The only thing that beats a Thinkpad is a PowerBook. Thinkpads rock. I had one. It's permanently "living with friends" now. Even the newer Thinkpads kick serious ass. Shouts out to my Big Blue homiez.
After 10/15 I won't be able to use the last version of MSN that works on the Classic MacOS! And some Macs are just not well-equipped to run MacOS X. My Blue G3 can run it, but my Wallstreet Powerbook isn't so lucky. Oh well, I'll just have to tell everyone to contact me via either AIM or YIM. Or IRC which I'm usually on all the time anyway.
Yes, but that was not plain-vanilla WebStar on MacOS Classic...that was WebStar+Lasso+FileMaker Pro. If the target site were just serving static pages off of WebStar you wouldn't have a prayer of getting in and 0wnz0ring it. With WebStar or Apache on OS X, maybe you'd have a chance. But not WebStar on MacOS 9 or below.
A good use for this desk...
on
iWorkstations?
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· Score: 1
Lately I've been using my PowerBook a lot when I'm watching TV. I put the critter on a TV Table (substantial wood kind, not the rickety aluminum kind) and IRC away while I'm watching TV. This desk would be ideal for that kind of entertainment multitasking.
I have been considering one of those rollaway desks specifically designed for laptop computers. However, being that I'm a broke dot-com refugee going back to school this Fall, I have more important priorities than that, like food and shelter. So the TV Table is just fine for my purposes.
No, IceBook is the term for the present-gen iBooks. Clamshell is the polite term for them, iToiletSeat is the impolite term for them.
Interesting that the Wallstreet Powerbook is also part of the return program. I have one, and has basically decided to stick with 9.1 and Linux on it instead of braving the waters of X.
However, my blue-and-white G3 is getting X as soon as Panther (OS X.3) comes out. People are having good success with New World Macs, even really old ones like the blue-and-white.
They have said, among other absurd things, that there are only two operating systems in the world: Windows and UNIX (so much for DR DOS/FreeDOS, VMS, et. al. I guess).
That's fsckn hilarious...I have a whole herd of computers that don't run either Windows or UNIX. They run the old-school classic MacOS. Most run 7.5.3 (Unity) but the newer ones run 9. I'm sure folks who run AmigaOS, BeOS and OS/2 and other classic-era operating systems are chuckling right now.
Oh yeah, I actually bought DR-DOS a long time ago. Back when it seemed Caldera was on the side of the Angels and were on the way to successfully stickin' it to Da Man (aka The Beast of Redmond) I broke down and bought a copy. Not a bad little version of DOS, although IBM PC DOS 2000 had some niceties that definitely outclassed it. I might just stick it on an elderly PC so I can play some moldy old DOS games. Doom II! Boo-yah! ^_^
OK, these robots are all well and good, but when are we going to see COMBAT MECHA?????? C'mon folks...nothing says "Shock and Awe" more than a 10-story-tall mecha, loaded for bear!!! Combat mechas NOW, dammit!!!! +^_^+
Re:Tell that to your fiancee... :0)
on
The Diamond Age
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· Score: 1
The Claddagh dates back way further than the 17th Century. However, Renaissance England and Ireland had a resurgence of interest in pre-Christian folklore (xref: The Faerie Queen, translations of the Mabinogeon from that era, and also Shakespeare, especially A Midsummer Night's Dream and King Lear) so it is easy to make that false assumption that the Claddagh dates back to that period.
Re:Tell that to your fiancee... :0)
on
The Diamond Age
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· Score: 1
I wear a silver Claddagh with my Navajo silver wedding ring. I went through two rings with stones in them: one with a faceted quartz stone, the other with an amethyst point. Both of those "engagement rings" got damaged over a few years of wear. When the amethyst point got lost for the very last time, I decided on the Claddagh instead. Pretty symbol with an interesting pre-Christian Irish history. I've had mine now for about 7-8 years now and it's perfect.
Meaningless adornment is largely overrated. Expensive jewelry isn't as much fun as expensive toys for the lab. My husband is of a similar mind, but with musical instruments.
Re:Tell that to your fiancee... :0)
on
The Diamond Age
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I specifically told my husband, when I was still his fiancee, that I absolutely, positively, did NOT want a diamond as an engagement ring. I definitely knew all the facts about 'bloody diamonds' and I didn't want any part of them.
With the advent of manufactured (umm, "cultured") diamonds and their potential uses in computers, I suppose I might be interested in a little "bling bling" now. That is, if the "bling bling" is safely inside the newest, kewlest mega-badass computer. 8-)
Michael: It's pretty brilliant. What it does is every time there's a bank transaction where interest is computed, you know, thousands a day? The computer ends up with these fractions of a cent, which it usually rounds off? What this does is takes those little remainders and puts them into an account. Peter: This sounds familiar. Michael: Yeah, they did it in Superman 3. Peter: Right. Michael: Underrated movie, actually.
Sometimes digging around on sites like Directron is a big help when you need to jam Econo but you want quality parts in your machine. I got a power supply made by Lite-On (same company as the Gold Standard of optical drives) for Compaq for use in their servers. It is conservatively rated at 300W but has been stress-tested at 380W and didn't even break a sweat. Here's the link, sorry they don't have any more of them. $20 to purchase. I paid $10 extra to test the thing as good before they pushed it out the door. There are 6 harness wires coming out of the PS...I think this was designed for a box with a RAID.
All Fry's are currently being converted over to run on linux (inventory,POS,everything).
That would be way easy because right now they are running on Netware. Novell is pushing Linux as an alternative system to run Netware on. All the point-of-sales and lookup boxes are basically diskless netbooting Netware terminals. Moving over to Linux should be a breeze for them.
No, all you need to do to buy an OEM copy of XP Home or XP Pro at Fry's is to buy a hard drive or a motherboard+CPU or a barebones system. I don't know if they even enforce those requirements anymore...
Hell there's supposedly even an Alice in Wonderland fry's!
That would be the one I worked at. Woodland Hills, CA. Very surreal. Especially at night after the hordes go home, the lights have almost all been turned off, and all you hear is the weird piano solo music they have on for background music.
These boxes were terminally "on the way over from China" during the time I was at Fry's in Computer Accessory Sales. I didn't get a chance to get my paws on one.
If Fry's was truly serious about selling a Linux box in their stores they would have loaded it with a better distro. I think that Thiz is used to QC (ha!) the boxes before they get loaded into the containers for the long journey to the Bay Area.
BTW the boxes are crap too...PC Chips motherboards. They really could have done better with a true EPIA-platform setup but instead these VIA CPU machines are the worst of both worlds. If you want something like this that will run Linux until the cows come home and fit in a space the size of a looseleaf binder, get an EPIA-M Nehemiah in a Cubid case. VIA is not great for making chipsets for other processors, but they do just fine with their own.
Actually Timothy Dalton's hardcore, ruthless, street-tough rendition of James Bond was the one that fit more closely with Ian Fleming's original concept. However, people missed the campy, witty Bond so Pierce Brosnan is better regarded than Timothy Dalton by most Bond fans.
I certainly think that Brosnan is way better than Roger Moore's Bond, and pretty close to Connery's prototype movie Bond. Agreed, the series needs better writers.
One element of progress: Bond Girls are getting better. From the original recipe bimbos, we now have kick-ass Bond Girls like Wai Lin (Michelle Yeoh) and Jinx (Hallie Berry). BTW, whatever happened to the promise to spin either or both characters off into their own series of movies? Maybe they should create a buddy picture with the both of them working on the same case. Or maybe not. Whatever.
Food for thought, from forgotten comedian Arte Johnson:
"The codfish lays ten thousand eggs, The homely hen lays one. The codfish never cackles To say what she had done. We ignore the codfish While the homely hen, we prize. The moral of this story is, IT PAYS TO ADVERTISE."
Ironically, it was Dell's DOMESTIC tech support that almost led a friend of mine (not real tech savvy but willing to learn) down the primrose path to video driver hell. He was doing some hardware updates and was told to just pile the stuff in and let Windows XP find all the drivers.
I told him "whoa, slow down Cowboy!" and had him reinstall the old video card. I then told him pretty much the procedure to uninstall the ATI crap before installing the new spiffy NVidia GeForce Ti4200 I advised him to get from NewEgg.
While he did this, he was on the phone with Dell's tech support night crew in Bangalore. Guess what? The Indian tech support people were way more clueful than the domestic ones on the day shift! They knew that he got bad info from the day shift and made very sure that he did the uninstall before trying to install the card.
They held his hand up until the point where he was to reboot with the new video card in for the first time. Then they told him "I'm sorry, but this isn't a Dell upgrade so you'll have to follow the manual that came with your video card to finish up." However, at that point the rest was cake.
He now has a hot-rod Dell with a GeForce 4Ti4200, a DVD+-RW drive, a DVD-ROM drive, a GB of RAM and a Hauppauge MPEG2 vidcap card. And he did the hardware upgrades with his own two hands. He feels empowered, I am spared picking up the pieces of the disaster that would have ensued had he gone with the original advice.
Yes, sometimes the Hindi accents get thick. But a lot of those guys in tech support in India are actual computer enthusiasts. The enthusiast market is almost as big in India as it is here. That guy in tech support in India is also going to be more likely to be able to walk you through a Linux issue because there are a lot more people actually USING Linux there than just dinking around with it on another partition because "it's supposed to be cool."
The clueless level-1 tech support guy exists on both hemispheres of the Planet. It is not a geographical thing at all.
Actually the procedure for a network reboot entails shutting down all computers attached to the cable modem or DSL modem, powercycling the modem, powercycling the router (if you use one) and then turning one computer back on to check the results. It has nothing to do with the computer's ability to adapt to changing information from the cable modem but to make sure that there is no traffic on the network when the "reboot" occurs.
It rarely happens with my DSL provider (DSL Extreme over Verizon "last mile") but I had to do this an alarming number of times when I had Adelphia PowerLink/Adelphia @Home cable modem. Stupid fsckn Adelphia...:P
Even if you turn off a lot of the "eye candy" the XP interface still strikes me as being slower and more ponderous than the snappy W2K one. WXP sucks down more resources with all the unnecessary services turned off than W2K does. W2K requires a smaller memory footprint and installs in less disk space. Remote Desktop is nice but VNC under W2K is fine and you don't have to purchase Terminal Server CALs to make it work.
My favorite feature on XP is driver rollback. Then again, you can add it to W2K with GoBack.
I read the linked article on lycoris.org, which is the Lycoris community site, and it depressed the hell out of me. Yes, in order to create Lycoris (which before the name change was Redmond Linux) they had to license Caldera OpenLinux from the company which now calls itself SCO.
The unfortunate upshot is that if you support Lycoris, you are ultimately supporting SCO. So it is with a heavy heart that I have to say that I will cease advising newbies to check out Lycoris. Instead, I will advise installation of Mandrake 9.1.
Too bad...Amethyst is really, really nice and is a great "training wheels" distro for those who are migrating from Windows.;_;
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I'd buy it. C'mon ThinkGeek...DO IT!
The only thing that beats a Thinkpad is a PowerBook. Thinkpads rock. I had one. It's permanently "living with friends" now. Even the newer Thinkpads kick serious ass. Shouts out to my Big Blue homiez.
After 10/15 I won't be able to use the last version of MSN that works on the Classic MacOS! And some Macs are just not well-equipped to run MacOS X. My Blue G3 can run it, but my Wallstreet Powerbook isn't so lucky. Oh well, I'll just have to tell everyone to contact me via either AIM or YIM. Or IRC which I'm usually on all the time anyway.
Well, we've already had a case in Anime where there was a cat in a super-human body, so I suppose it's not too far-fetched. ^_^
BTW, here's a clickable link: http://www.tbtf.com/archive/1997-08-18.html. Thank me.
Lately I've been using my PowerBook a lot when I'm watching TV. I put the critter on a TV Table (substantial wood kind, not the rickety aluminum kind) and IRC away while I'm watching TV. This desk would be ideal for that kind of entertainment multitasking.
I have been considering one of those rollaway desks specifically designed for laptop computers. However, being that I'm a broke dot-com refugee going back to school this Fall, I have more important priorities than that, like food and shelter. So the TV Table is just fine for my purposes.
No, IceBook is the term for the present-gen iBooks. Clamshell is the polite term for them, iToiletSeat is the impolite term for them.
Interesting that the Wallstreet Powerbook is also part of the return program. I have one, and has basically decided to stick with 9.1 and Linux on it instead of braving the waters of X.
However, my blue-and-white G3 is getting X as soon as Panther (OS X.3) comes out. People are having good success with New World Macs, even really old ones like the blue-and-white.
That's fsckn hilarious...I have a whole herd of computers that don't run either Windows or UNIX. They run the old-school classic MacOS. Most run 7.5.3 (Unity) but the newer ones run 9. I'm sure folks who run AmigaOS, BeOS and OS/2 and other classic-era operating systems are chuckling right now.
Oh yeah, I actually bought DR-DOS a long time ago. Back when it seemed Caldera was on the side of the Angels and were on the way to successfully stickin' it to Da Man (aka The Beast of Redmond) I broke down and bought a copy. Not a bad little version of DOS, although IBM PC DOS 2000 had some niceties that definitely outclassed it. I might just stick it on an elderly PC so I can play some moldy old DOS games. Doom II! Boo-yah! ^_^
OK, these robots are all well and good, but when are we going to see COMBAT MECHA?????? C'mon folks...nothing says "Shock and Awe" more than a 10-story-tall mecha, loaded for bear!!! Combat mechas NOW, dammit!!!! +^_^+
The Claddagh dates back way further than the 17th Century. However, Renaissance England and Ireland had a resurgence of interest in pre-Christian folklore (xref: The Faerie Queen, translations of the Mabinogeon from that era, and also Shakespeare, especially A Midsummer Night's Dream and King Lear) so it is easy to make that false assumption that the Claddagh dates back to that period.
Meaningless adornment is largely overrated. Expensive jewelry isn't as much fun as expensive toys for the lab. My husband is of a similar mind, but with musical instruments.
I specifically told my husband, when I was still his fiancee, that I absolutely, positively, did NOT want a diamond as an engagement ring. I definitely knew all the facts about 'bloody diamonds' and I didn't want any part of them.
With the advent of manufactured (umm, "cultured") diamonds and their potential uses in computers, I suppose I might be interested in a little "bling bling" now. That is, if the "bling bling" is safely inside the newest, kewlest mega-badass computer. 8-)
Peter: This sounds familiar.
Michael: Yeah, they did it in Superman 3.
Peter: Right.
Michael: Underrated movie, actually.
Sooner or later, everything becomes Office Space.
Sometimes digging around on sites like Directron is a big help when you need to jam Econo but you want quality parts in your machine. I got a power supply made by Lite-On (same company as the Gold Standard of optical drives) for Compaq for use in their servers. It is conservatively rated at 300W but has been stress-tested at 380W and didn't even break a sweat. Here's the link, sorry they don't have any more of them. $20 to purchase. I paid $10 extra to test the thing as good before they pushed it out the door. There are 6 harness wires coming out of the PS...I think this was designed for a box with a RAID.
That would be way easy because right now they are running on Netware. Novell is pushing Linux as an alternative system to run Netware on. All the point-of-sales and lookup boxes are basically diskless netbooting Netware terminals. Moving over to Linux should be a breeze for them.
No, all you need to do to buy an OEM copy of XP Home or XP Pro at Fry's is to buy a hard drive or a motherboard+CPU or a barebones system. I don't know if they even enforce those requirements anymore...
That would be the one I worked at. Woodland Hills, CA. Very surreal. Especially at night after the hordes go home, the lights have almost all been turned off, and all you hear is the weird piano solo music they have on for background music.
These boxes were terminally "on the way over from China" during the time I was at Fry's in Computer Accessory Sales. I didn't get a chance to get my paws on one.
If Fry's was truly serious about selling a Linux box in their stores they would have loaded it with a better distro. I think that Thiz is used to QC (ha!) the boxes before they get loaded into the containers for the long journey to the Bay Area.
BTW the boxes are crap too...PC Chips motherboards. They really could have done better with a true EPIA-platform setup but instead these VIA CPU machines are the worst of both worlds. If you want something like this that will run Linux until the cows come home and fit in a space the size of a looseleaf binder, get an EPIA-M Nehemiah in a Cubid case. VIA is not great for making chipsets for other processors, but they do just fine with their own.
Actually Timothy Dalton's hardcore, ruthless, street-tough rendition of James Bond was the one that fit more closely with Ian Fleming's original concept. However, people missed the campy, witty Bond so Pierce Brosnan is better regarded than Timothy Dalton by most Bond fans.
I certainly think that Brosnan is way better than Roger Moore's Bond, and pretty close to Connery's prototype movie Bond. Agreed, the series needs better writers.
One element of progress: Bond Girls are getting better. From the original recipe bimbos, we now have kick-ass Bond Girls like Wai Lin (Michelle Yeoh) and Jinx (Hallie Berry). BTW, whatever happened to the promise to spin either or both characters off into their own series of movies? Maybe they should create a buddy picture with the both of them working on the same case. Or maybe not. Whatever.
It should be in the shape of a shark with a fricken laser beam on its fricken head!
BTW: 1,000th post! w00t!
Food for thought, from forgotten comedian Arte Johnson:
"The codfish lays ten thousand eggs,
The homely hen lays one.
The codfish never cackles
To say what she had done.
We ignore the codfish
While the homely hen, we prize.
The moral of this story is,
IT PAYS TO ADVERTISE."
I don't know why I remembered that, but I did.
Ironically, it was Dell's DOMESTIC tech support that almost led a friend of mine (not real tech savvy but willing to learn) down the primrose path to video driver hell. He was doing some hardware updates and was told to just pile the stuff in and let Windows XP find all the drivers.
I told him "whoa, slow down Cowboy!" and had him reinstall the old video card. I then told him pretty much the procedure to uninstall the ATI crap before installing the new spiffy NVidia GeForce Ti4200 I advised him to get from NewEgg.
While he did this, he was on the phone with Dell's tech support night crew in Bangalore. Guess what? The Indian tech support people were way more clueful than the domestic ones on the day shift! They knew that he got bad info from the day shift and made very sure that he did the uninstall before trying to install the card.
They held his hand up until the point where he was to reboot with the new video card in for the first time. Then they told him "I'm sorry, but this isn't a Dell upgrade so you'll have to follow the manual that came with your video card to finish up." However, at that point the rest was cake.
He now has a hot-rod Dell with a GeForce 4Ti4200, a DVD+-RW drive, a DVD-ROM drive, a GB of RAM and a Hauppauge MPEG2 vidcap card. And he did the hardware upgrades with his own two hands. He feels empowered, I am spared picking up the pieces of the disaster that would have ensued had he gone with the original advice.
Yes, sometimes the Hindi accents get thick. But a lot of those guys in tech support in India are actual computer enthusiasts. The enthusiast market is almost as big in India as it is here. That guy in tech support in India is also going to be more likely to be able to walk you through a Linux issue because there are a lot more people actually USING Linux there than just dinking around with it on another partition because "it's supposed to be cool."
The clueless level-1 tech support guy exists on both hemispheres of the Planet. It is not a geographical thing at all.
Actually the procedure for a network reboot entails shutting down all computers attached to the cable modem or DSL modem, powercycling the modem, powercycling the router (if you use one) and then turning one computer back on to check the results. It has nothing to do with the computer's ability to adapt to changing information from the cable modem but to make sure that there is no traffic on the network when the "reboot" occurs.
It rarely happens with my DSL provider (DSL Extreme over Verizon "last mile") but I had to do this an alarming number of times when I had Adelphia PowerLink/Adelphia @Home cable modem. Stupid fsckn Adelphia...:P
Even if you turn off a lot of the "eye candy" the XP interface still strikes me as being slower and more ponderous than the snappy W2K one. WXP sucks down more resources with all the unnecessary services turned off than W2K does. W2K requires a smaller memory footprint and installs in less disk space. Remote Desktop is nice but VNC under W2K is fine and you don't have to purchase Terminal Server CALs to make it work.
My favorite feature on XP is driver rollback. Then again, you can add it to W2K with GoBack.
I read the linked article on lycoris.org, which is the Lycoris community site, and it depressed the hell out of me. Yes, in order to create Lycoris (which before the name change was Redmond Linux) they had to license Caldera OpenLinux from the company which now calls itself SCO.
;_;
The unfortunate upshot is that if you support Lycoris, you are ultimately supporting SCO. So it is with a heavy heart that I have to say that I will cease advising newbies to check out Lycoris. Instead, I will advise installation of Mandrake 9.1.
Too bad...Amethyst is really, really nice and is a great "training wheels" distro for those who are migrating from Windows.