Yes, I don't have my original either (parents threw it away long ago without my knowledge) but I have 3 I picked up on eBay for a song... Go get one and a Munch Man cartridge and have fun...:)
That was my first home computer and so it'll always have that special place in my memories, but that thing wasn't very useful when it was still current. I can't imagine trying to do anything useful with it now.
You must not have had a PEB... With the Peripheral Expansion Box the 99/4A was capable of similar performance to the early PCs.
Even more surprising than that: There's an active TI-99/4A group? Really?
Yes, there are those of us still active in various old computer projects, building IDE disk interfaces, etc. to allow easy use of these fun old boxen.... I've built my own CROM/GROM emulator for the TI (someone else designed an IDE interface but I haven't built one for myself yet) and I'm currently designing and building an IDE disk interface for the old WANG 2200 minicomputer line...
Heh! Perfect! I have three TI-99/4A machines and one has only B&W output because the 9918 is frizzafrazzed.. This will let me "upgrade" that one to VGA output! Sweet... lol
The only reason I keep my copy Encarta 95 around
on
A Copyright Nightmare
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· Score: 1
That is one of the few video clips (mid quality MPEG-1, iirc...), in the encyclopedia and since it is so closely held I've always kept that old copy (legal!) around to show people who've never seen it before... Sad, funny and true....
users can transition between Server Core and Server Graphical Shell at any time, with a single command and a single reboot.
At least we can usually change an IP address without rebooting on most WIndows boxes these days, the fact that you have to still have to *reboot* a Windows server to change many things never ceases to amaze me. How advanced!:)
> startx &
...
> killall X
What gives?:)
Why would one ever reboot except to change the running kernel version or to shutdown for hardware maintenance?
Part of the appeal of a windows server is that the poor dude who is asked to do all the IT stuff, but isn't actually an IT guy has a much lower barrier to entry in understanding 'Windows that happens to be a server' than trying to understand 'LAMP'.
Exactly... In all likelyhood that person has no business administering a server. That is a large part of why there are so many problems, insecurities, etc... People who THINK they can administer something when in reality they have very little idea what they're doing.
... their little offices or division that handle something in particular have a guy on staff who is the least technically incompetent person. They might have a degree in history, but be the youngest person on staff, or they're a gamer and know more about computers than say... anyone else. But they look at a CLI (correctly from their perspective) as something that died 20 years ago, and they have no desire to learn. Even kids in IT programmes are generally unprepared for this. And making them uninspired about your product before they've even started working doesn't seem like a great plan.
Anything that helps keep "admins" that shouldn't be "admins" from pretending to be "admins" should probably be considered a Good Thing...
If a $200 Ipod costs Apple $150 in parts, $10 assembly/packaging/shipping and $40 profit, that's still $150 that flowed into Chinese economy - not the US economy.
The parts cost for a $200 ipod to Apple is probably more like $40, not $150... That makes a big difference...
I am of the opinion that one should know as much as possible about the world that surrounds them, including how things work.. It's not so difficult to learn. I love learning.
I feel exactly the same way and don't understand how on earth anyone can NOT want to learn about everything around them but unfortunately that is not how the vast majority of people operate... Sadly...
It emulates a green-screen terminal running BASIC. So there.
Sometimes all you really need is the green-screen:)
I did just "re-code" this one the other day (from memory / re-make it up) to dump an old hard disk on a Wang 2200 minicomputer, though:
10 PRINT HEX(03020402000E); "SHEXDUMP";HEX(0F); " - WANG 2200 ";HEX(0E); "S";HEX(0F); "erial port ";HEX(0E);"HEX DUMP";HEX(0F);" disk utility ";HEX(0E); "Version 1.0";HEX(0F); 20PRINT "Copyright (C) 1988-2011 by Saturn Computer Technologies Inc.":PRINT 40PRINT "Enter valid data dump parameters:" 60INPUT "Starting sector number",B 70INPUT "Ending sector number",E 80IF B < 0 OR E < B THEN GOTO 30 90PRINT:PRINT "Parameters OK...":PRINT "Reading from FIXED disk...":PRINT 95S=E-B+1 100PRINT "Prepared to HEX dump";S;"sectors (";S*256;" bytes ) to this serial terminal" 110PRINT:PRINT "Press <Y> to continue, any other key to exit..."; 120KEYIN K$ 130IF K$="Y" OR K$="y" THEN 150 140PRINT:PRINT:PRINT "Dump aborted...":END 150DIM D$(256)1 160FOR S = B TO E 170PRINT : PRINT "SEC";S-B;",";S 180DATA LOAD BA F (S) D$() 200FOR C = 1 TO 256 210PRINT HEXOF(D$(C)); 220NEXT C 230NEXT S 250PRINT:PRINT "SEC -1 , -1" 260END
Still worked like a charm... What more could you ask for? LOL:)
And when do you expect that will happen? I don't think anyone will bother until electric cars are common enough to provide a significant tax base, which realistically means not for another 10 to 20 years. So unless you are planning to keep your new Tesla running for decades, it's not an issue for you.
No, perhaps not for the early adopters, just simply an observation... Something usually overlooked those who somehow believe the electric car is "THE" magical answer...
And of course if you are a proper greenie and get a big solar array along with your electric car, then you won't get taxed much on the electricity because you won't have bought the electricity, you'll have made it yourself.
Ah, yes, as soon as a large enough solar array can be efficient enough to do the job... We're nowhere close for most applications. Micro-generation of all sorts is key, though....
gas is actually an easy way to transport energy quite efficiently...
Very true. It's so efficient that it even makes sense to transport it all the way from Saudi Arabia. But being the best thing since sliced bread won't make help you much when there's no longer enough of it to go around.
Also very true, but currently we inefficiently burn fossil fuels and transport the energy to power the electric car which makes no sense (from a physics standpoint)... and it won't make economic sense either when things balance out, unfortunately....
Not to mention all the money you'll save on gas. Equivalent gas car will get at best 30 mpg. At $3.50 / gallon that's 12c / mile. Average price of electricity is about $0.12 / kWh and the Telsa Model S will probably go about 3 miles on...
Most of the gasoline cost is tax. Once they start raising an equivalent tax on the electricity to power your car to pay for roads, etc. it becomes far more expensive. (And right now in most areas electric is far more polluting at the source of the electricity generation, has inefficient transport, etc. Electric cars are not really "green" without a real true green source and low losses)
As a side-note, It would be far less expensive for most of our homes to generate our own electricity with a small natural gas turbine than it is to make large quantities of electricity far away and transport it... gas is actually an easy way to transport energy quite efficiently... electricity over long copper wires, transformers, etc... Very Not-So-Much!!:)
3. The batteries cost $10,000 to replace today. Their cost in 8 - 10 years is extremely difficult to anticipate, but assuming that the materials involved aren't massively more expensive, the technology will certainly be significantly cheaper and should push those prices down.
If the difference in price from the base model to highest range model is $20,000 and the only difference is the double batteries, doesn't that mean there's supposedly about $40,000 of battery in there in total?
Yes, I agree.. The standard FreeBSD filesystem arrangement is very clean and simple... It just makes a lot of sense. Base system is/usr and/etc, everything else is/usr/local and/usr/local/etc...
It matters not what 'distro' you choose, we real, true, 'power users' roll our own systems for our own needs... Perhaps using things like FreeBSD.... Ahhh.... Thats the stuff....
AGREED! You can call me a BSD fanboy if you like, but I run FreeBSD on about 20 servers and 10 other personal boxen for various purposes (and yes, most of my "desktops" are FreeBSD) and another 50 or so installed at customer sites... The ** ONLY ** reason I ever use any variant of Linux for ANY reason is for tuner card support for Myth-TV-type systems. And I HATE it. FreeBSD just always works. Set it up, sit back and read the logs. Thats what UNIX is supposed to be. FreeBSD has never crashed and eaten files on me... Many of my Myth boxes seem to eat files every few months for no apparent reason... no matter what filesystem I use, even on a clean shutdown probably 20% of the time when I fire up one of those Linux boxes it won't even fsck and boot; it's easiest to just pull the HDD and fsck it on another box... That's just the tip of the iceberg... It just seems to me to be a horribly fragmented OS... everyone and every distro does something differently and mostly just in the name of being quick-to-market... They all seem to have that same Microsoft-style disease; get it out the door quickly instead of doing it RIGHT. Every time I have to actually use Linux for something It makes me realize just how inferior it is to FreeBSD... Sometimes seems almost as bad as Windows! I'll take my BSD flavors ANYDAY over any flavor of Linux. Yes, perhaps I'm excessively biased (I've been using FreeBSD extensively since 1.x) but I've tried many Linux variants MANY times over the past, what's it's been now; 15 years? I've TRIED to like it! Yet, I've NEVER liked it one bit... ARGH! GRRRR!
They do, of course, have a manual imprinter (as I believe is always required as per the merchant agreement) for credit card transactions (although paper-copy charges can be easily disputed as it isn't a "chip" transaction now) but it doesn't help for debit cards when you have no ATM to get cash and no debit processing... I'd keep at least ONE real POTS line, but it's not my establishment...
This is why basic voice communications DOES need basic government oversight and regulation. If any type of phone company doesn't have the profit motive to serve a customer and serve them well, they'll naturally just ignore them instead of spending money they'll never recoup on you. This is why regulations were created in the first place, so everyone could have at least a basic standard of communication. Nothing has really changed. The access methods by various types of phone companies may have changed, yes, but the concept is the same. Everyone should be able to expect the availability of some form of basic communications to be available. Does it NEED to be POTS? I'm not qualified to answer that, but EVERY type of communications can't be made universally mandatory and POTS was built out the way it was for a reason, and it works fabulously well.
Any competitive provider will provide you with the appropriate CPE (Customer Premise Equipment) to connect your analog PBX to their VOIP/whatever network. Obviously traditional T1s are a very expensive way to get 24 phone lines but, for example, a cable provider (traditional TV cable co, the ones with a single coaxial cable to your premise) will bring a box that has a coax cable in and a standard 50-pin AMP telco connector out. They provision however many lines you need at the head end for your box, connect it to your phone system and away you go.
Then you have a lovely single point of failure when the one coax loses signal for some reason, you lose EVERYTHING. Whee!
I recently tried to explain this to the new owner of a restaurant/bar where I do all the IT work; why it was a TERRIBLY bad idea that he had fallen victim to the marketers from Shaw who told him "everything would stay exactly the way it was" when he signed up with them instead of the phone company. Now when there's a problem with the cable (tends to happen a couple times a year for various reasons), not only will all 15 TVs go blank (except the internal video loop) but it will now also take out the internet (formerly a totally reliable DSL) which includes the main connection for the ATM machine and the debit card machines for payment AS WELL as their backup! (usually a POTS line) which are now through the single point of failure... No phones, no ability to take payments from customers?!! Gonna give away a lot of free lunches the next time the cable goes out.... OUCH! He still doesn't seem to get it... Won't even spring for a second internet connection for redundancy... as that would erase the supposed "savings" he's getting by using the TV company instead of the PHONE company.
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Yes, I don't have my original either (parents threw it away long ago without my knowledge) but I have 3 I picked up on eBay for a song... Go get one and a Munch Man cartridge and have fun... :)
That was my first home computer and so it'll always have that special place in my memories, but that thing wasn't very useful when it was still current. I can't imagine trying to do anything useful with it now.
You must not have had a PEB... With the Peripheral Expansion Box the 99/4A was capable of similar performance to the early PCs.
Even more surprising than that: There's an active TI-99/4A group? Really?
Yes, there are those of us still active in various old computer projects, building IDE disk interfaces, etc. to allow easy use of these fun old boxen.... I've built my own CROM/GROM emulator for the TI (someone else designed an IDE interface but I haven't built one for myself yet) and I'm currently designing and building an IDE disk interface for the old WANG 2200 minicomputer line...
Heh! Perfect! I have three TI-99/4A machines and one has only B&W output because the 9918 is frizzafrazzed.. This will let me "upgrade" that one to VGA output! Sweet... lol
I see the link but not the logo. I'm in Canada.
Yes, the link only on google.com for me as well (Canada) but no logo... Nothing at all on google.ca
Wierd....
The front page of today's Calgary Herald business section suggests the rumors are not true, Samsung is not interested in RIM:
http://www.calgaryherald.com/business/Samsung+interested/6012112/story.html
That is one of the few video clips (mid quality MPEG-1, iirc...), in the encyclopedia and since it is so closely held I've always kept that old copy (legal!) around to show people who've never seen it before... Sad, funny and true....
users can transition between Server Core and Server Graphical Shell at any time, with a single command and a single reboot.
At least we can usually change an IP address without rebooting on most WIndows boxes these days, the fact that you have to still have to *reboot* a Windows server to change many things never ceases to amaze me. How advanced! :)
> startx &
...
> killall X
What gives? :)
Why would one ever reboot except to change the running kernel version or to shutdown for hardware maintenance?
Those who do not understand UNIX are doomed to reinvent it, poorly.
Right... Kind of like Linux... :)
(tongue firmly planted in cheek) :)
Part of the appeal of a windows server is that the poor dude who is asked to do all the IT stuff, but isn't actually an IT guy has a much lower barrier to entry in understanding 'Windows that happens to be a server' than trying to understand 'LAMP'.
Exactly... In all likelyhood that person has no business administering a server. That is a large part of why there are so many problems, insecurities, etc... People who THINK they can administer something when in reality they have very little idea what they're doing.
... their little offices or division that handle something in particular have a guy on staff who is the least technically incompetent person. They might have a degree in history, but be the youngest person on staff, or they're a gamer and know more about computers than say... anyone else. But they look at a CLI (correctly from their perspective) as something that died 20 years ago, and they have no desire to learn. Even kids in IT programmes are generally unprepared for this. And making them uninspired about your product before they've even started working doesn't seem like a great plan.
Anything that helps keep "admins" that shouldn't be "admins" from pretending to be "admins" should probably be considered a Good Thing...
Think more of things like backup software with a GUI interface, or antivirus.
Why on earth would you need a GUI for backup or anti-virus? Those are two perfect examples of things that certainly do NOT need a silly GUI!
If a $200 Ipod costs Apple $150 in parts, $10 assembly/packaging/shipping and $40 profit, that's still $150 that flowed into Chinese economy - not the US economy.
The parts cost for a $200 ipod to Apple is probably more like $40, not $150... That makes a big difference...
Or Chief Wiggum...
"No, no... Dig UP, stupid..."
I am of the opinion that one should know as much as possible about the world that surrounds them, including how things work.. It's not so difficult to learn. I love learning.
I feel exactly the same way and don't understand how on earth anyone can NOT want to learn about everything around them but unfortunately that is not how the vast majority of people operate... Sadly...
It emulates a green-screen terminal running BASIC. So there.
Sometimes all you really need is the green-screen :)
I did just "re-code" this one the other day (from memory / re-make it up) to dump an old hard disk on a Wang 2200 minicomputer, though:
Still worked like a charm... What more could you ask for? LOL :)
And when do you expect that will happen? I don't think anyone will bother until electric cars are common enough to provide a significant tax base, which realistically means not for another 10 to 20 years. So unless you are planning to keep your new Tesla running for decades, it's not an issue for you.
No, perhaps not for the early adopters, just simply an observation... Something usually overlooked those who somehow believe the electric car is "THE" magical answer...
And of course if you are a proper greenie and get a big solar array along with your electric car, then you won't get taxed much on the electricity because you won't have bought the electricity, you'll have made it yourself.
Ah, yes, as soon as a large enough solar array can be efficient enough to do the job... We're nowhere close for most applications. Micro-generation of all sorts is key, though....
gas is actually an easy way to transport energy quite efficiently...
Very true. It's so efficient that it even makes sense to transport it all the way from Saudi Arabia. But being the best thing since sliced bread won't make help you much when there's no longer enough of it to go around.
Also very true, but currently we inefficiently burn fossil fuels and transport the energy to power the electric car which makes no sense (from a physics standpoint)... and it won't make economic sense either when things balance out, unfortunately....
Not to mention all the money you'll save on gas. Equivalent gas car will get at best 30 mpg. At $3.50 / gallon that's 12c / mile. Average price of electricity is about $0.12 / kWh and the Telsa Model S will probably go about 3 miles on...
Most of the gasoline cost is tax. Once they start raising an equivalent tax on the electricity to power your car to pay for roads, etc. it becomes far more expensive. (And right now in most areas electric is far more polluting at the source of the electricity generation, has inefficient transport, etc. Electric cars are not really "green" without a real true green source and low losses)
As a side-note, It would be far less expensive for most of our homes to generate our own electricity with a small natural gas turbine than it is to make large quantities of electricity far away and transport it... gas is actually an easy way to transport energy quite efficiently... electricity over long copper wires, transformers, etc... Very Not-So-Much!! :)
3. The batteries cost $10,000 to replace today. Their cost in 8 - 10 years is extremely difficult to anticipate, but assuming that the materials involved aren't massively more expensive, the technology will certainly be significantly cheaper and should push those prices down.
If the difference in price from the base model to highest range model is $20,000 and the only difference is the double batteries, doesn't that mean there's supposedly about $40,000 of battery in there in total?
Yes, I agree.. The standard FreeBSD filesystem arrangement is very clean and simple... It just makes a lot of sense. Base system is /usr and /etc, everything else is /usr/local and /usr/local/etc...
It matters not what 'distro' you choose, we real, true, 'power users' roll our own systems for our own needs...
Perhaps using things like FreeBSD....
Ahhh....
Thats the stuff....
Zoidberg... Homeowner! :)
AGREED! You can call me a BSD fanboy if you like, but I run FreeBSD on about 20 servers and 10 other personal boxen for various purposes (and yes, most of my "desktops" are FreeBSD) and another 50 or so installed at customer sites... The ** ONLY ** reason I ever use any variant of Linux for ANY reason is for tuner card support for Myth-TV-type systems. And I HATE it. FreeBSD just always works. Set it up, sit back and read the logs. Thats what UNIX is supposed to be. FreeBSD has never crashed and eaten files on me... Many of my Myth boxes seem to eat files every few months for no apparent reason... no matter what filesystem I use, even on a clean shutdown probably 20% of the time when I fire up one of those Linux boxes it won't even fsck and boot; it's easiest to just pull the HDD and fsck it on another box... That's just the tip of the iceberg... It just seems to me to be a horribly fragmented OS... everyone and every distro does something differently and mostly just in the name of being quick-to-market... They all seem to have that same Microsoft-style disease; get it out the door quickly instead of doing it RIGHT. Every time I have to actually use Linux for something It makes me realize just how inferior it is to FreeBSD... Sometimes seems almost as bad as Windows! I'll take my BSD flavors ANYDAY over any flavor of Linux. Yes, perhaps I'm excessively biased (I've been using FreeBSD extensively since 1.x) but I've tried many Linux variants MANY times over the past, what's it's been now; 15 years? I've TRIED to like it! Yet, I've NEVER liked it one bit... ARGH! GRRRR!
They do, of course, have a manual imprinter (as I believe is always required as per the merchant agreement) for credit card transactions (although paper-copy charges can be easily disputed as it isn't a "chip" transaction now) but it doesn't help for debit cards when you have no ATM to get cash and no debit processing... I'd keep at least ONE real POTS line, but it's not my establishment...
This is why basic voice communications DOES need basic government oversight and regulation. If any type of phone company doesn't have the profit motive to serve a customer and serve them well, they'll naturally just ignore them instead of spending money they'll never recoup on you. This is why regulations were created in the first place, so everyone could have at least a basic standard of communication. Nothing has really changed. The access methods by various types of phone companies may have changed, yes, but the concept is the same. Everyone should be able to expect the availability of some form of basic communications to be available. Does it NEED to be POTS? I'm not qualified to answer that, but EVERY type of communications can't be made universally mandatory and POTS was built out the way it was for a reason, and it works fabulously well.
Any competitive provider will provide you with the appropriate CPE (Customer Premise Equipment) to connect your analog PBX to their VOIP/whatever network. Obviously traditional T1s are a very expensive way to get 24 phone lines but, for example, a cable provider (traditional TV cable co, the ones with a single coaxial cable to your premise) will bring a box that has a coax cable in and a standard 50-pin AMP telco connector out. They provision however many lines you need at the head end for your box, connect it to your phone system and away you go.
Then you have a lovely single point of failure when the one coax loses signal for some reason, you lose EVERYTHING. Whee!
I recently tried to explain this to the new owner of a restaurant/bar where I do all the IT work; why it was a TERRIBLY bad idea that he had fallen victim to the marketers from Shaw who told him "everything would stay exactly the way it was" when he signed up with them instead of the phone company. Now when there's a problem with the cable (tends to happen a couple times a year for various reasons), not only will all 15 TVs go blank (except the internal video loop) but it will now also take out the internet (formerly a totally reliable DSL) which includes the main connection for the ATM machine and the debit card machines for payment AS WELL as their backup! (usually a POTS line) which are now through the single point of failure... No phones, no ability to take payments from customers?!! Gonna give away a lot of free lunches the next time the cable goes out.... OUCH! He still doesn't seem to get it... Won't even spring for a second internet connection for redundancy... as that would erase the supposed "savings" he's getting by using the TV company instead of the PHONE company.
I guess there IS such a thing as a free lunch! :)
Then it is not really a "landline". You are using a type of VOIP service which requires a relatively fragile network to function.