Shees. You young whipper-snappers and your need for high-bandwidth. When I was young, we had no-bandwidth and we liked it. To transport files, we used disks, cassette tapes, cards and whatever else we could find. Delivering the file to another office gave us an excuse to get out of the office and flirt with the cute receptionists. The drive accross town meant that we could take a long lunch... pay the 5 cents and get a large soda... just don't spill any on that disk!
I bow to the master. I thought I was crotchety, talking about my new-fangled UUCP e-mail address and teletype conversion kits for IBM Selectrics. But you are the master.
30 cps, don't forget the start bit as well. 300 / (1 start + 8 data + 1 stop) = 30.
Heh. Remember speed tweaks for 300 baud?
300 / (1 start + 7 data + 0 stop) = 37.5
Back then there was no need for anything greater than 128 ASCII characters.
Of course, with an acoustic-coupled FSK modem, handshaking was non-existant and Mom would break the silence by calling you for dinner. Her voice would always leak past the seal around the telephone handset and interrupt the 2 hours you'd already devoted to downloading *one* GIF. So keeping the stop bit probably wasn't much of a performance penalty if it helped with stability. 33.3cps. Wow.
Then again, that was lightning fast compared to the DEC LA-36 teletype and 110 baud modem that someone gave me when I was about 12. At the time, there were rules about not connecting anything but phone company property to telephone lines, so acoustic coupled modems were de rigeur. I even remember seeing an acoustic couple 1200 baud once. My 110 baud modem was junked Bell Telephone equipment, so it was apparently exempt from the telephone line rules, and I used it when I didn't want to be interrupted. That was the slowest thing in the world. But when you were reading your e-mail (on 17" wide paper!), at least there was _never_ any spam. You could put your e-mail address up on your Archie server, or even post it in newsgroups, and there was never any spam.
[hums theme from All In The Family]
Every now and then, I'll fire up my old VT-100 and login to my FreeBSD box. I'll use vi at 300 baud just for the nostalgia.
For those of you old enough to remember - the TI99/A could produce ANY tonal frequency via simple BASIC program...
And a lot more! Three voice sound chip with a noise generator while most computers simply used a flip-flop to toggle the speaker on and off.
I made a touch-tone dialer program for it back when I was in elementary school. Loading the program from cassette kind of defeated the speed and convenience purpose of the dialer, though.
A friend of mine at the Ottawa TI User's Group took my idea a step further. The Speech Synthesizer was a common TI accessory, and he incorporated my program as a subroutine into an application that would read a diskette or cassette tape file of telephone numbers and call them. The program would dial, wait 30 seconds for the call to be picked up, and then start reading a message. Usually, it was used to broadcast meeting reminders in the days before e-mail.
Ahhhh, those were the days - when 16KB was a lot of RAM...
Heh. I had a chunk of core memory kicking around. I pitched it when I moved to Toronto in 1996, but I'd really love to have it back so I could build a bunch of vacuum-tube sense amplifiers and actually interface it to an ISA bus. I'd need to sit down and get good at assembly language again before I could actually use it for anything. Maybe cache a very small HTML page in it just to have something cool on my webserver.
Oh yeah, it was about 256 bytes of 12 bit wide core memory. (12 bits wide, it was probably off a 1960s PDP-11, but I don't know for sure.)
Hmm... 12AX7s are common and cheap dual triode tubes. I must have a hundred of them; that collection should handle almost all of address bus side of the matrix. [Does quick calculation of heater voltage (12 volts) times 600mA heater current per tube times 128 tubes = 9,216 watt space heater, just for the address bus logic. Shelve that idea.]
anyone remember the Radio Shack Color Computer (CoCo)?
Sure! Rockwell 6809 processor, same as the Vectrex vectored video arcade system. That was a pretty cool processor, it blew the 6502, 6510 and 8088 right out of the water. Very cool little chip. It was thge predecessor to the Motorola 68000.
I wanted a CoCo 50, which was the little micro Color Computer. Tiny thing with chicklet keys, but unlike the Timex-Sinclair 1000, the CoCo 50 had color and 5k of RAM. But I got the TI-99/4A for my 10th birthday instead, and never looked back.
Is there someone using that? Because my brother smashed mine with a hammer.
Not the PEB or the expansion cards!
Having worked on a lot of industrial and military computer systems, I have yet to see another computer that has cast aluminum cases around its expansion cards.
And that was mounted in a card cage that is stamped of thicker steel than the side impact beams in a Ford Explorer. (No kidding.)
The TI-99/4A came with a really bad BASIC. TI-BASIC was interpreted at runtime into "GPL" - Graphics Programming Language. It was a TI proprietary language that was used for most cartridges and stuff.
TI had decided in 1979, when they released the predecessor, the TI-99/4, that home users wouldn't be interested in programming, so BASIC was poor, and an Assembler wasn't available until 1981. TI also thought that they'd sell the consoles for $99 each, at a loss, and make their profits on the peripherals.
The processor was the same TMS9900 that was used in Patriot guided missiles. It was a real 16 bit CPU at a time when everything else had 6502s. They were really cool, too, because the CPU registers weren't actually on the CPU - they were in RAM. "Workspace Pointers" pointed to the location in RAM, and you could do a lot of really neat early multitasking tricks by using a routine called from the video interrupt to move the workspace pointer to a different location and therefore change your context in about 3 CPU cycles, versus the time it would take to move the information in all those registers. No protected mode, though.:(
All the stock RAM was addressed through the video controller, a TMS9918, which had really cool features like 32 automatic sprites and a video overlay and genlock feature that TI never used in the home computer. The shared RAM was cheap at a time when 16K of RAM was a lot of money, and they felt no one would ever see the difference.
The 32K RAM expansion and almost all of the other peripherals ran off the system bus, and had plug and play support that remains unmatched today. You plug in the card, and the drivers for the peripheral device are read from the ROM chip on the card at boot time.
The TI User's Groups are still quite active for a machine that was discontinued in 1983. You can actually get a couple of TI links from my webpage at www.glowingplate.com.
The TI-99/4A wasn't portable like the TRS-800 Model 100, but it was a highly cool little machine in its own way. Especially with that neat 1970s futuristic black and brushed aluminum case.
If you are driving 55mpg in a blinding snowstorm you need to distracted by your "passenger" yelling at you to SLOW down.
Nahhh... Wuss. I grew up in Ottawa and Montreal, Canada. I know a thing or two about driving in snow.
For one thing, you need rear wheel drive. Four wheel drive and front wheel drive just don't do the same thing. A rear wheel drive car or truck will actually take corners faster on snowy roads than it will on dry pavement... assuming the driver is well versed in the judicious use of the fishtail.
'Nother thing: 4x4 doesn't help you steer or stop. Too many car accidents that I've seen on 401, 417 and Decarie ("of the cavity") expressways have been caused by invulnerable Yentas on cellphones in their Lincoln Navigators. Gimme a break.
Finally, and most importantly, snow is soft, so when you hit that car in front of you, at least you're padded. [grin]
Seriously, winter driving is an art, and if the conditions are right, 55MPH in a snowstorm is no big deal - but I wouldn't go any faster than that.
Still, the task would be monumental and the value quite minimal. Such is the public's fickleness for science...
Well, as long as they got the engine up. It would make a neat transplant into my Chevette. Sure, I'd have to really pump the bellows, but once the boiler is good and hot, I'd be able to blow the doors off any Mustang that pulled up beside me.
Prior Restraint writes "According to this ZDNet article, Tony Goodhew, a Microsoft program manager, implies that MS will license C# in such a way that Ximian won't be able to implement the ECMA standard." This comes on the heels of Ximian's announcement of working on.Net aka Mono[?].
Maybe I'm missing something, but I'm not sure why one would want to implement.Net without needing to. Sure, the collaborate concepts behind it are great... but if we think Outlook is dangerous now, what does the future bring with the.Net strategy? Lost privacy? Stupid security bugs everywhere? Pay-to-play software?
Similar to the way that Outlook's address book vulnerabilities put at risk everyone with an e-mail address, what are the chances that.Net vulnerabilities will have reprocussions across all Internet services and platforms?
I'm hoping that.Net will finally mobilize the consumer to ditch Windows and get some competition back into the OS field. After all, Microsoft apparently can't even get IIS right, and that sounds a lot less sophisticated than what.Net attempts.
Typical. Thats about the only way a windows machine can rival a linux box for uptime. I havent tried any of the NT5 variants but NT4 showed the stability of a landslide.
Now, believe it or not, if you're running well-written programs (flight information system at Pearson International Airport), Windows 95B has served me well. Record uptime was in the 60-day range (after fixing the dreaded 49.7 day memory leak). I think the relative simplicity of Windows 95 versus NT 4 gives it less points of failure.
Besides, our software wrote directly to hardware, Windows NT/2000 doesn't like it when you do that, so we were pleasantly surprised with Windows 95's performance.
MODERATORS: I have yet to find a version of Windows that rivals Linux, Solaris or *BSD for stability. This posting is not pro-Microsoft.
On the other hand, I havent crashed a linux box ever, in over 4 years running various distros.
Ooh. I have. Always double-check your hardware settings before insmoding a piece of ISA hardware. [grin]
From a stock install? I don't know. I use an MS provided tool called uptime.exe. It works on NT4SP4 and newer (no Win9x tho').
Wow. It's a complete joke that it isn't included. I can't believe it. I believe more than before that I'm right - they know that they can't compete in uptime and availability with a conceptually simpler and more mature operating system that they've already slammed as obsolete and archaic.
According to the Win95 Easter egg, his e-mail address is billg@microsoft.com, not bgates.
Heh. Wasn't there a Microsoft Easter Egg with a 30 megabyte AVI file that had been renamed as a DLL? I'm sure it was part of the Developer Network CD or something like that; it wasn't a common Bought-It-At-Circuit-City Microsoft product.
His email address is actually billg@. Rumor has it that he spends a couple of hours every day on email.
I've heard that too, and it doesn't surprise me that he'd go for the first name thing. I've met the man several times (used to work for an audio-visual company, I put a lav mic on him during the Windows 95 World Conquest Tour), and he's really - urk - friendly and genuine. But everything becomes a race, a game. "Let's see if I can run this lav mic through my shirt before you can connect it to the mixer!"
What he didn't know was that the mixer was at the back of the room, so I was using a snake - basically a bus for mic cables. It was right under the podium. I plugged it in before he got the mic on, and he gave me a hell of a dirty look. >:)
"no truth"
You'd think there'd be at least a sig! Did he save the message and go back through the message headers? Heh:
X-Mailer: Gnus v5.6.45/XEmacs 21.1
Bill's secret is out.:)
But it was still kind of spooky.
His intensity and his absolute unwavering conviction that everything he (and, by extension, Microsoft) does is right is what spooks me the most. Ironically, while I loathe Microsoft, I admire his intelligence and his sense of humor. For example, I would bet money that he's seen the Bill Borg icon that Slashdot uses, and I'd also bet that he enjoyed it. Most computer geeks would like him in person, no matter how much we may abhorr his products.
Not much better, but pretty good considering I'd use linux if I could...
Record set: 06/25/01 09:03pm. Computer had been up for 2 w 5 d 20 h 21 m 16.862 s.
Okay. How do you find Windows 2000 uptime? The closest I've been able to come is by simply going to My Network Places, choosing Local Area Connection, and clicking on Status.
But that's not a real uptime, it's sucky. Microsoft probably hides it. [grin]
BTW, my Winblows box approaches the world record! 6 d, 10h, 55m, 46.. 47... 48... uhh.. seconds.
It's just because Microsoft is the number one webserver that the worm is targetted towards it. If Linux were the number one webserver the worm would target it.
Hmmm... Uhhh. Microsoft primarily makes operating systems which repeatly prove themselves marginal for desktop use, and criminally inadequate for anything requiring stability or security.
I think you're attempting to imply that IIS server, which comes free - though hobbled to various degrees - with all versions of NT and 2000, is the number one webserver.
P.S. Drunk driving is not as bad an activity as you describe.
I love drunk driving. It's a lot of fun. A friend of mine used to work in an automotive wrecking yard, and we used to love cracking open a few beers and driving around the yard in one of the junkers that came in under its own power. It was a great way of spending a Friday evening when I was in high school. I assure you, 50-foot-tall mountains of crushed cars are a lot harder to avoid after 6 beers. Even worse, 50-foot-tall mountains of crushed cars are a lot harder than uncrushed cars. They don't collapse well in accidents after they've been through the Al-jon. One might even suggest that they have less crush space. Especially the silly little Hondas.
You know what? I love my cars, and I love my beer. But the two don't mix. I don't drive (on public roads, anyway) if I've had even one beer.
Old people kill more people just because of senility, than drunk drivers.
Write your congressman. I want to see using a Microsoft server being treated as an act of criminal negligence, like drunk driving.
Haven't we all had enough of this bullspit?
My own webserver had been hit by several thousand of these attempts. When I got Slashdotted for putting up pictures of Bobo, it was bad. But this worm has been saturating my DSL with HTTP GET requests.
I wrote a small visual basic proggy that sits in the system tray on my win98 box.
When you push my doorbell (plugged into the joystick port to save serial ports) it maximixes and shows me who is at the door. I used the windows box because it is hooked to the tv and stereo for watching divx movies
Oh, that's a really cool idea! Yeah, if you wanna send me the source, that'd be great, thank you.
I use my Winblows 2000 box as my primary machine (mostly because PuTTY is a really good Telnet/SSH client and my *NIX boxes are headless). My video card dumps NTSC into my VCR, and from there, it goes off to my antique TV collection. It's really cool watching DVDs on a 1951 Motorola.:)
And I thought I was high tech because my answering machine automatically e-mails me my incoming messages.
Kind of reminds me of my first internet connection back in 1993-paying hourly rates. Power users paid more than moderate to low-end users. Is what we're seeing now a rerun of the old internet connection fee structures? Is that like one step forward and three steps back?
Sure sounds like it. But I don't think it'll play out, at least in urban areas. In moderately rural areas, cable installations will happily carry Internet access to those who are too far away from the CO to have DSL as an alternative.
DSL is also a fairly immature technology, and I suspect that innovation will lead to longer allowable loop runs. After all, DSL is only the same modulation technology as a 56k modem uses (a kind of sophisticated multi-carrier QUAM), but with wider analog bandwidth (which allows for more QUAM carriers and therefore more data), at a higher frequency (from 5kHz to 250kHz or so) and with greater loop impedance (so the phone is still "on hook" even while carrying several QUAM carriers). It's not magic, it's just several 56k modem chipsets and a custom controller chip stuffed into a small box with a UTP connector on the back. Nor is it doing anything that copper wire everywhere isn't already doing.
Even if the loop is long and doesn't give more than 10kHz bandwidth, DSL could now be implemented for an alway-on approximately 56k connection that doesn't interfere with voice communications. And, in practice, except for hum-bucking coils and line pads, the bandwidth of an unshielded untwisted pair (ie. telephone wire) is limited only by stray capacitance between the conductors. Picofarads, at best.
Since Xc = 1 over 2 x Pi x f x C, and arbitrarily assuming that the allowable maximum capacitive reactance is 100 ohms which roughly corresponds to the impedance of having three telephone extensions off hook on one line, AND given that telephone loop wire is 24? gauge (very small, anyway, meaning stray capacitance per foot is pitifully small), getting at least ISDN speeds out of a long DSL loop should be possible.
I think technology will prevail. Competition will help to control overly restrictive bandwidth usage policies.
I think I'll stick with my simple, reliable, and ultimately cheaper (for now), Kflex connection:).
Spoken like someone who has never had broadband access. If someone has never had a microwave oven, it's a hard sell. But once you have had one, the usage patterns become established, and you'll find it indispensible. Same thing with broadband access.
(it took me a WEEK to get the idiots to have my IP reverse-resolve properly...you can't browse slashdot without resolving, b/c they time out on a lookup (I guess their logs are configured to do lookups)
Hmmm... Well, I have a static IP, and my nameservers point to it. But my ISP's techs didn't delegate authority, so reverse DNS on my IP address will come up as a Velocet address. So far, it's only caused me a problem once, and that was trying to send an e-mail to an Internet security company.
Cablemodems are great! It's just the fools administering the service that suck.
Same with DSL. I was a cable modem fan until www.dsl.ca started offering DSL with an optional static IP for $5/mo. That was when I eschewed the relatively proven technology of cable modems to try out DSL. When I signed on a little over a year ago, they were basically a startup, and their service _really_ put the "U" back in "SUCK". But for the past six months, [rapping my knuckles on the gorgeous mahogany veneer cabinet of the Philco beside me] they've been really good. I'm impressed. Hey, they've even e-mailed me to alert me of impending downtime - what more could you want?
I'm sure that while his upsteam is sending more packets, the flood of http GET requests pouring through his downstream connection slows things down a bit.
Heh. Well, my download is 1.2Mbps, from a Nortel DSL modem. With PPPoE (yuck!) overhead, I've capped out at 1Mbps. But not with GET requests...
My upload speed is allegedly 320kbps - that's how my ISP advertises it - but I know it's capped out at 15kbps. With PPPoE overhead, I usually cap out at about 13kbps. About 3 times the upload of a 56k modem, but not stellar.
Now that the dust has cleared, and going through my server logs, I see that from 5:PM to 7:PM EST, I was averaging over 30 requests per minute, but topped out at over 250 requests per minute for about 15 minutes.
'a 56K dial-up modem can at times be faster than a cable modem and access can be more reliable' due to neighborhood bandwidth hogs, billing system bottlenecks server overloads, and various other problems, many of which apparently also apply to xDSL
If my cable modem weren't being so fscking slow right now!
While it may be true, Bobo resents that. He's built with junk, but he's definitely not crap.
Remember, to apply to get onto Junkyard Wars, you have to submit a videotape of you and your team explaining how a machine works. What better machine to explain than something built in the Junkyard Wars tradition?
Re:Union. Ech. Professional Org., Hmmmmm...
on
IT Unions?
·
· Score: 2
I think that a real, legally sanctioned _professional_ organization would go a long way to help some of my problems (like being here since 3:00am this morning). Something like what the denstists or doctors have - not really a Union that has barganing units and such, but an org that can sanction shops that don't treat their IT workers properly.
And, at the same time, can be used as a respectable licensing body.
Let's face facts here. IT is now at the point where an imbecile with a community college degree can get hired and do a lot of damage through sheer ineptitude. Last night, I had an ICQ conversation with a good friend of mine, who is A+ certified, who had no idea where to start to fix BSoD from VMM.VXD.
Step 1, I told him to open the machine and make sure that all the fans are still working, and that the memory and cards were properly seated.
Step 2, check for strange software, probably old 16-bit stuff loaded from config.sys/autoexec.bat/win.ini/system.ini, etc.
Step 3. Create a system disk without any memory managers or extended memory drivers, copy the program that I e-mailed to him onto the disk, and run the comprehensive memory and motherboard tests.
Well, it was step 3 that stopped him dead in his tracks. He dutifully went to Control Panel, Add/Remove Programs, Startup Disk... [sigh] It would have been so much easier to just format a diskette and type "SYS A:" at a command prompt.
Of course, when the Windows startup disk was used, himem.sys was loaded and the RAM check didn't work. I had to explain to him how to kill himem.sys...
He's an A+, and I've got no certification whatsoever. Guess who looks better on a resume? [sigh]
Well, at least I've got Linux and FreeBSD skills. [grin]
But we really need some sort of formalized licensing for various platforms, low or minimal cost, just pass the test and you're in - as we all know on Slashdot, many of the best computer geeks are self-taught. It would keep the employee signal to noise ratio a lot higher.
Until we do that, we will never be seen credibly as professionals.
Slashdot Mirror
Shees. You young whipper-snappers and your need for high-bandwidth. When I was young, we had no-bandwidth and we liked it. To transport files, we used disks, cassette tapes, cards and whatever else we could find. Delivering the file to another office gave us an excuse to get out of the office and flirt with the cute receptionists. The drive accross town meant that we could take a long lunch... pay the 5 cents and get a large soda... just don't spill any on that disk!
I bow to the master. I thought I was crotchety, talking about my new-fangled UUCP e-mail address and teletype conversion kits for IBM Selectrics. But you are the master.
www.glowingplate.com
30 cps, don't forget the start bit as well. 300 / (1 start + 8 data + 1 stop) = 30.
Heh. Remember speed tweaks for 300 baud?
300 / (1 start + 7 data + 0 stop) = 37.5
Back then there was no need for anything greater than 128 ASCII characters.
Of course, with an acoustic-coupled FSK modem, handshaking was non-existant and Mom would break the silence by calling you for dinner. Her voice would always leak past the seal around the telephone handset and interrupt the 2 hours you'd already devoted to downloading *one* GIF. So keeping the stop bit probably wasn't much of a performance penalty if it helped with stability. 33.3cps. Wow.
Then again, that was lightning fast compared to the DEC LA-36 teletype and 110 baud modem that someone gave me when I was about 12. At the time, there were rules about not connecting anything but phone company property to telephone lines, so acoustic coupled modems were de rigeur. I even remember seeing an acoustic couple 1200 baud once. My 110 baud modem was junked Bell Telephone equipment, so it was apparently exempt from the telephone line rules, and I used it when I didn't want to be interrupted. That was the slowest thing in the world. But when you were reading your e-mail (on 17" wide paper!), at least there was _never_ any spam. You could put your e-mail address up on your Archie server, or even post it in newsgroups, and there was never any spam.
[hums theme from All In The Family]
Every now and then, I'll fire up my old VT-100 and login to my FreeBSD box. I'll use vi at 300 baud just for the nostalgia.
Got a job for a Toronto computer geek who used to have a UUCP e-mail address? Click here!
For those of you old enough to remember - the TI99/A could produce ANY tonal frequency via simple BASIC program...
And a lot more! Three voice sound chip with a noise generator while most computers simply used a flip-flop to toggle the speaker on and off.
I made a touch-tone dialer program for it back when I was in elementary school. Loading the program from cassette kind of defeated the speed and convenience purpose of the dialer, though.
A friend of mine at the Ottawa TI User's Group took my idea a step further. The Speech Synthesizer was a common TI accessory, and he incorporated my program as a subroutine into an application that would read a diskette or cassette tape file of telephone numbers and call them. The program would dial, wait 30 seconds for the call to be picked up, and then start reading a message. Usually, it was used to broadcast meeting reminders in the days before e-mail.
Ahhhh, those were the days - when 16KB was a lot of RAM...Heh. I had a chunk of core memory kicking around. I pitched it when I moved to Toronto in 1996, but I'd really love to have it back so I could build a bunch of vacuum-tube sense amplifiers and actually interface it to an ISA bus. I'd need to sit down and get good at assembly language again before I could actually use it for anything. Maybe cache a very small HTML page in it just to have something cool on my webserver.
Oh yeah, it was about 256 bytes of 12 bit wide core memory. (12 bits wide, it was probably off a 1960s PDP-11, but I don't know for sure.)
Hmm... 12AX7s are common and cheap dual triode tubes. I must have a hundred of them; that collection should handle almost all of address bus side of the matrix. [Does quick calculation of heater voltage (12 volts) times 600mA heater current per tube times 128 tubes = 9,216 watt space heater, just for the address bus logic. Shelve that idea.]
anyone remember the Radio Shack Color Computer (CoCo)?Sure! Rockwell 6809 processor, same as the Vectrex vectored video arcade system. That was a pretty cool processor, it blew the 6502, 6510 and 8088 right out of the water. Very cool little chip. It was thge predecessor to the Motorola 68000.
I wanted a CoCo 50, which was the little micro Color Computer. Tiny thing with chicklet keys, but unlike the Timex-Sinclair 1000, the CoCo 50 had color and 5k of RAM. But I got the TI-99/4A for my 10th birthday instead, and never looked back.
Is there someone using that? Because my brother smashed mine with a hammer.
Not the PEB or the expansion cards!
Having worked on a lot of industrial and military computer systems, I have yet to see another computer that has cast aluminum cases around its expansion cards.
32k of RAM in a cast aluminum card.
And that was mounted in a card cage that is stamped of thicker steel than the side impact beams in a Ford Explorer. (No kidding.)
The TI-99/4A came with a really bad BASIC. TI-BASIC was interpreted at runtime into "GPL" - Graphics Programming Language. It was a TI proprietary language that was used for most cartridges and stuff.
TI had decided in 1979, when they released the predecessor, the TI-99/4, that home users wouldn't be interested in programming, so BASIC was poor, and an Assembler wasn't available until 1981. TI also thought that they'd sell the consoles for $99 each, at a loss, and make their profits on the peripherals.
The processor was the same TMS9900 that was used in Patriot guided missiles. It was a real 16 bit CPU at a time when everything else had 6502s. They were really cool, too, because the CPU registers weren't actually on the CPU - they were in RAM. "Workspace Pointers" pointed to the location in RAM, and you could do a lot of really neat early multitasking tricks by using a routine called from the video interrupt to move the workspace pointer to a different location and therefore change your context in about 3 CPU cycles, versus the time it would take to move the information in all those registers. No protected mode, though. :(
All the stock RAM was addressed through the video controller, a TMS9918, which had really cool features like 32 automatic sprites and a video overlay and genlock feature that TI never used in the home computer. The shared RAM was cheap at a time when 16K of RAM was a lot of money, and they felt no one would ever see the difference.
The 32K RAM expansion and almost all of the other peripherals ran off the system bus, and had plug and play support that remains unmatched today. You plug in the card, and the drivers for the peripheral device are read from the ROM chip on the card at boot time.
The TI User's Groups are still quite active for a machine that was discontinued in 1983. You can actually get a couple of TI links from my webpage at www.glowingplate.com.
The TI-99/4A wasn't portable like the TRS-800 Model 100, but it was a highly cool little machine in its own way. Especially with that neat 1970s futuristic black and brushed aluminum case.
If you are driving 55mpg in a blinding snowstorm you need to distracted by your "passenger" yelling at you to SLOW down.
Nahhh... Wuss. I grew up in Ottawa and Montreal, Canada. I know a thing or two about driving in snow.
For one thing, you need rear wheel drive. Four wheel drive and front wheel drive just don't do the same thing. A rear wheel drive car or truck will actually take corners faster on snowy roads than it will on dry pavement... assuming the driver is well versed in the judicious use of the fishtail.
'Nother thing: 4x4 doesn't help you steer or stop. Too many car accidents that I've seen on 401, 417 and Decarie ("of the cavity") expressways have been caused by invulnerable Yentas on cellphones in their Lincoln Navigators. Gimme a break.
Finally, and most importantly, snow is soft, so when you hit that car in front of you, at least you're padded. [grin]
Seriously, winter driving is an art, and if the conditions are right, 55MPH in a snowstorm is no big deal - but I wouldn't go any faster than that.
Novel use for an old power steering pump.
Still, the task would be monumental and the value quite minimal. Such is the public's fickleness for science...
Well, as long as they got the engine up. It would make a neat transplant into my Chevette. Sure, I'd have to really pump the bellows, but once the boiler is good and hot, I'd be able to blow the doors off any Mustang that pulled up beside me.
4,400 horsepower, baby!
Prior Restraint writes "According to this ZDNet article, Tony Goodhew, a Microsoft program manager, implies that MS will license C# in such a way that Ximian won't be able to implement the ECMA standard." This comes on the heels of Ximian's announcement of working on
Maybe I'm missing something, but I'm not sure why one would want to implement .Net without needing to. Sure, the collaborate concepts behind it are great... but if we think Outlook is dangerous now, what does the future bring with the .Net strategy? Lost privacy? Stupid security bugs everywhere? Pay-to-play software?
Similar to the way that Outlook's address book vulnerabilities put at risk everyone with an e-mail address, what are the chances that .Net vulnerabilities will have reprocussions across all Internet services and platforms?
I'm hoping that .Net will finally mobilize the consumer to ditch Windows and get some competition back into the OS field. After all, Microsoft apparently can't even get IIS right, and that sounds a lot less sophisticated than what .Net attempts.
Bobo hates cans.
Typical. Thats about the only way a windows machine can rival a linux box for uptime. I havent tried any of the NT5 variants but NT4 showed the stability of a landslide.
Now, believe it or not, if you're running well-written programs (flight information system at Pearson International Airport), Windows 95B has served me well. Record uptime was in the 60-day range (after fixing the dreaded 49.7 day memory leak). I think the relative simplicity of Windows 95 versus NT 4 gives it less points of failure.
Besides, our software wrote directly to hardware, Windows NT/2000 doesn't like it when you do that, so we were pleasantly surprised with Windows 95's performance.
MODERATORS: I have yet to find a version of Windows that rivals Linux, Solaris or *BSD for stability. This posting is not pro-Microsoft.
On the other hand, I havent crashed a linux box ever, in over 4 years running various distros.Ooh. I have. Always double-check your hardware settings before insmoding a piece of ISA hardware. [grin]
Bobo hates cans.
From a stock install? I don't know. I use an MS provided tool called uptime.exe. It works on NT4SP4 and newer (no Win9x tho').
Wow. It's a complete joke that it isn't included. I can't believe it. I believe more than before that I'm right - they know that they can't compete in uptime and availability with a conceptually simpler and more mature operating system that they've already slammed as obsolete and archaic.
Thanks for pointing me towards it, though. :)
According to the Win95 Easter egg, his e-mail address is billg@microsoft.com, not bgates.
Heh. Wasn't there a Microsoft Easter Egg with a 30 megabyte AVI file that had been renamed as a DLL? I'm sure it was part of the Developer Network CD or something like that; it wasn't a common Bought-It-At-Circuit-City Microsoft product.
His email address is actually billg@. Rumor has it that he spends a couple of hours every day on email.
I've heard that too, and it doesn't surprise me that he'd go for the first name thing. I've met the man several times (used to work for an audio-visual company, I put a lav mic on him during the Windows 95 World Conquest Tour), and he's really - urk - friendly and genuine. But everything becomes a race, a game. "Let's see if I can run this lav mic through my shirt before you can connect it to the mixer!"
What he didn't know was that the mixer was at the back of the room, so I was using a snake - basically a bus for mic cables. It was right under the podium. I plugged it in before he got the mic on, and he gave me a hell of a dirty look. >:)
"no truth"You'd think there'd be at least a sig! Did he save the message and go back through the message headers? Heh:
X-Mailer: Gnus v5.6.45/XEmacs 21.1Bill's secret is out. :)
But it was still kind of spooky.His intensity and his absolute unwavering conviction that everything he (and, by extension, Microsoft) does is right is what spooks me the most. Ironically, while I loathe Microsoft, I admire his intelligence and his sense of humor. For example, I would bet money that he's seen the Bill Borg icon that Slashdot uses, and I'd also bet that he enjoyed it. Most computer geeks would like him in person, no matter how much we may abhorr his products.
Not much better, but pretty good considering I'd use linux if I could... Record set: 06/25/01 09:03pm. Computer had been up for 2 w 5 d 20 h 21 m 16.862 s.
Okay. How do you find Windows 2000 uptime? The closest I've been able to come is by simply going to My Network Places, choosing Local Area Connection, and clicking on Status.
But that's not a real uptime, it's sucky. Microsoft probably hides it. [grin]
BTW, my Winblows box approaches the world record! 6 d, 10h, 55m, 46.. 47... 48... uhh.. seconds.
Heh. Here's my entry headline:
"Worm Killed By Reboot: World Record 7-day Windows 2000 Uptime Over"
On a somewhat unrelated note, adding this:
0 12 * * * uptime | mail -s "Eat your heart out." "bgates@microsoft.com"...to your crontab is a great way to brighten up Bill's morning.
It's just because Microsoft is the number one webserver that the worm is targetted towards it. If Linux were the number one webserver the worm would target it.
Hmmm... Uhhh. Microsoft primarily makes operating systems which repeatly prove themselves marginal for desktop use, and criminally inadequate for anything requiring stability or security.
I think you're attempting to imply that IIS server, which comes free - though hobbled to various degrees - with all versions of NT and 2000, is the number one webserver.
That's mighty good crack that you're smoking.
P.S. Drunk driving is not as bad an activity as you describe.I love drunk driving. It's a lot of fun. A friend of mine used to work in an automotive wrecking yard, and we used to love cracking open a few beers and driving around the yard in one of the junkers that came in under its own power. It was a great way of spending a Friday evening when I was in high school. I assure you, 50-foot-tall mountains of crushed cars are a lot harder to avoid after 6 beers. Even worse, 50-foot-tall mountains of crushed cars are a lot harder than uncrushed cars. They don't collapse well in accidents after they've been through the Al-jon. One might even suggest that they have less crush space. Especially the silly little Hondas.
You know what? I love my cars, and I love my beer. But the two don't mix. I don't drive (on public roads, anyway) if I've had even one beer.
Old people kill more people just because of senility, than drunk drivers.Uh-huh. Yeah. You fascinate me.
I got a little worried there for a sec!
I'm still worried!
Write your congressman. I want to see using a Microsoft server being treated as an act of criminal negligence, like drunk driving.
Haven't we all had enough of this bullspit?
My own webserver had been hit by several thousand of these attempts. When I got Slashdotted for putting up pictures of Bobo, it was bad. But this worm has been saturating my DSL with HTTP GET requests.
I wrote a small visual basic proggy that sits in the system tray on my win98 box. When you push my doorbell (plugged into the joystick port to save serial ports) it maximixes and shows me who is at the door. I used the windows box because it is hooked to the tv and stereo for watching divx movies
Oh, that's a really cool idea! Yeah, if you wanna send me the source, that'd be great, thank you.
I use my Winblows 2000 box as my primary machine (mostly because PuTTY is a really good Telnet/SSH client and my *NIX boxes are headless). My video card dumps NTSC into my VCR, and from there, it goes off to my antique TV collection. It's really cool watching DVDs on a 1951 Motorola. :)
And I thought I was high tech because my answering machine automatically e-mails me my incoming messages.
:)
Too much technology, too many dubious projects:
www.glowingplate.com/bobo.shtml
I've recently given my brother back his microwave and haven't replaced it. Still haven't starved in the past two months either.
Like they say, "The blade of grass that bends with the wind will bring a thousand happiness to the potter who also breeds chickens".
The DSL Slashdotting continues!
Kind of reminds me of my first internet connection back in 1993-paying hourly rates. Power users paid more than moderate to low-end users. Is what we're seeing now a rerun of the old internet connection fee structures? Is that like one step forward and three steps back?
Sure sounds like it. But I don't think it'll play out, at least in urban areas. In moderately rural areas, cable installations will happily carry Internet access to those who are too far away from the CO to have DSL as an alternative.
DSL is also a fairly immature technology, and I suspect that innovation will lead to longer allowable loop runs. After all, DSL is only the same modulation technology as a 56k modem uses (a kind of sophisticated multi-carrier QUAM), but with wider analog bandwidth (which allows for more QUAM carriers and therefore more data), at a higher frequency (from 5kHz to 250kHz or so) and with greater loop impedance (so the phone is still "on hook" even while carrying several QUAM carriers). It's not magic, it's just several 56k modem chipsets and a custom controller chip stuffed into a small box with a UTP connector on the back. Nor is it doing anything that copper wire everywhere isn't already doing.
Even if the loop is long and doesn't give more than 10kHz bandwidth, DSL could now be implemented for an alway-on approximately 56k connection that doesn't interfere with voice communications. And, in practice, except for hum-bucking coils and line pads, the bandwidth of an unshielded untwisted pair (ie. telephone wire) is limited only by stray capacitance between the conductors. Picofarads, at best.
Since Xc = 1 over 2 x Pi x f x C, and arbitrarily assuming that the allowable maximum capacitive reactance is 100 ohms which roughly corresponds to the impedance of having three telephone extensions off hook on one line, AND given that telephone loop wire is 24? gauge (very small, anyway, meaning stray capacitance per foot is pitifully small), getting at least ISDN speeds out of a long DSL loop should be possible.
I think technology will prevail. Competition will help to control overly restrictive bandwidth usage policies.
I think I'll stick with my simple, reliable, and ultimately cheaper (for now), Kflex connectionSpoken like someone who has never had broadband access. If someone has never had a microwave oven, it's a hard sell. But once you have had one, the usage patterns become established, and you'll find it indispensible. Same thing with broadband access.
(it took me a WEEK to get the idiots to have my IP reverse-resolve properly...you can't browse slashdot without resolving, b/c they time out on a lookup (I guess their logs are configured to do lookups)
Hmmm... Well, I have a static IP, and my nameservers point to it. But my ISP's techs didn't delegate authority, so reverse DNS on my IP address will come up as a Velocet address. So far, it's only caused me a problem once, and that was trying to send an e-mail to an Internet security company.
Cablemodems are great! It's just the fools administering the service that suck.Same with DSL. I was a cable modem fan until www.dsl.ca started offering DSL with an optional static IP for $5/mo. That was when I eschewed the relatively proven technology of cable modems to try out DSL. When I signed on a little over a year ago, they were basically a startup, and their service _really_ put the "U" back in "SUCK". But for the past six months, [rapping my knuckles on the gorgeous mahogany veneer cabinet of the Philco beside me] they've been really good. I'm impressed. Hey, they've even e-mailed me to alert me of impending downtime - what more could you want?
I'm sure that while his upsteam is sending more packets, the flood of http GET requests pouring through his downstream connection slows things down a bit.
Heh. Well, my download is 1.2Mbps, from a Nortel DSL modem. With PPPoE (yuck!) overhead, I've capped out at 1Mbps. But not with GET requests...
My upload speed is allegedly 320kbps - that's how my ISP advertises it - but I know it's capped out at 15kbps. With PPPoE overhead, I usually cap out at about 13kbps. About 3 times the upload of a 56k modem, but not stellar.
Now that the dust has cleared, and going through my server logs, I see that from 5:PM to 7:PM EST, I was averaging over 30 requests per minute, but topped out at over 250 requests per minute for about 15 minutes.
It seems that Bobo attempted to crush my webserver.
That was fun. Can we do it again sometime? :)
'a 56K dial-up modem can at times be faster than a cable modem and access can be more reliable' due to neighborhood bandwidth hogs, billing system bottlenecks server overloads, and various other problems, many of which apparently also apply to xDSL
If my cable modem weren't being so fscking slow right now!Wow. I pity the other users of my ISP right now. My DSL's upstream bandwidth is *pegged*, simply by putting a link to details of my Junkyard Wars application up on Slashdot.
If you can't be part of the solution, at least be part of the problem. (My ISP needs to improve its infrastructure a bit, anyway...)
Nothing like getting a $50,000 phone bill for all those Slashdot hits eh?
How about the gasoline costs of leaving the engine idling to keep that world-record uptime? Ouch.
www.glowingplate.com
Wait for the service to get cheap with large amounts of users before signing, if $50/MB is too much.
Yeah. And for the service to become more widespread. Like, Toronto area. And a static IP would be a nice feature, but not absolutely essential.
Then, I can move my webserver to the trunk of my 1970 Dodge Dart and get Slashdotted while I'm driving to work!
More technology = more dubious projects for me.
Here's a couple of stills from my Junkyard Wars application, if you like dubious projects.
Creativity with junk will be competing with crap.
While it may be true, Bobo resents that. He's built with junk, but he's definitely not crap.
Remember, to apply to get onto Junkyard Wars, you have to submit a videotape of you and your team explaining how a machine works. What better machine to explain than something built in the Junkyard Wars tradition?
You'll like Bobo. He's very strong. You can see him here.
And, at the same time, can be used as a respectable licensing body.
Let's face facts here. IT is now at the point where an imbecile with a community college degree can get hired and do a lot of damage through sheer ineptitude. Last night, I had an ICQ conversation with a good friend of mine, who is A+ certified, who had no idea where to start to fix BSoD from VMM.VXD.
Step 1, I told him to open the machine and make sure that all the fans are still working, and that the memory and cards were properly seated.
Step 2, check for strange software, probably old 16-bit stuff loaded from config.sys/autoexec.bat/win.ini/system.ini, etc.
Step 3. Create a system disk without any memory managers or extended memory drivers, copy the program that I e-mailed to him onto the disk, and run the comprehensive memory and motherboard tests.
Well, it was step 3 that stopped him dead in his tracks. He dutifully went to Control Panel, Add/Remove Programs, Startup Disk... [sigh] It would have been so much easier to just format a diskette and type "SYS A:" at a command prompt.
Of course, when the Windows startup disk was used, himem.sys was loaded and the RAM check didn't work. I had to explain to him how to kill himem.sys...
He's an A+, and I've got no certification whatsoever. Guess who looks better on a resume? [sigh]
Well, at least I've got Linux and FreeBSD skills. [grin]
But we really need some sort of formalized licensing for various platforms, low or minimal cost, just pass the test and you're in - as we all know on Slashdot, many of the best computer geeks are self-taught. It would keep the employee signal to noise ratio a lot higher.
Until we do that, we will never be seen credibly as professionals.