This sounds a bit like a Super GameBoy on steroids. However, I suppose that it would be a lot more practical nowadays with GBC and GBA games. Original GB games didn't look all that great on the big TV with the SGB even with the small visual facelift it offered. GBA games don't suffer from that.
Re:History of Active Surplus and Toronto computers
on
Great Surplus Stores?
·
· Score: 1
There's an "Active Electronics" on Victoria Park where Sayal and Daiwa Semitron (by Gordon Baker) are. Same outfit? Dunno.:)
As mentioned in another post, Supremetronics is still around. Run and operated by Cantonese-speaking (Southern Chinese, basically - I'm one of them:) ) people. Was that the case back in your day?
Places which sell actual computers have since moved up to College St. I wonder when that happened.
Sayal is still around, and they have another location in Missisauga as well. They don't have all that much surplus stuff, though. Still, prices are good. Staff are a mixed bag, as are some of the products. While I still lived in that area, I usually went to Daiwa Semitron for parts if I wanted more assurance that they worked.:)
(btw, Daiwa is also a major wholesale hardware distributor for local computer joints)
(Example: I brought a 100uF electrolytic capacitor to the counter and they asked me how many watts it was. Apparently they thought it was a resistor, not minding the fact that you can usually tell between a 1/2 watt and 1/4 watt resistor at first glance anyway)
- Ed.
Also Above All at Bloor and Bathurst
on
Great Surplus Stores?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Active Surplus is great for motors and random electronics bits and pieces, but their computer-related product selection leaves a bit to be desired. If you're looking for computer stuff, you might want to check Above All Electronics at Bloor and Bathurst (on Bloor, north side, slightly west of Honest Ed's). A lot more computer-related stuff there. They had a pile of gutted 486-era laptops and laptop displays the last time I checked - great fun!:)
Depends on the laptop. IBM laptops are well-known for being notoriously hard to crack. The passwords are stored on a seperate flash RAM chip on the motherboard, which is backed by a CRC checksum. In addition, the password is replicated on the hard drive, and when the BIOS password is set the exact same password is set on the hard drive.
If you simply wiped or tamped with the data on the chip, the CRC check would fail and the laptop would refuse to boot. Even if somebody managed to bypass the BIOS password by obtaining a "virgin" password chip (i.e. one that has no password set and a checksum to reflect that), they would still be unable to access the hard drive because they lack the password. If the hard drive was put into another computer, it would come up with a controller failure without the password.
Note that there is a way to circumvent this. You could buy a third party security chip (several companies sell them) and solder it in place of the original one. Then you simply toss out the original hard drive.
Apparantly a talented man from Australia has figured out exactly how the passwords are stored/encrypted on the chip and built a simple serial circuit and program combination to read it. The schematics and software are freely available on his website, and the idea is that you build the circuit, read the contents of the chip, send him the dump and pay him money to recover the password from inside the binary dump. This allows you to keep the hard drive.
Unfortunately, I don't have the URL of his website off-hand. If anybody has used his services, does it actually work?:)
Interestingly, I just bought a Canon FB 630P scanner today for the exact same reason. It came with no cable (which I had) or AC adapter (el cheapo at Active Surplus) and the carraige mechanism was dislodged. The scanner itself and the AC adapter cost little more than US$10 (hey, I'm a starving student, dammit). If I didn't have a midterm tomorrow I'd be hacking it open right now to fix it. Damn.:)
It's not the most elegant solution (I have to lug around my port replicator for the parallel port, PLUS the AC adapter), but you certainly can't beat the price.
Anybody know much about the carraige mechanisms of these things? It looks like it uses a three-pulley system - a motor turns a worm gear, which turns another gear attached to a pulley. Two other pulleys are on either ends of this one to keep it "in line". It looks like I just have to hook the belt up correctly to make it all work.
Actually, interestingly, it seems that the Half Life engine is mostly based on the Quake 1 engine. The overlap in features between the HL and Quake2 engine is mostly because of parallel development. Some Q2 engine features did eventually make it back into HL, but the "core" of the engine is Quake.
Then again, I could be speaking out of my ass again.
AMD is far from an upstart. They've been making semiconductors since 1969, although most of the initial line was made under license (i.e. they were more of a manufacturer than a maker).
In fact, they have been building chips to fit the PC platform nearly as long as Intel has. Take an old original IBM PC and fit an AMD 8088 clone in it and see what happens. Unfortunately, the inability to deliver a Pentium-class CPU in time (they were WAY behind Intel) hurt their revenue and market share a lot. Intel's "Pentium" name gained worldwide recognition - and left AMD in the dust.
Hopefully, AMD is not done yet, and like with the K5 they will be able to prop themselves up and surge ahead.
I thought a bit about this too. I concluded that the most effective way for AI controlled cars to work was to have every car controlled by AI. Then we can setup a wireless interface of some sort so cars can broadcast their past, current, and future actions. Using this information your car can then plan its own route without collisions.
Of course, then we'd have to keep pedestrians off the streets.
Or we need some really advanced optical vision stuff that will render the first technology redundant.
Hahaha, the heading of the paragraph following it is quite amusing too:)
Here's a direct rip off the page:
The 32MB they record the former 2HD (1. 44MB) making use of the disk
Large increasing capacity technology " FD32MB " of floppy disk development
< Main point effect >
Matsushita å electronic industrial corporation (president: æ± oral happiness 彦, head office: Kagawa prefecture Takamatsu city), the 2HD (1. 44MB) the 32MB (at the time of the format) to the floppy disk large increasing capacity technology " FD32MB " which can be recorded was developed with floppy disk making use of next term 240MB super disk drive.
< Effective fruit >
Use use expands the floppy disk which is the cheap record media by using the next term 240MB super disk drive which loads this technology, (the or less FD, the 2HD) as a large capacity record media of the 32MB. And so on as a secondary record medium of semiconductor memory of the 32MB which is used with the one for digital camera * semiconductor audio player and the like, it can assure the reuse of the FD.
< The inside permitting/inserting >
This technology, (1) improvement of the track/truck density with overwrite, (2) the ZBR (the Zone Bit Recording), improvement of the track recording density with the PRML, (3) improvement of reliability of the data due to the error correction technology due to the C 1 ECC which is not the FDD, (4) prevention of error elimination with the former FDD, consists of four new development technologies.
< Special length >
Former FD (2HD and 1. 44MB) record capacity approximately 22 time improvement (32MB).
< Until recently example >
The largest merit of the FD, being cheap, easily is thing, but in those to which record capacity is small, needs big record capacity such as picture * animated picture of these days it was not practical. In addition, there is a tendency where as for the used FD, reuse does not advance with the appearance of the large capacity record media, in and the like the desk makes desertion.
< Utilization >
For OEM drive for PC built-in from November of 2000 sample shipment schedule.
< Special permission >
Domestic 3 cases (while applying)
At my high school in Toronto, we have a course called "Robotics". The first assignment we get is to build a bridge out of popsicle sticks. Rules were (if I remember correctly):
* 250g maximum weight
* 60cm span
* made of popsicle sticks and hot glue
Last semester a bridge was built that held something in the realm of 70kg of weight. Not bad for a bunch of Grade 11 high school students.
My Toshiba Portege 3480 notebook will boot off its USB floppy drive. I've heard (but not confirmed) that the USB floppy drives off Sony Vaio SR notebooks will work too. It shouldn't be too different, since Linux sees them the same (as a SCSI storage device).
In fact, it shouldn't be too hard to implement booting from USB storage devices in the BIOS, since there *is* a standard for such devices. But it looks like the notebook manufacturers are a step ahead on this one.
The original poster said that BOTH the seller AND the bidder click the "defer to next bidder" button. i.e. both the seller and the next highest bidder have to agree to removing the top bidder. This will allow bidders to reject the offer if they have already bid on another similar item.
On another note, Yahoo! Auctions (what could be considered eBay's arch-rival) actually *does* offer a similar feature. Sellers can return to their auction page and click on [Remove this bidder] if they cannot complete the transaction with that bidder. However, this is done without the consent of the bidder, so the bidder *does* risk winning two similar auctions.
While you are in part correct, there is, in fact, MP4 (MPEG 1.0 Layer 4) compression in existence. I remember seeing several articles regarding it back in '98 or so. A search on old slashdot articles reveals nothing, but I think it had something to do with David Bowie......
The above is a mirror. I took the effort this time around to butcher all the HTML pages and remove the absolute paths for the images so it renders correctly. Hopefully.
The site was getting bogged down when I was leeching the files, so it's probably slashdotted by now.
Enjoy.
Actually, the original intention of my reply was to defend the P4, but rather than blindly saying "THE P4 ROCKS THE ATHLON'S EFFIN' ASS AT QUAKE3! SUCK THAT, MOFO!!!" I was trying to find some reasons for the performance improvement. The fact that drivers may have helped was my hypothesis and was not intended to defend the Athlon in any way.
I was, in fact, trying to make excuses for the P4. Guess you don't like me doing that. I'll stop now.
However, that may be due to DirectX 8.0's P4-awareness.
Then again, I don't think the nVidia video drivers actually USE much DirectX. The only two other things that use would DirectX as far as I can tell in Quake3 would be DirectInput and DirectSound. Would they make THAT much of a difference?
Maybe we should benchmark a P4 using an A3D soundcard, thus bypassing DirectSound also.
Cause then it forces the JVM to load in your browser, which gives a noticable and annoying delay.
People used to bitch all the time about the JavaScript banners on Slashdot for the same reason. It stalls loading the page until the JVM has finished loading.
(And yes, you can get through quite a few sites without encountering any JavaScript. Thank god.)
Slashdot Mirror
or perhaps a hybrid between two other species.
I suspect that it was the result of a man having a little too much to drink (or perhaps smoke) and stumbling into the jungle...
This sounds a bit like a Super GameBoy on steroids. However, I suppose that it would be a lot more practical nowadays with GBC and GBA games. Original GB games didn't look all that great on the big TV with the SGB even with the small visual facelift it offered. GBA games don't suffer from that.
There's an "Active Electronics" on Victoria Park where Sayal and Daiwa Semitron (by Gordon Baker) are. Same outfit? Dunno. :)
:) ) people. Was that the case back in your day?
As mentioned in another post, Supremetronics is still around. Run and operated by Cantonese-speaking (Southern Chinese, basically - I'm one of them
Places which sell actual computers have since moved up to College St. I wonder when that happened.
- Ed.
Sayal is still around, and they have another location in Missisauga as well. They don't have all that much surplus stuff, though. Still, prices are good. Staff are a mixed bag, as are some of the products. While I still lived in that area, I usually went to Daiwa Semitron for parts if I wanted more assurance that they worked. :)
(btw, Daiwa is also a major wholesale hardware distributor for local computer joints)
(Example: I brought a 100uF electrolytic capacitor to the counter and they asked me how many watts it was. Apparently they thought it was a resistor, not minding the fact that you can usually tell between a 1/2 watt and 1/4 watt resistor at first glance anyway)
- Ed.
Active Surplus is great for motors and random electronics bits and pieces, but their computer-related product selection leaves a bit to be desired. If you're looking for computer stuff, you might want to check Above All Electronics at Bloor and Bathurst (on Bloor, north side, slightly west of Honest Ed's). A lot more computer-related stuff there. They had a pile of gutted 486-era laptops and laptop displays the last time I checked - great fun! :)
- Ed.
Agreed. If you want common electronic components, go a few stores east to Supreme. They have a decent selection of that kind of stuff.
- Ed.
No no no, that's management. :) Remember, engineers account for tolerances and usually design things with a good safety margin.
:)
Engineer: the glass allows for a tipping angle below or equivalent to the inverse tangent of the quotient of the the glass' height and its width.
- Ed.
Depends on the laptop. IBM laptops are well-known for being notoriously hard to crack. The passwords are stored on a seperate flash RAM chip on the motherboard, which is backed by a CRC checksum. In addition, the password is replicated on the hard drive, and when the BIOS password is set the exact same password is set on the hard drive.
:)
If you simply wiped or tamped with the data on the chip, the CRC check would fail and the laptop would refuse to boot. Even if somebody managed to bypass the BIOS password by obtaining a "virgin" password chip (i.e. one that has no password set and a checksum to reflect that), they would still be unable to access the hard drive because they lack the password. If the hard drive was put into another computer, it would come up with a controller failure without the password.
Note that there is a way to circumvent this. You could buy a third party security chip (several companies sell them) and solder it in place of the original one. Then you simply toss out the original hard drive.
Apparantly a talented man from Australia has figured out exactly how the passwords are stored/encrypted on the chip and built a simple serial circuit and program combination to read it. The schematics and software are freely available on his website, and the idea is that you build the circuit, read the contents of the chip, send him the dump and pay him money to recover the password from inside the binary dump. This allows you to keep the hard drive.
Unfortunately, I don't have the URL of his website off-hand. If anybody has used his services, does it actually work?
- Ed.
Interestingly, I just bought a Canon FB 630P scanner today for the exact same reason. It came with no cable (which I had) or AC adapter (el cheapo at Active Surplus) and the carraige mechanism was dislodged. The scanner itself and the AC adapter cost little more than US$10 (hey, I'm a starving student, dammit). If I didn't have a midterm tomorrow I'd be hacking it open right now to fix it. Damn. :)
It's not the most elegant solution (I have to lug around my port replicator for the parallel port, PLUS the AC adapter), but you certainly can't beat the price.
Anybody know much about the carraige mechanisms of these things? It looks like it uses a three-pulley system - a motor turns a worm gear, which turns another gear attached to a pulley. Two other pulleys are on either ends of this one to keep it "in line". It looks like I just have to hook the belt up correctly to make it all work.
- Ed.
Actually, interestingly, it seems that the Half Life engine is mostly based on the Quake 1 engine. The overlap in features between the HL and Quake2 engine is mostly because of parallel development. Some Q2 engine features did eventually make it back into HL, but the "core" of the engine is Quake.
Then again, I could be speaking out of my ass again.
- Ed.
You know, to this day, Carmack still gets a cut off the Half-Life / Counterstrike sales.
Look who's crying now, eh?
:)
- Ed.
AMD is far from an upstart. They've been making semiconductors since 1969, although most of the initial line was made under license (i.e. they were more of a manufacturer than a maker).
In fact, they have been building chips to fit the PC platform nearly as long as Intel has. Take an old original IBM PC and fit an AMD 8088 clone in it and see what happens. Unfortunately, the inability to deliver a Pentium-class CPU in time (they were WAY behind Intel) hurt their revenue and market share a lot. Intel's "Pentium" name gained worldwide recognition - and left AMD in the dust.
Hopefully, AMD is not done yet, and like with the K5 they will be able to prop themselves up and surge ahead.
Hopefully.
- Ed.
Man, even with a broken link, the site is already feeling the toils of the slashdot effect. It came up like a dog. :)
:)
I ran the page through babelfish. What I'm interested in is this point under "Características Gerais":
* Acesso grátis ilimitado à Internet.
Can anybody who can actually read the page tell me what that's supposed to mean?
Babelfish translates it to:
* Limitless Acesso grÃtis à Internet.
Which really isn't all that helpful. It sounds like "Unlimited Internet Access". Are they bundling Internet service with this thing or something?
Also note this: above the diagrams, it says on the original page:
1 ANO DE GARANTIA
Babelfish translates it to:
1 ANUS OF GARANTIA
Hmm...
"One anus of WHAT?!?!"
- Ed.
I thought a bit about this too. I concluded that the most effective way for AI controlled cars to work was to have every car controlled by AI. Then we can setup a wireless interface of some sort so cars can broadcast their past, current, and future actions. Using this information your car can then plan its own route without collisions.
Of course, then we'd have to keep pedestrians off the streets.
Or we need some really advanced optical vision stuff that will render the first technology redundant.
:)
- Ed.
Hahaha, the heading of the paragraph following it is quite amusing too :)
:)
Here's a direct rip off the page:
The 32MB they record the former 2HD (1. 44MB) making use of the disk
Large increasing capacity technology " FD32MB " of floppy disk development
< Main point effect >
Matsushita å electronic industrial corporation (president: æ± oral happiness 彦, head office: Kagawa prefecture Takamatsu city), the 2HD (1. 44MB) the 32MB (at the time of the format) to the floppy disk large increasing capacity technology " FD32MB " which can be recorded was developed with floppy disk making use of next term 240MB super disk drive.
< Effective fruit >
Use use expands the floppy disk which is the cheap record media by using the next term 240MB super disk drive which loads this technology, (the or less FD, the 2HD) as a large capacity record media of the 32MB. And so on as a secondary record medium of semiconductor memory of the 32MB which is used with the one for digital camera * semiconductor audio player and the like, it can assure the reuse of the FD.
< The inside permitting/inserting >
This technology, (1) improvement of the track/truck density with overwrite, (2) the ZBR (the Zone Bit Recording), improvement of the track recording density with the PRML, (3) improvement of reliability of the data due to the error correction technology due to the C 1 ECC which is not the FDD, (4) prevention of error elimination with the former FDD, consists of four new development technologies.
< Special length >
Former FD (2HD and 1. 44MB) record capacity approximately 22 time improvement (32MB).
< Until recently example >
The largest merit of the FD, being cheap, easily is thing, but in those to which record capacity is small, needs big record capacity such as picture * animated picture of these days it was not practical. In addition, there is a tendency where as for the used FD, reuse does not advance with the appearance of the large capacity record media, in and the like the desk makes desertion.
< Utilization >
For OEM drive for PC built-in from November of 2000 sample shipment schedule.
< Special permission >
Domestic 3 cases (while applying)
Gotta love machine translations
At my high school in Toronto, we have a course called "Robotics". The first assignment we get is to build a bridge out of popsicle sticks. Rules were (if I remember correctly):
* 250g maximum weight
* 60cm span
* made of popsicle sticks and hot glue
Last semester a bridge was built that held something in the realm of 70kg of weight. Not bad for a bunch of Grade 11 high school students.
My Toshiba Portege 3480 notebook will boot off its USB floppy drive. I've heard (but not confirmed) that the USB floppy drives off Sony Vaio SR notebooks will work too. It shouldn't be too different, since Linux sees them the same (as a SCSI storage device).
In fact, it shouldn't be too hard to implement booting from USB storage devices in the BIOS, since there *is* a standard for such devices. But it looks like the notebook manufacturers are a step ahead on this one.
- Ed.
The original poster said that BOTH the seller AND the bidder click the "defer to next bidder" button. i.e. both the seller and the next highest bidder have to agree to removing the top bidder. This will allow bidders to reject the offer if they have already bid on another similar item.
On another note, Yahoo! Auctions (what could be considered eBay's arch-rival) actually *does* offer a similar feature. Sellers can return to their auction page and click on [Remove this bidder] if they cannot complete the transaction with that bidder. However, this is done without the consent of the bidder, so the bidder *does* risk winning two similar auctions.
- Ed.
While you are in part correct, there is, in fact, MP4 (MPEG 1.0 Layer 4) compression in existence. I remember seeing several articles regarding it back in '98 or so. A search on old slashdot articles reveals nothing, but I think it had something to do with David Bowie......
- Ed.
http://members.nbci.com/arealms0/gnomewin/ (directory listing) ore sktop.html (actual site)
http://members.nbci.com/arealms0/gnomewin/gnome-d
The above is a mirror. I took the effort this time around to butcher all the HTML pages and remove the absolute paths for the images so it renders correctly. Hopefully.
The site was getting bogged down when I was leeching the files, so it's probably slashdotted by now.
Enjoy.
- Ed.
http://members.nbci.com/arealms0/gnomewin/
:P)
It's got the ugly banner frame on the top, but hey, at least it works. And it's in no danger of being slashdotted.
(And no, I didn't mirror the files.
- Ed.
Actually, the original intention of my reply was to defend the P4, but rather than blindly saying "THE P4 ROCKS THE ATHLON'S EFFIN' ASS AT QUAKE3! SUCK THAT, MOFO!!!" I was trying to find some reasons for the performance improvement. The fact that drivers may have helped was my hypothesis and was not intended to defend the Athlon in any way.
I was, in fact, trying to make excuses for the P4. Guess you don't like me doing that. I'll stop now.
However, that may be due to DirectX 8.0's P4-awareness.
Then again, I don't think the nVidia video drivers actually USE much DirectX. The only two other things that use would DirectX as far as I can tell in Quake3 would be DirectInput and DirectSound. Would they make THAT much of a difference?
Maybe we should benchmark a P4 using an A3D soundcard, thus bypassing DirectSound also.
:)
- Ed.
CAN$40/mo is the going rate for pretty much any kind of broadband in Canada including "modem" rental now.
Cable right now is CAN$40/mo, and DSL is $40/mo after the $10 "modem" rental.
If you're a subscriber of Bell's (our phone monopoly up here) long distance service, you can get DSL for $30/mo.
- Ed.
Cause then it forces the JVM to load in your browser, which gives a noticable and annoying delay.
People used to bitch all the time about the JavaScript banners on Slashdot for the same reason. It stalls loading the page until the JVM has finished loading.
(And yes, you can get through quite a few sites without encountering any JavaScript. Thank god.)
- Ed.