I use oscilloscopes almost daily in my job as an EE, and I've found that I very much prefer the scopes that don't use Windows in any shape or form to the ones that do. If a scope requires a mouse, it's really a portable computer with an integrated DAC subsystem. You have to wait for it to boot up and shut down, and you have to have the flat space necessary to drive the mouse (or use a trackball). They are also generally less responsive to input and take longer to change modes than an embedded-system style scope.
My current desk unit is a Tektronix MSO 4054, which is ideal for what I do. Everything is adjusted using good old-fashioned knobs and buttons on the front panel. I also use several higher-end Teks that run Windows and various Agilent scopes, both from the 54600-series and the Infinium series.
It's true that the Windows-based scopes can often run other software and do more detailed analysis of data. However, I prefer to use the scope to acquire data, store it on a USB drive and then do that analysis at my desk later using my main computer.
In our corporate environment, having oscilloscopes on the network is frowned upon by our IT.
My dislike for oscilloscopes that run Windows is shared by most of my EE and technician colleagues. Non-EE types (physicists, MEs) seem to like the Windows interface because they use the scopes less often and they feel more at home with a PC-like interface.
In another vein, I despise touch screens. This is simply my personal preference, as I realize that many people like the way they link the data on screen to actions. I just hate fingerprints, and the tactile feedback provided by real buttons and knobs is far superior in my mind.
I see people say this frequently but never understand it. When I was a teenager, one of my brothers was given an NES and the other a Master System. We had several games for each one. I always thought the NES was superior.
The Sega's music was more chirpy and tinny than the NES's, which wasn't spectacular, either. But I could stand listening to NES music a lot more than that whiny Sega sound.
Sega's graphics had more complexity but that usually just meant it was harder to see what was going on, and the games tended to have a lot of flickery sprites, at least the games we had (Altered Beast, Zaxxon 3D, Afterburner). Occasionally the NES would have a flickery sprite (e.g. Legend of Zelda), but it was much less common.
The worst part was the Master System controller. While the game pad had almost the same layout as the NES controller, the D-Pad cross on the NES's was much easier to accurately control than the rounded square of the Sega's D-Pad. It was way too easy to accidentally hit a diagonal on the Sega when you were trying to go straight up or left.
Fortunately, Sega fixed their controller for the Genesis.
That was my reaction. I thought the article was going to be about a spreadsheet until I followed the link and discovered they were talking about Lotus Notes. Lotus used to be a brand more dominant than Microsoft, now it's just shorthand for a specific piece of PIM software.
Here here! Slow people in the left-hand lane of multilane freeways frustrate me to no end, too.
When I was in Germany a few years ago driving on the Autobahn I was impressed with how well people followed the rules and moved over to the right-hand side once they had finished their passing. It worked very well, even though a few cars were traveling much, much faster than others. I rarely saw a jam up occur simply because you could count on the slow cars getting over to the right-hand side and letting the fast cars go by on the left.
I wish us Americans were as diligent about simply following the traffic rules as the Germans. Driving in traffic would be a lot less aggravating.
CRTs still beat most flat-panels in terms of color, because they inherently have a logarithmic response that is very close to that of the human eye, but flat-panels have an intrinsic linear response. In order to accurately mimic the logarithmic curve, either an exceptionally high number of bits is required, or tricks need to be played with the illumination or driver circuitry.
Cheap flat-panels have fewer of these tricks implemented, and generally keep the bit depth low to reduce data bandwidth and allow cheaper components in the electronics, so their color reproduction is not very good.
It's common for people to assume that flat-panels are better than CRTs in every respect. It's simply not true. They are better in terms of size, weight, sharpness, and (usually) power consumption, but CRTs are better in terms of color and frequency response. Moving to flat-panels involves trade-offs, as does pretty much everything, it's just that popular opinion is that these trade-offs are worth it, even if they don't consciously realize they're being made.
Yeah, but the picture is nice and sharp, and has much better color than almost any flat-panel. I think the weight was a reasonable trade-off. (I also have a 21" Diamondtron, 12 years old now.)
I remember reading once that a lot of the changes introduced by American English are from Noah Webster when he created his dictionary. He felt that the United States needed its own language identity so he "Americanized" several spellings.
I'm not sure that people are. I've never known of anyone who's encounted employer resistance to leaving work to vote. It was more of a hypothetical situation. It's entirely possible that it's already written into the law, but it's never been something I needed to check into.
In my state, Oregon, we only vote by mail now, anyway, so it isn't even a potential problem.
Ah, but France's labor laws result in a greater proportion of the population having the day off on Sunday than in the U.S. While Tuesday is a "work day" and Sunday is part of the weekend, many people, particularly in working-class jobs, work on Sunday in the U.S. We have many more off-shift jobs due to around-the-clock manufacturing and service.
So moving the election to Sunday wouldn't really solve the problem, and may in fact skew the election more away from the "working class" because most off-shift jobs are working class.
A better solution would be to make election day a national holiday. Even then, some manufacturing wouldn't shut down, but provisions could be written into the law to make sure that everyone is free to leave work to vote.
Actually, yes. That was a big reason I resisted moving my computer to an ATX power supply in the late 1990s, and it was about 2 years after I finally did have an ATX supply before I knew of that workaround. Until I learned about the push-and-hold feature, I had been yanking the cord to do a hard power off. I have family members who are not computer adept that still don't realize that you can do this, after almost 10 years of having an ATX-style computer.
The big problem is that the ATX power switch behaves differently than the power switches of most every other device, and there are decades more of human experience with those other devices.
I work in the industry, designing technology that goes into high-def RPTV sets. My own opinion largely matches yours, that the majority of people won't really be that interested in either HD-DVD or Blu-Ray, at least for several years. I totally agree that the jump in image quality from VHS to DVD was much more significant than it is from DVD to either the 720p or 1080i HD formats. Recent large 1080p HD sets have excellent scalers that can make a 480p DVD look pretty good, although the level of detail will be a little lacking. Videophiles will want true HD sources now, but the more typical consumer will be content to wait.
Regarding LCD color, LCDs now have enough color depth and fast enough response time to match the color performance of CRTs. A CRT has a logarithmic color response to input voltage, which matches the human eye very well. An LCD has a linear color response, so electronics in the display have to mimic CRT behavior by applying a gamma curve function to the input signal. Nicer LCDs do this quite well (take a look at Apple's Cinema Display), and can match the best CRTs in color. The vast majority of LCDs do not do this very well, however, and so a cheap CRT will always have better color than a cheap LCD.
Also, direct view *MEANS* CRT.
Actually, no, direct view means anything that doesn't involve projection, but instead the image generation device is viewed directly. CRTs, LCD flat panels, and plasma flat panels are all classified as direct view. Non-direct view means RPTV (CRT-based, LCD microdisplay, LCoS/SXRD, or DLP) or front projection (typically either LCD microdisplay or DLP).
I wonder why they did it this way? Why not set up another virtual world with the newly designed game on it, and leave the original intact as a separate game? Why did it have to be one or the other? I would think the cost of a few servers and maintaining them would be less than the revenue generated by having two versions of the game.
Yeah, that would work, too, although a floppy disk is pretty small. I recently transferred some of my old DOS games from my 486 laptop to my Powerbook to run under Dosbox, and they were several megabytes each. It was a lot easier to be able to copy 10MB at a time!
I have an old 486DX4-100 laptop, and using a PCMCIA flash memory card is the easiest method to transfer DOS files to or from this laptop. My Powerbook's PC Card slot is very useful for this. Otherwise, I would have to rig up a serial cable which would be very slow. (This old laptop doesn't have LAN or I would just plug it into the home network.)
I also use this same method to transfer files to or from my HP 200LX palmtop.
You are correct on the RAM. There were two options: smaller chips that meant a maximum of 64K on the motherboard, or the larger chips which took you up to 256K. 640K was only reachable by using an expansion card. I had forgotten that the XT's motherboard could go all the way to 640K without using an expansion card.
As for the 360K floppies, by the time my dad bought our 5150 PC in late summer 1983, they were available. I think once they were introduced they were the new default or at least an option on the original PC.
This guy actually did this on a 5150, which is the original IBM PC from 1981. His system does have a hard disk, which makes it (almost) equivalent to the XT from 1983, so maybe that is a more fair date to use. One you add a hard disk, about the only difference is the number of expansion slots. The PC had 5 while the XT had 8.
Actually, this has been true from the early days. When I was a teenager in the mid 1980s, I didn't understand the difference between worms, viruses, and trojans and most people just called them all viruses.
Chances are the ball's center of mass is not in the center of the ball, but offset in such a way as to cause the ball to settle at rest nearly right-side up for the camera. This would be a simple solution that would work on many surfaces, including most floors.
Also, the article doesn't say, but it probably also has more than one camera inside so it can see in multiple directions at once.
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I use oscilloscopes almost daily in my job as an EE, and I've found that I very much prefer the scopes that don't use Windows in any shape or form to the ones that do. If a scope requires a mouse, it's really a portable computer with an integrated DAC subsystem. You have to wait for it to boot up and shut down, and you have to have the flat space necessary to drive the mouse (or use a trackball). They are also generally less responsive to input and take longer to change modes than an embedded-system style scope.
My current desk unit is a Tektronix MSO 4054, which is ideal for what I do. Everything is adjusted using good old-fashioned knobs and buttons on the front panel. I also use several higher-end Teks that run Windows and various Agilent scopes, both from the 54600-series and the Infinium series.
It's true that the Windows-based scopes can often run other software and do more detailed analysis of data. However, I prefer to use the scope to acquire data, store it on a USB drive and then do that analysis at my desk later using my main computer.
In our corporate environment, having oscilloscopes on the network is frowned upon by our IT.
My dislike for oscilloscopes that run Windows is shared by most of my EE and technician colleagues. Non-EE types (physicists, MEs) seem to like the Windows interface because they use the scopes less often and they feel more at home with a PC-like interface.
In another vein, I despise touch screens. This is simply my personal preference, as I realize that many people like the way they link the data on screen to actions. I just hate fingerprints, and the tactile feedback provided by real buttons and knobs is far superior in my mind.
...NES was inferior to Sega Master System...
I see people say this frequently but never understand it. When I was a teenager, one of my brothers was given an NES and the other a Master System. We had several games for each one. I always thought the NES was superior.
The Sega's music was more chirpy and tinny than the NES's, which wasn't spectacular, either. But I could stand listening to NES music a lot more than that whiny Sega sound.
Sega's graphics had more complexity but that usually just meant it was harder to see what was going on, and the games tended to have a lot of flickery sprites, at least the games we had (Altered Beast, Zaxxon 3D, Afterburner). Occasionally the NES would have a flickery sprite (e.g. Legend of Zelda), but it was much less common.
The worst part was the Master System controller. While the game pad had almost the same layout as the NES controller, the D-Pad cross on the NES's was much easier to accurately control than the rounded square of the Sega's D-Pad. It was way too easy to accidentally hit a diagonal on the Sega when you were trying to go straight up or left.
Fortunately, Sega fixed their controller for the Genesis.
1-2-3?
That was my reaction. I thought the article was going to be about a spreadsheet until I followed the link and discovered they were talking about Lotus Notes. Lotus used to be a brand more dominant than Microsoft, now it's just shorthand for a specific piece of PIM software.
I must be getting old.
Here here! Slow people in the left-hand lane of multilane freeways frustrate me to no end, too.
When I was in Germany a few years ago driving on the Autobahn I was impressed with how well people followed the rules and moved over to the right-hand side once they had finished their passing. It worked very well, even though a few cars were traveling much, much faster than others. I rarely saw a jam up occur simply because you could count on the slow cars getting over to the right-hand side and letting the fast cars go by on the left.
I wish us Americans were as diligent about simply following the traffic rules as the Germans. Driving in traffic would be a lot less aggravating.
CRTs still beat most flat-panels in terms of color, because they inherently have a logarithmic response that is very close to that of the human eye, but flat-panels have an intrinsic linear response. In order to accurately mimic the logarithmic curve, either an exceptionally high number of bits is required, or tricks need to be played with the illumination or driver circuitry.
Cheap flat-panels have fewer of these tricks implemented, and generally keep the bit depth low to reduce data bandwidth and allow cheaper components in the electronics, so their color reproduction is not very good.
It's common for people to assume that flat-panels are better than CRTs in every respect. It's simply not true. They are better in terms of size, weight, sharpness, and (usually) power consumption, but CRTs are better in terms of color and frequency response. Moving to flat-panels involves trade-offs, as does pretty much everything, it's just that popular opinion is that these trade-offs are worth it, even if they don't consciously realize they're being made.
Yeah, but the picture is nice and sharp, and has much better color than almost any flat-panel. I think the weight was a reasonable trade-off. (I also have a 21" Diamondtron, 12 years old now.)
Hopefully it doesn't turn into a pair of shrinking boxer shorts!
I remember reading once that a lot of the changes introduced by American English are from Noah Webster when he created his dictionary. He felt that the United States needed its own language identity so he "Americanized" several spellings.
What about owning 2 Class As? HP has both 15.* and 16.*.
15.* was assigned to HP, and 16.* was originally assigned to DEC, which was bought by Compaq, which was itself eventually bought by HP.
I'm not sure that people are. I've never known of anyone who's encounted employer resistance to leaving work to vote. It was more of a hypothetical situation. It's entirely possible that it's already written into the law, but it's never been something I needed to check into.
In my state, Oregon, we only vote by mail now, anyway, so it isn't even a potential problem.
Ah, but France's labor laws result in a greater proportion of the population having the day off on Sunday than in the U.S. While Tuesday is a "work day" and Sunday is part of the weekend, many people, particularly in working-class jobs, work on Sunday in the U.S. We have many more off-shift jobs due to around-the-clock manufacturing and service.
So moving the election to Sunday wouldn't really solve the problem, and may in fact skew the election more away from the "working class" because most off-shift jobs are working class.
A better solution would be to make election day a national holiday. Even then, some manufacturing wouldn't shut down, but provisions could be written into the law to make sure that everyone is free to leave work to vote.
is for you to use your new salary to buy lots of games. Duh!
Not all do. All of our Compaq/HP desktops at work lack this switch. The only way to completely shut the machine off is to unplug the cord.
Actually, yes. That was a big reason I resisted moving my computer to an ATX power supply in the late 1990s, and it was about 2 years after I finally did have an ATX supply before I knew of that workaround. Until I learned about the push-and-hold feature, I had been yanking the cord to do a hard power off. I have family members who are not computer adept that still don't realize that you can do this, after almost 10 years of having an ATX-style computer.
The big problem is that the ATX power switch behaves differently than the power switches of most every other device, and there are decades more of human experience with those other devices.
I work in the industry, designing technology that goes into high-def RPTV sets. My own opinion largely matches yours, that the majority of people won't really be that interested in either HD-DVD or Blu-Ray, at least for several years. I totally agree that the jump in image quality from VHS to DVD was much more significant than it is from DVD to either the 720p or 1080i HD formats. Recent large 1080p HD sets have excellent scalers that can make a 480p DVD look pretty good, although the level of detail will be a little lacking. Videophiles will want true HD sources now, but the more typical consumer will be content to wait.
Regarding LCD color, LCDs now have enough color depth and fast enough response time to match the color performance of CRTs. A CRT has a logarithmic color response to input voltage, which matches the human eye very well. An LCD has a linear color response, so electronics in the display have to mimic CRT behavior by applying a gamma curve function to the input signal. Nicer LCDs do this quite well (take a look at Apple's Cinema Display), and can match the best CRTs in color. The vast majority of LCDs do not do this very well, however, and so a cheap CRT will always have better color than a cheap LCD.
Also, direct view *MEANS* CRT.
Actually, no, direct view means anything that doesn't involve projection, but instead the image generation device is viewed directly. CRTs, LCD flat panels, and plasma flat panels are all classified as direct view. Non-direct view means RPTV (CRT-based, LCD microdisplay, LCoS/SXRD, or DLP) or front projection (typically either LCD microdisplay or DLP).
Look for Apple to make BIG inroads in the 5-to-9 world...
I wish I could make inroads into the 5-to-9 world myself! Right now I have to work at least 8 hours each day.
I wonder why they did it this way? Why not set up another virtual world with the newly designed game on it, and leave the original intact as a separate game? Why did it have to be one or the other? I would think the cost of a few servers and maintaining them would be less than the revenue generated by having two versions of the game.
Yeah, that would work, too, although a floppy disk is pretty small. I recently transferred some of my old DOS games from my 486 laptop to my Powerbook to run under Dosbox, and they were several megabytes each. It was a lot easier to be able to copy 10MB at a time!
I have.
I have an old 486DX4-100 laptop, and using a PCMCIA flash memory card is the easiest method to transfer DOS files to or from this laptop. My Powerbook's PC Card slot is very useful for this. Otherwise, I would have to rig up a serial cable which would be very slow. (This old laptop doesn't have LAN or I would just plug it into the home network.)
I also use this same method to transfer files to or from my HP 200LX palmtop.
You are correct on the RAM. There were two options: smaller chips that meant a maximum of 64K on the motherboard, or the larger chips which took you up to 256K. 640K was only reachable by using an expansion card. I had forgotten that the XT's motherboard could go all the way to 640K without using an expansion card.
As for the 360K floppies, by the time my dad bought our 5150 PC in late summer 1983, they were available. I think once they were introduced they were the new default or at least an option on the original PC.
This guy actually did this on a 5150, which is the original IBM PC from 1981. His system does have a hard disk, which makes it (almost) equivalent to the XT from 1983, so maybe that is a more fair date to use. One you add a hard disk, about the only difference is the number of expansion slots. The PC had 5 while the XT had 8.
Actually, this has been true from the early days. When I was a teenager in the mid 1980s, I didn't understand the difference between worms, viruses, and trojans and most people just called them all viruses.
we're building it through a web of experts at hundreds of institutions throughout the world.
Like St. Wonko's Institution for the Criminally Insane?
Chances are the ball's center of mass is not in the center of the ball, but offset in such a way as to cause the ball to settle at rest nearly right-side up for the camera. This would be a simple solution that would work on many surfaces, including most floors.
Also, the article doesn't say, but it probably also has more than one camera inside so it can see in multiple directions at once.
I can't help but nitpick on this. They're not price "spikes" if they don't come back down. What the article is describing are price "hikes."