Yeah, i'd say it might be tough. I remember lots of the demos were written to use a GUS ( Gravis Ultra Sound ) card. I wouldnt have a clue as to where to find one of those today.
I have two GUS MAX 1M cards at my office. I used to do some tracking with Scream Tracker (2.2something and then 3.2) -- Hmm, time to find my old 386 now...
I think there might end up being "Windows PCs" that will have motherboards that support the Palladium standard and then "other PC's" that won't. When you want to build a box for linux or BSD or whatever else, you'll have to buy the "other" hardware instead of Windows hardware. If there is enough profit in it, somebody will make it.
That's not far fetched -- all you'd need was a new BIOS. The LinuxBIOS guys make special deals with their vendors to get what they want. I mean if you have a (potential) customer who wants to buy a thousand systems wouldn't you shave a bit off the price if they didn't want BIOS chips?
Now LinuxBIOS is highly specialized -- I have been toying with it to get my dauphin orasis boards booting it -- it's NOT ready for primetime or even for most linux hackers, but if there's a vendor who buys a non-TPCA'd BIOS and puts them in non-TPCA'd mobos, I don't think there's much to stop them, especially if there are plenty of people out there who are nonplussed about this whole situation.
The method you mentioned is fine as well - the one drawback is that you'll come across loose pins more often than just lathering the whole thing in solder and cleaning up afterwards.
What I ran across with doing the solder everything method was (and perhaps I just had really shitty solder wick) is that sometimes the wick wouldn't get everything (i.e. the solder that was bridged inbehind the pins didn't get wicked up) or, more often, you ended up using a LOT more heat to clean it up (not to mention flux), risking more damage to the part.
You DEFINITELY have to be careful about anything that's going in wacko temperatures (like outside, but why the hell would you do this for something that goes outside?) because pushing on pins won't find "weak" joints - ones that will go when thermally stressed.
Very true -- These were PCMCIA video cards which were (IMO) more prone to physical stresses -- dropping, bending, etc.
A needle works quite well for finding weak joints also - the dentist's pick tends to "flex" a little more when doing it, but I keep going back and forth between the two depending on my mood.
Yup, the dentist's pick flexed like crazy and I created a lot of work for myself fixing extremely bent pins because I was dragging too hard and the pick caught a loose pin and schproiinnng! bent the pin 90 degrees because of all the potential energy stored in the springy steel of the pick. It was worse when there were two or three or four pins in a row that didn't get soldered correctly. ugh.
I had to work through 80 288-pin QFPs finding loose joints - I think I lost a few years off my eyesight that way...
Totally agreed. Mind you my vision is 20/200 in my good eye so I just took my glasses off and got a pretty relaxed visual state.:-)
You can't charge yourself, and unless you're psychotic and expect to get paid during the time when you're not working, free time is free.
I dunno, I suppose I look at it from the aspect that if I have free time I'd be using it to play with my kids, practise guitar or whatnot, not work on an electronics project since that's what I do for a living. And if I am working on an electronics project, I may as well be getting $35/hr+ for it.
Moreover there are quite a few things you can do with an fully programmable FPGA that you can't do with an Audiotron.
Again, if you've got the time, patience and ability to do FPGA synthesis then sure, but the potential to do so much more is a joke because you'll be modifying the hardware to take advantage of pretty much any gain in features.
For one, as someone pointed out, you can easily adapt this thing to draw power from Ethernet, and you eliminate the power need. Plus making it not require Windows is pretty damn easy as well.
POE is a joke. You still either need the switch to provide it or wire up the wall wart and two RJ45 jacks to get it done. The point is moot. I wasn't complaining it needed Windows per se, but rather that it requires a host computer to do the decode functionality and even playlist functionality. No thanks. I don't want to wander over to my computer to change the track. Hell even sliMP3 has a better solution for cheaper than it would cost to put the features in here.
You, however, do NOT want it to access an MP3 store - that's not what this thing does. You could easily redirect an Internet radio feed through this thing - or audio from a video game, etc. Anything you want.
So you're going to redirect the audio for a video game in another room to somewhere else...why? Audiotron does internet radio too, and I'm all but certain that it will let you route arbitrary audio streams to it.
And a cheap AC/DC converter is $5 from Radio Shack, and the case is about $3. I doubt they contribute significantly.
Show me where you can get a case that looks like it belongs in a home entertainment system for $3. I'll concede on the power supply.
I'm not bashing the project -- I mean any hardware geek likes things to play with. But it's not that fucking cool, and it's not that fucking easy to make it do more. That's all I was getting at.
Oh yes, and time is worth something. If you choose to hack on a device or play with your kids, that's time you could be making money with. It's all priorities. Money isn't everything, but that doesn't mean that time is cheap or free.
Lots of flux on the pads. Set the device down and line up as best as possible. Solder one corner (not middles), keeping it as straight as possible. CHeck registration and do the opposite corner. Get a decent blob of solder in these points (2-4 pins). Do the other two sides. Flux like hell again.
Now take the iron and angle it quite steeply and drag it across the row of pins. Amazingly, it leaves the perfect amount of solder at each pin and the joint looks exactly like a professional job. There may be some extra solder bridging the last few pins, use the wick to clean that up.
To test the joints I used a dentist's pick and raked it across, but not without regard... i.e. I didn't dig it across, but I wasn't shy, either. That way you find any loose pins easily and without destroying the part.
I did 204-pin PQFPs in about 10 minutes using this technique, but admittedly it took a few sacrificial parts to get the iron angle and the scraping torque perfected.
If you can do the work, and put in the time, you can easily make it for far less than $250, and far less than $150, as well, with basically any features you want.
Throw in a case, wall wart, remote and VFD and about 20 hours of time (minimum) and you could have bought a Turtle Beach AudioTron and ended up with something that doesn't require WinAmp or even Windows, just an MP3/Ogg store somewhere.
I love KDE but it is a difficult task to integrate other languages with.
Um, no. any DCOP interface is scriptable through the "dcop" command line tool (or kdcop to see it visually). KDE also has an XMLRPCDCOP gateway, so you can even use something like XWT and access any method any KDE application makes available.
Re:Support freedom - Kill a Cop!
on
Lab-Grown Steak
·
· Score: 2
or one referring to it as 'fucking' I doubt you have too many quiet conversations with a loved one.
Hey, what can I say, my wife's an extremely horny woman.:-) We can talk, we can cuddle, we can play cards, we can fuck... she's not shy about it, why should I mince words?
Sure, sometimes we break out the candes and the satin sheets... other times I just bend her over the nearest horizontal surface. What can I say, I'm an extremely lucky guy.
Besides, I don't have to remember to swap tapes when I want my favorite show recorded, or have to worry about swapping tapes, then in the interim someone decides to watch an old family movie and doesn't swap back, love that.
You do know about the write-protect tab, right? (I'm assuming you overwrote a family moment tape.)
This guy's pissing and moaning about his PVR in his bedroom. For fuck sakes, get the TV the hell out of there. What are you, in college or something? The bedroom's for sleeping and for fucking and quiet discussions with a loved one. It's not somewhere to have a TV or a telephone or even a laptop or PDA.
Christ. I'm a geek and all but even I don't need to have the television or computer in every room of the house.
just how delicate would these be....it still means nothing if I have to treat it like a baby. Id rather have tape disk still, which is probably way more shock resistant. True, this harddrive is selfcontained.
Actually the smaller the head assemblies get, the more rugged they tend to get, since they weigh so little that a sudden drop or shock a) can't bend the tiny arm and b) can't give the head sufficient momentum to carry it far enough to touch the surface. The arms and heads are made from the same materials as normal size drives, and the adhesives are just as strong.
That being said, the drive manufacturers know this and constantly bring the heads closer and closer to the surface. Combined with platter and head technology increases, this gives you more bits per inch at the cost of making it easier to damage.... It's all a big trade-off, but in the end the drive is more rugged, at least in the "heads touch platters" damage department.
I know foreign key support is planned, but I'm handling all my data integrity inside my apps.
And with that, we discover that gregfortune is not a database admin. By a long shot. It is simply not possible to achieve true ACID conformance and have your data integrity outside the database!
Triggers, foreign keys, stored procedures, fast ACID-compliance, SQL95-compliance, no bullshit hacks like "*" to increment...
Re:3 yr olds can't close one eye
on
Low Tech Toys?
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· Score: 4, Funny
hat's nuts. If your three year old can't close just one eye, it's probably because no one has shown them how. If you make a game of it I'll bet they'll have it down in a week.
In other news, I managed to keep my kids busy for quite some time by betting them that they couldn't lick their elbow.
If you think Word is slow and has an "aggravating" user interface, I don't know WHAT you'd say about it's redhead stepchild OpenOffice.
I use StarOffice every day (which is essentially OO) and it's neither slow nor aggravating. Now its widgets are not in the same locations that Microsoft's Office suite puts them, and that is taking some getting used to, if that is what you mean. But it's not aggravating.
I simply dropped my (2WD) Passat into 2nd, and cruised straight up the hill with nary a slip. I always smile when I see a disabled SUV on the side of the road in the winter..
So you've got good tires and know how to drive. That's no reason to make fun of people who are stuck.
Making fun of them because they thought that they could slap any old set of tires on and drive like it was a clear midsummer day, sure, but not all of us SUV drivers are that stupid.
Should I laugh at all you Golf and Passat drivers at the side of the road because you weren't "smart enough" to get a SUV? Of course not. I laugh at you because you didn't understand the handling of your vehicle under those weather conditions.
It all comes down to driver education and experience. SUVs will help get you out of a ditch, or get through areas where low-clearance vechicles won't, but that's about it. (yes I use it for both, incidentally.:-) You can't drive like it's the indy in an SUV in the wintertime and expect it to stay on the road.
I'd be very interested to learn about the unfortunate occasion sparking your ire. And I hope we may agree on your remarks being...outdated, if nothing else;-)
Indeed. There are many things I don't like about RedHat, but now I've got one less, it seems. I wasn't trying to troll RH at all. If I can find the data I spoke about, i'll let you know. I am happy I'm wrong about this, at any rate.
you can easily perform a hot-swap of the bios chip to flash it. I have done it at least 20 times for I-opener hackers around here. Boot with good bios , load the flash program. yank good bios chip. insert target chip CORRECTLY. flash it.
Or, just use/dev/bios and stop with the kludges. It's particularly useful on systems where the BIOS is soldered in (like my Dauphin Orasis V1 motherboards with TQFP flash chips).
You must explain to me how I did just that with RH 6.2, 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3 and 8.0 then. I'm dying to know why I'm the exception. Yes, I used standard kernels (with some added patches, but none from RH).
I've checked the crack content of my coffee and it's below the recommended dosage for/. moderators. I will have to see if I can dig this up again becuase it really pissed me off when I discovered it. If I'm wrong, that's great, but I wasn't trying to troll if I am wrong.
Having the keyboard processor reboot the 286 into 16 bit protected mode (it didn't really do 32 bit) was just a messy slow kludge.
I believe you're wrong -- using the keyboard controller to reset the processor was the icky slow kludge. Triple-faulting the CPU was still slow compared to the speedy i386 way of doing it, but it was far zippier than using the keyboard controller.
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Yeah, i'd say it might be tough. I remember lots of the demos were written to use a GUS ( Gravis Ultra Sound ) card. I wouldnt have a clue as to where to find one of those today.
I have two GUS MAX 1M cards at my office. I used to do some tracking with Scream Tracker (2.2something and then 3.2) -- Hmm, time to find my old 386 now...
I think there might end up being "Windows PCs" that will have motherboards that support the Palladium standard and then "other PC's" that won't. When you want to build a box for linux or BSD or whatever else, you'll have to buy the "other" hardware instead of Windows hardware. If there is enough profit in it, somebody will make it.
That's not far fetched -- all you'd need was a new BIOS. The LinuxBIOS guys make special deals with their vendors to get what they want. I mean if you have a (potential) customer who wants to buy a thousand systems wouldn't you shave a bit off the price if they didn't want BIOS chips?
Now LinuxBIOS is highly specialized -- I have been toying with it to get my dauphin orasis boards booting it -- it's NOT ready for primetime or even for most linux hackers, but if there's a vendor who buys a non-TPCA'd BIOS and puts them in non-TPCA'd mobos, I don't think there's much to stop them, especially if there are plenty of people out there who are nonplussed about this whole situation.
The method you mentioned is fine as well - the one drawback is that you'll come across loose pins more often than just lathering the whole thing in solder and cleaning up afterwards.
What I ran across with doing the solder everything method was (and perhaps I just had really shitty solder wick) is that sometimes the wick wouldn't get everything (i.e. the solder that was bridged inbehind the pins didn't get wicked up) or, more often, you ended up using a LOT more heat to clean it up (not to mention flux), risking more damage to the part.
You DEFINITELY have to be careful about anything that's going in wacko temperatures (like outside, but why the hell would you do this for something that goes outside?) because pushing on pins won't find "weak" joints - ones that will go when thermally stressed.
Very true -- These were PCMCIA video cards which were (IMO) more prone to physical stresses -- dropping, bending, etc.
A needle works quite well for finding weak joints also - the dentist's pick tends to "flex" a little more when doing it, but I keep going back and forth between the two depending on my mood.
Yup, the dentist's pick flexed like crazy and I created a lot of work for myself fixing extremely bent pins because I was dragging too hard and the pick caught a loose pin and schproiinnng! bent the pin 90 degrees because of all the potential energy stored in the springy steel of the pick. It was worse when there were two or three or four pins in a row that didn't get soldered correctly. ugh.
I had to work through 80 288-pin QFPs finding loose joints - I think I lost a few years off my eyesight that way...
Totally agreed. Mind you my vision is 20/200 in my good eye so I just took my glasses off and got a pretty relaxed visual state. :-)
You can't charge yourself, and unless you're psychotic and expect to get paid during the time when you're not working, free time is free.
I dunno, I suppose I look at it from the aspect that if I have free time I'd be using it to play with my kids, practise guitar or whatnot, not work on an electronics project since that's what I do for a living. And if I am working on an electronics project, I may as well be getting $35/hr+ for it.
Moreover there are quite a few things you can do with an fully programmable FPGA that you can't do with an Audiotron.
Again, if you've got the time, patience and ability to do FPGA synthesis then sure, but the potential to do so much more is a joke because you'll be modifying the hardware to take advantage of pretty much any gain in features.
For one, as someone pointed out, you can easily adapt this thing to draw power from Ethernet, and you eliminate the power need. Plus making it not require Windows is pretty damn easy as well.
POE is a joke. You still either need the switch to provide it or wire up the wall wart and two RJ45 jacks to get it done. The point is moot. I wasn't complaining it needed Windows per se, but rather that it requires a host computer to do the decode functionality and even playlist functionality. No thanks. I don't want to wander over to my computer to change the track. Hell even sliMP3 has a better solution for cheaper than it would cost to put the features in here.
You, however, do NOT want it to access an MP3 store - that's not what this thing does. You could easily redirect an Internet radio feed through this thing - or audio from a video game, etc. Anything you want.
So you're going to redirect the audio for a video game in another room to somewhere else...why? Audiotron does internet radio too, and I'm all but certain that it will let you route arbitrary audio streams to it.
And a cheap AC/DC converter is $5 from Radio Shack, and the case is about $3. I doubt they contribute significantly.
Show me where you can get a case that looks like it belongs in a home entertainment system for $3. I'll concede on the power supply.
I'm not bashing the project -- I mean any hardware geek likes things to play with. But it's not that fucking cool, and it's not that fucking easy to make it do more. That's all I was getting at.
Oh yes, and time is worth something. If you choose to hack on a device or play with your kids, that's time you could be making money with. It's all priorities. Money isn't everything, but that doesn't mean that time is cheap or free.
I did it quite differently:
Lots of flux on the pads. Set the device down and line up as best as possible. Solder one corner (not middles), keeping it as straight as possible. CHeck registration and do the opposite corner. Get a decent blob of solder in these points (2-4 pins). Do the other two sides. Flux like hell again.
Now take the iron and angle it quite steeply and drag it across the row of pins. Amazingly, it leaves the perfect amount of solder at each pin and the joint looks exactly like a professional job. There may be some extra solder bridging the last few pins, use the wick to clean that up.
To test the joints I used a dentist's pick and raked it across, but not without regard... i.e. I didn't dig it across, but I wasn't shy, either. That way you find any loose pins easily and without destroying the part.
I did 204-pin PQFPs in about 10 minutes using this technique, but admittedly it took a few sacrificial parts to get the iron angle and the scraping torque perfected.
If you can do the work, and put in the time, you can easily make it for far less than $250, and far less than $150, as well, with basically any features you want.
Throw in a case, wall wart, remote and VFD and about 20 hours of time (minimum) and you could have bought a Turtle Beach AudioTron and ended up with something that doesn't require WinAmp or even Windows, just an MP3/Ogg store somewhere.
I love KDE but it is a difficult task to integrate other languages with.
Um, no. any DCOP interface is scriptable through the "dcop" command line tool (or kdcop to see it visually). KDE also has an XMLRPCDCOP gateway, so you can even use something like XWT and access any method any KDE application makes available.
The least you could do was cite your source.
or one referring to it as 'fucking' I doubt you have too many quiet conversations with a loved one.
Hey, what can I say, my wife's an extremely horny woman. :-) We can talk, we can cuddle, we can play cards, we can fuck... she's not shy about it, why should I mince words?
Sure, sometimes we break out the candes and the satin sheets... other times I just bend her over the nearest horizontal surface. What can I say, I'm an extremely lucky guy.
Besides, I don't have to remember to swap tapes when I want my favorite show recorded, or have to worry about swapping tapes, then in the interim someone decides to watch an old family movie and doesn't swap back, love that.
You do know about the write-protect tab, right? (I'm assuming you overwrote a family moment tape.)
This guy's pissing and moaning about his PVR in his bedroom. For fuck sakes, get the TV the hell out of there. What are you, in college or something? The bedroom's for sleeping and for fucking and quiet discussions with a loved one. It's not somewhere to have a TV or a telephone or even a laptop or PDA.
Christ. I'm a geek and all but even I don't need to have the television or computer in every room of the house.
just how delicate would these be....it still means nothing if I have to treat it like a baby. Id rather have tape disk still, which is probably way more shock resistant. True, this harddrive is selfcontained.
Actually the smaller the head assemblies get, the more rugged they tend to get, since they weigh so little that a sudden drop or shock a) can't bend the tiny arm and b) can't give the head sufficient momentum to carry it far enough to touch the surface. The arms and heads are made from the same materials as normal size drives, and the adhesives are just as strong.
That being said, the drive manufacturers know this and constantly bring the heads closer and closer to the surface. Combined with platter and head technology increases, this gives you more bits per inch at the cost of making it easier to damage.... It's all a big trade-off, but in the end the drive is more rugged, at least in the "heads touch platters" damage department.
Actually it's 4W EIRP, 1W at the PA output (or is it anteanna input).
I know foreign key support is planned, but I'm handling all my data integrity inside my apps.
And with that, we discover that gregfortune is not a database admin. By a long shot. It is simply not possible to achieve true ACID conformance and have your data integrity outside the database!
What might you consider slightly complicated SQL?
Triggers, foreign keys, stored procedures, fast ACID-compliance, SQL95-compliance, no bullshit hacks like "*" to increment...
hat's nuts. If your three year old can't close just one eye, it's probably because no one has shown them how. If you make a game of it I'll bet they'll have it down in a week.
In other news, I managed to keep my kids busy for quite some time by betting them that they couldn't lick their elbow.
If you think Word is slow and has an "aggravating" user interface, I don't know WHAT you'd say about it's redhead stepchild OpenOffice.
I use StarOffice every day (which is essentially OO) and it's neither slow nor aggravating. Now its widgets are not in the same locations that Microsoft's Office suite puts them, and that is taking some getting used to, if that is what you mean. But it's not aggravating.
Can I run 120 VAC on the spare CAT5 pairs?
Actually IIRC the wire insulation is rated 300V, although the connectors certainly aren't. :-)
[Hear that, Jared? :P]
What's Subway got to do with that? :-)
I simply dropped my (2WD) Passat into 2nd, and cruised straight up the hill with nary a slip. I always smile when I see a disabled SUV on the side of the road in the winter..
So you've got good tires and know how to drive. That's no reason to make fun of people who are stuck.
Making fun of them because they thought that they could slap any old set of tires on and drive like it was a clear midsummer day, sure, but not all of us SUV drivers are that stupid.
Should I laugh at all you Golf and Passat drivers at the side of the road because you weren't "smart enough" to get a SUV? Of course not. I laugh at you because you didn't understand the handling of your vehicle under those weather conditions.
It all comes down to driver education and experience. SUVs will help get you out of a ditch, or get through areas where low-clearance vechicles won't, but that's about it. (yes I use it for both, incidentally. :-) You can't drive like it's the indy in an SUV in the wintertime and expect it to stay on the road.
I'd be very interested to learn about the unfortunate occasion sparking your ire. And I hope we may agree on your remarks being...outdated, if nothing else ;-)
Indeed. There are many things I don't like about RedHat, but now I've got one less, it seems. I wasn't trying to troll RH at all. If I can find the data I spoke about, i'll let you know. I am happy I'm wrong about this, at any rate.
you can easily perform a hot-swap of the bios chip to flash it. I have done it at least 20 times for I-opener hackers around here. Boot with good bios , load the flash program. yank good bios chip. insert target chip CORRECTLY. flash it.
Or, just use /dev/bios and stop with the kludges. It's particularly useful on systems where the BIOS is soldered in (like my Dauphin Orasis V1 motherboards with TQFP flash chips).
You must explain to me how I did just that with RH 6.2, 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3 and 8.0 then. I'm dying to know why I'm the exception. Yes, I used standard kernels (with some added patches, but none from RH).
I've checked the crack content of my coffee and it's below the recommended dosage for /. moderators. I will have to see if I can dig this up again becuase it really pissed me off when I discovered it. If I'm wrong, that's great, but I wasn't trying to troll if I am wrong.
Having the keyboard processor reboot the 286 into 16 bit protected mode (it didn't really do 32 bit) was just a messy slow kludge.
I believe you're wrong -- using the keyboard controller to reset the processor was the icky slow kludge. Triple-faulting the CPU was still slow compared to the speedy i386 way of doing it, but it was far zippier than using the keyboard controller.
If you did anything 32 bit the general idea was to disable MSdos entirely and getting back to 16 bit was *ugly*
Only on 80286s, and only if you consider the triple fault trick to be ugly. I thought it was rather cool.