I owned an 85 audi quattro and I still consider it better than my current BMW 5 series so am I missing something (other than perhaps nostalgia)?. The only major problem with it was the display electronics and AC died in the late 90s, compared to my Taurus which the entire thing nearly disintegrated after 6 years.
Display electronics? Either you lived in Europe or had a eurospec urquattro. US cars received analog gauges, Europe got the talking digital dashboard (that usually broke). Ironically the AC compressor was pretty much the only part of those cars Made in the USA. The hoses usually leaked all the freon out after a few years.
Wasn't it the Audi Quattro that was the first ever 4WD road car?
They likely were the first full time AWD (all 4 wheels always receive power) road car that could be used on all surfaces. Unlike the AMC Eagle, it had an open center differential integrated into the transmission. The Eagle used a viscous coupling transfer case that transferred power to the front wheel when it detected slip.
Short-term backwards compatibility is one thing, but when do you draw the line? If I remember my history correctly, Windows 95 was the first 32-bit Windows operating system, the last release of which was 12 years ago.
Windows NT 3.1, which this bug first appeared, was released in 1993. The one nice thing about NT's VDM and WoW subsystem is that it froze the Win16 API/environment so any 16-bit applications that worked with NT basically kept working without any new bugs up to Windows 7 32-bit. My old Windows 3.x apps kept working through various versions of NT, yet my Win32 apps kept breaking with each upgrade, go figure.
I took the cover from my LC IV and swapped it with her LC II cover. She was so happy with her new machine.
There was no "LC IV", there was the LC III+, and then the LC 475 (which was actually a re-badged Quadra 605). Apple was the king of badge engineering in the 90s. Plenty of the "high end and expensive" Quadras and Centris machines were rebranded as cheaper Performas, sometimes with the same exact hardware specs.
I guess the case makers forgot the days of full length VLB and ISA cards. The spec calls for 13.3 inch cards max, most cards are half that length nowadays. Of course this isn't a new problem, Tandy was infamous for building the cases of their 1000 line of computers too short to accept the then-common full length cards.
I still hold a grudge against nVidia after the crap drivers they put out initially when Windows XP came out. Lets not get into the mess the old nForce RAID controller drivers make, and there are plenty of unhappy folks with crackling X-Fis (although Creative is mostly to blame for that one). I did make a bit of money fixing machines with those driver problems though.
Don't you know that other kids are starving in Japan?! So... Eat it!
The Hacker's Diet covered this, something about instinct to eat all the food put in front of you. That or a generation of children scarred by grandmas from the depression era to "eat all your food, you look like you are starving". Yeah, we know you grew up in an era where food was scarce, but thats not the case anymore.
The CARB should be barred from mandating equipment, and simply mandate emissions standards.
Which brings up an excellent point. Does CARB actually have the power to mandate this glass? In the US, automobile glazing requirements are govern by the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS). Federal Law always trumps state law and if this actually gets enforced it sets a bad precedent. Next thing you know, CARB will be enforcing bumper standards and airbags all in the name of energy conservation (ok its a stretch, but still). Last I checked CARB was only able to set standards for vehicle tailpipe emissions because the feds. grandfathered them in (CARB existed prior to the EPA's emission standards).
You can't go much wrong with a decent HP Laser printer. As long as you don't get the completely bargain bucket, bottom of the range ones.
30,000 pages is nothing. I've got an 8-year-old HP5000 series that does 10,000 pages a year.
Anything with an Ethernet socket and support for PostScript (or even PDF natively, these days) is not going to need much in the way of drivers, particularly on OS X.
x2. They are readily available on the used market for a great price, parts are cheap and easy to source and service info is easy to find. Go for the "mid level" market lasers (anything 3000 series and up), they are usually built for heavier duty cycles then personal lasers so they last a LONG time for home use, and price per page is very low. At the same time, they usually have a smaller footprint then a typical workgroup printer.
They also usually come with JetDirect and memory slots for expansion. JetDirect cards support all the old and new network protocols (AppleTalk in particular) and can even be had with wireless. As for languages, every mid-level HP supports PCL6 and Postscript 3. Keep in mind that I regularly print from my Apple IIgs to a cheap Color Laserjet 3700dn using the GS/OS Laserwriter driver. No color support, but shows these modern printers have superb backward compatibility.
If you really need DOS/parallel support, HP droppped IEEE-1284 from their printers about 2 years ago. If the printer has an open JetDirect slot, HP sells a parallel port JetDirect card that you can usually find on ebay for cheap.
I once had a 1989 Opel Vectra whose bumpers still seemed to match that requirement, and it has saved me a nice chunk of money.
But I agree that you should not expect the bumper to handle a 30 mph crash.
Except that if the car was in Europe, it NEVER had to meet the 5mph bumper impact standards. It was strictly a requirement of the FMVSS used in the USA and Canada, and was reduced to 2.5mph starting in 1984.
Most folks with European cars in the USA would swap out the ugly big, goofy (and heavy!) 5 mph bumpers for the smaller cleaner European bumpers. At the time, those European bumpers were nothing more then a piece of plastic with some wimpy rebar behind them.
I spent most of my youth writing in cursive, because it was supposedly faster.
This is exactly why I never used it, it was never faster. I had a teacher scold me for not forming the letters "correctly" (like in the book). So instead of it being faster, I took forever making sure every letter was perfect. Also, lets not forget that cursive lessons and being left handed don't mix.
Then there were the threats from teachers that you HAD to write in cursive in the upper grades. I still did everything in print at school, never got marked down (likely because it wasn't worth the teacher's time to deal with bitching parents). I wrote maybe 3-4 book reports at home in cursive in the 3rd grade... most of which I had to rewrite due to smudging. After that...forget it, fired up the Apple IIc(!) and Bank Street Writer and just typed out stuff from then on. My teachers were more then happy to accept typed reports.... because they could actually read them.
On the Audi/VW side, there is an awesome program called VAG-COM which allows you to view all sorts of parameters, adjust values, read diagnostic codes, etc...almost EVERYTHING that can possibly be accessed or tweaked.
Just a word of warning with newer Audis (don't know if VW is doing it yet). Dealers are now using a tool called Software Version Management (SVM) thats similar to the Volvo system. It inventories the various systems in the car and determines what modules need to be updated. One nasty side effect is that it reset all the custom coding you did with VAG-COM back to the factory defaults (you can change them back though). It also poses a problem if you made some electrical mods to your car (like adding factory navigation or replacing control modules with newer more functional revisions) since the system will basically bitch the car isn't stock anymore.
I went to that link, there were an awful lot of "UNKNOWN CODE" listed. I stopped skimming between 500 and 600 and found over 70 "UNKNOWN CODE" listings in that. Those "UNKNOWN CODE" listings are what this law is about. Those aren't unused codes, they are codes that BMW considers trade secrets and that are only published to mechanics working for BMW dealerships (other car manufacturers have similar codes).
The manufacturer specific codes are usually found in the factory service manual, which you can easily purchase or borrow from someone.
I wonder if a lot of this silliness is only found on expensive luxury models like BMWs and Cadillacs. I'll bet your run-of-the-mill Kia or Hyundai doesn't have anything like this, even now.
Hyundai has their own dealer tool. If you happen to bleed your brakes yourself and somehow manage to get air in the ABS pump, using that tool is the only way to cycle the pump to get the air bubbles out. Early ABS equipped cars usually had a jumper of some sort on the ABS controller to cycle the ABS pump on its own, but that simply isn't the case anymore.
One reason I like owning a VWAG built car. Someone reverse engineered the vehicle's computer interface and a $350 3rd party cable now replicates most all the functions the $2500 dealer diag system does. VW even uses the product themselves. http://www.ross-tech.com/
Around 1993 my school library transitioned to Follett's DOS OPAC software. I think they were actually ahead of the local public library. The school's transition was just the catalog though, check in/out still used the silly cards and stamps. When the public library switched, they switched to a fully bar coded inventory system and electronic check in/out using WYSE dumb terminals. They still have those dumb terminals scattered about, many find them faster to search then using the more modern Windows interface.
Funny, back in the day iTunes used to actually support 3rd party MP3 players via plug-ins. Expect an arms race between Apple and Palm similar to the one AOL started with 3rd party IM clients and their OSCAR protocol.
Personally the only iPod like functionality I would like to see emulated on 3rd party devices is the dock connector and protocol used to talk with iPod interfaces used in car headunits. There are plenty of decent media players on the PC, but really no option for in vehicle integration other then the iPod/iPhone. Car and after market audio companies aren't rolling out Zune or PalmPre interfaces any time soon. The iPod is the only game in town.
Personally I don't see why they are sticking with the old Mozilla Suite if its going to require a ton of patching and rewriting anyway. Might as well back port Firefox if one has to go through all that work. After all, wasn't the move away from a monolithic internet application suite a way to increase speed and reduce memory footprint?
Maybe someone could port gecko to my System 6-based Apple IIGS?
Not going to happen without some sort of C++ compiler and decent graphics. Even then one would likely need a Transwarp GS/Zip GS card for a page to render faster then a weekend. After all, it takes the machine a couple of minutes just to decompress a small JPEG image!
Slashdot Mirror
Nope, it was reborn as the MS diagnostic and recovery toolset. link
In the process, they removed a few (minor) tools. They also altered Locksmith to write a log entry when someone resets a password.
Must have been a 5000 or later 90 series then. Believe it or not, that awful electronic climate control was sourced from GM!
I owned an 85 audi quattro and I still consider it better than my current BMW 5 series so am I missing something (other than perhaps nostalgia)?. The only major problem with it was the display electronics and AC died in the late 90s, compared to my Taurus which the entire thing nearly disintegrated after 6 years.
Display electronics? Either you lived in Europe or had a eurospec urquattro. US cars received analog gauges, Europe got the talking digital dashboard (that usually broke). Ironically the AC compressor was pretty much the only part of those cars Made in the USA. The hoses usually leaked all the freon out after a few years.
Wasn't it the Audi Quattro that was the first ever 4WD road car?
They likely were the first full time AWD (all 4 wheels always receive power) road car that could be used on all surfaces. Unlike the AMC Eagle, it had an open center differential integrated into the transmission. The Eagle used a viscous coupling transfer case that transferred power to the front wheel when it detected slip.
Short-term backwards compatibility is one thing, but when do you draw the line? If I remember my history correctly, Windows 95 was the first 32-bit Windows operating system, the last release of which was 12 years ago.
Windows NT 3.1, which this bug first appeared, was released in 1993. The one nice thing about NT's VDM and WoW subsystem is that it froze the Win16 API/environment so any 16-bit applications that worked with NT basically kept working without any new bugs up to Windows 7 32-bit. My old Windows 3.x apps kept working through various versions of NT, yet my Win32 apps kept breaking with each upgrade, go figure.
I took the cover from my LC IV and swapped it with her LC II cover. She was so happy with her new machine.
There was no "LC IV", there was the LC III+, and then the LC 475 (which was actually a re-badged Quadra 605). Apple was the king of badge engineering in the 90s. Plenty of the "high end and expensive" Quadras and Centris machines were rebranded as cheaper Performas, sometimes with the same exact hardware specs.
I guess the case makers forgot the days of full length VLB and ISA cards. The spec calls for 13.3 inch cards max, most cards are half that length nowadays. Of course this isn't a new problem, Tandy was infamous for building the cases of their 1000 line of computers too short to accept the then-common full length cards.
I still hold a grudge against nVidia after the crap drivers they put out initially when Windows XP came out. Lets not get into the mess the old nForce RAID controller drivers make, and there are plenty of unhappy folks with crackling X-Fis (although Creative is mostly to blame for that one). I did make a bit of money fixing machines with those driver problems though.
Didn't Microsoft license and use Winzip code for the built in XP zip support?
Don't you know that other kids are starving in Japan?! So... Eat it!
The Hacker's Diet covered this, something about instinct to eat all the food put in front of you. That or a generation of children scarred by grandmas from the depression era to "eat all your food, you look like you are starving". Yeah, we know you grew up in an era where food was scarce, but thats not the case anymore.
I changed the amount of food I ate from large dishes to normal dishes
How do you do that with US restaurant portions?
"I'd like a small meal, please." "OK, one supersized-mega kids' meal coming right up!"
You don't eat the whole serving they give you and take the rest home to eat another day. You CAN do that you know. ;)
The CARB should be barred from mandating equipment, and simply mandate emissions standards.
Which brings up an excellent point. Does CARB actually have the power to mandate this glass? In the US, automobile glazing requirements are govern by the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS). Federal Law always trumps state law and if this actually gets enforced it sets a bad precedent. Next thing you know, CARB will be enforcing bumper standards and airbags all in the name of energy conservation (ok its a stretch, but still). Last I checked CARB was only able to set standards for vehicle tailpipe emissions because the feds. grandfathered them in (CARB existed prior to the EPA's emission standards).
You can't go much wrong with a decent HP Laser printer. As long as you don't get the completely bargain bucket, bottom of the range ones.
30,000 pages is nothing. I've got an 8-year-old HP5000 series that does 10,000 pages a year.
Anything with an Ethernet socket and support for PostScript (or even PDF natively, these days) is not going to need much in the way of drivers, particularly on OS X.
x2. They are readily available on the used market for a great price, parts are cheap and easy to source and service info is easy to find. Go for the "mid level" market lasers (anything 3000 series and up), they are usually built for heavier duty cycles then personal lasers so they last a LONG time for home use, and price per page is very low. At the same time, they usually have a smaller footprint then a typical workgroup printer.
They also usually come with JetDirect and memory slots for expansion. JetDirect cards support all the old and new network protocols (AppleTalk in particular) and can even be had with wireless. As for languages, every mid-level HP supports PCL6 and Postscript 3. Keep in mind that I regularly print from my Apple IIgs to a cheap Color Laserjet 3700dn using the GS/OS Laserwriter driver. No color support, but shows these modern printers have superb backward compatibility.
If you really need DOS/parallel support, HP droppped IEEE-1284 from their printers about 2 years ago. If the printer has an open JetDirect slot, HP sells a parallel port JetDirect card that you can usually find on ebay for cheap.
I once had a 1989 Opel Vectra whose bumpers still seemed to match that requirement, and it has saved me a nice chunk of money.
But I agree that you should not expect the bumper to handle a 30 mph crash.
Except that if the car was in Europe, it NEVER had to meet the 5mph bumper impact standards. It was strictly a requirement of the FMVSS used in the USA and Canada, and was reduced to 2.5mph starting in 1984.
Most folks with European cars in the USA would swap out the ugly big, goofy (and heavy!) 5 mph bumpers for the smaller cleaner European bumpers. At the time, those European bumpers were nothing more then a piece of plastic with some wimpy rebar behind them.
I spent most of my youth writing in cursive, because it was supposedly faster.
This is exactly why I never used it, it was never faster. I had a teacher scold me for not forming the letters "correctly" (like in the book). So instead of it being faster, I took forever making sure every letter was perfect. Also, lets not forget that cursive lessons and being left handed don't mix.
Then there were the threats from teachers that you HAD to write in cursive in the upper grades. I still did everything in print at school, never got marked down (likely because it wasn't worth the teacher's time to deal with bitching parents). I wrote maybe 3-4 book reports at home in cursive in the 3rd grade... most of which I had to rewrite due to smudging. After that...forget it, fired up the Apple IIc(!) and Bank Street Writer and just typed out stuff from then on. My teachers were more then happy to accept typed reports.... because they could actually read them.
On the Audi/VW side, there is an awesome program called VAG-COM which allows you to view all sorts of parameters, adjust values, read diagnostic codes, etc...almost EVERYTHING that can possibly be accessed or tweaked.
Just a word of warning with newer Audis (don't know if VW is doing it yet). Dealers are now using a tool called Software Version Management (SVM) thats similar to the Volvo system. It inventories the various systems in the car and determines what modules need to be updated. One nasty side effect is that it reset all the custom coding you did with VAG-COM back to the factory defaults (you can change them back though). It also poses a problem if you made some electrical mods to your car (like adding factory navigation or replacing control modules with newer more functional revisions) since the system will basically bitch the car isn't stock anymore.
I went to that link, there were an awful lot of "UNKNOWN CODE" listed. I stopped skimming between 500 and 600 and found over 70 "UNKNOWN CODE" listings in that. Those "UNKNOWN CODE" listings are what this law is about. Those aren't unused codes, they are codes that BMW considers trade secrets and that are only published to mechanics working for BMW dealerships (other car manufacturers have similar codes).
The manufacturer specific codes are usually found in the factory service manual, which you can easily purchase or borrow from someone.
I wonder if a lot of this silliness is only found on expensive luxury models like BMWs and Cadillacs. I'll bet your run-of-the-mill Kia or Hyundai doesn't have anything like this, even now.
Hyundai has their own dealer tool. If you happen to bleed your brakes yourself and somehow manage to get air in the ABS pump, using that tool is the only way to cycle the pump to get the air bubbles out. Early ABS equipped cars usually had a jumper of some sort on the ABS controller to cycle the ABS pump on its own, but that simply isn't the case anymore.
One reason I like owning a VWAG built car. Someone reverse engineered the vehicle's computer interface and a $350 3rd party cable now replicates most all the functions the $2500 dealer diag system does. VW even uses the product themselves. http://www.ross-tech.com/
...since the site is slashdotted.
Around 1993 my school library transitioned to Follett's DOS OPAC software. I think they were actually ahead of the local public library. The school's transition was just the catalog though, check in/out still used the silly cards and stamps. When the public library switched, they switched to a fully bar coded inventory system and electronic check in/out using WYSE dumb terminals. They still have those dumb terminals scattered about, many find them faster to search then using the more modern Windows interface.
One word can sum up ICANN's "control" of the system... RegisterFly.
Funny, back in the day iTunes used to actually support 3rd party MP3 players via plug-ins. Expect an arms race between Apple and Palm similar to the one AOL started with 3rd party IM clients and their OSCAR protocol.
Personally the only iPod like functionality I would like to see emulated on 3rd party devices is the dock connector and protocol used to talk with iPod interfaces used in car headunits. There are plenty of decent media players on the PC, but really no option for in vehicle integration other then the iPod/iPhone. Car and after market audio companies aren't rolling out Zune or PalmPre interfaces any time soon. The iPod is the only game in town.
Personally I don't see why they are sticking with the old Mozilla Suite if its going to require a ton of patching and rewriting anyway. Might as well back port Firefox if one has to go through all that work. After all, wasn't the move away from a monolithic internet application suite a way to increase speed and reduce memory footprint?
Maybe someone could port gecko to my System 6-based Apple IIGS?
Not going to happen without some sort of C++ compiler and decent graphics. Even then one would likely need a Transwarp GS/Zip GS card for a page to render faster then a weekend. After all, it takes the machine a couple of minutes just to decompress a small JPEG image!