts like a normal space key, but the left key acts like a delete key by default, but it is software remappable. However, Alps no longer has the drivers for Windows or MacOS 8 available for download so the keyboard is somewhat hard to use.
have a question about the Xbox and booting into Linux that the little checking around that I have done has not been addressed. What if the bootloader sort of worked like the Linux bootloaders for older Macs like BootX for older PPC Macs and the Penguin bootloader for 68K Macs? Which is to say that a Linux Xbox bootloader would consist of a signed executable containing the Linux kernel inside of it. The Xbox would start up and the normal motions of booting the Xbox would occur until the Linux bootloader started up. At which point the executable would overwrite the standard Xbox kernel with the Linux kernel and execution would continue with the start up code in the Linux kernel.
Another place to check is your local library. No really stop laughing I mean it. The Hennepin County Library system in Minnesota has a small anime selection on DVD. The best selection to be found at the smaller city libraries as opposed the larger regional libraries. The obvious benefit of this is that it is free to borrow them.
Or for that matter a machine all put together and configured with a PPC motherboard and an IDE card for an x86 PC with a hard drive connected to it with Red Hat for an Alpha installed on it.
Try running "fink configure". Or make a new file named .cvspass in your home directory containing only the line ":pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/f ink A" without the quotes of course, its all my .cvspass file contains.
More potential uses for this cooler:
Overclock your graphics card.
Buy two and overclock a Dual G4 Tower.
Use several to cool some RDRAM.
Cool the Northbridge on your motherboard.
Overclock your Pentium 60.
Make your old 2GB Seagate Barracuda more reliable.
Clamp one onto an unsuspecting sleeping victim.
Overclock your brain.
Ahh yes and just for fun even if you bring along a nuclear reactor how do you propose refuel it? I don't know whether the processes on the Earth that concentrated Uranium would have occurred on Mars. The best deposits on the Earth are found where first, under anoxic conditions like before oxygen was a primary component of the atmosphere, granite was eroded away leaving Uranium bearing minerals behind. Then when the oxygen content of the atmosphere increased and the Uranium minerals became soluble and the water was transported away. Then, the water with Uranium had to encounter anoxic conditions where the uranium would precipitate out. Granted the first step could have happened on Mars, but even if it did, you would have to find these deposits and they would be pretty low grade. However the operating theory we have for the creation of granite could not have happened from what we can see of Mars. However there is some Uranium in basalt, which probably is on Mars, but the resultant deposits would probably be even lower in concentrations of Uranium than with granite.
Well you could always do something to your finger that permanently changes its fingerprint. Like giving yourself a nice deep slashing wound to your finger at a low angle and not stitching it up. At least some of you have probably done this before and bear the scars from it. I have two fingers and part of my palm I must have done this to. The tip of my left index finger has an area with a fair amount of scar tissue underlying it where the print is interrupted which must have occurred when I was young because I don't know what I did to get it. I figure my left index finger probably would have given a noticeably different print before the wound. So you can cancel your old fingerprint by running a sharp knife across your compromised finger at a low angle. I say low angle because I think it would have a better chance to scar and to change the print. Just do this by a sink because fingers have a habit of bleeding profusely. Granted you will probably lose a some feeling in that finger after it heals due to the scar tissue. Also watch out for infection.
You know the disturbing thing is we were pretty well on out way to patching up our relationships with North Korea and for that matter Iran until Bush became President. Then, Bush withdrew from essentially all of the foreign policy initiatives that Clinton had been working on and did some other things like calling Iran, Iraq, and North Korea an axis of evil. Now due to the inaction of the US both the Israel/Palestinian peace process and US relations with North Korea and Iran have been set back years. I mean before the State of the Union Address this year Iran had offered to let the US fly troops over itself and had offered sanctuary to US troops too. Keep up the good work Bush, maybe next you can instigate a nuclear war between Pakistan and India.
maybe the title of XXX is intentional.
It sounds like NCDOT suffers from the same problem that Minnesota's DOT (MNDOT) suffers from. There is a section of freeway in Minneapolis where you have state highway 62 and I-35W share about a mile worth of freeway. Highway 62 is an east/west highway and I-35W is officially a north-south running highway, not that it does a very good job of this in all sections. Going northbound to this horrifying section of pavement, I-35W goes pretty much straight north until it curves rather abruptly to the east where you enter the commons area. Then highway 62 joins up and you enter the I-35W/62 commons area and you start going east for about a mile before I-35W splits off and it decides to go north again. I would imagine this occurred since any four given townships will not meet a point. Instead two meet in the middle of the border of a third. At any rate before entering this monument of bad planning I-35W goes from three lanes each direction to two lanes each direction. Thats not the worst of it though, Highway 62 goes from two lanes each direction down to one lane before entering the commons area. The actual commons section is three lanes each direction and after separating, each highway returns to its original number of lanes.
The most joy that is to be had before and during and after that section of highway is by starting out about five miles west of the I-35W/62 commons area, driving westbound on 62 where 62 merges into US-212 and becomes 62. This is very bad as US-212 handles about the half traffic of 62. As you continue on west you move into the left lane because the signs say that it is the way to continue on highway 62. Now at this point 62 is two lanes. Then a MNDOT paint crew put down a double white line before the commons area and posts two signs. IIRC one sign is "Right lane Lyndale Ave. exit only" and the second is and I'm serious "Do not cross double white line." Now I'm serious when I say that there are many people who cannot comprehend this, cross the white lines, and slow traffic down. These people cause traffic to become stop and go on westbound 62 reaching back three or four miles. The jam then merges with the US-212/62 jam to become a horrifying mess. This happens every day. This section of highway is one of the worst in the nation. Now the politicians in Minnesota have tried to allocate funds to fix this section of highway, but until the last plan which appears to have been shelved, none of the plans seemed to address the problem that even when separated from I-35W, 62 still needs two lanes.
This is maybe more than you needed to know. At any rate don't get me to describe in detail the I-94 east exit from I-394 eastbound which goes into downtown Minneapolis. The exit has only one lane for an exit ramp that is shared with another exit for about 500 feet and divided only by another magical double white line. Where almost all of the traffic of a reasonably busy I-394 east funnels onto I-94 east. Where at night the I-394 eastbound traffic can have a longer back up that takes more time to clear up than the back up of the westbound traffic out of downtown.
The problem with white LED's is that they can be inconsistent in their color. If you will recall they are made by placing a small amount of white phosphorus on the light emitting element of a high powered blue LED. When the phosphorus is bombarded by blue photons it emits photons that make up the rest of the visible light spectrum. The issue with manufacturing white LED's is that it is difficult to make white LED's that are consistent in their color and brightness. Too little phosphorus and the LED's light can look a little blue. Too much phosphorus and the LED is dimmer than a good white LED. If the phosphorus is placed off center the light produced by the LED varies in color and brightness. Of course their are grades of LED's, but the higher quality LED's cost more. Some people in developed nations might find these quality variations unacceptable. Now don't get me wrong there are some places where I could stand the inconsistencies of white LED's, like in a garage, a hallway, or some other room where tasks are done that do not require the color to be consistent. I would find it annoying to have inconsistent light in some place where I would be reading though. For that matter while I cannot be sure as I do not use makeup, applying makeup might be difficult in light that has color and intensity variations.
Mac PCI is pretty much the same as PC PCI, the only important place it differs is in the boot ROMs and a special case for video cards. For PowerPC machines which include Macs and for Sun machines the boot ROMs are written in Forth and is platform independent. However, I am not aware of any Mac/Sun cross-platform cards. However, I believe this is possible. For x86 machines the boot ROMs are written in x86 assembly. For Alpha based machines the ROMs are written in Alpha assembly. IIRC Alphas can emulate, though not very well, an x86 so that x86 PCI cards with boot ROMs can be used in an Alpha. The boot ROMs are really only necessary on those cards that need to be set up before boot up of the OS. These cards include video cards, SCSI cards, IDE cards, or network cards that are to be used to netboot need boot ROMs. Otherwise they are not needed. Now if the card is intended for a Mac or Sun it helps to have a ROM that tells the BIOS its name and address ranges. This method is also helpful to force users of Macs and Suns into using a card intended for their platform as opposed to a generic and potentially much cheaper x86 card. I personally have used an OEM Adaptec SCSI card from a Mac in an x86 PC. Granted the drives hooked up to it are non-bootable, but it works. I have also put the same DEC tulip ethernet card in both a Mac and a PC and it worked both times. The important case where this is not true in video cards is because a graphics controller intended for Macs and PCs has to deal with an issue in bit depths in either in hardware, which is faster, or in software, which is slower. In Macs at 16 bits per pixel, five bits are for blue five are for green, five are for red and one is for transparency. In x86 machines at 16 bits per pixel, five are for blue, six are for green, and five are for red. To the best of my knowledge every video card that has a boot ROM for the Mac except the 3dfx Voodoo 3 can do 16 bpp the Mac way in hardware.
Well you could always do something goofy like using an Acard UW SCSI to IDE bridge. It allows the use of IDE drives with Ultra Wide SCSI controllers. Unfortunately the bridge only supports UDMA/66 on the IDE side and only 40MB/s for SCSI, so it isn't as fast as it could be.
I don't know, I did 1600x1200 on a 15" monitor once. It was unpleasant to say the least. Thats not as bad as it could be though. You could get a 10"(9" viewable) Trinitron CRT from a Mac Color Classic and plug it into the electronics of a 21" or larger Sony Trinitron monitor and run the abomination at 1600x1200 or higher. Hmm, I have an extra one of those 10" CRTs. Maybe I should try that.
Heh, be glad your not me. I live in Minneapolis, Minnesota and I could never stand having a winter without snow or sub-zero temps. Though having several inches of snow over the last two weekends in April is a bit much. For that matter I'd have trouble living as far south as Des Moines, Iowa. For a few years I lived in Duluth, which is about 200 miles north of Minneapolis, on the shore Lake Superior and I loved it. The lake with its 50 or 60 degreee water temperature does wonderful things to the summer weather in Duluth.
You know what would be a really useful program for the Start menu? One that got rid of that god damned one pixel border around the bottom and left edge of the Start button. The result would be that you would not actually have to aim for the Start button. Instead you would just have to go to the lower left hand corner of the screen and click and the Start menu would appear.
You know it wouldn't surprise me if the only reason Apple put an ADB port on the Blue and White G3, the first candy colored tower, was for Xpress users. Quark probably initially refused to make a USB dongle. They did this even though Apple owns the patents on ADB and at one time you had to ask Apple nicely to make ADB devices. The licensing agreement that Quark has with Apple for ADB probably made it impossible for Apple to force Quark to make a USB dongle initially at least. For that matter the latency timer for the ADB bus on the Blue and Whites is very high and makes devices such as keyboards, mice, or drawing tablets useless. Apple probably would have been happiest if they could have left ADB off those machines. Also anyone know how many years it took for Quark to make at least some parts of Xpress run as PowerPC native code?
Just to nitpick, but those sounded like 6400, which are second generation PPC Macs and those aren't too bad, what really would have been bad would be a 6200/75 with 8MB of RAM. You just needed to add more RAM to get much of anything done. When it comes to booting though, on the 6400, leave a small MacOS partition and use BootX for booting linux. If you were doing this using Open Firmware and bootvars you were just asking for trouble. Unless you were doing this before BootX was released, in which case, I feel your pain. I had to go that route with a 6500, its successor. Also, you were wrong, those BIOSes are "b0rked" pretty well. For instance you can't boot from any SCSI device using Open Firmware. They also don't like to work with PCI to PCI bridge chips. Additionally all those extra boot arguments you had to pass are totally unnecessary on the non-consumer grade machines of that generation like the 7600 or the 8500.
In fact, during the Permian era mammal-like reptiles made up a significant number of the reptile species. This came to an end after the Permian-Triassic extinction when most of the mammal-like reptiles went extinct.
Interestingly enough the Permian-Triassic extinction was a much more massive extinction than the extinction at Cretaceous-Tertiary boundry, which killed the dinosaurs off. We have little evidence and are unsure as to what caused the Permian-Triassic extinction.
Heh, reminds me of two things. I have an Apple Laserwriter 16/600 and it uses an AMD 25MHz AM29030 to render Postscript and an Intel 80186 to control the I/O ports. The other computer it reminds me of is the Mac IIfx, the Mac Quadra 900 and the Quadra 950, which all use similar design to each other. First, there is the main CPU which is a Motorola 68030 in the IIfx and a 68040 in the Quadras. Next there are two 6502 processors to control the floppy drive, serial ports and keyboard and mouse bus. Then on top of that there is a Z80 for the two serial ports. Then on the Quadras you could buy a card from Apple with a 486DX on it to run Windows. If you were feeling even more insane you could buy a NuBus card from a company that had a 68040 on it. This would allow you to boot it with another copy of the MacOS. Since there were four Nubus slots free if you put the 486 card in you could have put for of these cards in. So in total on a Quadra 900 or 950 the CPUs that you could have had would be five 68040s, a 486DX, two 6502s, and a Z80.
For the Mars Polar Lander to have destroyed a hypothetical face on Mars, NASA would have had to launched something with the size and the mass of the Sears Tower at it. If NASA could launch an object like that from the surface of the Earth with the technology we have today or for that matter, that we might have in fifty years, I'm almost totally certain that NASA would find something better to do with its time and money. It would have been even more stupid if NASA had built such an object in orbit and launched it at Mars. Seriously, there is no face, there never was a face and what you thought you saw was just the interaction of light and shadow off of an interestingly shaped mountain.