Re:How bout the same X session and two cursors?
on
Two Headed Penguins?
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· Score: 1
One note. I've done this in Mac OS and a few versions of Windows, on laptop machines with no problems, but never under Linux.
With many computers, if you connect a secondary pointing device, keyboard and display, you'll have exactly what you're talking about. Haven't tried it with a desktop, but I'd be surprised if it didn't work. I would avoid using identical devices. Just put one user on PS/2 and the other on USB.
Re:The Real Exploration Vehicles vs Poseurs
on
The Ultimate S.U.V.
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· Score: 2
Actually, the MaxiMog was built in part by Unicat. Look here.
Good idea, actually. Most of those wings look like good "car handles." Sadly, I can't pick up the car to test it out. On a laptop, it would be more aerodynamic, so it would be faster, and I'd have some way of carrying the computer about.
A couple of security suggestions:
1) Avoid sequential numbering.
2) The Mag stripe should have information that's not printed on the card.
3) Printed information on the card should be verified against data from the swipe.
4) Mag card numbers should be independent of any specific user information.
- HDTV sets are *really* expensive. They will remain so until volume grows, so this is a chicken-and-egg problem with no reasonable solution. Most people will NOT buy a new TV to deal with HDTV. TV viewership is falling as it is with more and more channels of tripe. Really high-fidelity tripe is not likely to sell any better.
I agree with the tripe comment. I remember what MTV used to be! HDTV sets do tend to be expensive, but there is a wildcard out there that's mixing things up. HDTV monitors allow people to buy HD-capable televisions for a marginally higher price than an analog tv. By leaving out the HDTV tuner, consumers can buy a tv now, when they need a new one, and get the tuner box later, when prices are lower and programming is more available. Here's an example. Circuit City has the Hitachi 32UDX10S 32" HDTV monitor for $1299, they also have the Sony KV32FV27 for $1199. So you can get an entry-level HD capable set for just a little more than a good analog tv.
And remote car starters? You would have to disable the clutch interlock, so imagine you're parked on a city street with your car in gear. You start the car remotely and - BANG - your starter motor pushes your car into another one. Or down a hill.
You need a slushbox. Most of these starter kits say "For use on vehicles with automatic transmissions."
I can think of better ways to hack within a car: How bout an audio system that lets you record instead of just play?
Look at Sony's Minidisc head units. JC Whitney used to sell a dual cassette head unit with high speed dubbing and recording.
Re:Wanna see something completely fscked?
on
This is IT?
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· Score: 2
That's IIS for you. It's error messages look too much like MSIE.
I don't even run a floppy on my computer. I'd like to see bios updates distributed as ISO images that can be burned to a CD. (Roxio could make a fortune on this - self burning images?) Alternately, you could make the system fetch an update via the internet - just put a small os image with a basic GUI in the rom. Include a flash program, networking services (including dialup) and you'll have what you need for an intuitive bios setup application, and an easy reliable bios flash.
I just got mine in the mail - mostly because of this story! It's really a delight for surfing, and the setup of the machine took maybe 20 minutes. The only issues I ran into were:
Well, it's the first time I've had to do a cpu heatsink since the socket 3 days. Everyone had me worried about flipchips... Too easy, but I did take a couple of minutes orient everything before snapping the heatsink in place.
Things are tight in there, but not annoyingly so. The biggest problem with the machine overall was that the 5.25" bay is short. I wanted to move my old HP 8200i internal cd-rw in. I couldn't. It bumped against the back panel AC jack with another 1/2" to go. I ended up having to put a crummy (sounds like a vacuum) Acer 24x cd-rom in. It barely fit. It temporary though. I have my eyes on a DVD-R CD-RW combo...:) Just have to pay for the rest of this machine first...
The audio is very quiet out the back panel jacks, and somewhat quiet out the front. I need to look into that.
Overall, A+ machine, much better than the last build I did (and if you caught the Socket 3 reference, you know it's been a while).
With the 128MB of ram (temporary measure only) Windows XP Pro screams.
I'm sitting at my desk right now wearing chain mail, a leather brigadine , a beautiful leather cloak, and English riding boots. Girded at my side is my longsword, and after work, I think I'll head down to the tavern and drink some ale in my leather mug. What do you have on?
Kind of reminds me of The Big U ( here and right here) by Neal Stephenson. A real Fred Fine vibe going on.
That link, my friend, would be one of the best slashdot stories ever. And I say this as someone who is platform agnostic. Steve Jobs has a reality distortion field, sure. It's a mix of charisma, black turtleneck, and worn jeans. Bill has aquired one as well, even if it's just the result of having more money, and having Steve Balmer running morale duty. Microsoft insiders have an inflated image of him. Microsoft.com recently had a rather saucy offer: "See Bill Gates and Sting at the Windows XP launch! Click here!
You're not talking about the internal antenna, are you? One of my co-workers bought it. He saw no improvement. At the very least, I'd expect that there would be a few models so the antenna could be tuned for the frequency used by the phone. To my knowledge, there is no such product. If you want more detail, call Miss. Cleo.
I'm sure there are a ton of Apple junkies out there checking the major sites. I suspect you'll find something here really fast. They might get a +1 Informative out of it.
Connectix, long time purveyors of Virtual PC (I've seen a number of Mac versions, as well as a NeXT version an I think a few variations of IRIX and Solaris) released a version for Windows a few months back. Virtual PC for Windows allows you to create a virtual x86 box on your Windows machine, without any partitions.
I think you might also be able to emulate a dos environment inside of Mandrake's LNX4WIN.
Or you could go buy an old machine for a song. Try Goodwill. Go to a garage sale. Bring a $20.
Not too clear from your article - is your exhibit for consumption on the web, or some sort of real world show? If the latter, you have many, many more options, including special software.
If I assume that your exhibit will be on a web site, I'd suggest a few things...
First, text rendering in html tends to be iffy. PDF tends to work a bit better.
I'd try telnet. It's possible to embed a java telnet client to allow your web-based users a quick connection to ASCII/ANSI content.
As for the RIP, you'll probably be best off with screen captures. If you're willing to go into a great deal more effort, you could try to convert them into Flash animations. It would suck to do, but I would think it would be possible. RIP is just relativly easy to interpret commands in plain old ascii. The geekish could even create it in vi. I've seen perl create flash animations in real time. I suppose it would be within the realm of someone versed in Perl to create something that would do the translation. No idea about NAPLPS.
The Amiga thing could be done a few ways. My favorite is to get a Amiga and do screen caps. Could even automate the process with AREXX. IIRC JRCOMM supported event handling.
Dealerships would have yet another method for selling cars. "Mr. Protagonist, this is Mr. Mitnick at the dealership. As you may recall, you drove a red Toyota last Tuesday. The car enjoyed your visit, but I'm afraid been unable to give a test drive since you left. It's just been curled up in a corner of the dealership sobbing and watching Herbie movies. Mr. Protagonist, that car loves you. Most people look all their life for love like that. If I were you, I'd get down here to the dealership, and get down on one knee and ask that car's forgiveness. Besides, we have some great finance rates."
Look for stupid "sitting" services, like those offered to Cabbage Patch and Tamagotchi owners. For just a few dollars, you can have someone say nice things to your car while it's in long-term storage at the airport.
The rumors are that Geos is being reskinned with an Aqua interface. I'd still suggest upgrading your hardware - GS OS X is supposed to be much more feature rich.
Agreed. Linux is pretty good, but IMHO, classic Mac OS is probably the best platform for battery life. Just stick to OS 9 (9.2.1 is current). Unless something big happened with OS X 10.1, X is a battery hog. Other people mentioned turning the display's brightness all the way down. Probably the single best gain there, but some other ideas:
Adjust the Energy Saver Control Panel settings for hard disk sleep. I find that very short times (1-2 minutes) don't make sense for surfing, but working inside of BBEdit, 1 min ute is perfect. The system seldom needs to read the disk, so I don't often waste energy on starting the drive.
Remove any media from the drives. The system can access removable drives for no apparent reason, wasting power.
Mentioned above, but worth repeating. Max out your ram. My iBook can take 320MB of ram, and that's just what I've installed. Made a big difference.
Turn off virtual memory. There's no need to use it for most applications. I turned it off when I got my ram, and never turned it on again.
If you're living in a text editor or other lightweight program, try creating a RAM disk. You may not need to touch your hard drive for hours...
Considering that the LCII has a 68LC020 processor and maxes out at 10MB RAM, I'd have to say no. Try Linux, though!
Actually, the LC II uses a 68030. IIRC, the only shipping Macs to use the 68020 processors are the Mac II and the LC. Both 68020 machines ran at 16Mhz, and neither had the "LC" designation. They can run *nix as long as the 68852 PMMU is installed.
The LC II should be able to run FreeBSD, Debian, and a RedHat 5.2 port that seems to only be available on a small university FTP server - I don't want to post it on slashdot.
I did own an LC 475 for a time, but unfortunately, many Linux distros have a hard time with most of the 68LC040 processors installed in Macs. Seems they were defective in some obscure way that the MacOS didn't care about, but Linux lived on. Of course, the easy fix is to drop in a 50 Mhz 68040 processor, but with PowerPC machines so cheap, it didn't seem like spending more money on the LC 475 was worth it.
I think a pizza box machine might be fun for a project though. Fairly fast without really needing a fan, good collection of ports, tiny motherboard with all I/O. One card slot that takes cards that lay flat, without needing some silly riser board. Available all day at eBay for ~$20. I still have a TV card lying around here somewhere...
I agree, to an extent. I have two machines that most of my computing is done on. One is a 466Mhz iBook that would have no problem running OS X. The other is a Pentium 100Mhz desktop. It has a few things that are up to date, like the hard drives, but for the most part the machine is a bit over the hill. My point, this machine can't really run Windows XP. It shouldn't be running ME. I wouldn't run anything later than 98 on it. It's a dog running KDE. BeOS is a dream though!:)
Operating systems move forward just like hardware. OS X is a big move forward, and Apple made a decision regarding incorporation of backward compatibility. At least Apple makes a few choice OS versions available for free on theirFTP server. As for the P100, it might become an MP3 server when I do the home network...
Obscurity isn't security. Look here. While I hope nobody would disclose sensitive info on Slashdot, a system that's comprimised by posting it's OS isn't secure in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
With many computers, if you connect a secondary pointing device, keyboard and display, you'll have exactly what you're talking about. Haven't tried it with a desktop, but I'd be surprised if it didn't work. I would avoid using identical devices. Just put one user on PS/2 and the other on USB.
Actually, the MaxiMog was built in part by Unicat. Look here.
Good idea, actually. Most of those wings look like good "car handles." Sadly, I can't pick up the car to test it out. On a laptop, it would be more aerodynamic, so it would be faster, and I'd have some way of carrying the computer about.
A couple of security suggestions:
1) Avoid sequential numbering.
2) The Mag stripe should have information that's not printed on the card.
3) Printed information on the card should be verified against data from the swipe.
4) Mag card numbers should be independent of any specific user information.
I agree with the tripe comment. I remember what MTV used to be! HDTV sets do tend to be expensive, but there is a wildcard out there that's mixing things up. HDTV monitors allow people to buy HD-capable televisions for a marginally higher price than an analog tv. By leaving out the HDTV tuner, consumers can buy a tv now, when they need a new one, and get the tuner box later, when prices are lower and programming is more available. Here's an example. Circuit City has the Hitachi 32UDX10S 32" HDTV monitor for $1299, they also have the Sony KV32FV27 for $1199. So you can get an entry-level HD capable set for just a little more than a good analog tv.
You need a slushbox. Most of these starter kits say "For use on vehicles with automatic transmissions."
Look at Sony's Minidisc head units. JC Whitney used to sell a dual cassette head unit with high speed dubbing and recording.
That's IIS for you. It's error messages look too much like MSIE.
I don't even run a floppy on my computer. I'd like to see bios updates distributed as ISO images that can be burned to a CD. (Roxio could make a fortune on this - self burning images?) Alternately, you could make the system fetch an update via the internet - just put a small os image with a basic GUI in the rom. Include a flash program, networking services (including dialup) and you'll have what you need for an intuitive bios setup application, and an easy reliable bios flash.
Well, it's the first time I've had to do a cpu heatsink since the socket 3 days. Everyone had me worried about flipchips... Too easy, but I did take a couple of minutes orient everything before snapping the heatsink in place.
Things are tight in there, but not annoyingly so. The biggest problem with the machine overall was that the 5.25" bay is short. I wanted to move my old HP 8200i internal cd-rw in. I couldn't. It bumped against the back panel AC jack with another 1/2" to go. I ended up having to put a crummy (sounds like a vacuum) Acer 24x cd-rom in. It barely fit. It temporary though. I have my eyes on a DVD-R CD-RW combo... :) Just have to pay for the rest of this machine first...
The audio is very quiet out the back panel jacks, and somewhat quiet out the front. I need to look into that.
Overall, A+ machine, much better than the last build I did (and if you caught the Socket 3 reference, you know it's been a while).
With the 128MB of ram (temporary measure only) Windows XP Pro screams.
That link, my friend, would be one of the best slashdot stories ever. And I say this as someone who is platform agnostic. Steve Jobs has a reality distortion field, sure. It's a mix of charisma, black turtleneck, and worn jeans. Bill has aquired one as well, even if it's just the result of having more money, and having Steve Balmer running morale duty. Microsoft insiders have an inflated image of him. Microsoft.com recently had a rather saucy offer: "See Bill Gates and Sting at the Windows XP launch! Click here!
Bill and Sting. Indeed.
You're not talking about the internal antenna, are you? One of my co-workers bought it. He saw no improvement. At the very least, I'd expect that there would be a few models so the antenna could be tuned for the frequency used by the phone. To my knowledge, there is no such product. If you want more detail, call Miss. Cleo.
See it here
I'm sure there are a ton of Apple junkies out there checking the major sites. I suspect you'll find something here really fast. They might get a +1 Informative out of it.
Well, I think the iWalk is bunk. It's 12:00 and the Apple Store is down.
Actually, this year. January to be exact.
I think you might also be able to emulate a dos environment inside of Mandrake's LNX4WIN.
Or you could go buy an old machine for a song. Try Goodwill. Go to a garage sale. Bring a $20.
If I assume that your exhibit will be on a web site, I'd suggest a few things...
First, text rendering in html tends to be iffy. PDF tends to work a bit better.
I'd try telnet. It's possible to embed a java telnet client to allow your web-based users a quick connection to ASCII/ANSI content.
As for the RIP, you'll probably be best off with screen captures. If you're willing to go into a great deal more effort, you could try to convert them into Flash animations. It would suck to do, but I would think it would be possible. RIP is just relativly easy to interpret commands in plain old ascii. The geekish could even create it in vi. I've seen perl create flash animations in real time. I suppose it would be within the realm of someone versed in Perl to create something that would do the translation. No idea about NAPLPS.
The Amiga thing could be done a few ways. My favorite is to get a Amiga and do screen caps. Could even automate the process with AREXX. IIRC JRCOMM supported event handling.
Look for stupid "sitting" services, like those offered to Cabbage Patch and Tamagotchi owners. For just a few dollars, you can have someone say nice things to your car while it's in long-term storage at the airport.
PS, why does this look so much like a BMW Isetta?
I can see it's emotional well-being endangered by goatse.cx links, frist prost-ers, and gratuitous Natalie Portman references.
The rumors are that Geos is being reskinned with an Aqua interface. I'd still suggest upgrading your hardware - GS OS X is supposed to be much more feature rich.
Adjust the Energy Saver Control Panel settings for hard disk sleep. I find that very short times (1-2 minutes) don't make sense for surfing, but working inside of BBEdit, 1 min ute is perfect. The system seldom needs to read the disk, so I don't often waste energy on starting the drive.
Remove any media from the drives. The system can access removable drives for no apparent reason, wasting power.
Mentioned above, but worth repeating. Max out your ram. My iBook can take 320MB of ram, and that's just what I've installed. Made a big difference.
Turn off virtual memory. There's no need to use it for most applications. I turned it off when I got my ram, and never turned it on again.
If you're living in a text editor or other lightweight program, try creating a RAM disk. You may not need to touch your hard drive for hours...
Actually, the LC II uses a 68030. IIRC, the only shipping Macs to use the 68020 processors are the Mac II and the LC. Both 68020 machines ran at 16Mhz, and neither had the "LC" designation. They can run *nix as long as the 68852 PMMU is installed.
The LC II should be able to run FreeBSD, Debian, and a RedHat 5.2 port that seems to only be available on a small university FTP server - I don't want to post it on slashdot.
I did own an LC 475 for a time, but unfortunately, many Linux distros have a hard time with most of the 68LC040 processors installed in Macs. Seems they were defective in some obscure way that the MacOS didn't care about, but Linux lived on. Of course, the easy fix is to drop in a 50 Mhz 68040 processor, but with PowerPC machines so cheap, it didn't seem like spending more money on the LC 475 was worth it.
I think a pizza box machine might be fun for a project though. Fairly fast without really needing a fan, good collection of ports, tiny motherboard with all I/O. One card slot that takes cards that lay flat, without needing some silly riser board. Available all day at eBay for ~$20. I still have a TV card lying around here somewhere...
Operating systems move forward just like hardware. OS X is a big move forward, and Apple made a decision regarding incorporation of backward compatibility. At least Apple makes a few choice OS versions available for free on theirFTP server. As for the P100, it might become an MP3 server when I do the home network...
Obscurity isn't security. Look here. While I hope nobody would disclose sensitive info on Slashdot, a system that's comprimised by posting it's OS isn't secure in the first place.