What's with all the fluff articles lately? I read a detailed article many years ago about Woz' phone phreaking adventures an his love of jokes and pranks is well known. I'd love to read a modern article on some of the (presumably hilarious) details, but this is certainly not it.:-)
Ok, I know sometimes a type-o or two can get through even the most closely proofread post, English isn't necessarily a given poster's primary language and I was raised in a family with multiple English teachers. However, lately this one drives me absolutely bonkers on a daily basis, seemingly on every thread, here on/.
Only because people keep saying there are only two options until people believe it. As soon as people actually bother to vote for another option, there will actually BE another option!
If it is broadcast in your local area anyway, why should it be wrong to download a copy that someone else used their antenna and capture card to record instead of recording it yourself? If you have a cable/sat/etc subscription to a channel, why should it be wrong to download a copy of something you've already paid to be able to watch but someone else actually recorded? etc.
So ripping the same CD on two different drives will usually produce slightly different files depending on exactly how the drive positions the read head relative to the start of the disc.
Depends on the drive. Most ignore the error correction bits however some better (and usually older) ones will actually read the error correction bits and correct (any correctable errors) on the fly and you'll always get either the exact same data or a read error.
No, there actually are error correction bits but most players/drives ignore them when playing/reading audio. Good drives like Plextors will do bit-perfect DAE. Even some of my older Sony, Yamaha and Pioneer SCSI drives do it by themselves. I still use my old drives for my DAE needs. Most cheap new drives don't bother but you can read multiple times and make it pretty close with software. Something like grip works well.
Your stupid conception of the world is shared by many people, so I won't blame you for repeating BS. I will however laugh at you for being Canadian.
Ditto.
We all know the USA is far and away the best country in the world, by all metrics in all categories.
-- In the only episode of that "Are you smarter than a fifth grader?" show that I ever watched, the contestant honestly didn't know what country was located to the north of the United States. (To be fair, all the 5th graders did...:-) )
Yes, thank you... I was meaning "we" when I said North America; my point being it's not just the USA that seemingly doesn't manufacture as much, and yes I'm fully aware that "we" still manufacture many, many things, but it at least seems to me that we've outsourced many types of production to the point that we almost don't remember how to make them... Consumer products, etc. especially... How many "regular" consumer items that you buy lately have a made in Canada/USA/Mexico label on them? My T-shirt was made in Bangladesh, my shoes in Vietnam, my Dodge truck which was assembled in Detroit has a Nippon-Denso alternator and starter, not the USA/Canada made Mopar parts like my trusty old maxivan, etc. etc. etc. ad infinitum... My 20 year old 4800W garage space heater was made in Canada, and it still works perfectly after thousands and thousands and thousands of hours of use... The company still exists, making large ventilation fans and such, but doesn't make things like $50 heaters you buy at Home Depot / whatever anymore... I've repaired a friend's "made in China" similar model thrice already and it's only 2 years old.... Regardless of how much we "still manufacture" it SEEMS to ME that some things have really been lost. YMMV
North America has generally seemed to have forgotten how to actually build things. I'm located in Canada, and on those few items my tiny company makes, I'm proud to put the stamp and seal of where it's made on my products...
Actually, I believe it started earlier than that. Harper may have started the "privacy" stuff
It wasn't the Harper government... The Liberals tabled far wider reaching anti-privacy and oversight legislation!! It was the conservatives that avoided that only to now bring their own only-slightly-less-ridiculous bills...
And web developers won't care. I think this is an important note. Old IE users (6/7/8) make up a large enough chunk of the web that legacy support for them is considered a higher priority for most, but FF 3.6 users are very much a minority, so you can't expect any support going forward.
Web developers are a huge part of the problem (as was/is IE in general). The whole idea of HTML in the first place was that the browser shouldn't matter... You should be able to render a reasonable version of a page with any browser! That hasn't worked for a long time and the content is mostly to blame. It should never return different data depending on what browser you use. It shouldn't have to by design... but it's broken!
Dear luddite, get off of the internet. Please. Win 2k is 1.5 years beyond its extended support end date.
While you're whining about apps and OS that can't run in 512MB ram, the rest of us have blazing fast desktops that never touch swap, because 16GB of ddr3 ram is something like $100-150 today.
I think you will find that most of the serious people here on/. have fast, modern machines available also, however, you don't seem to understand the concept that there are many, many situations where lesser / older hardware (or software, for that matter) is mandated for many, many different reasons.
Simply 'patching' things up by adding more CPU and RAM is not always the solution! Especially in small or embedded or specialized systems. (Think of all the things like POS systems... It doesn't take much CPU to be a glorified cash register and electrified ledger -- we got all that figured out 30 years ago, but these systems are EXTREMELY expensive to upgrade with absolutely no real-work-being-done benefit. I maintain several POS systems running NT4 and there is still no reason to upgrade anything just because Microsoft hasn't supported NT4 for years!)
I'm running Firefox 3.6 on a machine running Windows 2000 with 512MB of RAM (built it around the turn of the millennium). For web browsing, it's quite sufficient.
I still occasionally use on of my old P3 laptops when I need a hardware serial port and it dual boots BSD or Win2K with 128 Mb of RAM and swapping disabled. A SeaMonkey of similar vintage still runs & browses fine, but I'm sure I'd be hosed if I tried to run a latest-release browser. Where's a 16-bit Mosaic executable when I need it , or perhaps winLynx??:)
Of course, I think I can't upgrade because the latest firefox doesn't support Windows 2000 anymore, and this machine running XP probably won't happen (I don't think XP SP3 works on 512MB anymore)
Not sure why it wouldn't work on 2K (NT4 and 5 are the only decent versions of Windows, IMO and 2K is the only windows installed on even my most recent laptops) but XPSP3 will still run in 256 Mb, at least with no AV or bloated printer drivers loaded...
Ahh, the days of efficiency, how I miss thee.... Compare the bloat of modern Excel for a simple spreadsheet task to the elegance and simplicity of something like Lucid-3D from 25 years ago. Lucid-3D was one of the first spreadsheet programs to support working with values from multiple sheets at once, just like all modern spreadsheets are now but it took only some 29 kilobytes of memory -- so small it was implemented as a TSR! Come to think of it, I should go find the original install disk and run it on BSD, actually...:)
And, for the 75% of simple spreadsheet tasks most users do today, Lucid-3D would still be fully capable...
Are people really running machines with that little ram? I have 4GB on my 2 year old computer.
Do you realize how ridiculous it is to "need" 2-4 GB of RAM ro run a web browser?! Talk about BLOAT! It's the principle of the thing.... Seemingly every type of software has become huge and bloated without actually getting any more real work done but web browsers are some of the worst. You may use the same old argument that the Band-Aid of faster processors and more memory makes it a moot point, but you should not need that much CPU and RAM to render silly web pages! There are always reasons to write nice, tight, efficient code. These days we're porting these types of applications to smaller, lighter, slower hardware (ie. smartphones) and the overhead is just insane.
In 94-95 put my first a dedicated web terminal in my bedroom on a leftover 286/16 with 4 MB of RAM (from my BBS machine when I upgraded it to a 386), booting from a floppy drive then loading windows 3.1 via Lantastic-Z over a serial port (!!) as I couldn't afford more ethernet cards back then (high school, about $150 each at the time). It took several minutes to boot over the serial port, but once it was up, NCSA mosaic just worked like a charm. Yes, this was in the days of smaller, simpler web pages, pre-google, back in the days when the Global Network Navigator was new and my 'net connection was a dedicated 33.6K dial-up (at $300 / month!!)) but the bloat since then is just nuts.
That machine worked great until I finally bought a couple 486 boards for the FreeBSD machines downstairs and shuffled a 386/40 up to my bedroom PC so it could run BSD instead of WIndows, then later up to a 486/120 with dual 420MB HDDs in a striped array and probably the full 32mb of RAM... That was actually a pretty quick box, and I could build world on FreeBSD in only a couple hours on it, which I used to do regularly even if just for the novelty value of recompiling an entire OS in a couple hours. (That seemed amazing at the time)
On the 486, I could have several browser windows on the go, multiple xterms, be decoding and playing MP3s or raw audio from the media server, anything I needed running, really, and still have spare CPU left to run MP3 encoding jobs in the background when I was encoding my entire CD collection across multiple machines... (96, perhaps?)
Why does it take you 2.8 GB of RAM to do something that used to be done in 32 MB with room to spare?
Kill the yellow channel on the color inks. If your printer uses separate black ink, just leave the color out. If all else fails, print a lot of pages of all-yellow on the same set of several sheets until the yellow ink runs out.
Except that once you are out of yellow ink, it will refuse to print anything until you add more yellow!
I agree, it's a very broad net; you pretty much have to question who buys into the shit that this is really to prevent any counterfeiting.
Of course not... As usual, they SAY it is for some reasonable-sounding-to-the-layman reason, but it's much more far-reaching than that. And we all have to suffer.
Against far-reaching internet monitoring legislation? You must be a pedophile, it's just for child porn... etc. etc...
Grrr.. Why do we let them get away with these things?!!
Yes, and it uses a LOT of it! Older HP color lasers would print a B&W page without using the color toner cartridges at all, no wasted toner on a B&W page... Many of the newer ones I've seen always use a color pass for B&W, making color toner cartridges run out quite quickly when printing B&W even though it shouldn't even have to pull color toner onto the drum. And yes, the yellow always runs out first (even though it's only used a little bit more than the base "waste toner" that is used on each pass of a cartridge). (I have a couple LaserJet 2840s and this is VERY obvious; we get about 10% of rated color toner cart life due to high B&W use).
I'm sure HP loves it, it's another way to sell even more quantity of their overpriced inks and toners. This "feature" costs us about $500/year per printer in extra toner use! (About an extra cyan and magenta each year -- yellow about every 9 mo.)
I can even see the pattern naked-eye, at least on the 96 bright paper we use... It's always been VERY annoying. Otherwise, fairly nice printers, but they eat supplies and I've known exactly why since day 1.
you know recycled stock of these things come up all the time for less than 10 bucks
Oh, I know... I just never bothered because I have three 99/4As and it still works, just not color and could be useful for parts if one of the ones I actually play with (one is original, one is modded) have a problem. Now if I buy one of these, it's $10 saved by not buying a 9918.:) I had always thought of getting one of the later Yamaha chips like used in the Geneve, can do a little board for one of those with 128k or 192k of video RAM and do whatever it was, 512x512 graphics... I don't have a Myarc so always kinda wanted to play with one of those, but now I think I'll get one of these VGA-out boards for another option.
Let me see if I have this straight, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. You first having to have a working one of these machines
Yes. Personally, I have three...
we are talking consumer level quality of the early 80s
Yes. One of mine has no color output, only B&W because the 9918 is fried... Thus, I intend to get one of these chips and make that one into a VGA-out unit. Neat!:)
The chip is even socketed from the factory on the 99/4a (unlike the monster double-wide 64-pin DIP CPU), you don't even need to desolder it. If I remember right there's even a little aluminum heatsink on it attaching it to the chassis. It really was a pretty powerful little chip in it's day for the cost.
THEN you are gonna have to take this working 30+ year old machine and take a soldering iron to it?
Yes. That's how you fix and/or upgrade hardware things.
you are gonna take a soldering iron to a 30+ year old unit that its frankly a fricking miracle most of these things work at all? Do you know how damned fussy and temperamental some of these machines were to start with?
Yes. However, most problems with these systems can be easily fixed with proper use of said soldering iron.:) They're actually very reliable!
Yes, it was.. Real 16-bit even, though only the stock 256 byte system RAM (yes people, 256 BYTES) is on the 16 bit bus, but it's SRAM and runs at full processor speed (like L1 cache in todays processors)... I have an extra 32K of ram installed on one of mine directly on the 16-bit system bus... That would have cost a fortune back then, now it's just a few chips from the junk box!:)
Slashdot Mirror
What's with all the fluff articles lately? I read a detailed article many years ago about Woz' phone phreaking adventures an his love of jokes and pranks is well known. I'd love to read a modern article on some of the (presumably hilarious) details, but this is certainly not it. :-)
ARGH!
Ok, I know sometimes a type-o or two can get through even the most closely proofread post, English isn't necessarily a given poster's primary language and I was raised in a family with multiple English teachers. However, lately this one drives me absolutely bonkers on a daily basis, seemingly on every thread, here on /.
http://grammarist.com/usage/than-then/
Thank you!
Section 15, part 3A:
I stand corrected.
Mod that link up.
They basically just banned adding "on a computer", etc. to a patent automatically becoming a new patentable "invention".
There are more than two options.
Only in theory, not in practice.
Only because people keep saying there are only two options until people believe it. As soon as people actually bother to vote for another option, there will actually BE another option!
If it is broadcast in your local area anyway, why should it be wrong to download a copy that someone else used their antenna and capture card to record instead of recording it yourself? If you have a cable/sat/etc subscription to a channel, why should it be wrong to download a copy of something you've already paid to be able to watch but someone else actually recorded? etc.
So ripping the same CD on two different drives will usually produce slightly different files depending on exactly how the drive positions the read head relative to the start of the disc.
Depends on the drive. Most ignore the error correction bits however some better (and usually older) ones will actually read the error correction bits and correct (any correctable errors) on the fly and you'll always get either the exact same data or a read error.
No, there actually are error correction bits but most players/drives ignore them when playing/reading audio. Good drives like Plextors will do bit-perfect DAE. Even some of my older Sony, Yamaha and Pioneer SCSI drives do it by themselves. I still use my old drives for my DAE needs. Most cheap new drives don't bother but you can read multiple times and make it pretty close with software. Something like grip works well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Book_(audio_CD_standard)
I was dismayed to see this article in the paper today:
http://www.calgaryherald.com/technology/Smartphone+storage+memory+cards+exempt+from+copying+fees/7920963/story.html
I didn't think we'd (Canada) be stupid enough to actually go through with this new copyright bill, but it seems that it has.
Your stupid conception of the world is shared by many people, so I won't blame you for repeating BS.
I will however laugh at you for being Canadian.
Ditto.
We all know the USA is far and away the best country in the world, by all metrics in all categories.
-- :-) )
In the only episode of that "Are you smarter than a fifth grader?" show that I ever watched, the contestant honestly didn't know what country was located to the north of the United States. (To be fair, all the 5th graders did...
Yes, thank you... I was meaning "we" when I said North America; my point being it's not just the USA that seemingly doesn't manufacture as much, and yes I'm fully aware that "we" still manufacture many, many things, but it at least seems to me that we've outsourced many types of production to the point that we almost don't remember how to make them... Consumer products, etc. especially... How many "regular" consumer items that you buy lately have a made in Canada/USA/Mexico label on them? My T-shirt was made in Bangladesh, my shoes in Vietnam, my Dodge truck which was assembled in Detroit has a Nippon-Denso alternator and starter, not the USA/Canada made Mopar parts like my trusty old maxivan, etc. etc. etc. ad infinitum... My 20 year old 4800W garage space heater was made in Canada, and it still works perfectly after thousands and thousands and thousands of hours of use... The company still exists, making large ventilation fans and such, but doesn't make things like $50 heaters you buy at Home Depot / whatever anymore... I've repaired a friend's "made in China" similar model thrice already and it's only 2 years old.... Regardless of how much we "still manufacture" it SEEMS to ME that some things have really been lost. YMMV
North America has generally seemed to have forgotten how to actually build things. I'm located in Canada, and on those few items my tiny company makes, I'm proud to put the stamp and seal of where it's made on my products...
isn't it?
Actually, I believe it started earlier than that. Harper may have started the "privacy" stuff
It wasn't the Harper government... The Liberals tabled far wider reaching anti-privacy and oversight legislation!! It was the conservatives that avoided that only to now bring their own only-slightly-less-ridiculous bills...
And web developers won't care. I think this is an important note. Old IE users (6/7/8) make up a large enough chunk of the web that legacy support for them is considered a higher priority for most, but FF 3.6 users are very much a minority, so you can't expect any support going forward.
Web developers are a huge part of the problem (as was/is IE in general). The whole idea of HTML in the first place was that the browser shouldn't matter... You should be able to render a reasonable version of a page with any browser! That hasn't worked for a long time and the content is mostly to blame. It should never return different data depending on what browser you use. It shouldn't have to by design... but it's broken!
Dear luddite, get off of the internet. Please. Win 2k is 1.5 years beyond its extended support end date.
While you're whining about apps and OS that can't run in 512MB ram, the rest of us have blazing fast desktops that never touch swap, because 16GB of ddr3 ram is something like $100-150 today.
I think you will find that most of the serious people here on /. have fast, modern machines available also, however, you don't seem to understand the concept that there are many, many situations where lesser / older hardware (or software, for that matter) is mandated for many, many different reasons.
Simply 'patching' things up by adding more CPU and RAM is not always the solution! Especially in small or embedded or specialized systems. (Think of all the things like POS systems... It doesn't take much CPU to be a glorified cash register and electrified ledger -- we got all that figured out 30 years ago, but these systems are EXTREMELY expensive to upgrade with absolutely no real-work-being-done benefit. I maintain several POS systems running NT4 and there is still no reason to upgrade anything just because Microsoft hasn't supported NT4 for years!)
I'm running Firefox 3.6 on a machine running Windows 2000 with 512MB of RAM (built it around the turn of the millennium). For web browsing, it's quite sufficient.
I still occasionally use on of my old P3 laptops when I need a hardware serial port and it dual boots BSD or Win2K with 128 Mb of RAM and swapping disabled. A SeaMonkey of similar vintage still runs & browses fine, but I'm sure I'd be hosed if I tried to run a latest-release browser. Where's a 16-bit Mosaic executable when I need it , or perhaps winLynx?? :)
Of course, I think I can't upgrade because the latest firefox doesn't support Windows 2000 anymore, and this machine running XP probably won't happen (I don't think XP SP3 works on 512MB anymore)
Not sure why it wouldn't work on 2K (NT4 and 5 are the only decent versions of Windows, IMO and 2K is the only windows installed on even my most recent laptops) but XPSP3 will still run in 256 Mb, at least with no AV or bloated printer drivers loaded...
Ahh, the days of efficiency, how I miss thee.... Compare the bloat of modern Excel for a simple spreadsheet task to the elegance and simplicity of something like Lucid-3D from 25 years ago. Lucid-3D was one of the first spreadsheet programs to support working with values from multiple sheets at once, just like all modern spreadsheets are now but it took only some 29 kilobytes of memory -- so small it was implemented as a TSR! Come to think of it, I should go find the original install disk and run it on BSD, actually... :)
And, for the 75% of simple spreadsheet tasks most users do today, Lucid-3D would still be fully capable...
Are people really running machines with that little ram? I have 4GB on my 2 year old computer.
Do you realize how ridiculous it is to "need" 2-4 GB of RAM ro run a web browser?! Talk about BLOAT! It's the principle of the thing.... Seemingly every type of software has become huge and bloated without actually getting any more real work done but web browsers are some of the worst. You may use the same old argument that the Band-Aid of faster processors and more memory makes it a moot point, but you should not need that much CPU and RAM to render silly web pages! There are always reasons to write nice, tight, efficient code. These days we're porting these types of applications to smaller, lighter, slower hardware (ie. smartphones) and the overhead is just insane.
In 94-95 put my first a dedicated web terminal in my bedroom on a leftover 286/16 with 4 MB of RAM (from my BBS machine when I upgraded it to a 386), booting from a floppy drive then loading windows 3.1 via Lantastic-Z over a serial port (!!) as I couldn't afford more ethernet cards back then (high school, about $150 each at the time). It took several minutes to boot over the serial port, but once it was up, NCSA mosaic just worked like a charm. Yes, this was in the days of smaller, simpler web pages, pre-google, back in the days when the Global Network Navigator was new and my 'net connection was a dedicated 33.6K dial-up (at $300 / month!!)) but the bloat since then is just nuts.
That machine worked great until I finally bought a couple 486 boards for the FreeBSD machines downstairs and shuffled a 386/40 up to my bedroom PC so it could run BSD instead of WIndows, then later up to a 486/120 with dual 420MB HDDs in a striped array and probably the full 32mb of RAM... That was actually a pretty quick box, and I could build world on FreeBSD in only a couple hours on it, which I used to do regularly even if just for the novelty value of recompiling an entire OS in a couple hours. (That seemed amazing at the time)
On the 486, I could have several browser windows on the go, multiple xterms, be decoding and playing MP3s or raw audio from the media server, anything I needed running, really, and still have spare CPU left to run MP3 encoding jobs in the background when I was encoding my entire CD collection across multiple machines... (96, perhaps?)
Why does it take you 2.8 GB of RAM to do something that used to be done in 32 MB with room to spare?
Oh, right... Aero... :)
Kill the yellow channel on the color inks. If your printer uses separate black ink, just leave the color out. If all else fails, print a lot of pages of all-yellow on the same set of several sheets until the yellow ink runs out.
Except that once you are out of yellow ink, it will refuse to print anything until you add more yellow!
I agree, it's a very broad net; you pretty much have to question who buys into the shit that this is really to prevent any counterfeiting.
Of course not... As usual, they SAY it is for some reasonable-sounding-to-the-layman reason, but it's much more far-reaching than that. And we all have to suffer.
Against far-reaching internet monitoring legislation? You must be a pedophile, it's just for child porn... etc. etc...
Grrr.. Why do we let them get away with these things?!!
Problem 4: Printing these dots consumes my ink.
Yes, and it uses a LOT of it! Older HP color lasers would print a B&W page without using the color toner cartridges at all, no wasted toner on a B&W page... Many of the newer ones I've seen always use a color pass for B&W, making color toner cartridges run out quite quickly when printing B&W even though it shouldn't even have to pull color toner onto the drum. And yes, the yellow always runs out first (even though it's only used a little bit more than the base "waste toner" that is used on each pass of a cartridge). (I have a couple LaserJet 2840s and this is VERY obvious; we get about 10% of rated color toner cart life due to high B&W use).
I'm sure HP loves it, it's another way to sell even more quantity of their overpriced inks and toners. This "feature" costs us about $500/year per printer in extra toner use! (About an extra cyan and magenta each year -- yellow about every 9 mo.)
I can even see the pattern naked-eye, at least on the 96 bright paper we use... It's always been VERY annoying. Otherwise, fairly nice printers, but they eat supplies and I've known exactly why since day 1.
you know recycled stock of these things come up all the time for less than 10 bucks
Oh, I know... I just never bothered because I have three 99/4As and it still works, just not color and could be useful for parts if one of the ones I actually play with (one is original, one is modded) have a problem. Now if I buy one of these, it's $10 saved by not buying a 9918. :) I had always thought of getting one of the later Yamaha chips like used in the Geneve, can do a little board for one of those with 128k or 192k of video RAM and do whatever it was, 512x512 graphics... I don't have a Myarc so always kinda wanted to play with one of those, but now I think I'll get one of these VGA-out boards for another option.
This board also replaces the TMS9928:
"The F18A is a pin-compatible replacement for the TMS9918A, 9928, and 9929 Video Data Processors"
A matter of perspective, I guess?
Let me see if I have this straight, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. You first having to have a working one of these machines
Yes. Personally, I have three...
we are talking consumer level quality of the early 80s
Yes. One of mine has no color output, only B&W because the 9918 is fried... :)
Thus, I intend to get one of these chips and make that one into a VGA-out unit. Neat!
The chip is even socketed from the factory on the 99/4a (unlike the monster double-wide 64-pin DIP CPU), you don't even need to desolder it. If I remember right there's even a little aluminum heatsink on it attaching it to the chassis. It really was a pretty powerful little chip in it's day for the cost.
THEN you are gonna have to take this working 30+ year old machine and take a soldering iron to it?
Yes. That's how you fix and/or upgrade hardware things.
you are gonna take a soldering iron to a 30+ year old unit that its frankly a fricking miracle most of these things work at all? Do you know how damned fussy and temperamental some of these machines were to start with?
Yes. However, most problems with these systems can be easily fixed with proper use of said soldering iron. :)
They're actually very reliable!
Yes, it was.. Real 16-bit even, though only the stock 256 byte system RAM (yes people, 256 BYTES) is on the 16 bit bus, but it's SRAM and runs at full processor speed (like L1 cache in todays processors)... I have an extra 32K of ram installed on one of mine directly on the 16-bit system bus... That would have cost a fortune back then, now it's just a few chips from the junk box! :)