There's a reason for the addition of the spoiler on later model year TTs.
Most probably there is a reason. However, (at least here in Europe), every owner of an original TT could get a free upgrade to the spoiler version. That was not the only thing changed: they also modified the suspension and a whole list of other things. Note that the spoiler that was *not* mandatory in the recall. If you wanted you could leave it out. Occasionally I see one without, but mostly all have spoilers. (The TT is a very popular car here, you see at least 5 a day, if not 10.)
Also in the same recall you could optionally add ESP if you didn't have it. That however cost about 350€.
Why do I know this? Simple: I own one. I have an "original TT", and it's got a spoiler and ESP. I just want to add that I drove 200kmh with it before it was modified and it behaved perfectly normal at that speed. Of course it was on a clear straight highway. I still wonder what exactly went wrong with the people that lost control of their TT's, but apparently I wasn't driving fast enough to get strange behaviour.
For every knowledgeable enthusiast, there are many more misinformed or incorrect speculators whose opinions usually spring from personal preference or a need to hear themselves talk.
And this differs from Slashdot, how?;-)
Driving an unmodified car and proud of it. Can't stand "overtuned" cars.
As the other poster mentioned, it was illegal in France. If I recall correctly it were the banks that lobbied to make it legal since weak encryption was a no-no for eBanking. (And, yes, I am in the eBanking bussiness). Similar restriction did exists in other countries.
I live in Europe and therefore I can't easily download strong-encryption PGP, but if I do, whose fault is it? Mine, or the server that hosts it in the US?
Uhm, as far as I know most EU countries repealed those laws. Otherwhise, I'm a criminal and didn't even know it.
Heck, I bought the OpenBSD CD's (which includes strong encryption) from a Belgian company. That would be impossible if strong encryption were illegal in Europe.
(Of course, IANAL)
Ah, the P3 800Mhz... That was my machine a few years ago. It's now my parents/brother machine. My brother plays GTA3 and Vice City all the time on it.. Works like a charm, but it does have 768Meg RAM.
Personally, I either run my good old iBook or my dual Athlon MP 2400/1GB RAM (which I have never managed to get full) That one runs Linux, FreeBSD and Win2K.
Don't dispair, my friend... Did you show her a Mac yet? She might just go for the prettyness and then you're safe. Girls like pretty things after all:-) (And as a bonus, you get Unix for play with)
You haven't convinced her? Huh? Even after showing her that your rig is a (improvising here) P-II 333/128Meg running WindowMaker. Custom compiled kernel of course;-) (I'm just saying this because I did something like that a few years ago)
Well, mine was really pissed after she saw my iBook. I let her play around with OS X and she was delighted. Why she is pissed? Because she didn't know of the existence of Apple before me. For what she shelled out for that OEM machine (it's even worse, I work for the company that makes those fucking OEM machines), she could have had a real nice Mac. Waaaay better than my 3-year old iBook.
Look around for people that bought a new PC. If you're lucky they still have their old one. If you're really lucky, they think it is a piece of crap because it runs so slow.
Case in point, my girlfriend (there goes my/. credibility) bought a P-IV 2.4HT with huge flat-planel screen, DVD burner, 512Meg RAM and I'm surely skipping things. Her brother bought something similar (but slightly lower-spec) at the same time. Now, well, they bought this before she knew me.
So, I find out they didn't throw away the old machine. I ask her to show it to me, expecting a later P-I or even a P-II (it was running slow after all). My eyeballs nearly fell out! The fucking this was a P-III 500MHz, 10Gig harddisk, CD-Burner, 64Meg RAM. You can already guess why this felt slow...
Anyways, a 256Meg RAM stick later (which I always have lying around somewhere) and a 10Euro 10/100NIC later, I have it back up on full-speed. Nice little machine, really...
Oh, and you want to know what she does with her über-PCs? Surf the web, write letters in Word and ehm, burn the occasinal CD. That P-III would have done for the years to come.
So, in the end: look out for people that have bought new PC's and check out what they have in store. Anything from a P-II on is worth collecting. I have made P-II desktops for people without money from spare parts (which I collected from people thowing away "crap machines").
Well, I'm pretty sure that the i387 was a real coprocessor. I cited everything from memory, since back in those days I was heavily following PC's and I don't tend to forget these things.
The 486 was the first to introduce an on-die FPU, as you can read in wikipedia article . It mentions everything I tell, and more, so you really don't have to take my word for it.
The naming oddness with the 386 and 486 were marketing gimmics in order to sell low-spec CPU's to unsuspecting customers. Much like the early day Celerons without cache.
I can tell you the history of the x86 cpus up until the Pentium Pro (which I had back in theday), after that, I don't know the details anymore. Last Intel CPU that I had was a P-III 800Mhz which now happily serves my parents as a home computer. Okay, there is still one Intel machine in my house: a good old Pentium 166MMX powering my "server";-)
Nope, I live in Luxembourg and I can assure you that this country is the worst place to be to buy extravagant hardware. Heck, I can't even buy MiniITX boards here, I have to order them in the UK or elsewhere.
My MP board was ordered in Belgium (shop was recommended by a friend): mpl.be , and their shipping costs to Lux were acceptable. Alas, I had to pay Belgian VAT which is much higher than Lux VAT.
Nope... You have it wrong, in the 286 and the 386 days the chips didn't have an FPU. The 287 and the 387 were real FPUs. Floating point without the coprocessor was done in emulation and slow.
The only processor where your claim is true, is the 486SX, which had indeed the floating point unit disabled. When you bought the 487 (or Overdrive, not sure there), it was essentially a 486DX processor which turned off the 486SX processor.
The joke on the customer here was that SX and DX means something completely different on the 386 chip. (bus speed was doubled on a 386DX and not on a 386SX)
I have a AMD Athlon MP 2400+ system. Works just fine, and while I had to look around a bit to get the components, it wasn't that hard.
Of course, if you shun AMD, then I can't help you: most probably you will need to go the Xeon way then. Tyan has quite a lot of MP boards. Look at the Tiger family, that's what I have: Tyan Tiger 2466MPX.
"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." -- Edsger Dijkstra
That's odd. Science was actually the only thing that made sense to me. Analysing poetry and that kind of stuff "made no sense to me". I personally never heard anyone say "I hate science, it makes no sense". I did hear: "I don't like science, it [is too hard]/[has too much maths]/[is boring]/...".
Until the motherboard died about a year ago (or was it two?), I had a PPro 200 running Windows 2000. Granted, the machine had 256Meg RAM, but it ran really fine. No significant slowdowns, or lack of responsiveness. It might have helped that all disks were SCSI, but we won't go into that.
Well, okay, don't forget I'm talking about desktop tasks. Games (not countng fun but old games like halflife) were not doable, but I didn't care.
Your XP claim sounds reasonable, but only if you have more ram than 256Meg. At work there is a P-III 500Mhz with 256Meg RAM running XP professional and I find it very very slow. Luckily it's not my workstation:-)
then it's time to pull out the ammo box and have another revolutionary war.
I know that is the idea behind "the right to bear arms", but do you really think this could happen in these modern days? Even if you felt that you should take out the ammo box, and you find enough like-minded-people (and "your local militia" is far from enough to overthrow the entire US army), don't you think you would be jailed for conspiracy first?
Depends on your corporate environment. Where I work, we run Windows NT4 (properly separated from the internet) on brand new Dells. Sound cards? Yeah, the machines got them, but there are no drivers. DirectX? On NT4? DirectX 5 was the last one, I think.
Outlook Express? No trace of it, even IE is at 5.0 or so... We do use Outlook 98, but as I said.. properly firewalled.
I don't think that corporate setting is somehow exceptional.
Incorrect: Rod Malda (CmdrTaco) is the founder. Jon Pater (CowboyNeal) is the sysadmin. You need to brush up on your slashdot subculture. Reading this won't hurt either.;-)
I recognise your post. It is probably what I would have posted the week after I bought my first Mac OS X based machine. That was in december 2001. Quite some time ago.
You know, I was used to Windows (mostly NT4), and I got a Mac because I heard so much good about OS X. I was lost, angry, disapointed. I hated my Mac. Why did I spend over 2000€ for this piece of crap? No, seriously...after two weeks of usage, I learnt that my mind had been deformed by Micosoft Windows. I let Windows loose, and now the OSX interface makes sense. For me it took two weeks of getting used to.
And you know what? I gave my Mac to my sister, a "Jane Sixpack" as we say in this place. She didn't ask any question. She was surfing, used iPhoto and iMovie, and whatnot.
You fail to see that once you learnt something you are inevitably linked to it. "unformatted" people don't have this problem. Ask my sister....
was 4GB, but when the HD died, I found out it is ~impossible to find 20GB HDs anymore
Yes, exactly! Last time I needed a new harddisk (that was, uhm, two years ago), 20Gigs was already a dying breed. Actually, I wanted smaller for my server, but alas, nothing smaller than 20Gig was there. So, I had to settle for that. Which is annoying because my old server won't boot from 20Gig drives, so it has a 1.5Gig drive just for bootstrap purposes too. Stupid, but that's the way it is.
What are the smallest sizes these days? 60Gig? Or already 80Gig? I haven't bene paying attention lately.
If you drive an average, 20 mpg car or small truck in America, the engine is capable of generating 200 horsepower (or more) when you slam down on the accelerator.
Uhm... I'm not an automobile engineer, but somebody got to explain this to me. Is the *average* American car really in the 200HP range? I mean, I have a 225HP car, and that's considered "a lot" in Europe. Is there anybody that can explain this to me?
Uhm, in that logic is a failure. Right now everybody and his brother can rip. However if only a few dozen can rip (you, me, etc...), and we put that on P2P or freenet....
That is exactly the same as when everybody can rip. Once information is free (and bits 'n bytes are just information) there is no restraint
Same here... W2k will be my last Windows version. I have to maintaine XP for my girlfriend and I never *never* had so much problems. My W2k systems works perfectly fine though. Okay, since I put her system behind my OpenBSD firewall, there weren't any problems anymore...
But still...My good old SMP machine will have to switch to Linux or FreeBSD soon. I miss Unix way too much (personal laptop = iBook, running OS X... at work often Sun Solaris over ssh)
Slashdot Mirror
Most probably there is a reason. However, (at least here in Europe), every owner of an original TT could get a free upgrade to the spoiler version. That was not the only thing changed: they also modified the suspension and a whole list of other things. Note that the spoiler that was *not* mandatory in the recall. If you wanted you could leave it out. Occasionally I see one without, but mostly all have spoilers. (The TT is a very popular car here, you see at least 5 a day, if not 10.)
Also in the same recall you could optionally add ESP if you didn't have it. That however cost about 350€.
Why do I know this? Simple: I own one. I have an "original TT", and it's got a spoiler and ESP. I just want to add that I drove 200kmh with it before it was modified and it behaved perfectly normal at that speed. Of course it was on a clear straight highway. I still wonder what exactly went wrong with the people that lost control of their TT's, but apparently I wasn't driving fast enough to get strange behaviour.
And this differs from Slashdot, how? ;-)
Driving an unmodified car and proud of it. Can't stand "overtuned" cars.
As the other poster mentioned, it was illegal in France. If I recall correctly it were the banks that lobbied to make it legal since weak encryption was a no-no for eBanking. (And, yes, I am in the eBanking bussiness). Similar restriction did exists in other countries.
Uhm, as far as I know most EU countries repealed those laws. Otherwhise, I'm a criminal and didn't even know it.
Heck, I bought the OpenBSD CD's (which includes strong encryption) from a Belgian company. That would be impossible if strong encryption were illegal in Europe.
(Of course, IANAL)
Personally, I either run my good old iBook or my dual Athlon MP 2400/1GB RAM (which I have never managed to get full) That one runs Linux, FreeBSD and Win2K.
Don't dispair, my friend... Did you show her a Mac yet? She might just go for the prettyness and then you're safe. Girls like pretty things after all :-) (And as a bonus, you get Unix for play with)
Well, mine was really pissed after she saw my iBook. I let her play around with OS X and she was delighted. Why she is pissed? Because she didn't know of the existence of Apple before me. For what she shelled out for that OEM machine (it's even worse, I work for the company that makes those fucking OEM machines), she could have had a real nice Mac. Waaaay better than my 3-year old iBook.
Case in point, my girlfriend (there goes my /. credibility) bought a P-IV 2.4HT with huge flat-planel screen, DVD burner, 512Meg RAM and I'm surely skipping things. Her brother bought something similar (but slightly lower-spec) at the same time. Now, well, they bought this before she knew me.
So, I find out they didn't throw away the old machine. I ask her to show it to me, expecting a later P-I or even a P-II (it was running slow after all). My eyeballs nearly fell out! The fucking this was a P-III 500MHz, 10Gig harddisk, CD-Burner, 64Meg RAM. You can already guess why this felt slow...
Anyways, a 256Meg RAM stick later (which I always have lying around somewhere) and a 10Euro 10/100NIC later, I have it back up on full-speed. Nice little machine, really...
Oh, and you want to know what she does with her über-PCs? Surf the web, write letters in Word and ehm, burn the occasinal CD. That P-III would have done for the years to come.
So, in the end: look out for people that have bought new PC's and check out what they have in store. Anything from a P-II on is worth collecting. I have made P-II desktops for people without money from spare parts (which I collected from people thowing away "crap machines").
The 486 was the first to introduce an on-die FPU, as you can read in wikipedia article . It mentions everything I tell, and more, so you really don't have to take my word for it.
The naming oddness with the 386 and 486 were marketing gimmics in order to sell low-spec CPU's to unsuspecting customers. Much like the early day Celerons without cache.
I can tell you the history of the x86 cpus up until the Pentium Pro (which I had back in theday), after that, I don't know the details anymore. Last Intel CPU that I had was a P-III 800Mhz which now happily serves my parents as a home computer. Okay, there is still one Intel machine in my house: a good old Pentium 166MMX powering my "server" ;-)
My MP board was ordered in Belgium (shop was recommended by a friend): mpl.be , and their shipping costs to Lux were acceptable. Alas, I had to pay Belgian VAT which is much higher than Lux VAT.
The only processor where your claim is true, is the 486SX, which had indeed the floating point unit disabled. When you bought the 487 (or Overdrive, not sure there), it was essentially a 486DX processor which turned off the 486SX processor.
The joke on the customer here was that SX and DX means something completely different on the 386 chip. (bus speed was doubled on a 386DX and not on a 386SX)
Of course, if you shun AMD, then I can't help you: most probably you will need to go the Xeon way then. Tyan has quite a lot of MP boards. Look at the Tiger family, that's what I have: Tyan Tiger 2466MPX.
"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." -- Edsger Dijkstra
That would be Wirth. Also see his "official homepage" My first year CS was Oberon... A Pascal derivate. :-)
That's odd. Science was actually the only thing that made sense to me. Analysing poetry and that kind of stuff "made no sense to me". I personally never heard anyone say "I hate science, it makes no sense". I did hear: "I don't like science, it [is too hard]/[has too much maths]/[is boring]/...".
Well, okay, don't forget I'm talking about desktop tasks. Games (not countng fun but old games like halflife) were not doable, but I didn't care.
Your XP claim sounds reasonable, but only if you have more ram than 256Meg. At work there is a P-III 500Mhz with 256Meg RAM running XP professional and I find it very very slow. Luckily it's not my workstation :-)
I know that is the idea behind "the right to bear arms", but do you really think this could happen in these modern days? Even if you felt that you should take out the ammo box, and you find enough like-minded-people (and "your local militia" is far from enough to overthrow the entire US army), don't you think you would be jailed for conspiracy first?
It's a naive question, I know...
Outlook Express? No trace of it, even IE is at 5.0 or so... We do use Outlook 98, but as I said.. properly firewalled.
I don't think that corporate setting is somehow exceptional.
Like Excel...
(Ouch... I forgot to put on my asbestos suit.
I know... when I found that entry, I was laughing my butt off. I did learn some stuff though. (I didn't know about the "In Japan" jokes)
Incorrect: Rod Malda (CmdrTaco) is the founder. Jon Pater (CowboyNeal) is the sysadmin. You need to brush up on your slashdot subculture. Reading this won't hurt either. ;-)
You know, I was used to Windows (mostly NT4), and I got a Mac because I heard so much good about OS X. I was lost, angry, disapointed. I hated my Mac. Why did I spend over 2000€ for this piece of crap? No, seriously...after two weeks of usage, I learnt that my mind had been deformed by Micosoft Windows. I let Windows loose, and now the OSX interface makes sense. For me it took two weeks of getting used to.
And you know what? I gave my Mac to my sister, a "Jane Sixpack" as we say in this place. She didn't ask any question. She was surfing, used iPhoto and iMovie, and whatnot.
You fail to see that once you learnt something you are inevitably linked to it. "unformatted" people don't have this problem. Ask my sister....
Yes, exactly! Last time I needed a new harddisk (that was, uhm, two years ago), 20Gigs was already a dying breed. Actually, I wanted smaller for my server, but alas, nothing smaller than 20Gig was there. So, I had to settle for that. Which is annoying because my old server won't boot from 20Gig drives, so it has a 1.5Gig drive just for bootstrap purposes too. Stupid, but that's the way it is.
What are the smallest sizes these days? 60Gig? Or already 80Gig? I haven't bene paying attention lately.
Funny that nucleardog.com website ;-)
Uhm... I'm not an automobile engineer, but somebody got to explain this to me. Is the *average* American car really in the 200HP range? I mean, I have a 225HP car, and that's considered "a lot" in Europe. Is there anybody that can explain this to me?
Uhm, in that logic is a failure. Right now everybody and his brother can rip. However if only a few dozen can rip (you, me, etc...), and we put that on P2P or freenet....
That is exactly the same as when everybody can rip. Once information is free (and bits 'n bytes are just information) there is no restraint
But still...My good old SMP machine will have to switch to Linux or FreeBSD soon. I miss Unix way too much (personal laptop = iBook, running OS X... at work often Sun Solaris over ssh)