I just moved in a Pinball Machine - it's a blast. Lots of maintenance on games that use RealPhysics(tm) tho. Most all pins made after about 1977 are computer controlled anyway - this one's got a 6800, some 2716 ROMS, SCR's to drive the lights, interesting game play.
Oh my god, you're not kidding...
My roommate has a 1971 or '72 Williams Fantastic. Note that this is not a sought-after "Captain Fantastic" based on Elton John's album, it's just a "Fantastic".
It's a four-player pinball machine, with a great playfied and a really psychedelic back glass. It's a gorgeous machine.
And it's all electromechanical. Hell, even the rectifiers in the power supply aren't silicon, they're selenium!
There's a sophisticated cam-switch assembly that takes care of the state of the game at all times. It's clocked - believe it or not - by another cam and motor mechanism. Basically, with a big pile of relays, this thing has shift registers, binary adders, simple 4-bit memory and a whopping 5Hz CPU clock. It's the most complicated thing that I have ever seen where plywood is a major structural element, and the wiring is cloth insulated. In this machine, all the cloth insulation is the same color, which makes tracing the wires from source to destination almost impossible.
Of course, it doesn't quite work. I tried to count all the relay contacts in it, and I had to stop at 300 pairs. One of those pairs somewhere sticks in some game modes, jams either flipper solenoid on, and blows the 24V power supply's fuse, leaving you with backlights and a dead game.
My girlfriend and I took a good friend to an 'adult entertainment' store one evening after he turned 21. The whole time he was there he played a 15 year old Ms. Pac-Man machine that had probably been sitting in the corner for as long unused. Funniest thing I've ever seen.
Okay, I loved Pac Man, but not to that extent.
Either the strippers were really bad, or the guy is gay. Try taking him to another place, maybe even one with naked men. I know that when I was 21, Ms. Pac Man woulda had nothing on a good striptease. That ain't normal.
I encourage people to look in an arcade cabinet: you'd be surprised at just how little there is in there: speakers, monitor, controls, all wired up to a single interface connector.
Absolutely. The magic and hi-tech (of the day) exists entirely in those boards.
Even the monitor itself is no big deal: it's a TV CRT (not the expensive fine dot pitch CRT of even the cheapest VGA monitor), with support electronics that takes an RGB input and approximately broadcast television scanning signals (for most non-vectored arcace machines). Basically, if you had the boards, a good soldering iron, and some idea what you were doing, you could probably modify any old TV set to take the arcade machine's output. Hell, you'd even have an amplifier for the sound.:)
What I thought I was going to see, and something that would have been incredibly cool, was instructions on building a Ms Pacman board from scratch: using off the shelf chips and home-burnt PROMs (naughty!). Wake me up when we see that.
That would be cool, but I think you might have to get up from your slumber for a few bathroom breaks.
It's not tough to make your own printed circuit boards. Positive photo-etched, draw up the layout on the computer, laser print it to a transparency, expose the board, then etch and drill. But when you add double or multilayered boards, it becomes exponentially tougher with each layer, since plate-through holes that are the staple of mass-produced PC boards are very tough to make. Not to mention aligning the patterns properly, etc.
Wire-wrapping on veroboard, like the original IBM PC prototype was, isn't really practical for most people: it's too easy to miss something from the schematic or do it wrong. Besides, with a whopping, lightning-fast 3MHz processor - let alone anything faster, you will get into RF problems which will translate into stability issues with the computer. The solution? Ground plane. And what does that take? A multilayer PC board. I've never seen anyone figure out a practical way of making a ground plane for a wire-wrapped circuit.
Some of the old ICs that are in those things would be very hard to get now. If I recall, Pac Man used a Z80. They're still available, since they're used in a lot of industrial controllers and stuff like that. But starting to find memory controllers and stuff that would have been in the original Pac Man machines running with ?1K? ?2K? - whatever - of RAM, would be tough as nails to find. If you can't get them, the addresses and handling of just about every device on the data bus will probably be different, and this will mean that you'd have to go through the contents of the ROMs and change them where necessary.
Remember, you can dis-assemble machine language from the ROMs back to assembly. But there won't be any comments in the code, or any spaces between subroutines to make it more human-readable or anything like that. And you would have to do that for every game you wish to reproduce. It would be hell.
So, you either buy a real Pac Man machine, or you hack a TV set into a wooden box, connect it to the output of your trusty NTSC-out video card (ATI All-in-Wonder series, Xpert@Play98, etc. work well with MAME), and stuff a PC into the cabinet.
No, that's not where the automotive measure of "brake horsepower" is from.
That's the measured or calculated force required to stall the engine. Essentially, the reciprocal of all the output power of the engine as well as the inertia of the rotating/reciprocating mass.
Sorry, *you're* wrong, and I'm done debating with you, I've got better things to do. Like driving worn-out valve guides out of a cylinder head.
Anyone with any experience in engines knows that 200 horsepower at 6000 RPM implies 175 foot-pounds of torque. In other words, either you are the sloppiest so-called engineer on the face of the earth, or you're a troll.
Horsepower is torque measured over time.
The measure of time, in this case, is RPMs.
You do the math, brainiac.
And there's more than one way to measure horsepower. I suggest you avoid the glossy ads in the car magazines: to look impressive, those are generally in *brake* horsepower.
Serious calculations of engine power are always done in torque at a specific RPM or kW of output energy; horsepower is way too vague. And if you have to use horsepower, use SAE Net. It's a lot less vague.
... and eliminating the drive-shaft tunnel, which does a lot to increase foot room.
Absolutely. That is a definite FWD advantage.
Your disposable cars are that way because they're uni-bodies, not front-drive.
Oh yeah, monocoque construction makes a car a lot tougher and more expensive to repir.
But so does front wheel drive.
If you hit another vehicle, for example, your engine, transmission and differential are all involved. Not to mention the usual basics like radiator, steering, etc. Because the drivetrain is crammed into a tiny space rather than spread out under the car, it's a lot harder to fix.
Further, because most of these front wheel drive cars use MacPherson strut suspensions - which are simple, compact and cheap but have little room for adjustment after a collision - you generally end up with a damaged car that can't be made to track properly without welding in new inner fenders and strut towers. Most rear wheel drive unibodies (and full-frame cars) use double-A arm front suspensions, which are a lot bulkier but have more linear movement in all planes as well as being a lot more serviceable after damage. Instead of attempting to change a bent strut tower, you generally end up changing a bent upper control arm.
It's very difficult to get the necessary energy absorption for crashworthiness with a body-on-frame.
Rest assured, I'm well familiar with unibodies. Consider that three of my vehicles (my 1974 Valiant, my 1971 New Yorker and my 1980 Chevette) are unibody.
As for vehicle safety, what you say is true. But I prefer to avoid hitting things. If I've had even one beer, I don't get behind the wheel (but I'd be legal to 4). While I own a cellphone, that is never turned on in the car or truck. Never. My stereo is never cranked up loud enough to prevent me from hearing the rest of the traffic around me, my vehicles are always in top mechanical shape, and I always concentrate fully on the task at hand. And if I'm feeling sleepy, even if I'm only ten miles from home, I'll pull over, flip down or across the seats, and take a nap.
My driving record? Flawless. Ten years, no accidents or moving violations. And yet I drive a long way to work every day, taking a freeway that is second busiest in the world (after only the Santa Monica Freeway) and have for a number of years. And, this despite the fact that I've been known to shred my rear tires into clouds of smoke every now and then.
So, what if someone cuts me off?
Nice thing about a vehicle that won't buckle - surrounded by a sea of vehicles that will buckle - is that if some jackass in a Prelude cuts me off and I hit him, I'll win. He'll absorb my impact. I'm sure he'd do body damage to my truck, but I doubt he'd do much structural damage. Even if he did, I'd fix it in an afternoon with a hyrdaulic ram to straighten the frame back, my MIG welder to gusset it if there was any sign of fatigue, and then a quick tweak of the eccentric bolts on my upper control arms that set my camber and caster.
Unibody is stiffer than a frame; this gives better drivability.
Depends on the frame. Compared to an I-channel or C-channel body on frame, for sure. But most of the finest luxury cars today retain a body on frame, using a box-section frame. The penalty? Gas mileage.
The benefits of a full frame, which kept them around for so long? The structural members are fractional inch steel plate stampings, not thin sheet measured in gauge. Less corrosion. Less metal fatigue. And the structural integrity of the car is more dependant on sheer quantities of steel, rather than the shape imparted into the metal by a stamping press.
Tangible benefits? You see a lot more 20-year-old Caprice Classics, Ford LTDs and other full-frame vehicles driving around than you see of 20-year-old Fairmonts. Easier to fix, too. And it makes sense to make a car last. The environmental cost of making a car is a lot more than the gains of replacing it at half of its average lifespan with one that is only incrementally cleaner and more fuel efficient. So it makes sense to take good care of a good, solid car, keep it well-tuned, and maintain it.
Other benefits? Cost to the manufacturer. One basic frame can be readily adapted to serve a large number of vehicles. Chevy S-10 and Astrovan shared a frame, for example. Easy to redesign a car based on slapping new body panels onto the existing rolling frame.
It's nearly impossible to get rid of squeaks unless the whole car is welded together. Again, this means unibody.
Or good body-to-frame mounts.
It's even more difficult to get rid of road noise with a unibody's welded structural members carrying every vibration to the passenger compartment. Don't you get sick of listening to your wheel bearings when you're on the highway? Body to frame mounts damp that.
Not to burst your bubble, but judging from your past posts your opinions are set in concrete and facts are nearly irrelevant to you anyway.
Ahhh, yes, I know who this is: it's the self-proclaimed automobile expert speaking from the depths of his many hours spent watching Shadetree Mechanic. Afraid to post from your user account? Can't afford the karma of an off-topic debate? I can.
Listen, I was wrenching on cars 15 years ago as a kid. I've worked on everything from Tercels to (once) a Testarossa. My roommate and best friend of 11 years works at probably the world's foremost professional automotive restoration shop.
While I'm neither a professional mechanic nor am I an automotive engineer (but I am an SAE member, go figure...), I know that you're neither one of those things. I've written columns in automotive magazines from Car Craft to Car and Driver. You, sir, are simply someone who spells better than most, perhaps could manage to change a fanbelt by the side of the road, and has been incensed when I insulted your idea of a fine automobile.
Unless you can actually come up with solid facts - not those refutable by any freshman level high school automotive class - I think you really should sit back and not comment, lest you continue to display your ignorance and short-sightedness.
If you're going to compare the Integra to a Honda, compare it to the Civic Si. The Prelude is far better than the Integra. I'd think that a/.'er would appreciate the efficiency which yeilds 200 hp out of that "whiny little" 2.2L I4.
I know, petty post, but I love my car.
Yeah, well, that's cool and all, but I love taking on these silly little V-Tecs.
You could blow away my baby, a 1974 Valiant Brougham. She's got a Slant-6, weighs less than 3,000 lbs, gets about 30 miles per gallon, and I take her on long scenic trips. About as fast as a new Taurus, it gets up to speed fast enough on the highway, but it's not a performance car. Your power to weight ratio is better than my Valiant's.
My 1976 Dodge Ram gets 7 miles per gallon, my 1971 New Yorker does 6 miles per gallon. Both blow under 25 PPM hydrocarbon on a (voluntary) dyno emissions test. (Yeah, they're expensive, when I punch the gas, I can see the gauge moving - but I like 'em, and I can afford it.)
Despite the stickers, your car isn't "Powered by Honda". It's powered by *gasoline*. The more you can mix with air and then burn, the more power you make. More displacement = more power. Period. Sure, you can get more power out of a drop of gas than I can - that's not in contest - but it's an incremental amount more. These aren't computers, car engines are a fairly mature technology and nothing really important has happened since the 1950s with the advent of the hemispherical combustion chamber. 2.2L vs. 6.6L? My smallest V8 is a full three times bigger than your engine. Your whiny little four-banger is a fly caught in my air filter.
While neither is a vintage musclecar, both of them have big-block V8s. 6.6L and 7.2L, respectively. The truck weighs in at 4,469lbs (with fuel and driver). The New Yorker comes in at 4,900 lbs, again, with fuel and driver.
Both of them have greater than 9.0:1 compression ratios, from the factory. Both of them have >270 duration cams, from the factory. Both of them have blown the doors off all sorts of real musclecars, let alone silly imported "tuned" riceboxes with big stereos, "Euro" (urinal) wipers and chainsaw exhaust tips.
I like to flick cigarette butts into those upturned exhaust tips. The water that puddles in your muffler puts them out very nicely.
efficiency which yeilds 200 hp out of that "whiny little"
Good for you. You may put 200 brake horsepower out your crankshaft, 6,000 RPM, probably with a whopping 50 foot-pounds of torque at that. I put well over 200 SAE net horsepower out at my tires in a vehicle that weighs merely twice as much. At 3,500 RPM, and with over 300 foot-pounds of torque. Who wins? I do. No contest.
Haven't you ever seen an Acura Integra? It's just a Prelude. Same whiny little engine with half the cylinders missing and pointed the wrong way in the engine bay.Huh? Please tell me you're a troll.
Nope. I'm one of the most devoted automotive fans you'll ever meet.
Actually they have the same number of cylinders and point the same way in the engine bay.
8/2=4. Half the cylinders missing. One half of the "V" sliced off, at that. Ugh. Like a mastectomy.
Same engine? Uh uh. Different displacement, different casting, different mounting points... same manufacturer though, that's about it.
Different casting? Oh, that's news to me. Okay. I recind the "same engine" bit. But if the engine is still transverse-mounted and only four cylinders, it's not a real man's car.
You can't performance drive a front-wheel-drive car. Why is it that most cop cars are rear wheel drive? No torque steer! No MacPherson strut effects on your ackerman angles! Predictable behavior when you lose traction on one of your drive wheels!
The advantages of front wheel drive are cost of manufacture, weight (primarily for fuel economy reasons), and disposability (hit a curb, write off the car). Not reasons to be proud of a FWD car.
I've only seen one transverse-mount rear-wheel-drive car, and that was the Pontiac Fiero.
Besides, I've never seen a real man driving *any* Honda product.
Let's face facts. You hang around a good biker bar, or something like that. You won't hear conversation like "Ugh! Wow! He must be a tough dude. Look at his '94 Civic!"
"Ugh! Wow! He must be a boring, disposeable accountant! He's in a 1971 Hemi Cuda!"
And neither of them have the ever popular "V4" touted in the original post;)
<grin> I let that one slide, too.
There are differences between the normal and marquee manufacturers. Significant ones in some cases although they could be termed luxuries, but if you want 'em you gotta pay for 'em. The Cimarron debacle... well I think Cadillac would prefer if that wasn't ever mentioned again.
Whole-heartedly.
If they'd simply called it a Cavalier with the optional heated leather seats, I don't think anyone would have cared.
Actually, my daily-driver 1976 Dodge Ram has heated leather seats. They come in very handy in Toronto winters. (They're out of a 1997 Lincoln Town Car - I had to ditch the truck's bench, it was wrinkling my suits.)
My current car very well might fit in your trunk but you gotta catch it first:)
No problem. A Chrysler 440 out of the box will easily haul a New Yorker in the 14-second range. (Remember, this is before Corporate Average Fuel Economy and emissions laws!) Lightly modded, I've seen a '72 New Yorker (different grill and tail lights, but that's about it) blow the doors off a Buick Grand National. And Grand Nationals are fast - my advice is that you should avoid challenging them at stoplights.
Further, keep in mind that my car gets just over 6 miles per gallon. The engine runs under thermostat almost all the time (except when I crank the Mopar Airtemp A/C on a hot day), the exhaust blows under 15 PPM hydrocarbon, so all that gas is going somewhere...
Old tech doesn't mean slow tech. These aren't computers.;)
(It's a *lightly* modded NSX... not the fastest thing out there but still pretty fun).
"Modded" = "tuned by" stickers all over it? Heheheh.... Wanna race my truck for pink slips? I've got a buddy who runs a scrapyard, after I blow your doors off, I'll take your car, run over it with the front end loader, toss it in the back of my truck for winter traction, and then take on your buddies.
Big stereos and stickers do not a racecar make.
If you're in the Toronto area, you also want to stay away from 1980 Chevettes, too. I've shoehorned a Buick 3.8L V6, TH-350, and Ford 8.8" diff with 4.91 posi into it. It pulls a solid 12.3 on the 1/4 mile, and it looks dead stock. You wouldn't want your girlfriend to notice that the rusty old Chevette you thought you left at the stoplight was still beside you.
(Speaking of sleepers, this is being typed from a Pentium-II 350 on an Asus motherboard that has been stuffed into a "Triton 8 MHz TurboXT" case, connected to an old NEC MultiSync 3D, and has a Compaq Deskpro 286 keyboard attached. No one will steal it...)
Let me explain this with a metaphor : car sales. Say you have an old treacherous Toyota salesman with two brands of cars on his lot. One is the economy model, it's a V4 engine and no extras. The other is the luxury model, which is a V4 engine with gold-plated spark plugs and automatic everything. It's the same crap with better spark plugs that give you a 4% increase in raw horsepower (which will equate to cleaner gas consumption that might register on high-end monitoring gear). However the luxury model costs twice as much as the economy model.
Haven't you ever seen an Acura Integra? It's just a Prelude. Same whiny little engine with half the cylinders missing and pointed the wrong way in the engine bay.
Or a Camry masquerading as a Lexus. Or a Maxima masquerading as an Infiniti.
Or, my personal favorite and mercifully discontinued, a Cavalier masquerading as a Cadillac (Cimarron).
Remember the good old days when there actually was a difference between the el-cheapo model and the real thing? When a 1971 Valiant and a 1971 New Yorker shared an alternator, a starter motor, and that was about it? (Having said that, I love both those cars; my Valiant's *grill* would trash anything on the road today, and that's without even pulling the 4,900lb 21-foot-long 7.2L V8-powered New Yorker Brougham out of the garage. Acuras, beware: or else I'll stuff your silly little car in my trunk.)
Then, I pause for a second, and think forward to the 1980s. The K-car masquerading as a New Yorker. My big-block 440 cubic inch V8 trembles, stumbing away momentarily from its normal silky-quiet power and smoothness as the thought crosses my mind. The bad karma surrounding the 1980s New Yorker has forever tainted the memory of the world's largest non-limousine passenger car.
The Yahoo servers for SMTP services that USER CONNECT TO have been quite flaky. I have outages that lasted up to a month. POP3 is also bad from time to time.
Their POP3 servers also appear to be affected adversely by Outlook. I have a friend who insists on using Outlook, and she e-mailed me. Yahoo's POP servers choked on it; I had to log in through their web access to delete the message. It's repeatable, though I don't know what part of the message kills it.
To top it off, she's one of these community college computer science students. She won't listen to me when I tell her that Outlook isn't standards-compliant. (And, I had to do three hours of tech support to help her install a second hard drive in her Windows 98 machine, to demonstrate what her third year at St. Lawrence College has taught her. She still doesn't have it working, mostly because she doesn't believe you can only run two IDE devices on each IDE bus.) <sigh>
Note Yahoo commonly gets swamped the SMTP from outside world into Yahoo system to an actual account can take upto 8 hours. So enjoy the FREE mail.
Yeah, I use one of these accounts. I just set up Sendmail on my gateway machine.
Oh goody. Another toy to distract the idiots in the "Honda Racing" Accords as they tailgate me down the Don Valley Parkway.
Thankfully, my truck can effortlessly demolish any Honda product ever made.
While this is great technology with many applications, I'd hope that people would have sufficient common sense not to use them in the car.
Sadly, in my drive to work every day, I see literally dozens of people reading newspapers folded up in their steering wheels, gabbing on the phone, eating breakfast (cereal - from a bowl - while driving a car that rolled back on hills (stickshift!) - the guy was *good*), doing make-up, shaving, etc.
I just worry that this innovation will only result in more traffic jams.
When I got home, the microwave oven transformer attached to the answering machine was warm, and there's a big oily-black carbon spot with tufts of tabby fur all over the place...
*Note: To understand call the number, use *67 in Toronto for call privacy:-)
Hey man, if I was worried about my answering machine, would I have posted the number to Slashdot? Nah. I don't care, it amuses me. I own the first answering machine in world history to be Slashdotted. Over 400 calls so far, and the old 386SX has taken it just fine. I don't answer caller ID numbers I don't recognize, and my ringer is turned off before I go to bed.
Want the outgoing message in MP3, WAV or Faxtalk Messenger's proprietary modified ADPCM VOX file? E-mail me.
Hey! I've got a 625 CFM Carter AFB carburetor on a Chrysler 400 CID (6.6L) V8. She doesn't bog, I assure you.
Actually, it's in a pickup truck without a Sure-Grip differential. Pulling away from a light without smoking off a 235-75R15 is tough. Let alone killing my manifold vacuum.
[redneck carspeak] No sir, she don't bog.
My client, Mr. Claus, respectfully requests that you and all the other k1dd135 on the planet quit sending him unsolicited e-messages requesting toys. If you continue this practice, I will be forced to notify your ISP and ask them to terminate your account.
Spammers are now running dictionary attacks against SMTP servers. A spammer will connect to mail.example.com and try a large (if not exaustive) list of possible usernames. If the mail server gives an 'OK' message the address is added to the spammers list; if it gets a 'user unknown' it discards it and goes on to the next.
Oh jeez, that's spooky.
I'm administering several small domains running Linux. Now, I gotta admit, I still haven't read the many great thick tomes on Sendmail. I do have relaying from outside my LANs turned off, of course, but that's the only overt anti-spam measure I've taken.
Running Sendmail 8.9.3, can anything be done to stop this?
I assume modifying Sendmail to give an OK reply to every attempted username would simply result in a deluge of messages being bounced which would eat my bandwidth and still wouldn't protect my users. Turning off the OK to username queries would probably effectively block all incoming e-mail.
It is too bad there is no way to poison the sender of the spam. Spammers will evolve beyond this, they always do.
On my Christmas Wish List, I want Santa to bring me something that doesn't exist. Something that's a great idea, but not actually possible. Ya know, like world peace, honest politicians or stable Microsoft products.
I want an e-mail client that will automatically detect spam and e-mail virus hoaxes - with 100% accuracy, so I don't lose real messages - and without any intervention on my part, smurf the sender.
Because, Dear Santa, I wish to be able to post my e-mail address with impunity, for all to see.
If I remember correctly, After the recall of the original Pentiums, some company was selling jewelry made out of the defective silicon. Apparently, Intel was just going to throw them away and someone bought the lot. A necklace with an inset Pentium cost around $15, if I remember correctly.
Yeah, I've seen them, but it's not what I want. I'm looking for one in the original case with the huge gold-plated die cover in the ceramic. They looked like jewelery on their own; I want to tastefully frame it. With due diligence to static protection, of course.
If you look at the old days of radio - when radio was still as new as computers - some of the early technological gaffes are now highly sought after. I'd like to do my part for history and preserve one.
As for the recalled P60s/66s, can you imagine being the poor son of a bitch with the job of breaking the dies out of the spiders? Ugh. Must have been hell.
I've got an FDIV P60. In fact, I'm using it right now. This old things survived alot..going on six years this Friday in fact. Most of the original hardware is still intact with the exception of an additional HD (old one is still functional, just too damn small), more RAM, and a new case fan.
Nice. I still have a few old machines on my home LAN. The computer that answers my phone is a 386SX with an old external 28.8k modem running Faxtalk Messenger on Windows 3.1. (You can Slashdot it at (416) 755-8870; it amuses me. Messages are moved as they arrive to my webserver so I can check them online.)
Oh, and a network card.
Other than that, the SB16 still plays, the 3X CDROM still spins, and the 2400 baud modem probably still works but I haven't needed it for a while now.
If it's a real Creative Labs SB-16, that's great! Those things are really easy to hack. On mine, I've built the entire output buffer amplifier into a shielded box. The original used LM741 output buffer amplifiers; I've replaced them with TL084s, which are a very low noise op-amp. It's cranked the signal to noise ratio from about 60 to about 80 (tested) and brought the THD down from about 1.3% to 0.1%. It's now a sound card that is a good match for the Sound A-5000 amplifier and Acoustic Research AR-4x speakers that serve as my main computer's sound system.
Though, I wish the damned thing was PCI. <grin> I can't find any decent PCI sound cards that I can hack at a component level...
I'm still waiting for my replacement chip, but I don't think that's going to happen. Oh well.
And if it does, it'll be warehouse fresh, not factory fresh. Heheheh.
Just watch your processor cooling system carefully. And those are especially vulnerable to power cycles. (Big die of brittle silicon that gets heated and cooled a lot when you turn it on and off.)
Yeah it was difficult, but all the idiots that used the same heatsink and fan combos that were designed to cool a 66-MHx i486 processor got what they deserved when their 66-MHZ Pentium processors overheated. Putting a computer together isn't like working with legos, you know. A little reading would have gone a LONG way in preventing the meltdowns.
Ever seen a Compaq P60? Or a Gateway P60? These weren't clones with crappy cases, 1" square nameplates, and assembly quality like that. These are mass-produced machines, designed by engineers, who had probably read all of Intel's docs. And I've seen lots of them where the active heatsink just couldn't keep up.
I remember an IBM server with the new cutting-edge P66. Now, towards the end of the 486 era, a lot of the manufacturers (as opposed to clone builders) were getting to large passive heatsinks and even interesting fan solutions. The old HP Vectra 486 machines had a fan mounted above a heatsink-less processor. The fan blew air across the top of the processor at a 45 degree angle.
But all the early Pentium machines that I ever touched had active heatsinks, just like most of today's processors. From the real manufacturers, they had somewhat more substantial fans than the "Ball Bearing" made-in-Taiwan crap that clone builders (still) use.
And this IBM was no exception. There was nothing wrong with the fan - it still spun, and it was a good quality piece. It was a Panaflow 12VDC brushless fan mounted to a 2" tall extruded aluminum heatsink, strapped onto the top of this processor. When I got to the machine, the remains of the blades of the fan didn't show any signs of dirt, dust or cigarette smoke accumulation. The fan even spun freely. But the plastic frame of the fan was warped and the blades had been distorted. It made a hell of a vibration when it started up, and the owner had brought the machine in for us to fix because the computer was noisy and smelled really bad of something melting. I replaced the fan (Nidec cast-aluminum with a composite impeller, $30 fan, use them in all my computers to this day), re-routed some ribbon cables away from the processor to see if I could give it more airflow, and then my co-workers and I were betting on when it would come back. It didn't.
The FDIV bug impacted 60-MHz, 66-MHz, 75-MHz, 90-MHz and 100-MHz Pentium processors.
Yeah, okay. I got ahead of myself, I apologize. It was late 1994 when Intel fixed the FDIV bug. The Pentium 75 was commonly shipping at the time; the P90 was popular, the P100 was the high-end chip, and the P120 was just on the horizon.
I've never noticed a P75 with the bug, but because of where I've worked, we didn't have many of the 3.3V-generation Pentiums to support until around the P100. And that was well into 1995.
The 120-MHz Pentium processor was the first processor to *not* have the FDIV bug impacting it.
I think it's fairer to say that the P-120 is the first one that has never had a release with the FDIV problem. I assure you, Intel has made P75s to P100s without the FDIV.
But all of the high-voltage Pentiums were affected; unless they were replaced under Intel's recall, they had the FDIV flaw.
Shouldn't that be the top 9.9999999348 Intel slipups?
Yeah. Speaking of that, what about the FDIV bug that made the early Pentiums completely unsuitable for AutoCAD and spreadsheets?
Hell, all you'd need is a stack of P60s and you could easily knock SETI@Home out of the water.
Actually, even if they didn't have the FDIV bug, the old coffee warmers were enough of a kludge themselves to be listed as a bug or slipup.
For those who don't remember them, or weren't into computers at the time, the original Pentium 60 and Pentium 66 used the Socket 4. They didn't have the staggered pins like a Pentium 75-233 had, they had rowed pins like a 486.
Also, like most 486s, they ran at 5V. And, as a result, they got hot.
Man, oh man, did they get hot. Especially the short-lived Pentium 66.
They had constant cooling problems. I've seen several P60s and P66s where the cooling fans stalled and were actually melted or scorched by the heat of the processor. They were also prone to failure, since they'd often run at 60-70C, turning on and off a system with an early Pentium was a great way to cause thermal cycling second to none. Since the processors had big dies too, they were very prone to cracking.
I've burned my fingers on a few of the damned things.
Thankfully, Intel came out with the 3.3V Pentium 75 shortly after that, and it addressed both the FDIV bug and the heating.
Here in the Toronto area, there's a chain of stores called Cash Converters. They're a thrift shop that tries to be upmarket, but there's the usual 486DX-33 for only $400! kind of cluelessness. And top-loading VHS VCRs for only $100. (Hell, you can buy a new one for that much!) But sometimes, you find cool old stuff in there.
This summer, I was with a friend who was looking around for lenses for an old Canon camera and we were in the Victoria Park at Danforth store. In their display case along with a pile of other processors and memory - no static protection or anything - was a Pentium 60.
This P60 was blackened like an Apollo capsule that has re-entered Earth's atmosphere. And the price tag sticker on it? Only $150. Wow. Sweet deal.
I'd actually like to have an old P60 chip that I can frame and stick up on a wall somewhere. But $150? Heheheh. I'd love to see the sucker who buys that thing.
Can I post the picture of your mom having sex with hitler that I made in photoshop, or is regulation only of things that offend *other* people ridiculous socialism?
Go for it. I'd consider that to be freedom of expression. Have a party.
At the same time, however, recognize that I'll post that picture I have of you banging a sheep.
Socialism is evil, like communism, it doesn't work. France is a socialist country. And *I* live in a socialist country.
If you want to be taxed all to hell to pay for silly protectionist policies and the stupidity of the proles, that's fine with me: just leave me the hell out of it.
I prefer a capitalism, which rewards those who work hard, and punishes laziness.
French judge has upheld an earlier ruling ordering Yahoo! to ban French users from buying Nazi memorabilia from its auction site. Even though the content is not accessible from www.yahoo.fr/ the ruling insists that even "the visualization in France of these objects" on the www.yahoo.com auction site constitutes a breach of French law and orders Yahoo to bar all French IPs from accessing it despite Yahoo's assertions that this would not guarantee that nobody in France would be able to see it.
Okay. If *anyone* here can sew together a Nazi uniform for a GI Joe action figure or something, you *need* to do it, and you *need* to put it up on Yahoo Auctions.
I dunno. In France, do the judges wear silly wigs like the British? There must be some sort of attire that can be comfortably merged with a red swastika armband as a freedom of speech protest.
You bastard! That is a IBM's legendary buckling spring M-type keyboard that the kid drilled on! Those keyboards deserve some respect, I tell ya, they are better than any of CmdrTaco's lame keyboards combined.
Agreed. The only keyboard in the same league as those (and their compact PS/2 cousin) is the two-tone brown keyboard that shipped with early Compaq Deskpros. Actually, I like it for exactly the opposite reasons that I like the loud IBM spring-loaders.
Sometimes, you want to feel like you're using a Selectric to type your e-mail, sometimes you don't.
I wish the guy had destroyed a really cheesy no-name clone keyboard instead.
Then all of a suddent the computer crashed and we were even more amazed as what we saw was: ] CATALOG
<grin> I used to work for a TV station. At the time, all of our titling was done with Chyron boxes in the studio, and our mobile stuff was done with a genlocked Amiga 2000 and a copy of Broadcast Titler 2.0.
Well, Amigas were fine computers. I love them dearly, and I have several, but I've never known them to be too stable.
Neither was this one. In the middle of a live broadcast, the computer crashed. It took a good few seconds before any of us noticed the little "Zzzz" mouse pointer (an Amiga hourglass, if you will, looks like a cartoon sleep bubble) sitting in the corner of the Program and On-Air monitors.
Of course, this was for the Progressive Conservative Leadership Convention in Ottawa a few years ago; a big political thing. And the news director couldn't stop flipping out that the Zzzz looked like we were trying to editorialize the guy currently giving a long and boring speech on the screen.
No matter what, always remember, if the character generator is not actively superimposing a title, switch it off of the Program bus.
Slashdot Mirror
I just moved in a Pinball Machine - it's a blast. Lots of maintenance on games that use RealPhysics(tm) tho. Most all pins made after about 1977 are computer controlled anyway - this one's got a 6800, some 2716 ROMS, SCR's to drive the lights, interesting game play.
Oh my god, you're not kidding...
My roommate has a 1971 or '72 Williams Fantastic. Note that this is not a sought-after "Captain Fantastic" based on Elton John's album, it's just a "Fantastic".
It's a four-player pinball machine, with a great playfied and a really psychedelic back glass. It's a gorgeous machine.
And it's all electromechanical. Hell, even the rectifiers in the power supply aren't silicon, they're selenium!
There's a sophisticated cam-switch assembly that takes care of the state of the game at all times. It's clocked - believe it or not - by another cam and motor mechanism. Basically, with a big pile of relays, this thing has shift registers, binary adders, simple 4-bit memory and a whopping 5Hz CPU clock. It's the most complicated thing that I have ever seen where plywood is a major structural element, and the wiring is cloth insulated. In this machine, all the cloth insulation is the same color, which makes tracing the wires from source to destination almost impossible.
Of course, it doesn't quite work. I tried to count all the relay contacts in it, and I had to stop at 300 pairs. One of those pairs somewhere sticks in some game modes, jams either flipper solenoid on, and blows the 24V power supply's fuse, leaving you with backlights and a dead game.
My girlfriend and I took a good friend to an 'adult entertainment' store one evening after he turned 21. The whole time he was there he played a 15 year old Ms. Pac-Man machine that had probably been sitting in the corner for as long unused. Funniest thing I've ever seen.
Okay, I loved Pac Man, but not to that extent.
Either the strippers were really bad, or the guy is gay. Try taking him to another place, maybe even one with naked men. I know that when I was 21, Ms. Pac Man woulda had nothing on a good striptease. That ain't normal.
I encourage people to look in an arcade cabinet: you'd be surprised at just how little there is in there: speakers, monitor, controls, all wired up to a single interface connector.
Absolutely. The magic and hi-tech (of the day) exists entirely in those boards.
Even the monitor itself is no big deal: it's a TV CRT (not the expensive fine dot pitch CRT of even the cheapest VGA monitor), with support electronics that takes an RGB input and approximately broadcast television scanning signals (for most non-vectored arcace machines). Basically, if you had the boards, a good soldering iron, and some idea what you were doing, you could probably modify any old TV set to take the arcade machine's output. Hell, you'd even have an amplifier for the sound. :)
What I thought I was going to see, and something that would have been incredibly cool, was instructions on building a Ms Pacman board from scratch: using off the shelf chips and home-burnt PROMs (naughty!). Wake me up when we see that.That would be cool, but I think you might have to get up from your slumber for a few bathroom breaks.
It's not tough to make your own printed circuit boards. Positive photo-etched, draw up the layout on the computer, laser print it to a transparency, expose the board, then etch and drill. But when you add double or multilayered boards, it becomes exponentially tougher with each layer, since plate-through holes that are the staple of mass-produced PC boards are very tough to make. Not to mention aligning the patterns properly, etc.
Wire-wrapping on veroboard, like the original IBM PC prototype was, isn't really practical for most people: it's too easy to miss something from the schematic or do it wrong. Besides, with a whopping, lightning-fast 3MHz processor - let alone anything faster, you will get into RF problems which will translate into stability issues with the computer. The solution? Ground plane. And what does that take? A multilayer PC board. I've never seen anyone figure out a practical way of making a ground plane for a wire-wrapped circuit.
Some of the old ICs that are in those things would be very hard to get now. If I recall, Pac Man used a Z80. They're still available, since they're used in a lot of industrial controllers and stuff like that. But starting to find memory controllers and stuff that would have been in the original Pac Man machines running with ?1K? ?2K? - whatever - of RAM, would be tough as nails to find. If you can't get them, the addresses and handling of just about every device on the data bus will probably be different, and this will mean that you'd have to go through the contents of the ROMs and change them where necessary.
Remember, you can dis-assemble machine language from the ROMs back to assembly. But there won't be any comments in the code, or any spaces between subroutines to make it more human-readable or anything like that. And you would have to do that for every game you wish to reproduce. It would be hell.
So, you either buy a real Pac Man machine, or you hack a TV set into a wooden box, connect it to the output of your trusty NTSC-out video card (ATI All-in-Wonder series, Xpert@Play98, etc. work well with MAME), and stuff a PC into the cabinet.
Crankshaft power into a brake is power, period
No, that's not where the automotive measure of "brake horsepower" is from.
That's the measured or calculated force required to stall the engine. Essentially, the reciprocal of all the output power of the engine as well as the inertia of the rotating/reciprocating mass.
Sorry, *you're* wrong, and I'm done debating with you, I've got better things to do. Like driving worn-out valve guides out of a cylinder head.
Anyone with any experience in engines knows that 200 horsepower at 6000 RPM implies 175 foot-pounds of torque. In other words, either you are the sloppiest so-called engineer on the face of the earth, or you're a troll.
Horsepower is torque measured over time.
The measure of time, in this case, is RPMs.
You do the math, brainiac.
And there's more than one way to measure horsepower. I suggest you avoid the glossy ads in the car magazines: to look impressive, those are generally in *brake* horsepower.
Serious calculations of engine power are always done in torque at a specific RPM or kW of output energy; horsepower is way too vague. And if you have to use horsepower, use SAE Net. It's a lot less vague.
Absolutely. That is a definite FWD advantage.
Your disposable cars are that way because they're uni-bodies, not front-drive.Oh yeah, monocoque construction makes a car a lot tougher and more expensive to repir.
But so does front wheel drive.
If you hit another vehicle, for example, your engine, transmission and differential are all involved. Not to mention the usual basics like radiator, steering, etc. Because the drivetrain is crammed into a tiny space rather than spread out under the car, it's a lot harder to fix.
Further, because most of these front wheel drive cars use MacPherson strut suspensions - which are simple, compact and cheap but have little room for adjustment after a collision - you generally end up with a damaged car that can't be made to track properly without welding in new inner fenders and strut towers. Most rear wheel drive unibodies (and full-frame cars) use double-A arm front suspensions, which are a lot bulkier but have more linear movement in all planes as well as being a lot more serviceable after damage. Instead of attempting to change a bent strut tower, you generally end up changing a bent upper control arm.
It's very difficult to get the necessary energy absorption for crashworthiness with a body-on-frame.Rest assured, I'm well familiar with unibodies. Consider that three of my vehicles (my 1974 Valiant, my 1971 New Yorker and my 1980 Chevette) are unibody.
As for vehicle safety, what you say is true. But I prefer to avoid hitting things. If I've had even one beer, I don't get behind the wheel (but I'd be legal to 4). While I own a cellphone, that is never turned on in the car or truck. Never. My stereo is never cranked up loud enough to prevent me from hearing the rest of the traffic around me, my vehicles are always in top mechanical shape, and I always concentrate fully on the task at hand. And if I'm feeling sleepy, even if I'm only ten miles from home, I'll pull over, flip down or across the seats, and take a nap.
My driving record? Flawless. Ten years, no accidents or moving violations. And yet I drive a long way to work every day, taking a freeway that is second busiest in the world (after only the Santa Monica Freeway) and have for a number of years. And, this despite the fact that I've been known to shred my rear tires into clouds of smoke every now and then.
So, what if someone cuts me off?
Nice thing about a vehicle that won't buckle - surrounded by a sea of vehicles that will buckle - is that if some jackass in a Prelude cuts me off and I hit him, I'll win. He'll absorb my impact. I'm sure he'd do body damage to my truck, but I doubt he'd do much structural damage. Even if he did, I'd fix it in an afternoon with a hyrdaulic ram to straighten the frame back, my MIG welder to gusset it if there was any sign of fatigue, and then a quick tweak of the eccentric bolts on my upper control arms that set my camber and caster.
Unibody is stiffer than a frame; this gives better drivability.Depends on the frame. Compared to an I-channel or C-channel body on frame, for sure. But most of the finest luxury cars today retain a body on frame, using a box-section frame. The penalty? Gas mileage.
The benefits of a full frame, which kept them around for so long? The structural members are fractional inch steel plate stampings, not thin sheet measured in gauge. Less corrosion. Less metal fatigue. And the structural integrity of the car is more dependant on sheer quantities of steel, rather than the shape imparted into the metal by a stamping press.
Tangible benefits? You see a lot more 20-year-old Caprice Classics, Ford LTDs and other full-frame vehicles driving around than you see of 20-year-old Fairmonts. Easier to fix, too. And it makes sense to make a car last. The environmental cost of making a car is a lot more than the gains of replacing it at half of its average lifespan with one that is only incrementally cleaner and more fuel efficient. So it makes sense to take good care of a good, solid car, keep it well-tuned, and maintain it.
Other benefits? Cost to the manufacturer. One basic frame can be readily adapted to serve a large number of vehicles. Chevy S-10 and Astrovan shared a frame, for example. Easy to redesign a car based on slapping new body panels onto the existing rolling frame.
It's nearly impossible to get rid of squeaks unless the whole car is welded together. Again, this means unibody.Or good body-to-frame mounts.
It's even more difficult to get rid of road noise with a unibody's welded structural members carrying every vibration to the passenger compartment. Don't you get sick of listening to your wheel bearings when you're on the highway? Body to frame mounts damp that.
Not to burst your bubble, but judging from your past posts your opinions are set in concrete and facts are nearly irrelevant to you anyway.Ahhh, yes, I know who this is: it's the self-proclaimed automobile expert speaking from the depths of his many hours spent watching Shadetree Mechanic. Afraid to post from your user account? Can't afford the karma of an off-topic debate? I can.
Listen, I was wrenching on cars 15 years ago as a kid. I've worked on everything from Tercels to (once) a Testarossa. My roommate and best friend of 11 years works at probably the world's foremost professional automotive restoration shop.
While I'm neither a professional mechanic nor am I an automotive engineer (but I am an SAE member, go figure...), I know that you're neither one of those things. I've written columns in automotive magazines from Car Craft to Car and Driver. You, sir, are simply someone who spells better than most, perhaps could manage to change a fanbelt by the side of the road, and has been incensed when I insulted your idea of a fine automobile.
Unless you can actually come up with solid facts - not those refutable by any freshman level high school automotive class - I think you really should sit back and not comment, lest you continue to display your ignorance and short-sightedness.
Yeah, well, that's cool and all, but I love taking on these silly little V-Tecs.
You could blow away my baby, a 1974 Valiant Brougham. She's got a Slant-6, weighs less than 3,000 lbs, gets about 30 miles per gallon, and I take her on long scenic trips. About as fast as a new Taurus, it gets up to speed fast enough on the highway, but it's not a performance car. Your power to weight ratio is better than my Valiant's.
My 1976 Dodge Ram gets 7 miles per gallon, my 1971 New Yorker does 6 miles per gallon. Both blow under 25 PPM hydrocarbon on a (voluntary) dyno emissions test. (Yeah, they're expensive, when I punch the gas, I can see the gauge moving - but I like 'em, and I can afford it.)
Despite the stickers, your car isn't "Powered by Honda". It's powered by *gasoline*. The more you can mix with air and then burn, the more power you make. More displacement = more power. Period. Sure, you can get more power out of a drop of gas than I can - that's not in contest - but it's an incremental amount more. These aren't computers, car engines are a fairly mature technology and nothing really important has happened since the 1950s with the advent of the hemispherical combustion chamber. 2.2L vs. 6.6L? My smallest V8 is a full three times bigger than your engine. Your whiny little four-banger is a fly caught in my air filter.
While neither is a vintage musclecar, both of them have big-block V8s. 6.6L and 7.2L, respectively. The truck weighs in at 4,469lbs (with fuel and driver). The New Yorker comes in at 4,900 lbs, again, with fuel and driver.
Both of them have greater than 9.0:1 compression ratios, from the factory. Both of them have >270 duration cams, from the factory. Both of them have blown the doors off all sorts of real musclecars, let alone silly imported "tuned" riceboxes with big stereos, "Euro" (urinal) wipers and chainsaw exhaust tips.
I like to flick cigarette butts into those upturned exhaust tips. The water that puddles in your muffler puts them out very nicely.
efficiency which yeilds 200 hp out of that "whiny little"Good for you. You may put 200 brake horsepower out your crankshaft, 6,000 RPM, probably with a whopping 50 foot-pounds of torque at that. I put well over 200 SAE net horsepower out at my tires in a vehicle that weighs merely twice as much. At 3,500 RPM, and with over 300 foot-pounds of torque. Who wins? I do. No contest.
Haven't you ever seen an Acura Integra? It's just a Prelude. Same whiny little engine with half the cylinders missing and pointed the wrong way in the engine bay. Huh? Please tell me you're a troll.
Nope. I'm one of the most devoted automotive fans you'll ever meet.
Actually they have the same number of cylinders and point the same way in the engine bay.8/2=4. Half the cylinders missing. One half of the "V" sliced off, at that. Ugh. Like a mastectomy.
Same engine? Uh uh. Different displacement, different casting, different mounting points... same manufacturer though, that's about it.Different casting? Oh, that's news to me. Okay. I recind the "same engine" bit. But if the engine is still transverse-mounted and only four cylinders, it's not a real man's car.
You can't performance drive a front-wheel-drive car. Why is it that most cop cars are rear wheel drive? No torque steer! No MacPherson strut effects on your ackerman angles! Predictable behavior when you lose traction on one of your drive wheels!
The advantages of front wheel drive are cost of manufacture, weight (primarily for fuel economy reasons), and disposability (hit a curb, write off the car). Not reasons to be proud of a FWD car.
I've only seen one transverse-mount rear-wheel-drive car, and that was the Pontiac Fiero.
Besides, I've never seen a real man driving *any* Honda product.
Let's face facts. You hang around a good biker bar, or something like that. You won't hear conversation like "Ugh! Wow! He must be a tough dude. Look at his '94 Civic!"
"Ugh! Wow! He must be a boring, disposeable accountant! He's in a 1971 Hemi Cuda!"
And neither of them have the ever popular "V4" touted in the original post<grin> I let that one slide, too.
There are differences between the normal and marquee manufacturers. Significant ones in some cases although they could be termed luxuries, but if you want 'em you gotta pay for 'em. The Cimarron debacle... well I think Cadillac would prefer if that wasn't ever mentioned again.Whole-heartedly.
If they'd simply called it a Cavalier with the optional heated leather seats, I don't think anyone would have cared.
Actually, my daily-driver 1976 Dodge Ram has heated leather seats. They come in very handy in Toronto winters. (They're out of a 1997 Lincoln Town Car - I had to ditch the truck's bench, it was wrinkling my suits.)
My current car very well might fit in your trunk but you gotta catch it firstNo problem. A Chrysler 440 out of the box will easily haul a New Yorker in the 14-second range. (Remember, this is before Corporate Average Fuel Economy and emissions laws!) Lightly modded, I've seen a '72 New Yorker (different grill and tail lights, but that's about it) blow the doors off a Buick Grand National. And Grand Nationals are fast - my advice is that you should avoid challenging them at stoplights.
Further, keep in mind that my car gets just over 6 miles per gallon. The engine runs under thermostat almost all the time (except when I crank the Mopar Airtemp A/C on a hot day), the exhaust blows under 15 PPM hydrocarbon, so all that gas is going somewhere...
Old tech doesn't mean slow tech. These aren't computers. ;)
(It's a *lightly* modded NSX... not the fastest thing out there but still pretty fun)."Modded" = "tuned by" stickers all over it? Heheheh.... Wanna race my truck for pink slips? I've got a buddy who runs a scrapyard, after I blow your doors off, I'll take your car, run over it with the front end loader, toss it in the back of my truck for winter traction, and then take on your buddies.
Big stereos and stickers do not a racecar make.
If you're in the Toronto area, you also want to stay away from 1980 Chevettes, too. I've shoehorned a Buick 3.8L V6, TH-350, and Ford 8.8" diff with 4.91 posi into it. It pulls a solid 12.3 on the 1/4 mile, and it looks dead stock. You wouldn't want your girlfriend to notice that the rusty old Chevette you thought you left at the stoplight was still beside you.
(Speaking of sleepers, this is being typed from a Pentium-II 350 on an Asus motherboard that has been stuffed into a "Triton 8 MHz TurboXT" case, connected to an old NEC MultiSync 3D, and has a Compaq Deskpro 286 keyboard attached. No one will steal it...)
I love surprising people.
Let me explain this with a metaphor : car sales. Say you have an old treacherous Toyota salesman with two brands of cars on his lot. One is the economy model, it's a V4 engine and no extras. The other is the luxury model, which is a V4 engine with gold-plated spark plugs and automatic everything. It's the same crap with better spark plugs that give you a 4% increase in raw horsepower (which will equate to cleaner gas consumption that might register on high-end monitoring gear). However the luxury model costs twice as much as the economy model.
Haven't you ever seen an Acura Integra? It's just a Prelude. Same whiny little engine with half the cylinders missing and pointed the wrong way in the engine bay.
Or a Camry masquerading as a Lexus. Or a Maxima masquerading as an Infiniti.
Or, my personal favorite and mercifully discontinued, a Cavalier masquerading as a Cadillac (Cimarron).
Remember the good old days when there actually was a difference between the el-cheapo model and the real thing? When a 1971 Valiant and a 1971 New Yorker shared an alternator, a starter motor, and that was about it? (Having said that, I love both those cars; my Valiant's *grill* would trash anything on the road today, and that's without even pulling the 4,900lb 21-foot-long 7.2L V8-powered New Yorker Brougham out of the garage. Acuras, beware: or else I'll stuff your silly little car in my trunk.)
Then, I pause for a second, and think forward to the 1980s. The K-car masquerading as a New Yorker. My big-block 440 cubic inch V8 trembles, stumbing away momentarily from its normal silky-quiet power and smoothness as the thought crosses my mind. The bad karma surrounding the 1980s New Yorker has forever tainted the memory of the world's largest non-limousine passenger car.
The Yahoo servers for SMTP services that USER CONNECT TO have been quite flaky. I have outages that lasted up to a month. POP3 is also bad from time to time.
Their POP3 servers also appear to be affected adversely by Outlook. I have a friend who insists on using Outlook, and she e-mailed me. Yahoo's POP servers choked on it; I had to log in through their web access to delete the message. It's repeatable, though I don't know what part of the message kills it.
To top it off, she's one of these community college computer science students. She won't listen to me when I tell her that Outlook isn't standards-compliant. (And, I had to do three hours of tech support to help her install a second hard drive in her Windows 98 machine, to demonstrate what her third year at St. Lawrence College has taught her. She still doesn't have it working, mostly because she doesn't believe you can only run two IDE devices on each IDE bus.) <sigh>
Note Yahoo commonly gets swamped the SMTP from outside world into Yahoo system to an actual account can take upto 8 hours. So enjoy the FREE mail.Yeah, I use one of these accounts. I just set up Sendmail on my gateway machine.
Oh goody. Another toy to distract the idiots in the "Honda Racing" Accords as they tailgate me down the Don Valley Parkway.
Thankfully, my truck can effortlessly demolish any Honda product ever made.
While this is great technology with many applications, I'd hope that people would have sufficient common sense not to use them in the car.
Sadly, in my drive to work every day, I see literally dozens of people reading newspapers folded up in their steering wheels, gabbing on the phone, eating breakfast (cereal - from a bowl - while driving a car that rolled back on hills (stickshift!) - the guy was *good*), doing make-up, shaving, etc.
I just worry that this innovation will only result in more traffic jams.
I hung-up.... Poor bunny
Kitten, damn you, kitten!
When I got home, the microwave oven transformer attached to the answering machine was warm, and there's a big oily-black carbon spot with tufts of tabby fur all over the place...
*Note: To understand call the number, use *67 in Toronto for call privacyHey man, if I was worried about my answering machine, would I have posted the number to Slashdot? Nah. I don't care, it amuses me. I own the first answering machine in world history to be Slashdotted. Over 400 calls so far, and the old 386SX has taken it just fine. I don't answer caller ID numbers I don't recognize, and my ringer is turned off before I go to bed.
Want the outgoing message in MP3, WAV or Faxtalk Messenger's proprietary modified ADPCM VOX file? E-mail me.
:)
To: BogBlockMopar
Hey! I've got a 625 CFM Carter AFB carburetor on a Chrysler 400 CID (6.6L) V8. She doesn't bog, I assure you.
Actually, it's in a pickup truck without a Sure-Grip differential. Pulling away from a light without smoking off a 235-75R15 is tough. Let alone killing my manifold vacuum.
[redneck carspeak] No sir, she don't bog.
My client, Mr. Claus, respectfully requests that you and all the other k1dd135 on the planet quit sending him unsolicited e-messages requesting toys. If you continue this practice, I will be forced to notify your ISP and ask them to terminate your account.Wouldn't even Santa find such a tool useful? :)
Is your email address: slant6mopar@yahxx.com ? It seems a spambot just scarfed it up!
Bastard! I hope you get a melanoma on your glans.
Spammers are now running dictionary attacks against SMTP servers. A spammer will connect to mail.example.com and try a large (if not exaustive) list of possible usernames. If the mail server gives an 'OK' message the address is added to the spammers list; if it gets a 'user unknown' it discards it and goes on to the next.
Oh jeez, that's spooky.
I'm administering several small domains running Linux. Now, I gotta admit, I still haven't read the many great thick tomes on Sendmail. I do have relaying from outside my LANs turned off, of course, but that's the only overt anti-spam measure I've taken.
Running Sendmail 8.9.3, can anything be done to stop this?
I assume modifying Sendmail to give an OK reply to every attempted username would simply result in a deluge of messages being bounced which would eat my bandwidth and still wouldn't protect my users. Turning off the OK to username queries would probably effectively block all incoming e-mail.
So, what's a small-time sysadmin supposed to do?
It is too bad there is no way to poison the sender of the spam. Spammers will evolve beyond this, they always do.
On my Christmas Wish List, I want Santa to bring me something that doesn't exist. Something that's a great idea, but not actually possible. Ya know, like world peace, honest politicians or stable Microsoft products.
I want an e-mail client that will automatically detect spam and e-mail virus hoaxes - with 100% accuracy, so I don't lose real messages - and without any intervention on my part, smurf the sender.
Because, Dear Santa, I wish to be able to post my e-mail address with impunity, for all to see.
If I remember correctly, After the recall of the original Pentiums, some company was selling jewelry made out of the defective silicon. Apparently, Intel was just going to throw them away and someone bought the lot. A necklace with an inset Pentium cost around $15, if I remember correctly.
Yeah, I've seen them, but it's not what I want. I'm looking for one in the original case with the huge gold-plated die cover in the ceramic. They looked like jewelery on their own; I want to tastefully frame it. With due diligence to static protection, of course.
If you look at the old days of radio - when radio was still as new as computers - some of the early technological gaffes are now highly sought after. I'd like to do my part for history and preserve one.
As for the recalled P60s/66s, can you imagine being the poor son of a bitch with the job of breaking the dies out of the spiders? Ugh. Must have been hell.
I've got an FDIV P60. In fact, I'm using it right now. This old things survived alot..going on six years this Friday in fact. Most of the original hardware is still intact with the exception of an additional HD (old one is still functional, just too damn small), more RAM, and a new case fan.
Nice. I still have a few old machines on my home LAN. The computer that answers my phone is a 386SX with an old external 28.8k modem running Faxtalk Messenger on Windows 3.1. (You can Slashdot it at (416) 755-8870; it amuses me. Messages are moved as they arrive to my webserver so I can check them online.)
Oh, and a network card. Other than that, the SB16 still plays, the 3X CDROM still spins, and the 2400 baud modem probably still works but I haven't needed it for a while now.If it's a real Creative Labs SB-16, that's great! Those things are really easy to hack. On mine, I've built the entire output buffer amplifier into a shielded box. The original used LM741 output buffer amplifiers; I've replaced them with TL084s, which are a very low noise op-amp. It's cranked the signal to noise ratio from about 60 to about 80 (tested) and brought the THD down from about 1.3% to 0.1%. It's now a sound card that is a good match for the Sound A-5000 amplifier and Acoustic Research AR-4x speakers that serve as my main computer's sound system.
Though, I wish the damned thing was PCI. <grin> I can't find any decent PCI sound cards that I can hack at a component level...
I'm still waiting for my replacement chip, but I don't think that's going to happen. Oh well.And if it does, it'll be warehouse fresh, not factory fresh. Heheheh.
Just watch your processor cooling system carefully. And those are especially vulnerable to power cycles. (Big die of brittle silicon that gets heated and cooled a lot when you turn it on and off.)
$5 for a 75 mhz pentium, link is here
I have yet to see a 5 volt Pentium 75.
Yeah it was difficult, but all the idiots that used the same heatsink and fan combos that were designed to cool a 66-MHx i486 processor got what they deserved when their 66-MHZ Pentium processors overheated. Putting a computer together isn't like working with legos, you know. A little reading would have gone a LONG way in preventing the meltdowns.
Ever seen a Compaq P60? Or a Gateway P60? These weren't clones with crappy cases, 1" square nameplates, and assembly quality like that. These are mass-produced machines, designed by engineers, who had probably read all of Intel's docs. And I've seen lots of them where the active heatsink just couldn't keep up.
I remember an IBM server with the new cutting-edge P66. Now, towards the end of the 486 era, a lot of the manufacturers (as opposed to clone builders) were getting to large passive heatsinks and even interesting fan solutions. The old HP Vectra 486 machines had a fan mounted above a heatsink-less processor. The fan blew air across the top of the processor at a 45 degree angle.
But all the early Pentium machines that I ever touched had active heatsinks, just like most of today's processors. From the real manufacturers, they had somewhat more substantial fans than the "Ball Bearing" made-in-Taiwan crap that clone builders (still) use.
And this IBM was no exception. There was nothing wrong with the fan - it still spun, and it was a good quality piece. It was a Panaflow 12VDC brushless fan mounted to a 2" tall extruded aluminum heatsink, strapped onto the top of this processor. When I got to the machine, the remains of the blades of the fan didn't show any signs of dirt, dust or cigarette smoke accumulation. The fan even spun freely. But the plastic frame of the fan was warped and the blades had been distorted. It made a hell of a vibration when it started up, and the owner had brought the machine in for us to fix because the computer was noisy and smelled really bad of something melting. I replaced the fan (Nidec cast-aluminum with a composite impeller, $30 fan, use them in all my computers to this day), re-routed some ribbon cables away from the processor to see if I could give it more airflow, and then my co-workers and I were betting on when it would come back. It didn't.
The FDIV bug impacted 60-MHz, 66-MHz, 75-MHz, 90-MHz and 100-MHz Pentium processors.Yeah, okay. I got ahead of myself, I apologize. It was late 1994 when Intel fixed the FDIV bug. The Pentium 75 was commonly shipping at the time; the P90 was popular, the P100 was the high-end chip, and the P120 was just on the horizon.
I've never noticed a P75 with the bug, but because of where I've worked, we didn't have many of the 3.3V-generation Pentiums to support until around the P100. And that was well into 1995.
The 120-MHz Pentium processor was the first processor to *not* have the FDIV bug impacting it.I think it's fairer to say that the P-120 is the first one that has never had a release with the FDIV problem. I assure you, Intel has made P75s to P100s without the FDIV.
But all of the high-voltage Pentiums were affected; unless they were replaced under Intel's recall, they had the FDIV flaw.
Shouldn't that be the top 9.9999999348 Intel slipups?
Yeah. Speaking of that, what about the FDIV bug that made the early Pentiums completely unsuitable for AutoCAD and spreadsheets?
Hell, all you'd need is a stack of P60s and you could easily knock SETI@Home out of the water.
Actually, even if they didn't have the FDIV bug, the old coffee warmers were enough of a kludge themselves to be listed as a bug or slipup.
For those who don't remember them, or weren't into computers at the time, the original Pentium 60 and Pentium 66 used the Socket 4. They didn't have the staggered pins like a Pentium 75-233 had, they had rowed pins like a 486.
Also, like most 486s, they ran at 5V. And, as a result, they got hot.
Man, oh man, did they get hot. Especially the short-lived Pentium 66.
They had constant cooling problems. I've seen several P60s and P66s where the cooling fans stalled and were actually melted or scorched by the heat of the processor. They were also prone to failure, since they'd often run at 60-70C, turning on and off a system with an early Pentium was a great way to cause thermal cycling second to none. Since the processors had big dies too, they were very prone to cracking.
I've burned my fingers on a few of the damned things.
Thankfully, Intel came out with the 3.3V Pentium 75 shortly after that, and it addressed both the FDIV bug and the heating.
Here in the Toronto area, there's a chain of stores called Cash Converters. They're a thrift shop that tries to be upmarket, but there's the usual 486DX-33 for only $400! kind of cluelessness. And top-loading VHS VCRs for only $100. (Hell, you can buy a new one for that much!) But sometimes, you find cool old stuff in there.
This summer, I was with a friend who was looking around for lenses for an old Canon camera and we were in the Victoria Park at Danforth store. In their display case along with a pile of other processors and memory - no static protection or anything - was a Pentium 60.
This P60 was blackened like an Apollo capsule that has re-entered Earth's atmosphere. And the price tag sticker on it? Only $150. Wow. Sweet deal.
I'd actually like to have an old P60 chip that I can frame and stick up on a wall somewhere. But $150? Heheheh. I'd love to see the sucker who buys that thing.
Can I post the picture of your mom having sex with hitler that I made in photoshop, or is regulation only of things that offend *other* people ridiculous socialism?
Go for it. I'd consider that to be freedom of expression. Have a party.
At the same time, however, recognize that I'll post that picture I have of you banging a sheep.
Socialism is evil, like communism, it doesn't work. France is a socialist country. And *I* live in a socialist country.
If you want to be taxed all to hell to pay for silly protectionist policies and the stupidity of the proles, that's fine with me: just leave me the hell out of it.
I prefer a capitalism, which rewards those who work hard, and punishes laziness.
French judge has upheld an earlier ruling ordering Yahoo! to ban French users from buying Nazi memorabilia from its auction site. Even though the content is not accessible from www.yahoo.fr/ the ruling insists that even "the visualization in France of these objects" on the www.yahoo.com auction site constitutes a breach of French law and orders Yahoo to bar all French IPs from accessing it despite Yahoo's assertions that this would not guarantee that nobody in France would be able to see it.
Okay. If *anyone* here can sew together a Nazi uniform for a GI Joe action figure or something, you *need* to do it, and you *need* to put it up on Yahoo Auctions.
I dunno. In France, do the judges wear silly wigs like the British? There must be some sort of attire that can be comfortably merged with a red swastika armband as a freedom of speech protest.
Damned socialists.
You bastard! That is a IBM's legendary buckling spring M-type keyboard that the kid drilled on! Those keyboards deserve some respect, I tell ya, they are better than any of CmdrTaco's lame keyboards combined.
Agreed. The only keyboard in the same league as those (and their compact PS/2 cousin) is the two-tone brown keyboard that shipped with early Compaq Deskpros. Actually, I like it for exactly the opposite reasons that I like the loud IBM spring-loaders.
Sometimes, you want to feel like you're using a Selectric to type your e-mail, sometimes you don't.
I wish the guy had destroyed a really cheesy no-name clone keyboard instead.
Then all of a suddent the computer crashed and we were even more amazed as what we saw was:
] CATALOG
<grin> I used to work for a TV station. At the time, all of our titling was done with Chyron boxes in the studio, and our mobile stuff was done with a genlocked Amiga 2000 and a copy of Broadcast Titler 2.0.
Well, Amigas were fine computers. I love them dearly, and I have several, but I've never known them to be too stable.
Neither was this one. In the middle of a live broadcast, the computer crashed. It took a good few seconds before any of us noticed the little "Zzzz" mouse pointer (an Amiga hourglass, if you will, looks like a cartoon sleep bubble) sitting in the corner of the Program and On-Air monitors.
Of course, this was for the Progressive Conservative Leadership Convention in Ottawa a few years ago; a big political thing. And the news director couldn't stop flipping out that the Zzzz looked like we were trying to editorialize the guy currently giving a long and boring speech on the screen.
No matter what, always remember, if the character generator is not actively superimposing a title, switch it off of the Program bus.