Don't forget how much extra you'd pay for the JFS! Which didn't even come from Sun, it came from a third party (Veritas) In contrast, Linux comes with two of them, and they're both free. I enable the journaling HFS on my Powerbook just because I can, and because my laptop is more likely to need a hard reboot. I do not want to go through a double-fsck again.
Which brings up the other point. Now that Apple has made itself into a Unix desktop company, both Sun and SGI are in serious trouble in that market. Despite all the whiners about how expensive Apple gear is compare to a white-box PC, Sun and SGI gear, even their "budget" gear, makes Apple look cheap. Apple even has a low-end server now. Not only do they give away the development environment away for free, but they don't have client license fees for their server OS.
Apple (and x86 Linux too) is killing the high-margin Unix desktop market without even trying hard. I even know someone who used to use a Tadpole SPARC laptop and now loves his TiBook. SGI's days are numbered, and all Sun has going for it is the high-end server market.
I RTFA'd this yesterday, and I thought Cringely's choice of who should buy Sun was interesting. He's right that Sun no longer has anything Apple would need. But the idea that Sony should be the one to buy Sun was brilliant. I agree that Sony could fit Sun's high-end servers into their company.
First of all, FTP is a crazy klunky protocol, and a bitch to firewall properly too. It's also one of the oldest protocols, even pre-dating TCP/IP. And then there are all the fun root exploit bugs that have been in various FTP servers.
In my case, I run an Apache server on my file server box because it gives me full 100% throughput at Ethernet speeds. That's 10+ megaBYTES/sec. The average anime episode downloads in 10-15 seconds, and when friends come over, I don't have to worry about them having the right kind of client when they want to leech.
Where FTP becomes useful is when you want people to upload to you.
Re:You could always buy replacement parts...
on
Finally, A Working NES!
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· Score: 2, Informative
Around 1995 or so, a friend of mine had a dead NES he got at a swap meet, which had been killed at some point by a kid spilling milk into it. So I took a spare motherboard off of my junker pile and swapped it in using his slot.
The damn thing worked more perfectly than I had ever seen an NES work! (Note, I did not have one "back in the day", and gave up on consoles from after the 2600 died until I started collecting classic games around 1993 or so.) Because the unit had been killed while the socket was still in good shape, it didn't have the typical "flashing" problems of most of the NES units of the day.
Why did Nintendo come up with this stupid "toaster" design? Because common wisdom back in 1986 was that home video games were dead, so they wanted something that didn't look like a video game console. All the other consoles in the past, and most of the cartridge-based ones since then have had the cartridge sticking out. They made it an ugly gray color to break from the blacks and browns and woodgrains of the 1979-1984 era. They made it a box to break from all the sloped and rounded designs. All the stuff that made a console look good was thrown out the door, and they were left with an ugly gray box. At least they introduced the automatic TV switch.
The moral of the story is that you can buy a new slot connector (after all, they're swappable) and have a perfectly running NES.
Not that I care. I have a top-load, but even better, I have a Tri-Star, so I can play NES and SNES games on the same unit.
we'll see very little archival problems of PSX games
It's the wierd format games like Dreamcast (using "GD-ROM", but can boot homebrews without modification, so can have ripper programs uploaded to it) and GameCube (supposedly the disc spins backwards, and nobody has yet gotten it to boot a homebrew disc) that will be the problem.
There's probably something about high-handicap games that makes computers inherently worse players. Besides, there's the "play inside your own territory" effect, where the computer would have all these stones inside its own territory lowering its score slightly, while the human would be getting points (3. Profit!) from any black stones he surrounded.
It's probably also a nasty worst-case test of territorial evaluation in terms of the give-and-take necessary to come out a few points ahead. Plus, lots of computer programs play much less agressively when they evaluate themselves as many points ahead, to avoid making risky moves that could end up in large-point blunders.
But think about it: thirty years ago a human beating chess computer would be only on an episode of Star Trek.
Which brings up the question: Why no Go in Star Trek?
Real world (and boring) answer: because nobody involved in Star Trek production in the mid-60's (or mid-90's) had ever heard of it.
Cool in-story answer: because when the Vulcans first started researching Earth culture, they found this incredibly elegant (if you aren't a complete rules weenie) and difficult game. They were so embarassed about not having discovered it themselves (and embarassed just about being embarassed in the first place) that they set about burying the game for all time. It's a major political incident whenever the game is mentioned to a Vulcan.
In Go terms, this would be like a 9-dan forcing a triple ko, which is very much a draw (unless you're using superko, which isn't normally used in pro games). Or for a more common example, like making seki, which is a local draw situation. (And after all, Chess is a battle, Go is a war.)
Re:Then why am I not impressed?
on
Baked Apple
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· Score: 1
And the power supplies? Easy prey to fray. You unwind the flying saucer enough times, and suddenly there's not so much insulation down near hub of the spool.
The trick is to avoid unwinding that last loop of wire.
My first yo-yo died because the wires finally wore out in the (so-called) strain relief of the plug that goes into the Powerbook. I dropped my replacement on a linoleum floor one day and it almost completely broke in two. I've even taken it apart once since then, just because I could.
I tried to get the old one to break in case I could re-use the innards, but it didn't work.
There is no way that RJ45 connectors would be able to endure any kind of live stage abuse.
That's the first thing I thought of. They keep falling out of my laptop's port all the time, even when the clip isn't broken. Good thing I have my DHCP server provide the same IP address to both my Ethernet and WiFi interfaces so it can do a seamless fallback.
There is a good reason why the 1/4" plug is so successful.
At least mLAN uses Firewire cables which are possibly a little more durable.
Then you've never had the pleasure of the plastic center bit breaking and coming out with the cable. Seems the ports are still usable even without it, but I worry a bit about shorts and stuff.
Re:Slight error in your notes
on
The 1991 "X-Box"
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· Score: 4, Informative
386DX = 386 with full 32 bit front-side bus
386SX = 386 with 16-bit FSB
486DX = 486 with math coprocessor
486SX = 486 with math coprocessor disabled
487SX = 486 with math coprocessor and slightly different pinout so it wouldn't work in the 486SX/DX socket, and which disabled the 486SX at startup
That's why I think the port 25 blocking needs to be for people on dynamic IP addresses (dialup, DHCP or PPPoE), and not for people on fixed IP addresses.
This will stop most luser spam, because most lusers don't have fixed IP internet connections. Whether it's an idiot running an open poxy or a moron who responsed to an ad in the Weekly Saver for "MAKE $75/HR WITH YOUR COMPUTER!", at least this will get rid of the harder to trace stuff.
The real problem is ISPs that just don't fscking care. The ISPs who would go out of their way to block port 25 for fixed IP customers were probably not the ones with much of an outbound spam problem in the first place.
Actually, they've been contracting out to the Galaxy-famous Sirius Cybernetics Corporation. The next series of models won't just have speech synthesis, they'll also have Genuine People Personalities!
"Thank you for making a simple cell phone very happy."
IDE drives didn't make SCSI drives any cheaper, did they? The logic board is the only thing that will change, and it will have a similar cost to regular IDE controller boards.
I have maybe as much as half a terabyte of anime fansubs that I've accumulated over the past two years, most from Usenet, some from F2F trading. I've got a dual-120G RAID to store the "current" stuff that I can download to (takes about 15 sec. each) and watch on the Winderz box in the living room. That's a quarter of a terabyte, and I usually leave it within a few megs of being full. And it's all stuff that I have another copy of somewhere else so I don't have to make backups of the damn thing.
For yardstick comparison, one "full season" of anime (26 episodes) in DivX format usually takes up around 3.5-4.5GB on average at the most common resolution and compression level.
And now I've got this terrible cross with Hunter S Thompson popping into
my head.
"It was half way to Rivendell when the drugs began to take hold"
Hunter S Tolkien "Fear and Loathing in Barad Dur"
Actually that whole thread has a couple of ideas in it. The root message has Ned Flanders as Tom Bombadil:
5) I concede to all those who said Bombadil was annoying in my last
post. My memory of Tom Hey-ho-merry-dol Bombadil was far less
hey-nonny-nonny-annoying than the actual experience of reading him. He
ring-a-ding-a-dillo sounds like Ned-diddly-ed Flanders at a
hey-doodle-hi-diddle-riddle-diddle-dee Renaissance Festival. And his
"Hey, li'l dudes, that whole ring deal? 'tain't my prob-diddly-oblem"
attitude nauseated me. The world's about to be turned into a giant
Concentration Camp, and he's out prancing in the posies and unwilling
to help? Feh.
Slashdot Mirror
At least they quit making mainframe 9-track tape drives beep and chrip sometime back in the late '80s.
Which brings up the other point. Now that Apple has made itself into a Unix desktop company, both Sun and SGI are in serious trouble in that market. Despite all the whiners about how expensive Apple gear is compare to a white-box PC, Sun and SGI gear, even their "budget" gear, makes Apple look cheap. Apple even has a low-end server now. Not only do they give away the development environment away for free, but they don't have client license fees for their server OS.
Apple (and x86 Linux too) is killing the high-margin Unix desktop market without even trying hard. I even know someone who used to use a Tadpole SPARC laptop and now loves his TiBook. SGI's days are numbered, and all Sun has going for it is the high-end server market.
I RTFA'd this yesterday, and I thought Cringely's choice of who should buy Sun was interesting. He's right that Sun no longer has anything Apple would need. But the idea that Sony should be the one to buy Sun was brilliant. I agree that Sony could fit Sun's high-end servers into their company.
And for those of you worrying about what will happen to Java, maybe Sun dying would keep Sun from screwing it up even more.
>> 11 Gold found!
>> LEARNED NEW ATTACK! "COMPRESSED AIR"
Wait, that's not a scepter, it's a bicycle pump!
In my case, I run an Apache server on my file server box because it gives me full 100% throughput at Ethernet speeds. That's 10+ megaBYTES/sec. The average anime episode downloads in 10-15 seconds, and when friends come over, I don't have to worry about them having the right kind of client when they want to leech.
Where FTP becomes useful is when you want people to upload to you.
The damn thing worked more perfectly than I had ever seen an NES work! (Note, I did not have one "back in the day", and gave up on consoles from after the 2600 died until I started collecting classic games around 1993 or so.) Because the unit had been killed while the socket was still in good shape, it didn't have the typical "flashing" problems of most of the NES units of the day.
Why did Nintendo come up with this stupid "toaster" design? Because common wisdom back in 1986 was that home video games were dead, so they wanted something that didn't look like a video game console. All the other consoles in the past, and most of the cartridge-based ones since then have had the cartridge sticking out. They made it an ugly gray color to break from the blacks and browns and woodgrains of the 1979-1984 era. They made it a box to break from all the sloped and rounded designs. All the stuff that made a console look good was thrown out the door, and they were left with an ugly gray box. At least they introduced the automatic TV switch.
The moral of the story is that you can buy a new slot connector (after all, they're swappable) and have a perfectly running NES.
Not that I care. I have a top-load, but even better, I have a Tri-Star, so I can play NES and SNES games on the same unit.
It's the wierd format games like Dreamcast (using "GD-ROM", but can boot homebrews without modification, so can have ripper programs uploaded to it) and GameCube (supposedly the disc spins backwards, and nobody has yet gotten it to boot a homebrew disc) that will be the problem.
It's probably also a nasty worst-case test of territorial evaluation in terms of the give-and-take necessary to come out a few points ahead. Plus, lots of computer programs play much less agressively when they evaluate themselves as many points ahead, to avoid making risky moves that could end up in large-point blunders.
Which brings up the question: Why no Go in Star Trek?
Real world (and boring) answer: because nobody involved in Star Trek production in the mid-60's (or mid-90's) had ever heard of it.
Cool in-story answer: because when the Vulcans first started researching Earth culture, they found this incredibly elegant (if you aren't a complete rules weenie) and difficult game. They were so embarassed about not having discovered it themselves (and embarassed just about being embarassed in the first place) that they set about burying the game for all time. It's a major political incident whenever the game is mentioned to a Vulcan.
I think Contact Bridge would be a more interesting Olympic sport. Four no trump? WHACK!
In Go terms, this would be like a 9-dan forcing a triple ko, which is very much a draw (unless you're using superko, which isn't normally used in pro games). Or for a more common example, like making seki, which is a local draw situation. (And after all, Chess is a battle, Go is a war.)
The trick is to avoid unwinding that last loop of wire.
My first yo-yo died because the wires finally wore out in the (so-called) strain relief of the plug that goes into the Powerbook. I dropped my replacement on a linoleum floor one day and it almost completely broke in two. I've even taken it apart once since then, just because I could.
I tried to get the old one to break in case I could re-use the innards, but it didn't work.
P.S. The picture seems to be slashdotted into oblivion now.
Gee, if only he spent as much time worrying about dupe articles as he did worrying about yet another tweak to the moderation system...
That's the first thing I thought of. They keep falling out of my laptop's port all the time, even when the clip isn't broken. Good thing I have my DHCP server provide the same IP address to both my Ethernet and WiFi interfaces so it can do a seamless fallback.
There is a good reason why the 1/4" plug is so successful.
At least mLAN uses Firewire cables which are possibly a little more durable.
Then you've never had the pleasure of the plastic center bit breaking and coming out with the cable. Seems the ports are still usable even without it, but I worry a bit about shorts and stuff.
386DX = 386 with full 32 bit front-side bus
386SX = 386 with 16-bit FSB
486DX = 486 with math coprocessor
486SX = 486 with math coprocessor disabled
487SX = 486 with math coprocessor and slightly different pinout so it wouldn't work in the 486SX/DX socket, and which disabled the 486SX at startup
Nothing strange to see here, move along...
Or they could be showing the wrong anime. Put a little shoujo into the mix, ok? ^_^
6) Discuss the social implications and impact of hundreds of magical girls contacting their mentors every night via bright, vertical shafts of light.
I think a $50 locking cable kit would be a much better idea.
This will stop most luser spam, because most lusers don't have fixed IP internet connections. Whether it's an idiot running an open poxy or a moron who responsed to an ad in the Weekly Saver for "MAKE $75/HR WITH YOUR COMPUTER!", at least this will get rid of the harder to trace stuff.
The real problem is ISPs that just don't fscking care. The ISPs who would go out of their way to block port 25 for fixed IP customers were probably not the ones with much of an outbound spam problem in the first place.
"Thank you for making a simple cell phone very happy."
IDE drives didn't make SCSI drives any cheaper, did they? The logic board is the only thing that will change, and it will have a similar cost to regular IDE controller boards.
For yardstick comparison, one "full season" of anime (26 episodes) in DivX format usually takes up around 3.5-4.5GB on average at the most common resolution and compression level.
And now I've got this terrible cross with Hunter S Thompson popping into my head.
"It was half way to Rivendell when the drugs began to take hold" Hunter S Tolkien "Fear and Loathing in Barad Dur"
Actually that whole thread has a couple of ideas in it. The root message has Ned Flanders as Tom Bombadil:
5) I concede to all those who said Bombadil was annoying in my last post. My memory of Tom Hey-ho-merry-dol Bombadil was far less hey-nonny-nonny-annoying than the actual experience of reading him. He ring-a-ding-a-dillo sounds like Ned-diddly-ed Flanders at a hey-doodle-hi-diddle-riddle-diddle-dee Renaissance Festival. And his "Hey, li'l dudes, that whole ring deal? 'tain't my prob-diddly-oblem" attitude nauseated me. The world's about to be turned into a giant Concentration Camp, and he's out prancing in the posies and unwilling to help? Feh.