Re:Nobody mentioned my trusty old Panasonic :-(
on
Printer Makers' Ploys
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· Score: 2
Real laser printers are rated at fifteen times that output, per month.
10,000 pages is nothing in the life of a laser printer. Even cheap, step-above-toy printers are rated for 10k pages/month.
Your example says nothing about Panasonic's reliability.
I have a Laserjet III which, in its prior life, consumed a 500-sheet reem of paper daily.
It's as happy as it ever was. Some moving parts have worn out - fans needed replaced, the paper-grab wheel needed some care, but it's ancient - 10 years old, at least. Fans die, and natural rubber parts dry out given sufficient time.
Try again when you're a member of the 500,000 pagecount club.
HP will (or at least, has in the past) sell odd parts to end users, as long as you're polite and adept at describing what it is. If you've got the part number on hand, it's probably even trivial.
I ordered a new upper blower for an ancient HPLJ III by calling their service department and asking for one. The guy on the other end of the phone was initially confused because he didn't think that the LJ III had any blowers in it. When I described to him the squirrel-cage-looking contraption in front of me, he began to understand.
Turns out that, at some point, HP replaced the strange blower assembly with a square fan on a metal bracket.
Which was fine with me.
The fan, which arrived at my house fairly quickly, was complete shit. It lasted a only few months before I had to tear the printer apart again and replace it, but since I already had the fancy bracket, I just ordered a medium output 24VDC fan of same dimension from Mouser Electronics for a few dollars.
I decided to replace the lower blower, at the same time, but I when I did so I left it in place to help plug the hole in the back of the machine -- I didn't feel like paying HP's price for a useful metal bracket and a broken fan. So, I cut a hole in the bottom of the printer, and mounted a 24VDC 80mm fan. I put a fan guard on the outside and re-routed some internal wiring to keep things from getting chewed. I also invested approximately $2 in some very nice, extra tall self-adhesive feet made from matching grey rubber by 3M to elevate the printer enough for air to flow underneath.
It lives to this day, churning out pages like you wouldn't believe.
I'd like to point out that there is a small, but very open and reliable enterprise in HP warez.
I have a ScanJet IIcx from somewhere around the middle of the 1990s. It cost a bloody fortune.
I tried to download drivers for in 1999, having lost the original floppy (!) disks, with no love from HP, who only wanted to trade cash for their drivers. They seemingly fail to realize that when a customer spends more than $1k on a fucking scanner, that they expect it to be supported forever, or at least until it dies.
So. Dejanews points me to an HP FTP over in the Orient somewhere, which has current (English!) drivers.
Download, install. Life is good. I feel no guilt, and don't believe that I should. I might've felt different if this scanner were sanely priced when I bought it, but it wasn't...
Just as troubling, is Creative Lab's fisthold on their Live!Ware drivers. They, too, used to be free.
OTOH, many CL cards are easily upgraded from one generation to the next, simply by plugging in a different driver. Gotta love it when the marketing department engineers new products.
(Live! cards can be turned into Live! 5.1 with driver-supported AC3 decoding and some more signal routing, PCI16 cards turn into SB128, and so on. The whole game reminds me of flashing Ricoh firmware into a Phillips CD-R to fix bugs, or using iRiver's firmware on my Riovolt to get more features, or...)
Other gripes: 3dfx bought STB some years ago, and killed all of their products immediately. I had an old STB dual-port ISA RS-232 card that I needed jumpers for, and was able to find good documentation at 3dfx.com, cut-and-pasted from STB's original HTML.
I emailed webmaster@3dfx.com, and thanked him, asking that he do what he could to keep the documentation and drivers online. He wrote back and said that they'd never disappear, since it was no trouble to keep the pages available and provided a useful service for the potential customers that 3dfx aquired along with STB.
And then, nVidia picked up 3dfx, and dropped 3dfx.com in the forsale bin along with STB's documentation, as soon as the deal was signed.
nVidia is thus not a company that I consider to be consumer-friendly. Or customer-friendly. Or friendly at all, come to think of it...
They've even pissed directly upon the GNU community by releasing GPL'd drivers (back in the Riva128, TNT days...) as pre-processed machine code - not C source. And they thought this was OK.
People seem to forget about these things around here very quickly, as they spout off about how cool the ti400 is (or whatever the latest product for this half is called).
HP is but one among many.
On the other side of the coin is IBM and RadioShack. Both have complete documentation, drivers, and information for nearly everything electronic they've ever sold available for free on their web page. I've got old IBM ISA 10base-2 cards that IBM provides bootable (!) PC-DOS floppy setup disk images for. I got handed a Tandy 386SX/25 which I had no trouble finding BIOS setup disks for, and a number of universal remotes which would be useless now if not for the online codebooks RS provides.
Alas, IBM and RS always charge more than everyone else for all-but-identical items, too.
My apartment is gas-free, so everything I do shows up on the electric bill.
The stereo idles at a couple hundred Watts, with seperate preamp, CD player, tape machine (which I never use, and is always on), and a professional, rackmount, high-bias MOSFET amp.
The computers, I don't dare to think about much, let alone measure. A 19" monitor, two 15" monitors, a couple of K6-2's, an old Pentium, -lots- of various ReallyHot hard drives, and a collection of old-school external SCSI devices, none of which are ever turned off or put into sleep mode. The only energy-efficient computer I own is an NCR/AT&T 386SL/25 laptop, which is plugged in with a 1-amp, 12V wall wart. Oh, I forgot the laser printer, and the 800KVA of Best Ferrups UPS, and the 450KVA APC Backups. The APC generally never feels warm, so is probably fairly efficient - not surprising since it's a standby-only unit. The Ferrups, OTOH, has a large fan which runs continously, pumping heat out the back of its 85-pound chassis like a furnace. I've got TVs, and VCRs, and other stuff which I'm sure just soaks up power, even when off. My daughter's 19" color TV is never, ever turned off - it's either playing a Disney-esque movie, or presenting the Cartoon Network. And nevermind the laser printers.
The fridge is set to keep the freezer cold enough that the metal bits will freeze moist skin instantly, and the fridge part cold enough to freeze whatever unfortunate item ends up in front of the cold air outlet on the top shelf.
I light cigarettes with my toaster, too, which probably costs quite a bit more than even the cheapest disposable butane lighters, all said.
All of it keeps the massive (20A, 120V) air conditioner busy more or less continuously, on days when it's too warm (say, above 68 degrees) to open windows and switch on fans. And that's not because it's old - they replaced its tired Kenmore predecessor with a brand new Whirlpool a week or two after I moved in here, less than a year ago. I do keep the thermostat set to sub-Arctic, however.
And those fans run even with the AC on as well, to circulate the blessed, sinfully-cold air. I'm sure they're not exactly cheap to run, either.
I do -tend- to turn off lights when not using the room that they're in, except for the (centrally-located) kitchen, whose 80W of flourescent brilliance gleam nearly 24x7 most days (and -always- while people are awake). Not to mention the horribly inefficient blacklight fixture in the bedroom, which never goes dark.
But, whatever. I don't make much money, and the $105 monthly electric bill constitutes a substantial portion of my income. When wintertime comes around, all of this stuff will produce heat for me, for free, which will help amortize the expenditure of running and cooling it all during the summer (and if you believe that...). And, additionally, I'll have HEAP of some other assistance program pay a substantial portion of that bill. Nevermind that the thermostats for the baseboard heaters are set to "off," these electronics are going to keep me warm this winter. And you, my most fortunate friends, are going to pay for it.
I suspect that I'll have the windows open much of the time, even in the depth of a northern Ohio January, just to keep the temperature below 80 degrees inside. God bless America.
There are a few things that I do use which are rather energy-efficient: a hideously-expensive Timex LCD alarm clock which will, AFAICT, run for -years- on a pair of AA Lithiums, sans backlight and radio. But the backlight is of the electroluminescent sort, same as the night lights I use in the bathroom and hallway - which, according to their packaging, only cost 3 cents per year to operate.
That's only two things. Damn.
Oh. And water in this place is free - I don't even pay to operate the water heater.
Except, I do pay for the funky, 1964-vintage Ultraflo water system. This place has no valves at the tub, or the bathroom sink, in the kitchen, or anywhere else (except inside the shitter). All water flow is operated by electric pushbutton switches, operating a mess of adjustable 12VAC solenoid valves in a cupboard via similarly ancient, 18-gauge multi-conductor wire.
Which does make me feel a bit better about the free water thing. I know the Earth is covered in it, but it should cost something, right? Even if it's just for the convenience of having a pre-set valve adjust the temperature for my liking at the touch of a button, water should not be free.
Is the power grid really all that effective a medium for transferring heat from one place to another?
Somebody mod the parent up. Score:3 Informative would be a fine result, or Funny.
Besides being in rather incredible accordance with the context of this article, such -official- oddities as the two linked Google hacks simply require more attention than being scored at 2.
It harkens back to a day when people actuallyhad funwith their Net-centric job.
The Google bits are a living legend, from an expired era when corporate mentalities were considered prudish and people were just getting used to the idea of wearing jeans to the office, right there to be consumed and enjoyed. Let them be seen.
...or see if invisible is up to distributing another band.
Yes, yes, it's old-school. But, believe it or not, people still do hear a good band perform, and then ask about it at record stores. And, believe it or not, some of these stores are actually very tiny, local enterprises that would gladly try to find any music you might like, and then happily sell it to you for ~$5 less than the Place At The Mall would if they were willing to order it in the first place.
The Walmart here, every day, sells 700MB Memorex media at ~$20 for a spindle of 50. This breaks down to 40 cents each, or 57.14 cents per gigabyte.
A week ago, I bought a 100-disc spindle of some rather generic 700MB media on sale at another local department store for $18. 18 cents each, or 25.71 cents per gigabyte.
It takes 229 CD-Rs at 700 megabytes each to store 160 gigabytes (these are 1,000,000,000 byte hard drive marketing gigs, not 1,073,741,824 byte actual gigabytes).
So.
229 CD-Rs at $91.60 or $41.22, depending on day of week, would seem to be a good deal less expensive than one of these hard drives, and a good deal more reliable than RAID-1 (which is not ever to be trusted as a fucking backup solution. I've seen fucked up IDE controllers torch everything attached to them more often than I've seen hard drives die on their own).
The turntable exists. I forget who made it, though... Such is the way things are in with high-end audio - companies produce a few examples of one or two really great, hideously expensive products, and then elect to either cut their losses and close shop or declare bankruptcy, before fading completely into obscurity.
It had a dust-free enclosure within which the magic happened, and tracked/read the groove with a laser.
From what I can gather, it sounded good, but suffered from problems in that the source material was -not- mastered with such a playback mechanism in mind. Skilled engineers will set up the cutting lathe, the equipment driving it, and the whole recording process with the target audience's anticipated hardware and enviroment in mind, trying to counteract whatever distortion or frequency response blips are likely to be a problem.
This beast was a bit far off in left field for it to be a factor in any of those educated guesses and adjustments, so there wasn't (AFAIK) any software made specifically to play on it.
But the biggest problem was dust, scratches, and other imperfections. Since it had no physical apparatus to follow the (very wiggly) groove, nor a needle to push microscopic dust particles out of its path, every flaw on the vinyl surface was very plainly heard and easily lead to mistracking. A case of something being too perfect, perhaps. Rough vinyl -loves- to soak up dust.
Ask groups.google.com about it. ISTR some discussion of this thing in rec.audio.high-end, once upon a time...
As for laserdiscs being obsolete, bzzt. The vastly superior video fidelity (compared to DVD, anyhow) and inexpensiveness of hardware and media (thanks, Ebay!) has kept the format kicking, and it's not due to die any time soon. You get Dolby Digital, chapter selection, and most of the other things that most people think were introduced with DVD, with the exception of the stupid fucking animated menus and impossible-to-skip commercials.
Same reason that Big Ugly Dishes are still fairly common items - sure, people could "upgrade" to some 18" DBS system for cheap (or free), but with a BUD you can recieve the same absolutely perfect AM-modulated analog video that DirecTV gets, -before- it gets routed through another few racks of lossy electronics and MPEG-esque compression, and another satellite, and another recieving dish, and a consumer-level IRD of marginal quality, before finally hitting the TV.
Some of this old tech is just too cool to die.
We began these posts by writing about turntables. Talk about ancient tech that just won't go away...
Nevermind that 128 meg cards are not quite as cheap as the author alludes. If a man came up to you on the street and offered you a 64 or 128 megabyte DIMM, of proper type for your system, would you not take it home, plug it in, and enjoy it, all while being thankful for the most fortunate occasion?
Not long ago, I built a new Athlon XP desktop box (Win98, non-taxing business apps and light browsing) with a 64 meg S3 card, with s-video and composite NTSC outputs, some motion compensation bullshit, and terrible 3D performance. My old V3 2000 smoked it on just about everything during a comparative burn-in session, with a K6-2.
The V3 has 16 megs of RAM. The S3 has four times as much. And since it's nearly useless for anything OpenGL and it's driving a fixed 1024x768 LCD, it's never going to use more than 4 megs of that RAM for a framebuffer.
I picked the S3 because it was -cheap-. Cheaper than 32meg nVidia cards, cheaper than off-brand Voodoo3 cards made in Korea with surplus, post-nVidia GPUs, cheaper than Trident, cheaper than a Riva128 or a 2 meg Matrox, or any of ATi's available offerings.
I realize that S3 is dead, and will always be (thanks, SonicBlue - and I'll never have an empeg now, either). But the driver is stable, and the machine will be running the same install of 98 until some catastrophic hardware failure makes cause for something different. As long as it performs acceptably with IE's smooth scrolling features, and the wind-up start menu included with 98SE, all is golden.
So, cheap&stable is the order of the day.
If I were building a headless Linux box instead of a more interactive machine, I'd have chosen the same card. I reiterate: I could not find a cheaper AGP video card from any retailer that I was purchasing other items from. (gotta factor in shipping costs, yaknow...)
Getting ~60 megs of really fucking fast swapspace -for free- sounds like a winner, to me. And if you still think it's a bad idea, search Slashdot for old discussions of using CompactFlash cards as swap. Talk about silly, expensive means of adding virtual RAM...
I'd run something like this in a heartbeat on a headless machine, or one not destined for 3D work. Noone needs 16 megs, let alone 32, 64, or 128 just for a framebuffer. Might as well do something useful with it, even if it is slightly more expensive than an equal-capacity DIMM.
I highly doubt that Shawn Fanning is thinking much about martyrdom, as he brings one of his paid-in-cash exotic sports cars in for its weekly tuneup and detailing, before heading off for another day of doing whatever the fuck he wants to.
More likely, he's probably just thankful that his free money went into lining the Ferrari family's pockets, rather than those of some executive at Worldcom.
Since when has it been deduced that floods and thunderstorms are recent events?
The topsoil here in Northwest Ohio has a large percentage of sand in it. One might imagine that it is such because it was under water for a substantial period, when things were probably warmer than right now.
In the antithesis of this, this area was also carved flat by glaciers.
And yet, even in light of these enviromental twitches, I'm somehow able to write this right now.
Obviously, if a species ceases to evolve, there is a chance that unexpected external influences will cause its demise.
Obviously, if a species continues to evolve, there is a chance that unexpected external influences will cause it to grow resistant.
The earth is still here, changing, evolving, and generally putting up with its varied inhabitants.
Having now killed the basis of your argument, I'll move on to character assasination:
Did you return your copy of Windows when it stopped working for minor (but unexpected) influences?
Nope, I'll restate it again: My cable modem is *completely free*.
Which is to say, that woh.rr.com will charge me the -same amount- whether I use their provided modem, or purchase my own from a company like Linksys, or an Ebay-sourced Toshiba of similar ilk to what I've already got, or whatever.
Frankly, given the cost of the Linksys products as new, it'd take -so fucking long- to amortize at the "typical" $5/mo rental (even if I got a monthly discount) that it'd likely revert to simple carbon before it paid for itself. And that is assuming that simple component failure, lightning, or other localized catastrophe does not due it in first.
And not only was the install free, and contract-less, the first three months of service were half price.
I also get a free month for every new suscriber I refer, which seems to be a pretty fair way of doing business.
P'haps you just need to lean on your local regulatory authority, and persuade them that the locally-mandated cable monopoly where you live is an abonishment toward mankind?
I've got precious few complaints about my modem service where I come from, and those are generally hardware-based. (Tonight, the Toshiba modem locked hard. The coax connector felt warm. It took a cold restart to bring it back to life. OTOH, it's also sitting directly above the exhaust for the aforementioned 85 pounds of active, Best Ferrups UPS.)
(now, if only they'd carry Speedvision on an analog channel, I'd be able to sideline my complaints about the moving pictures they deliver over the same wire...)
(Nope, don't work for them. I did, once upon a time, pretend to program them for multi-$k home theater systems. They make, AFAIK, as advanced a remote control system you can find. Period. Flushing toilets via remote DTMF dialin is trivial compared to the things people do with Crestron gear on a daily basis.)
What sorts of computers are you people working on, which require the use of dremel tools, pliers, portable bandsaws, and a half-ton of various and sundry other tools? I've got a lot of this stuff, myself, but I don't want to tote it all around with me.
When I work on computers, I carry with me a Craftsman #2 phillips screwdriver and a folding pocket knife that is just a hair too small to be considered a concealed weapon, with a very sharp, half-serrated edge.
I've seldom needed anything else. Hardware diagnosis generally doesn't require a working spare of every part of a PC, and the parts themselves are generally too cheap individually to bother with fixing them.
Turn it on, nothing happens? Make sure power button is plugged in and things all look right. Else, the motherboard -and- PSU are both highly suspect and should not be trusted.
System boots, but without video and monitor does not turn on, optionally with POST beeps? Re-seat video card, else replace. Monitors generally show symptoms long before they bite the dust, so if it's a toast CRT they've likely known about it for a very long time wouldn't have called you to help them in the first place.
POST beeps, or everything spins up but nothing else happens. Funky RAM. Re-seat, and replace. Same symptoms with a flamed CPU, but that normally doesn't happen unless the fan is not spinning or has obviously bad bearings.
No sound? Re-seat, and then try software fixes. If still broke, replace.
Customer fucked up a BIOS flash? Remove BIOS with careful application of aforementioned knife (this is where a stout blade is important), install in a live system, re-run the appropriate flash utility, replace everything where it belongs, and you're golden.
New hard drive? Grab jumpers between knife point and appropriate finger of same hand - no finger nails required.
Computer works fine, but eventually becomes flakey? Suspect software. If not software, then heat. Find things that are hot and just look and see if there's anything physically wrong with them - like, say, the audio cable from a CD-ROM drive being crammed under the sound card into the 16-bit portion of an ISA slot. Or a component which has a large brown circle around it on the PCB - obviously something which is, or has been, Way Too Hot. Whatever part it's attached to gets replaced.
I'm not going to disassemble, for instance, a CD-ROM drive on-site. If anything, I'll diagnose it as toast, and have them buy a new one. These parts are worth too little to troubleshoot and fix when paid hourly.
The point is this: Don't bother carrying more than you need. I've got a small bag of screws and various other case hardware in the glovebox of my car, and it generally stays there.
Supposedly, certain Compaq machines require the use of a Torx driver to get into them, but I've never seen one. I only work on computers as a favor to people that I know, at least in passing - and these people don't buy Compaq. If I ever find one, however, I've got a wonderful set of 16 security Torx bits that I found in the junk bin at a hardware store for $1.50. It stays at home where it belongs, alongside the dremel.
To put this into context, I've got a P133 over in the corner for light web browsing and such. It runs seti@home, and has a very low-speed, low-noise PSU fan. The hard drive is an oddly quiet 6.5 gig Seagate.
There is no CPU fan in this machine. It does have a fairly large heatsink, aligned properly to promote convection currents, and the appropriate amount of heatsink goop between it and the CPU.
I found the big heatsink attached to a (dead) fan in another machine I was working on. Pulled the fan off, and things have been dandy.
It gets warm. Not hot. When I first told people about this, they thought I'd kill the CPU instantly. But it's been running for years now, and I really don't miss hearing the bearings go bad on yet another CPU fan.
For finding big heatsinks new, try looking at Alpha's product line - they ship their stuff from the factory fan-less, and their VARs generally put together kits with hideously noisy fans. Ask for one without, and you'll probably be able to buy one without difficulty.
Also, ISTR old Packard Bell Pentium machines having a positively huge heatsink on the CPU, without a fan. These machines are very likely to be available for free, these days...
* My cable modem didn't come with a contract. I could call this afternoon and have it switched off, or reduce the payment to something like $5/mo and keep the modem around. (Who needs bandwidth at home, while on vacation?)
* My cable modem and installation was completely free.
* The installer had a good look at my shelving unit full of shit, including 85 pounds of UPS, a switch, FreeBSD router, and a bunch of external SCSI devices. He asked, "So, what operating system are you running here, anyway?" "Lessee... FreeBSD there, XP on this desktop box, 2k on my girlfriend's machine over there, and this laptop has Slackware on it." He says: "Oh," and just hands me the box with the modem in it. I wouldn't have had it any other way, anyhow. He didn't care what I was running, and was probably happy that it was a slam-dunk install and he got to take lunch early. Which is cool, as far as I'm concerned. I already had dhcpd configured on the FreeBSD box, so the whole thing was very plug-n-play for me.
* No, it doesn't hurt to not have broadband. It does, however, become an addiction. Just as some bandwidth is better than none, more bandwidth is better than some.
* Great. At least with Time Warner, the local offices all operate more-or-less independantly. Tell them there's no way that you'll ever be home for the installer to show up, and you'd appreciate it if they'd just let you pick up a modem so you can do it yourself. Amerit^H^H^H^H^H^HSBC already does this, by default, with their DSL service around here. You order it, they perform whatever line tests need done, and a box comes to your door with a modem and some terse instructions.
* Without broadband, you have no idea what it means to be apathetic.
Bill acceptors have gotten better in recent years.
The self-checkout systems at department stores near here have no difficulty accepting bills with odd stamps and writing on them, torn/missing/folded corners, or bills so faded and stained that they're grey on grey instead of black on green, or bills with small chunks of paper missing from the middle.
I have no idea what mechanism they use to determine whether the bill is real or not, but they're so imparticular about what they accept that I've often wondered if they check anything at all except denomination.
The only time I've ever had one of these more recent machines react badly was when I fed the (contracted) soda machine at work a very tightly rolled dollar. It got lost, somewhere, in the paper guides, unable to either reject or accept the bill.
Eventually, it gave up. I didn't get the dollar back, or any soda from it, but it was perfectly happy with a somewhat-less-rolled bill after about a minute or so of failing to handle the one I'd just fed it. I took my $1.55 can of Coke and left, chalking it up to experience.
That all said, while I do stand for the abolishment of the penny (as long as sales tax gets rounded -down-, by law) and the introduction of coins of greater value, I've had very little displeasure lately buying expensive things (say, $70 worth of groceries) with automated bill acceptors.
Forget plugging in a DVD player to a computer monitor.
Anything "mid-priced" will output some form of NTSC video, which is horrible in all incarnations. Even if you get -really lucky- and score a VGA-esque RGB output, you'll be ill-equipped to see "just how crisp it can be," because the DACs on your Sun's video hardware are significantly better than anything inside of a sanely-priced DVD player.
Better to pick up a DVD drive, and some good software. This is, after all, a computer monitor. Drive it with a computer. At 1920x1200.
You'll get, depending on hardware and software, some very fine scaling and framerate conversion and filtering. Things will be great, as good as it gets. If your Sun can't do it, a cheap PC with an appropriate DVD-supporting video card will still be cheaper than a super-high-res progressive scan DVD player.
Whereas, a DVD player will only drive the monitor at a couple of fixed frequencies and resolutions, which may or may not include overscan support, and thus show a chance of being incredibly poor-looking on a computer display - and that's only if you get the interfaces to talk to eachother at all.
That all said, if you're insistant, this box will do what you want with just about any analog signal you can come up with. And since noone seems to want to make an analog -> DVI converter, things get even more hairy. Something like this this adapter card along with this way-overkill video switchermight do it.
You don't want to ask what any of that stuff costs, though. There's reasons why the price isn't listed on the web page. (other stuff probably exists which does similar things with varying amounts of overkill, but Extron has a reputation for being the best. If you wanna see "just how crisp it can be" in such an arrangement, look no further.)
It's not an NT error, but an Intel one, dating back to the Beginning of Time (or the 6MHz 286, anyway). The same errors are reported in the same way under OS/2, and probably a number of other operating systems - I seem to recall Win95 puking out similar nomenclature during at least one BSOD.
Under OS/2, such screaching halts are known as "traps," instead of blue screens. And since OS/2 users were generally more knowledgable about computers then, than NT users are today, there's a lot of information available to help with fixing it.
According to groups.google.com-archived message from 1993, 0D is a General Protection Fault.
GPFs happen all the time with bunky hardware. Try re-seating (or just purchasing new) RAM, CPU, and anything else socketed that you can find.
And if that doesn't work, toss the machine. Or give it away to someone with stubborn enough to fix it. Different boxes of similar ilk are available in the $50 range, these days - no need to spend any absurd amount of time with a diagnosis.
A few years ago, when everyone was buying and selling 4x burners like hotcakes because they were just so damn fast, I picked up an 8x Plextor.
Various forums and newsgroups were still full of messages from people having various problems with various combinations of burner, media, and reader. People were generally having a difficult time making things work, some or all of the time. Because of this, I decided to research things a bit before dropping any serious amount of money on CD-Rs.
So. I picked up two samples each of some ~10 varieties of CD-R. Maxell, Memorex, Sony, TDK, the "new" 8x-rated Kodak, the "old" 4x-rated Kodak, high- and low-end Ricoh, something called "CD Rocket Fuel", and so on.
I burned a bunch of identical audio CDs onto these discs, and then collected a variety of players with which to play them (an abused playstation, an Aiwa portable, a Carver rackmount unit, and cdparanoia+stopwatch on the 32x Plextor CD-ROM in the same machine), hoping to get an idea of the error rate of various combinations.
Results? 2x-rated media burned fine at 8x. 4x media burned fine at 8x. The only 8x-rated media in the test was the Kodak gold/green and the S&F "Rocket Fuel".
The Kodak, the priciest of the whole lot, performed least well. The anti-skip on the Aiwa portable took longer to fill its buffer, the Playstation was more susceptible to shaking-induced skips, and cdparanoia took longer to read it.
Which was kind of a bummer, because they were advertising shelf lives in the range of 100 years and I'd like my data to outlive me.
Since then, I've bought a few spindles of TDK which I've been happy with at home. I did pick up a batch of Verbatim blanks which were absolute trash, though, and would not read in my (non-abused) Playstation at all.
In the studio, where we had the same 8x Plextor, we had no difficulty, complaint, or general bad vibes from using the cheapest media we can find. Mostly, this was because it was a money-losing enterprise, and a few cents saved per blank added up to, say, getting few pizzas one night instead of a bag full of $0.99 cheeseburgers from Hardees.
Since this experience, I've been using whatever I can find cheap, though I will pay a bit more for unbranded blanks.
(100 packs of some unbranded Asian-imported generic knockoff CD-R are on sale right now at a local department store for something like $15. I intend to buy the remaining stock on payday.)
At my last place of residence, I had WiFi net access (though, we called it 802.11b at that time...).
The company providing this service had constructed a rather large (several hundred feet large, dwarfing an AT&T microwave relay station a few hundred yards down the road from it) tower near my house.
I guess I should mention that the landscape around here is flat. Like a ruler. And completely devoid of obstructions.
I had no trouble at all getting 500 kBps downloads using the Aironet 350 AP and Pringles can-looking antenna they provided and installed from this massive tower 2.1 miles away.
The point of this text? They cover, probably with some degree of success, a very significant portion of Northwest Ohio with just ten of these towers.
Cell phones don't get that kind of range.
And even -handheld- cell phones are good for up to for 600mW of output (in the US, per FCC rules). The Aironet is about half of that.
Old-school bag phones had output of up to 3W. Which -might- have been as good as Comwavz -appears- to be doing with plain old 802.11b.
I never got rain fade, or snow fade, or any fade at all while I used it, even when conditions rendered visibility to zero. My microwave didn't phase it, and waving my 2.4GHz spread spectrum Uniden cordless phone directly in front of the antenna didn't make any measurable dent in latency. An arc welder used directly below the antenna didn't make a difference, either.
Things worked almost as well after an hour or two of sustained 50-70MPH winds kicked the loosely-mounted antenna so that it was at 90 degrees to the aforementioned towering wonder of bandwidth - the least efficient way I can imagine for that type of antenna to work.
I was able to also communicate -directly- with a few other of their customers. Those which I was able to identify were often several miles away, none with antennas pointed at mine (nor mine at theirs). Speeds were slow in this ad-hoc arrangement, sometimes in the range of 30kBps, but often were on par with my (current) 2Mbit cable modem.
I am led to wonder, thus, precisely what the problem is. It seems to be a remarkably durable way to communicate, and I have difficulty believing that Starbucks, of all places, can put a dent in anything controlled by people with motivation to make it continue working.
(I did have some downtime, once or twice, but each time that happened I was able to use binoculars to spot a guy wearing a toolbelt, jacking his way up that towering steel phalus. I attributed the temporary loss of bandwidth to safety of his (obviously brass) balls, not to any enviromental or interferance issues.)
So spend more on multi-port RS-232 cards and bulky, expensive cables, since noone can type that fast, anyway.
God forbid you might need to update the software, ever, on these trouble-prone 10-year-old laptops with NO CD-ROM DRIVES, armed with only a low-speed PPP connection. Things could be zipping along at a couple hundred kilobytes per second or so, for less cost and less hassle than serial's two-or-three kBps, with less of a dead-end system.
And serial ports on PCs typically aren't able to be set to 28.8kbps - try, instead, the following more-or-less standard selections:
If you really want dumb terminals, buy dumb terminals. I picked up a pair of fine-looking VT-330s at a hamfest a few years back for $30, and both work great.
I also chanced upon an 8-port Bocaboard, and an old-school multi-I/O card with four serial, three parallel, two IDE, and two floppy (!) controllers. Quite a beastly little 16-bit ISA card that is.
It all sits in the closet these days, though. The free 386SL/25 laptop with its $3 ethernet card is better than that pile of rubbish, and consumes less power and desk space, and doesn't rely on any other particular machine to be alive for it to be useful.
I can buy cable for it almost anywhere, whereas serial cables are beginning to get a bit scarce. I don't have to worry about ground loops because 10base-T is ungrounded - no chance of the interaction of a surge protector and a bolt of lightning using my laptop, on the other end of a long wire, as a ground (well. maybe I shouldn't go -that- far, but it is far less likely to happen with ethernet vs. RS-232).
But, whatever. You wacky geeks go ahead and design a complicated, slow system of shims and widgets for passing Secret Messages when all you need is a tube, a glorified ping pong ball, and a bit of Newtonian physics...
It's still in Slack, and pops up just before the install finishes up.
It was a somewhat garish feature even Back in the Day, but I guess it does serve some a purpose when a VGA card has a particularly disgusting BIOS font.
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Real laser printers are rated at fifteen times that output, per month .
10,000 pages is nothing in the life of a laser printer. Even cheap, step-above-toy printers are rated for 10k pages/month.
Your example says nothing about Panasonic's reliability.
I have a Laserjet III which, in its prior life, consumed a 500-sheet reem of paper daily.
It's as happy as it ever was. Some moving parts have worn out - fans needed replaced, the paper-grab wheel needed some care, but it's ancient - 10 years old, at least. Fans die, and natural rubber parts dry out given sufficient time.
Try again when you're a member of the 500,000 pagecount club.
HP will (or at least, has in the past) sell odd parts to end users, as long as you're polite and adept at describing what it is. If you've got the part number on hand, it's probably even trivial.
I ordered a new upper blower for an ancient HPLJ III by calling their service department and asking for one. The guy on the other end of the phone was initially confused because he didn't think that the LJ III had any blowers in it. When I described to him the squirrel-cage-looking contraption in front of me, he began to understand.
Turns out that, at some point, HP replaced the strange blower assembly with a square fan on a metal bracket.
Which was fine with me.
The fan, which arrived at my house fairly quickly, was complete shit. It lasted a only few months before I had to tear the printer apart again and replace it, but since I already had the fancy bracket, I just ordered a medium output 24VDC fan of same dimension from Mouser Electronics for a few dollars.
I decided to replace the lower blower, at the same time, but I when I did so I left it in place to help plug the hole in the back of the machine -- I didn't feel like paying HP's price for a useful metal bracket and a broken fan. So, I cut a hole in the bottom of the printer, and mounted a 24VDC 80mm fan. I put a fan guard on the outside and re-routed some internal wiring to keep things from getting chewed. I also invested approximately $2 in some very nice, extra tall self-adhesive feet made from matching grey rubber by 3M to elevate the printer enough for air to flow underneath.
It lives to this day, churning out pages like you wouldn't believe.
I'd like to point out that there is a small, but very open and reliable enterprise in HP warez.
I have a ScanJet IIcx from somewhere around the middle of the 1990s. It cost a bloody fortune.
I tried to download drivers for in 1999, having lost the original floppy (!) disks, with no love from HP, who only wanted to trade cash for their drivers. They seemingly fail to realize that when a customer spends more than $1k on a fucking scanner, that they expect it to be supported forever, or at least until it dies.
So. Dejanews points me to an HP FTP over in the Orient somewhere, which has current (English!) drivers.
Download, install. Life is good. I feel no guilt, and don't believe that I should. I might've felt different if this scanner were sanely priced when I bought it, but it wasn't...
Just as troubling, is Creative Lab's fisthold on their Live!Ware drivers. They, too, used to be free.
OTOH, many CL cards are easily upgraded from one generation to the next, simply by plugging in a different driver. Gotta love it when the marketing department engineers new products.
(Live! cards can be turned into Live! 5.1 with driver-supported AC3 decoding and some more signal routing, PCI16 cards turn into SB128, and so on. The whole game reminds me of flashing Ricoh firmware into a Phillips CD-R to fix bugs, or using iRiver's firmware on my Riovolt to get more features, or...)
Other gripes: 3dfx bought STB some years ago, and killed all of their products immediately. I had an old STB dual-port ISA RS-232 card that I needed jumpers for, and was able to find good documentation at 3dfx.com, cut-and-pasted from STB's original HTML.
I emailed webmaster@3dfx.com, and thanked him, asking that he do what he could to keep the documentation and drivers online. He wrote back and said that they'd never disappear, since it was no trouble to keep the pages available and provided a useful service for the potential customers that 3dfx aquired along with STB.
And then, nVidia picked up 3dfx, and dropped 3dfx.com in the forsale bin along with STB's documentation, as soon as the deal was signed.
nVidia is thus not a company that I consider to be consumer-friendly. Or customer-friendly. Or friendly at all, come to think of it...
They've even pissed directly upon the GNU community by releasing GPL'd drivers (back in the Riva128, TNT days...) as pre-processed machine code - not C source. And they thought this was OK.
People seem to forget about these things around here very quickly, as they spout off about how cool the ti400 is (or whatever the latest product for this half is called).
HP is but one among many.
On the other side of the coin is IBM and RadioShack. Both have complete documentation, drivers, and information for nearly everything electronic they've ever sold available for free on their web page. I've got old IBM ISA 10base-2 cards that IBM provides bootable (!) PC-DOS floppy setup disk images for. I got handed a Tandy 386SX/25 which I had no trouble finding BIOS setup disks for, and a number of universal remotes which would be useless now if not for the online codebooks RS provides.
Alas, IBM and RS always charge more than everyone else for all-but-identical items, too.
My apartment is gas-free, so everything I do shows up on the electric bill.
The stereo idles at a couple hundred Watts, with seperate preamp, CD player, tape machine (which I never use, and is always on), and a professional, rackmount, high-bias MOSFET amp.
The computers, I don't dare to think about much, let alone measure. A 19" monitor, two 15" monitors, a couple of K6-2's, an old Pentium, -lots- of various ReallyHot hard drives, and a collection of old-school external SCSI devices, none of which are ever turned off or put into sleep mode. The only energy-efficient computer I own is an NCR/AT&T 386SL/25 laptop, which is plugged in with a 1-amp, 12V wall wart. Oh, I forgot the laser printer, and the 800KVA of Best Ferrups UPS, and the 450KVA APC Backups. The APC generally never feels warm, so is probably fairly efficient - not surprising since it's a standby-only unit. The Ferrups, OTOH, has a large fan which runs continously, pumping heat out the back of its 85-pound chassis like a furnace. I've got TVs, and VCRs, and other stuff which I'm sure just soaks up power, even when off. My daughter's 19" color TV is never, ever turned off - it's either playing a Disney-esque movie, or presenting the Cartoon Network. And nevermind the laser printers.
The fridge is set to keep the freezer cold enough that the metal bits will freeze moist skin instantly, and the fridge part cold enough to freeze whatever unfortunate item ends up in front of the cold air outlet on the top shelf.
I light cigarettes with my toaster, too, which probably costs quite a bit more than even the cheapest disposable butane lighters, all said.
All of it keeps the massive (20A, 120V) air conditioner busy more or less continuously, on days when it's too warm (say, above 68 degrees) to open windows and switch on fans. And that's not because it's old - they replaced its tired Kenmore predecessor with a brand new Whirlpool a week or two after I moved in here, less than a year ago. I do keep the thermostat set to sub-Arctic, however.
And those fans run even with the AC on as well, to circulate the blessed, sinfully-cold air. I'm sure they're not exactly cheap to run, either.
I do -tend- to turn off lights when not using the room that they're in, except for the (centrally-located) kitchen, whose 80W of flourescent brilliance gleam nearly 24x7 most days (and -always- while people are awake). Not to mention the horribly inefficient blacklight fixture in the bedroom, which never goes dark.
But, whatever. I don't make much money, and the $105 monthly electric bill constitutes a substantial portion of my income. When wintertime comes around, all of this stuff will produce heat for me, for free, which will help amortize the expenditure of running and cooling it all during the summer (and if you believe that...). And, additionally, I'll have HEAP of some other assistance program pay a substantial portion of that bill. Nevermind that the thermostats for the baseboard heaters are set to "off," these electronics are going to keep me warm this winter. And you, my most fortunate friends, are going to pay for it.
I suspect that I'll have the windows open much of the time, even in the depth of a northern Ohio January, just to keep the temperature below 80 degrees inside. God bless America.
There are a few things that I do use which are rather energy-efficient: a hideously-expensive Timex LCD alarm clock which will, AFAICT, run for -years- on a pair of AA Lithiums, sans backlight and radio. But the backlight is of the electroluminescent sort, same as the night lights I use in the bathroom and hallway - which, according to their packaging, only cost 3 cents per year to operate.
That's only two things. Damn.
Oh. And water in this place is free - I don't even pay to operate the water heater.
Except, I do pay for the funky, 1964-vintage Ultraflo water system. This place has no valves at the tub, or the bathroom sink, in the kitchen, or anywhere else (except inside the shitter). All water flow is operated by electric pushbutton switches, operating a mess of adjustable 12VAC solenoid valves in a cupboard via similarly ancient, 18-gauge multi-conductor wire.
Which does make me feel a bit better about the free water thing. I know the Earth is covered in it, but it should cost something, right? Even if it's just for the convenience of having a pre-set valve adjust the temperature for my liking at the touch of a button, water should not be free.
Is the power grid really all that effective a medium for transferring heat from one place to another?
Somebody mod the parent up. Score:3 Informative would be a fine result, or Funny.
Besides being in rather incredible accordance with the context of this article, such -official- oddities as the two linked Google hacks simply require more attention than being scored at 2.
It harkens back to a day when people actually had fun with their Net-centric job.
The Google bits are a living legend, from an expired era when corporate mentalities were considered prudish and people were just getting used to the idea of wearing jeans to the office, right there to be consumed and enjoyed. Let them be seen.
...or see if invisible is up to distributing another band.
Yes, yes, it's old-school. But, believe it or not, people still do hear a good band perform, and then ask about it at record stores. And, believe it or not, some of these stores are actually very tiny, local enterprises that would gladly try to find any music you might like, and then happily sell it to you for ~$5 less than the Place At The Mall would if they were willing to order it in the first place.
Bad math.
The Walmart here, every day, sells 700MB Memorex media at ~$20 for a spindle of 50. This breaks down to 40 cents each, or 57.14 cents per gigabyte.
A week ago, I bought a 100-disc spindle of some rather generic 700MB media on sale at another local department store for $18. 18 cents each, or 25.71 cents per gigabyte.
It takes 229 CD-Rs at 700 megabytes each to store 160 gigabytes (these are 1,000,000,000 byte hard drive marketing gigs, not 1,073,741,824 byte actual gigabytes).
So.
229 CD-Rs at $91.60 or $41.22, depending on day of week, would seem to be a good deal less expensive than one of these hard drives, and a good deal more reliable than RAID-1 (which is not ever to be trusted as a fucking backup solution. I've seen fucked up IDE controllers torch everything attached to them more often than I've seen hard drives die on their own).
The turntable exists. I forget who made it, though... Such is the way things are in with high-end audio - companies produce a few examples of one or two really great, hideously expensive products, and then elect to either cut their losses and close shop or declare bankruptcy, before fading completely into obscurity.
It had a dust-free enclosure within which the magic happened, and tracked/read the groove with a laser.
From what I can gather, it sounded good, but suffered from problems in that the source material was -not- mastered with such a playback mechanism in mind. Skilled engineers will set up the cutting lathe, the equipment driving it, and the whole recording process with the target audience's anticipated hardware and enviroment in mind, trying to counteract whatever distortion or frequency response blips are likely to be a problem.
This beast was a bit far off in left field for it to be a factor in any of those educated guesses and adjustments, so there wasn't (AFAIK) any software made specifically to play on it.
But the biggest problem was dust, scratches, and other imperfections. Since it had no physical apparatus to follow the (very wiggly) groove, nor a needle to push microscopic dust particles out of its path, every flaw on the vinyl surface was very plainly heard and easily lead to mistracking. A case of something being too perfect, perhaps. Rough vinyl -loves- to soak up dust.
Ask groups.google.com about it. ISTR some discussion of this thing in rec.audio.high-end, once upon a time...
As for laserdiscs being obsolete, bzzt. The vastly superior video fidelity (compared to DVD, anyhow) and inexpensiveness of hardware and media (thanks, Ebay!) has kept the format kicking, and it's not due to die any time soon. You get Dolby Digital, chapter selection, and most of the other things that most people think were introduced with DVD, with the exception of the stupid fucking animated menus and impossible-to-skip commercials.
Same reason that Big Ugly Dishes are still fairly common items - sure, people could "upgrade" to some 18" DBS system for cheap (or free), but with a BUD you can recieve the same absolutely perfect AM-modulated analog video that DirecTV gets, -before- it gets routed through another few racks of lossy electronics and MPEG-esque compression, and another satellite, and another recieving dish, and a consumer-level IRD of marginal quality, before finally hitting the TV.
Some of this old tech is just too cool to die.
We began these posts by writing about turntables. Talk about ancient tech that just won't go away...
Nevermind that 128 meg cards are not quite as cheap as the author alludes. If a man came up to you on the street and offered you a 64 or 128 megabyte DIMM, of proper type for your system, would you not take it home, plug it in, and enjoy it, all while being thankful for the most fortunate occasion?
Not long ago, I built a new Athlon XP desktop box (Win98, non-taxing business apps and light browsing) with a 64 meg S3 card, with s-video and composite NTSC outputs, some motion compensation bullshit, and terrible 3D performance. My old V3 2000 smoked it on just about everything during a comparative burn-in session, with a K6-2.
The V3 has 16 megs of RAM. The S3 has four times as much. And since it's nearly useless for anything OpenGL and it's driving a fixed 1024x768 LCD, it's never going to use more than 4 megs of that RAM for a framebuffer.
I picked the S3 because it was -cheap-. Cheaper than 32meg nVidia cards, cheaper than off-brand Voodoo3 cards made in Korea with surplus, post-nVidia GPUs, cheaper than Trident, cheaper than a Riva128 or a 2 meg Matrox, or any of ATi's available offerings.
I realize that S3 is dead, and will always be (thanks, SonicBlue - and I'll never have an empeg now, either). But the driver is stable, and the machine will be running the same install of 98 until some catastrophic hardware failure makes cause for something different. As long as it performs acceptably with IE's smooth scrolling features, and the wind-up start menu included with 98SE, all is golden.
So, cheap&stable is the order of the day.
If I were building a headless Linux box instead of a more interactive machine, I'd have chosen the same card. I reiterate: I could not find a cheaper AGP video card from any retailer that I was purchasing other items from. (gotta factor in shipping costs, yaknow...)
Getting ~60 megs of really fucking fast swapspace -for free- sounds like a winner, to me. And if you still think it's a bad idea, search Slashdot for old discussions of using CompactFlash cards as swap. Talk about silly, expensive means of adding virtual RAM...
I'd run something like this in a heartbeat on a headless machine, or one not destined for 3D work. Noone needs 16 megs, let alone 32, 64, or 128 just for a framebuffer. Might as well do something useful with it, even if it is slightly more expensive than an equal-capacity DIMM.
It is, once again, free.
I highly doubt that Shawn Fanning is thinking much about martyrdom, as he brings one of his paid-in-cash exotic sports cars in for its weekly tuneup and detailing, before heading off for another day of doing whatever the fuck he wants to.
More likely, he's probably just thankful that his free money went into lining the Ferrari family's pockets, rather than those of some executive at Worldcom.
Interesting? The mods must be smoking crack.
Since when has it been deduced that floods and thunderstorms are recent events?
The topsoil here in Northwest Ohio has a large percentage of sand in it. One might imagine that it is such because it was under water for a substantial period, when things were probably warmer than right now.
In the antithesis of this, this area was also carved flat by glaciers.
And yet, even in light of these enviromental twitches, I'm somehow able to write this right now.
Obviously, if a species ceases to evolve, there is a chance that unexpected external influences will cause its demise.
Obviously, if a species continues to evolve, there is a chance that unexpected external influences will cause it to grow resistant.
The earth is still here, changing, evolving, and generally putting up with its varied inhabitants.
Having now killed the basis of your argument, I'll move on to character assasination:
Did you return your copy of Windows when it stopped working for minor (but unexpected) influences?
No?
Weak. Try again.
Nope, I'll restate it again: My cable modem is *completely free*.
Which is to say, that woh.rr.com will charge me the -same amount- whether I use their provided modem, or purchase my own from a company like Linksys, or an Ebay-sourced Toshiba of similar ilk to what I've already got, or whatever.
Frankly, given the cost of the Linksys products as new, it'd take -so fucking long- to amortize at the "typical" $5/mo rental (even if I got a monthly discount) that it'd likely revert to simple carbon before it paid for itself. And that is assuming that simple component failure, lightning, or other localized catastrophe does not due it in first.
And not only was the install free, and contract-less, the first three months of service were half price.
I also get a free month for every new suscriber I refer, which seems to be a pretty fair way of doing business.
P'haps you just need to lean on your local regulatory authority, and persuade them that the locally-mandated cable monopoly where you live is an abonishment toward mankind?
I've got precious few complaints about my modem service where I come from, and those are generally hardware-based. (Tonight, the Toshiba modem locked hard. The coax connector felt warm. It took a cold restart to bring it back to life. OTOH, it's also sitting directly above the exhaust for the aforementioned 85 pounds of active, Best Ferrups UPS.)
(now, if only they'd carry Speedvision on an analog channel, I'd be able to sideline my complaints about the moving pictures they deliver over the same wire...)
Even better, check out some of Crestron's products.
(Nope, don't work for them. I did, once upon a time, pretend to program them for multi-$k home theater systems. They make, AFAIK, as advanced a remote control system you can find. Period. Flushing toilets via remote DTMF dialin is trivial compared to the things people do with Crestron gear on a daily basis.)
What sorts of computers are you people working on, which require the use of dremel tools, pliers, portable bandsaws, and a half-ton of various and sundry other tools? I've got a lot of this stuff, myself, but I don't want to tote it all around with me.
When I work on computers, I carry with me a Craftsman #2 phillips screwdriver and a folding pocket knife that is just a hair too small to be considered a concealed weapon, with a very sharp, half-serrated edge.
I've seldom needed anything else. Hardware diagnosis generally doesn't require a working spare of every part of a PC, and the parts themselves are generally too cheap individually to bother with fixing them.
Turn it on, nothing happens? Make sure power button is plugged in and things all look right. Else, the motherboard -and- PSU are both highly suspect and should not be trusted.
System boots, but without video and monitor does not turn on, optionally with POST beeps? Re-seat video card, else replace. Monitors generally show symptoms long before they bite the dust, so if it's a toast CRT they've likely known about it for a very long time wouldn't have called you to help them in the first place.
POST beeps, or everything spins up but nothing else happens. Funky RAM. Re-seat, and replace. Same symptoms with a flamed CPU, but that normally doesn't happen unless the fan is not spinning or has obviously bad bearings.
No sound? Re-seat, and then try software fixes. If still broke, replace.
Customer fucked up a BIOS flash? Remove BIOS with careful application of aforementioned knife (this is where a stout blade is important), install in a live system, re-run the appropriate flash utility, replace everything where it belongs, and you're golden.
New hard drive? Grab jumpers between knife point and appropriate finger of same hand - no finger nails required.
Computer works fine, but eventually becomes flakey? Suspect software. If not software, then heat. Find things that are hot and just look and see if there's anything physically wrong with them - like, say, the audio cable from a CD-ROM drive being crammed under the sound card into the 16-bit portion of an ISA slot. Or a component which has a large brown circle around it on the PCB - obviously something which is, or has been, Way Too Hot. Whatever part it's attached to gets replaced.
I'm not going to disassemble, for instance, a CD-ROM drive on-site. If anything, I'll diagnose it as toast, and have them buy a new one. These parts are worth too little to troubleshoot and fix when paid hourly.
The point is this: Don't bother carrying more than you need. I've got a small bag of screws and various other case hardware in the glovebox of my car, and it generally stays there.
Supposedly, certain Compaq machines require the use of a Torx driver to get into them, but I've never seen one. I only work on computers as a favor to people that I know, at least in passing - and these people don't buy Compaq. If I ever find one, however, I've got a wonderful set of 16 security Torx bits that I found in the junk bin at a hardware store for $1.50. It stays at home where it belongs, alongside the dremel.
To put this into context, I've got a P133 over in the corner for light web browsing and such. It runs seti@home, and has a very low-speed, low-noise PSU fan. The hard drive is an oddly quiet 6.5 gig Seagate.
There is no CPU fan in this machine. It does have a fairly large heatsink, aligned properly to promote convection currents, and the appropriate amount of heatsink goop between it and the CPU.
I found the big heatsink attached to a (dead) fan in another machine I was working on. Pulled the fan off, and things have been dandy.
It gets warm. Not hot. When I first told people about this, they thought I'd kill the CPU instantly. But it's been running for years now, and I really don't miss hearing the bearings go bad on yet another CPU fan.
For finding big heatsinks new, try looking at Alpha's product line - they ship their stuff from the factory fan-less, and their VARs generally put together kits with hideously noisy fans. Ask for one without, and you'll probably be able to buy one without difficulty.
Also, ISTR old Packard Bell Pentium machines having a positively huge heatsink on the CPU, without a fan. These machines are very likely to be available for free, these days...
Er.
The P90 and P60 were completely different cores from the rest of the vanilla Pentium line, and always were rather rare, being the first generation.
P75, 100, 120, 133, 150, 166, and 200 shared the same core.
Point by point:
* So, you're cheap. Broadband isn't for you.
* My cable modem didn't come with a contract. I could call this afternoon and have it switched off, or reduce the payment to something like $5/mo and keep the modem around. (Who needs bandwidth at home, while on vacation?)
* My cable modem and installation was completely free.
* The installer had a good look at my shelving unit full of shit, including 85 pounds of UPS, a switch, FreeBSD router, and a bunch of external SCSI devices. He asked, "So, what operating system are you running here, anyway?" "Lessee... FreeBSD there, XP on this desktop box, 2k on my girlfriend's machine over there, and this laptop has Slackware on it." He says: "Oh," and just hands me the box with the modem in it. I wouldn't have had it any other way, anyhow. He didn't care what I was running, and was probably happy that it was a slam-dunk install and he got to take lunch early. Which is cool, as far as I'm concerned. I already had dhcpd configured on the FreeBSD box, so the whole thing was very plug-n-play for me.
* No, it doesn't hurt to not have broadband. It does, however, become an addiction. Just as some bandwidth is better than none, more bandwidth is better than some.
* Great. At least with Time Warner, the local offices all operate more-or-less independantly. Tell them there's no way that you'll ever be home for the installer to show up, and you'd appreciate it if they'd just let you pick up a modem so you can do it yourself. Amerit^H^H^H^H^H^HSBC already does this, by default, with their DSL service around here. You order it, they perform whatever line tests need done, and a box comes to your door with a modem and some terse instructions.
* Without broadband, you have no idea what it means to be apathetic.
Bill acceptors have gotten better in recent years.
The self-checkout systems at department stores near here have no difficulty accepting bills with odd stamps and writing on them, torn/missing/folded corners, or bills so faded and stained that they're grey on grey instead of black on green, or bills with small chunks of paper missing from the middle.
I have no idea what mechanism they use to determine whether the bill is real or not, but they're so imparticular about what they accept that I've often wondered if they check anything at all except denomination.
The only time I've ever had one of these more recent machines react badly was when I fed the (contracted) soda machine at work a very tightly rolled dollar. It got lost, somewhere, in the paper guides, unable to either reject or accept the bill.
Eventually, it gave up. I didn't get the dollar back, or any soda from it, but it was perfectly happy with a somewhat-less-rolled bill after about a minute or so of failing to handle the one I'd just fed it. I took my $1.55 can of Coke and left, chalking it up to experience.
That all said, while I do stand for the abolishment of the penny (as long as sales tax gets rounded -down-, by law) and the introduction of coins of greater value, I've had very little displeasure lately buying expensive things (say, $70 worth of groceries) with automated bill acceptors.
Forget plugging in a DVD player to a computer monitor.
Anything "mid-priced" will output some form of NTSC video, which is horrible in all incarnations. Even if you get -really lucky- and score a VGA-esque RGB output, you'll be ill-equipped to see "just how crisp it can be," because the DACs on your Sun's video hardware are significantly better than anything inside of a sanely-priced DVD player.
Better to pick up a DVD drive, and some good software. This is, after all, a computer monitor. Drive it with a computer. At 1920x1200.
You'll get, depending on hardware and software, some very fine scaling and framerate conversion and filtering. Things will be great, as good as it gets. If your Sun can't do it, a cheap PC with an appropriate DVD-supporting video card will still be cheaper than a super-high-res progressive scan DVD player.
Whereas, a DVD player will only drive the monitor at a couple of fixed frequencies and resolutions, which may or may not include overscan support, and thus show a chance of being incredibly poor-looking on a computer display - and that's only if you get the interfaces to talk to eachother at all.
That all said, if you're insistant, this box will do what you want with just about any analog signal you can come up with. And since noone seems to want to make an analog -> DVI converter, things get even more hairy. Something like this this adapter card along with this way-overkill video switcher might do it.
You don't want to ask what any of that stuff costs, though. There's reasons why the price isn't listed on the web page. (other stuff probably exists which does similar things with varying amounts of overkill, but Extron has a reputation for being the best. If you wanna see "just how crisp it can be" in such an arrangement, look no further.)
It's not an NT error, but an Intel one, dating back to the Beginning of Time (or the 6MHz 286, anyway). The same errors are reported in the same way under OS/2, and probably a number of other operating systems - I seem to recall Win95 puking out similar nomenclature during at least one BSOD.
Under OS/2, such screaching halts are known as "traps," instead of blue screens. And since OS/2 users were generally more knowledgable about computers then, than NT users are today, there's a lot of information available to help with fixing it.
According to groups.google.com-archived message from 1993, 0D is a General Protection Fault.
GPFs happen all the time with bunky hardware. Try re-seating (or just purchasing new) RAM, CPU, and anything else socketed that you can find.
And if that doesn't work, toss the machine. Or give it away to someone with stubborn enough to fix it. Different boxes of similar ilk are available in the $50 range, these days - no need to spend any absurd amount of time with a diagnosis.
Might be a media issue, but:
A few years ago, when everyone was buying and selling 4x burners like hotcakes because they were just so damn fast, I picked up an 8x Plextor.
Various forums and newsgroups were still full of messages from people having various problems with various combinations of burner, media, and reader. People were generally having a difficult time making things work, some or all of the time. Because of this, I decided to research things a bit before dropping any serious amount of money on CD-Rs.
So. I picked up two samples each of some ~10 varieties of CD-R. Maxell, Memorex, Sony, TDK, the "new" 8x-rated Kodak, the "old" 4x-rated Kodak, high- and low-end Ricoh, something called "CD Rocket Fuel", and so on.
I burned a bunch of identical audio CDs onto these discs, and then collected a variety of players with which to play them (an abused playstation, an Aiwa portable, a Carver rackmount unit, and cdparanoia+stopwatch on the 32x Plextor CD-ROM in the same machine), hoping to get an idea of the error rate of various combinations.
Results? 2x-rated media burned fine at 8x. 4x media burned fine at 8x. The only 8x-rated media in the test was the Kodak gold/green and the S&F "Rocket Fuel".
The Kodak, the priciest of the whole lot, performed least well. The anti-skip on the Aiwa portable took longer to fill its buffer, the Playstation was more susceptible to shaking-induced skips, and cdparanoia took longer to read it.
Which was kind of a bummer, because they were advertising shelf lives in the range of 100 years and I'd like my data to outlive me.
Since then, I've bought a few spindles of TDK which I've been happy with at home. I did pick up a batch of Verbatim blanks which were absolute trash, though, and would not read in my (non-abused) Playstation at all.
In the studio, where we had the same 8x Plextor, we had no difficulty, complaint, or general bad vibes from using the cheapest media we can find. Mostly, this was because it was a money-losing enterprise, and a few cents saved per blank added up to, say, getting few pizzas one night instead of a bag full of $0.99 cheeseburgers from Hardees.
Since this experience, I've been using whatever I can find cheap, though I will pay a bit more for unbranded blanks.
(100 packs of some unbranded Asian-imported generic knockoff CD-R are on sale right now at a local department store for something like $15. I intend to buy the remaining stock on payday.)
Yep. And the only alarm circuit I've ever had the pleasure of rigging for bandwidth was cheaper than than the cheapest POTS plan offered.
Which is to say, that it makes the telephone company MORE MONEY to sell you POTS alongside DSL than it does for them to just rent you a dry pair.
Which is to say, that it costs you MORE MONEY to buy POTS alongside DSL than it does to just rent a dry pair.
Which is to say... who am I kidding? Did you fail your elementary math class, or are you just trolling?
At my last place of residence, I had WiFi net access (though, we called it 802.11b at that time...).
The company providing this service had constructed a rather large (several hundred feet large, dwarfing an AT&T microwave relay station a few hundred yards down the road from it) tower near my house.
I guess I should mention that the landscape around here is flat. Like a ruler. And completely devoid of obstructions.
I had no trouble at all getting 500 kBps downloads using the Aironet 350 AP and Pringles can-looking antenna they provided and installed from this massive tower 2.1 miles away.
The point of this text? They cover, probably with some degree of success, a very significant portion of Northwest Ohio with just ten of these towers.
Cell phones don't get that kind of range.
And even -handheld- cell phones are good for up to for 600mW of output (in the US, per FCC rules). The Aironet is about half of that.
Old-school bag phones had output of up to 3W. Which -might- have been as good as Comwavz -appears- to be doing with plain old 802.11b.
I never got rain fade, or snow fade, or any fade at all while I used it, even when conditions rendered visibility to zero. My microwave didn't phase it, and waving my 2.4GHz spread spectrum Uniden cordless phone directly in front of the antenna didn't make any measurable dent in latency. An arc welder used directly below the antenna didn't make a difference, either.
Things worked almost as well after an hour or two of sustained 50-70MPH winds kicked the loosely-mounted antenna so that it was at 90 degrees to the aforementioned towering wonder of bandwidth - the least efficient way I can imagine for that type of antenna to work.
I was able to also communicate -directly- with a few other of their customers. Those which I was able to identify were often several miles away, none with antennas pointed at mine (nor mine at theirs). Speeds were slow in this ad-hoc arrangement, sometimes in the range of 30kBps, but often were on par with my (current) 2Mbit cable modem.
I am led to wonder, thus, precisely what the problem is. It seems to be a remarkably durable way to communicate, and I have difficulty believing that Starbucks, of all places, can put a dent in anything controlled by people with motivation to make it continue working.
(I did have some downtime, once or twice, but each time that happened I was able to use binoculars to spot a guy wearing a toolbelt, jacking his way up that towering steel phalus. I attributed the temporary loss of bandwidth to safety of his (obviously brass) balls, not to any enviromental or interferance issues.)
Yep.
So spend more on multi-port RS-232 cards and bulky, expensive cables, since noone can type that fast, anyway.
God forbid you might need to update the software, ever, on these trouble-prone 10-year-old laptops with NO CD-ROM DRIVES, armed with only a low-speed PPP connection. Things could be zipping along at a couple hundred kilobytes per second or so, for less cost and less hassle than serial's two-or-three kBps, with less of a dead-end system.
And serial ports on PCs typically aren't able to be set to 28.8kbps - try, instead, the following more-or-less standard selections:
115200, 57600, 38400, 19200, 9600, 4800, 2400, 1200, 300
If you really want dumb terminals, buy dumb terminals. I picked up a pair of fine-looking VT-330s at a hamfest a few years back for $30, and both work great.
I also chanced upon an 8-port Bocaboard, and an old-school multi-I/O card with four serial, three parallel, two IDE, and two floppy (!) controllers. Quite a beastly little 16-bit ISA card that is.
It all sits in the closet these days, though. The free 386SL/25 laptop with its $3 ethernet card is better than that pile of rubbish, and consumes less power and desk space, and doesn't rely on any other particular machine to be alive for it to be useful.
I can buy cable for it almost anywhere, whereas serial cables are beginning to get a bit scarce. I don't have to worry about ground loops because 10base-T is ungrounded - no chance of the interaction of a surge protector and a bolt of lightning using my laptop, on the other end of a long wire, as a ground (well. maybe I shouldn't go -that- far, but it is far less likely to happen with ethernet vs. RS-232).
But, whatever. You wacky geeks go ahead and design a complicated, slow system of shims and widgets for passing Secret Messages when all you need is a tube, a glorified ping pong ball, and a bit of Newtonian physics...
It's still in Slack, and pops up just before the install finishes up.
It was a somewhat garish feature even Back in the Day, but I guess it does serve some a purpose when a VGA card has a particularly disgusting BIOS font.