The bus company who I travel to and from work on every day have fitted each bus with a PC. There's a flat screen display attached to the bulkhead behind the driver facing the passengers, and some unit, probably embedded, on the other side.
I believe it's going to be intergrated with GPS to give a read out of the current location and ETA. It's not working yet, so either displays an AMI BIOS boot message with no boot device, or just the bus company logo.
He's a British hi-fi looney who sells all kinds of silly things, such as pens and stickers, for marking CDs and audio equipment, which supposedly make the equipment sound better. All of the, naturally, are sold at very silly prices, but some people do buy them. The most expensive item he sells is a crocodile clip called "The Quantun Clip" that retails at £500, and supposedly improves the sound of anything it has been attached to.
Absolutely barking mad! Yet many daft people believe him!
His website is at http://www.belt.demon.co.uk/ if you're brave enough to view it.
A couple of years ago, my local library in Ripon, North Yorkshire, moved to new and very much larger premises, and had a Playstation installed as one of the facilities, fitted with headphones.
Unfortunately the children using it made so much noise that it was withdrawn after only a few months of service.
Championship Manager 4 is a football (to give it it's proper name!) management game, probably the longest running genre in the UK. The player picks the team and tactics, buys and sells players and so on.
In fact the first computer magazine I ever purchased back in 1982 not only carried an advertisment Football Manager by Kevin Toms (a game originally written in BASIC that itself was available for many years), but also had a listing for another game of the type for the Apple II.
I spent hours during 1983 playing Football Manager on the ZX Spectrum. I still can remember the match highlights consisting of stick-men and long time it took to sort the league table after every match!
I've had that problem too. I had one CD that I couldn't play in iTunes on my iBook that effectivly made OS X useless (back in the days of 10.1) as it was exceedingly unresponsive. When I finally got the CD out of the drive I discovered a severe pressing fault - a huge blob of paint on the playing surface - that rendered the disk unreadable.
I've since had simillar symptoms with another CD - this one has a hidden track at the start of the disc.
I'm sure that a firmware update could resolve these issues too.
When I installed Debian on my iBook last year it wasn't easy due to a problem with the IDE drivers in the kernel.
At that time booting the Linux kernel off a CD would prevent the IDE bus from being seen by the kernel once it was running. The only solution at the time was to copy the kernel and bootloader onto an empty HFS partition, and boot off that via Open Firmware.
If this kernel problem hasn't been resolved as of yet, a live CD will cause problems.
I recall about 10 years ago that one of the video adaptor manufacturers optimised their Windows 3.1 acclerated video drivers to give the best performance possible with the benchmark program Ziff-Davis used for their reviews.
One test involved writing a text string in a particular font continuously to the screen in. This text string was encoded directly in the driver for speed. Similarly one of the polygon drawing routines was optimised for the particular polygons used in this benchmark.
There was a analogue audio copy-protection mechanism in development around 1987 called something like "Copycode" which I recall reading about at the time. It worked by cutting a notch into the audio spectrum somewhere. One of the audio magazines at the time referred to it as the "A Flat" remover. It didn't catch on.
This is not to be confused with the digital Copycode mechanism shipped in audio DAT players to prevent DAT to DAT copies of commercial material.
A few years ago I was working at the London head office of a big UK company. They used roaming profiles on all machines. It would take about 5 minutes to log in each morning due to all staff arriving at roughly the same time, and the network suffered an terrible hammering as a result.
It was made a tad worse by fact that all Windows 98 desktops were imaged from the same Ghost image with at least 2 significant faults. Firstly they had not installed any busmastered IDE drivers, and secondly that the Netware stack was the primary host-name resolver. Even after changing this on my desktop, logon performance was still dreadfully slow.
(Although Banyan was interesting, are they still around?)
No, long gone.
Microsoft purchased part of them in around 1998 or so, and from then onwards Banyan tried to migrate their customers over to pure NT networks, ostensibly going via their StreetTalk for NT product.
At that stage, though, Banyan's market share was falling dramatically, and some nasty bugs (particularly long-filename support with European codepages) and reluctance to support some client OSs didn't help either.
The plates on the front and back of UK cars are, and have always been, called 'Number Plates'.
Even the BBC has been known to get this wrong.
Also been tried in Leeds, England.
on
Cashless Society
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· Score: 1
A simillar scheme was tried on in Leeds, England, a few years ago as an experiment before going national. Banks and other places were fitted out with charging machines, and the majority of retailers were able to take them.
Reading the release notes indicates that only the Windows version of the iPod is supported. Additionally the build environment has to be a PC running Linux. Which means that the majority of iPod owners using Macs are excluded at the moment.
Further research indicates that at the moment neither MP3 nor Ogg playback are working in real-time, partially due to the iPod lacking an FPU. There is no support at present for the Firewire port either.
So, what use can be made from a Linux system with 5 control buttons, a dial control and a locking switch as input and a low-res mono display and audio as output? Not a lot, really. It's not even much use as a games platform emulator.
30 minutes? Obviously never been to a match, then!
Half time is always 15 minutes in England, which gives you plenty of time to get a pie and catch the half-time raffle. In Scotland they somehow only allow 10 minutes of half-time.
I had the misfortune of using this pile of junk a few years ago, but not on Linux, but on a variety of other systems such as HPUX, Solaris, Windows and even an IBM mainframe. Quick frankly the most over-hyped, memory hogging, very expensive pile of crap I've ever had the misfortune of using.
The software on any machine consisted of agents that reported back to the main system via SNMP (security hell!). The UNIX agents were not only huge memory hogs, but on most systems I worked on returned figures that were completly meaningless to the well being of a modern unix-system. The Windows ones were even worse when it came to grabbing memory.
The main purpose of Unicenter was to allow CA to charge high amounts of money for on site support. The manuals were just so appallingly bad that on site support was the only option. Even training courses seemed to concentrate on using the minor components that no-one in their right mind consider in enterprise environments.
Re:don't we have such a device already ?
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Assorted CES Gizmos
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· Score: 2
Umm, sounds like a minuturised version of Teletext to me. The BBC has been putting infomation like that on terrestial television signals since 1974!
Slashdot Mirror
The bus company who I travel to and from work on every day have fitted each bus with a PC. There's a flat screen display attached to the bulkhead behind the driver facing the passengers, and some unit, probably embedded, on the other side.
I believe it's going to be intergrated with GPS to give a read out of the current location and ETA. It's not working yet, so either displays an AMI BIOS boot message with no boot device, or just the bus company logo.
If you want real fun, investigate Peter Belt.
He's a British hi-fi looney who sells all kinds of silly things, such as pens and stickers, for marking CDs and audio equipment, which supposedly make the equipment sound better. All of the, naturally, are sold at very silly prices, but some people do buy them. The most expensive item he sells is a crocodile clip called "The Quantun Clip" that retails at £500, and supposedly improves the sound of anything it has been attached to.
Absolutely barking mad! Yet many daft people believe him!
His website is at http://www.belt.demon.co.uk/ if you're brave enough to view it.
The so called Toddler's Truce, it ended back in 1957!
A couple of years ago, my local library in Ripon, North Yorkshire, moved to new and very much larger premises, and had a Playstation installed as one of the facilities, fitted with headphones.
Unfortunately the children using it made so much noise that it was withdrawn after only a few months of service.
The Mac version of IE supports PNG alpha-channel transparency properly.
Championship Manager 4 is a football (to give it it's proper name!) management game, probably the longest running genre in the UK. The player picks the team and tactics, buys and sells players and so on.
In fact the first computer magazine I ever purchased back in 1982 not only carried an advertisment Football Manager by Kevin Toms (a game originally written in BASIC that itself was available for many years), but also had a listing for another game of the type for the Apple II.
I spent hours during 1983 playing Football Manager on the ZX Spectrum. I still can remember the match highlights consisting of stick-men and long time it took to sort the league table after every match!
When I first started using SCO XENIX back in the 1980s, I always thought that "The Santa Cruz Operation" sounded like a wing of the mafia.
Now with these extortion tactics I seem to have been proved correct all along!
I've had that problem too. I had one CD that I couldn't play in iTunes on my iBook that effectivly made OS X useless (back in the days of 10.1) as it was exceedingly unresponsive. When I finally got the CD out of the drive I discovered a severe pressing fault - a huge blob of paint on the playing surface - that rendered the disk unreadable.
I've since had simillar symptoms with another CD - this one has a hidden track at the start of the disc.
I'm sure that a firmware update could resolve these issues too.
When I installed Debian on my iBook last year it wasn't easy due to a problem with the IDE drivers in the kernel.
At that time booting the Linux kernel off a CD would prevent the IDE bus from being seen by the kernel once it was running. The only solution at the time was to copy the kernel and bootloader onto an empty HFS partition, and boot off that via Open Firmware.
If this kernel problem hasn't been resolved as of yet, a live CD will cause problems.
I recall about 10 years ago that one of the video adaptor manufacturers optimised their Windows 3.1 acclerated video drivers to give the best performance possible with the benchmark program Ziff-Davis used for their reviews.
One test involved writing a text string in a particular font continuously to the screen in. This text string was encoded directly in the driver for speed. Similarly one of the polygon drawing routines was optimised for the particular polygons used in this benchmark.
There was a analogue audio copy-protection mechanism in development around 1987 called something like "Copycode" which I recall reading about at the time. It worked by cutting a notch into the audio spectrum somewhere. One of the audio magazines at the time referred to it as the "A Flat" remover. It didn't catch on.
This is not to be confused with the digital Copycode mechanism shipped in audio DAT players to prevent DAT to DAT copies of commercial material.
I've seen this in practice; it's horrible!
A few years ago I was working at the London head office of a big UK company. They used roaming profiles on all machines. It would take about 5 minutes to log in each morning due to all staff arriving at roughly the same time, and the network suffered an terrible hammering as a result.
It was made a tad worse by fact that all Windows 98 desktops were imaged from the same Ghost image with at least 2 significant faults. Firstly they had not installed any busmastered IDE drivers, and secondly that the Netware stack was the primary host-name resolver. Even after changing this on my desktop, logon performance was still dreadfully slow.
(Although Banyan was interesting, are they still around?)
No, long gone.
Microsoft purchased part of them in around 1998 or so, and from then onwards Banyan tried to migrate their customers over to pure NT networks, ostensibly going via their StreetTalk for NT product.
At that stage, though, Banyan's market share was falling dramatically, and some nasty bugs (particularly long-filename support with European codepages) and reluctance to support some client OSs didn't help either.
Do you mean the one that has just appeared in Software Update - 1.0 Beta 2 (v73)?
The bus certainly won't go zip, zip, zip, though. It's a Leyland National, now rarely seen except for driver training and private tender school runs.
If you look at the pictures on the site linked to in the article (http://www.computerbus.com), they are desktop machines, running Mac OS 9.
Back in 1992, British PC manufacturer Amstrad built a machine that combined a 386/SX PC with a Sega Megadrive.
It was a complete flop, though.
Sinclair did manage to sell around 16,000 C5s worldwide. I doubt that the Segway will ever acheive anything like this.
I'm in North Yorkshire, the location of a number of WW2 RAF bomber bases. I wandered around one of them as a child, but I'm not sure which one it was.
There were also a few fake air-bases built to confuse German recce units.
The plates on the front and back of UK cars are, and have always been, called 'Number Plates'.
Even the BBC has been known to get this wrong.
A simillar scheme was tried on in Leeds, England, a few years ago as an experiment before going national. Banks and other places were fitted out with charging machines, and the majority of retailers were able to take them.
It was a total failure.
Reading the release notes indicates that only the Windows version of the iPod is supported. Additionally the build environment has to be a PC running Linux. Which means that the majority of iPod owners using Macs are excluded at the moment.
Further research indicates that at the moment neither MP3 nor Ogg playback are working in real-time, partially due to the iPod lacking an FPU. There is no support at present for the Firewire port either.
So, what use can be made from a Linux system with 5 control buttons, a dial control and a locking switch as input and a low-res mono display and audio as output? Not a lot, really. It's not even much use as a games platform emulator.
30 minutes? Obviously never been to a match, then!
Half time is always 15 minutes in England, which gives you plenty of time to get a pie and catch the half-time raffle. In Scotland they somehow only allow 10 minutes of half-time.
I had the misfortune of using this pile of junk a few years ago, but not on Linux, but on a variety of other systems such as HPUX, Solaris, Windows and even an IBM mainframe. Quick frankly the most over-hyped, memory hogging, very expensive pile of crap I've ever had the misfortune of using.
The software on any machine consisted of agents that reported back to the main system via SNMP (security hell!). The UNIX agents were not only huge memory hogs, but on most systems I worked on returned figures that were completly meaningless to the well being of a modern unix-system. The Windows ones were even worse when it came to grabbing memory.
The main purpose of Unicenter was to allow CA to charge high amounts of money for on site support. The manuals were just so appallingly bad that on site support was the only option. Even training courses seemed to concentrate on using the minor components that no-one in their right mind consider in enterprise environments.
Umm, sounds like a minuturised version of Teletext to me. The BBC has been putting infomation like that on terrestial television signals since 1974!