Ask the people who make data terminals for stock brokers. Apparently they have a tendency to smash their keyboards, then call tech support saying their computer "just stopped working".
Later in the article they say "With 100 Mbps of capacity, businesses can easily implement video conferencing and voice over IP (VoIP)." 1000, 100, Fast Ethernet, 67x T1...blah.
And then it says they use Cisco 3524, 3508, and 2912 (!) switches. The 3524 is Fast Ethernet with a couple of gigabit ports, the 3508 is a gigabit-only switch, and the 2912 is the lowest end of the 29xx Fast Ethernet switch line, so they've either had those a long time or gotten them used cheap. Which means that they have a gigabit core and Fast Ethernet access. So those "cheap routers" only have to handle 100 mbit, and as access routers the latency of store-and-forward isn't so much of a problem. It's the core that needs cut-through switching.
For gigabit, the 32/33 PCI bus of an average PC would indeed be saturated, but the point of gigabit these days is more to aggregate bandwidth than to have single servers delivering 100 MBytes/sec.
However the linked article does not say anything about free access. In fact, it says they aren't "sure what the charge will be for the service". And that it's MobileStar running the network, who are not known as a free wireless provider.
but because of the.com fallout, they started charging like $6.95 a day or something
No, that's because it was a "trial period" by Wayport. There was at least one other company (MobileStar) providing 802.11b, but they went FC a few months back. Both of them had a login screen that totally fucked up my browser cache (or something) such that it kept trying to access their stupid login server whenever I tried to go to my home page.
Back in the late '80s, a friend of mine had one of the first Apple HD-20 hard drives. At a user group meeting someone stole the computer and hard drive. But not the boot disk. See, this wierd hard drive hooked up to the floppy port, and until the 512e/Mac Plus ROM, you had to have a special boot disk which contained a replacement floppy driver to use it.
So he called up all the places in town that sold Macs (all two or three of them) and waited. Sure enough the idiot kid shows up at a store asking about an HD-20 boot disk. Snagged!
The difference now is that the internet is everywhere, and it's now possible to have the computer "phone home".
Two minor nitpicks (only two!):
* I thought Space War was first implemented on the TX-O, not the PDP-1.
* Systems never mentioned: RCA Studio II (the only pre-2600 cartridge system not mentioned), Emerson Arcadia 2001 (with sound effects that must have been programmed by a tone-deaf person; you have to hear it to understand just how bad they are), APF M-1000, Atari Lynx.
More random stuff:
* When Atari finally released the 7800 in 1986, the units had been sitting in a warehouse, ready for sale for two years, since being cancelled in 1984 because "nobody wanted to buy video games any more". Sure, nobody wanted to buy crappy 2600 games any more... but Nintendo was foolish enough to release a system anyhow.:)
* I had one of those old Coleco Telstar units when I was a kid. One thing about it was that if you slid the game select switch to just the right position, you got a version of the "hockey" game where one side had three paddles instead of two.
* And FWIW, a few years back I found a (very thick) book by Tab Books which covers the design of TTL-based (as in no CPU) games. Very interesting what you can do without a CPU, but it really takes a Woz to get that kind of stuff right. (IIRC, Woz designed the coin-op Breakout machine.)
I was recently lucky enough to find the Laserdisc set last month for $25 at an antiques store I check about twice a year. (They usually go for $50 or so on ebay.) Region codes? What region codes? And it's the NTSC version, and supposedly includes those same deleted scenes, too.
But then, like me he read the specifications and the awful price, and he agrees that it is over priced and under specced.
If so, I believe it's a lot less so than the original iMac. The LCD screen necessarily raises the price by at least $200, and with a 700 G4, it's no slouch. In my opinion, the only thing truly under-specced is the RAM. They should have included 256 megs, what with current prices for PC-100 SDRAM (I doubt they're using anything better than PC-100). The SODIMM slot doesn't look like it has room for a double-height module and an AirPort card at the same time, so it'll be limited to adding either 256 megs or an expensive 512 megs (as opposed to a cheap double-height 512 meg module) in the near future.
I wouldn't get one as a server, but duhhhh, in no way was it intended to be a server.
I haven't seen this happen much, but a chip can blow its lid too. The best example I have seen is an old Colecovision that must have been hit with a surge from lightning. A third of the chips in that thing had popped their tops, and one capacitor was very singed. But LEDs are still much easier to explode than chips.
Many years ago, in the mid-'80s, back when I had time to do fun things like hook up TTL chips to make LEDs blink, I exploded two LEDs at two different times, by accidently putting 5 volts across them with no current-limiting resistor. The second was a tiny LED, not much bigger than modern surface mount LEDs, but the first time, it was a jumbo (6mm or so) red LED, and the top popped off and bounced off of my glasses. Good thing I wear glasses or it could have gone into my eye, and it would have not been fun explaining that to my mom.
So basically, if you want to try this at home kids, get a few junk jumbo LEDs, a 5 volt non-switching power supply, and if you're smart, a nailboard to pop them from a distance.
Phillips patents expire in 2002 and 2003, and it would take that long just to get the litigation moving. We may be screwed.
This isn't just a patent issue. Patents don't cover that little logo that says "CD Digital Audio", trademarks do. All they have to do is keep enforcing it, and it will stay in effect. The result is still that "broken" audio CDs will not be able to use the official logo.
[Here's the beauty of the idea:] But as more servers are upgraded, fewer and fewer servers will be able to be used as scapegoats for spoofed spam, and pressure will mount to upgrade these servers as well.
Considering how many spams are sent through open relays, which are usually caused by someone (often in east Asia) doing a default install which includes a five-year-old version of Sendmail, or using some broken utility to generate their sendmail.cf file (which can also result in an open relay, since that stuff gets upgraded along with Sendmail), and of which the person running the computer may not even know is running (thanks to the glory days of RedHat turning every inet daemon on by default), the number of broken servers will probably increase at a much higher rate than the servers that get upgraded.
Every time I go to a used book store, or a thrift store, and see years-old distros of Linux on the shelf, I shudder at the thought of how much 'sploitable stuff is permanently etched into those old CD-ROMs.
Ditto the OS itself. Nothing I've seen indicates any sort of real customization is possible. After using either Gnome or KDE, you get *real* spoiled in that area.
You can load Yellow Dog Linux on it. If you just have to have Gnome or KDE, nothing is stopping you. So what's your problem with that? Besides, OS X is no slouch. I've gotten real spoiled by the MacOS 9 Finder, but as of 10.1.2 OS X's user interface has become tolerable. And it doesn't crash either (except that the AirPort drivers cause a kernel panic when I wake up my PowerBook at work if I don't remember to turn AirPort off before putting it to sleep.)
I just woke up half an hour ago, I just now (before hitting Submit) got to see the Time Canada picture thanks to forked.net, but I did find this nice little link from MacSlash, and it's almost exactly what I expected an LCD iMac to look like, an LCD screen with a fat bulge behind it: Les Imacs LCD
Price: 256MB/24X CD-ROM M8545LL/A 899EUR, 256MB/DVD-ROM M3731LL/A or CD-RW M3732LL/A 1459EUR, 512MB/DVD-ROM and CD-RW M3733LL/A 1659EUR. These are apprently French prices, and I don't know whether they include VAT. Dollar prices should be of the same magnitude.
Maybe Time Canada's picture was of the legendary AirMac? It looks like a damn lamp with an LCD screen attached. It's clearly intended to take the place of the Cube as the l33t d3sign3r Mac.
This is why I only enable Flash on a case-by-case basis these days, since the time when weather.com had one with a freaking TRUCK HORN sound. Since Mozilla doesn't provide an easy way to do this, the next easiest way is to move the Flash plugin in or out of the Plugins folder. Mozilla notices this change without having to be re-launched. If it's not a Flash ad, you can get Mozilla to block it for you automatically.
Then all you get is a full-page blank square with a little puzzle piece inside.
Seems that whenever someone picks you as a "Friend", you go on to his "Fans" list. It would be kinda cool if there were a way to know who has the biggest Fans list. Right now, a certain cleverly named person already has over a dozen.
The problem isn't the last mile, contrary to the buzzwords... the problem is getting the pipe to run many, many miles to actual end users' homes.
...or find a place to live that's real close to a CO. I bought a house that's about 7000 feet, but my DSL comes off of a Remote Terminal that's presumably in the big beige box down the street about 500 feet away. (I wonder if SBC can offer the 6 Mbit ADSL download speeds from RT DSLAMS.)
One thing the article doesn't mention is if lower speeds are available at longer distances, or if the technology supports repeater boxes in un-air conditioned cabines.
Actually you can run plain 10-base T over Cat-3, but you're limited to 100 meters (300 feet) because of the timing restrictions of the collision detection. I'm sure CSMA/CD is the first thing that went out the window with LRE.
Slashdot Mirror
P.S. I am not making this up.
Vax Mail, memos, and status reports
Tomcat, Atari's last XY game
Atari patents
There's a lot more on the site, including an article about XY monitors, but nothing else really Atari-related.
And then it says they use Cisco 3524, 3508, and 2912 (!) switches. The 3524 is Fast Ethernet with a couple of gigabit ports, the 3508 is a gigabit-only switch, and the 2912 is the lowest end of the 29xx Fast Ethernet switch line, so they've either had those a long time or gotten them used cheap. Which means that they have a gigabit core and Fast Ethernet access. So those "cheap routers" only have to handle 100 mbit, and as access routers the latency of store-and-forward isn't so much of a problem. It's the core that needs cut-through switching.
For gigabit, the 32/33 PCI bus of an average PC would indeed be saturated, but the point of gigabit these days is more to aggregate bandwidth than to have single servers delivering 100 MBytes/sec.
Get out your umbrellas and lawnchairs!
I really wish some network would re-run the series again.
The hell with that. I want it on DVD already.
However the linked article does not say anything about free access. In fact, it says they aren't "sure what the charge will be for the service". And that it's MobileStar running the network, who are not known as a free wireless provider.
Or a filez 133ch. Let's see... www dot giganews dot com... alt.binaries.anime... extract binaries... :-)
No, that's because it was a "trial period" by Wayport. There was at least one other company (MobileStar) providing 802.11b, but they went FC a few months back. Both of them had a login screen that totally fucked up my browser cache (or something) such that it kept trying to access their stupid login server whenever I tried to go to my home page.
So he called up all the places in town that sold Macs (all two or three of them) and waited. Sure enough the idiot kid shows up at a store asking about an HD-20 boot disk. Snagged!
The difference now is that the internet is everywhere, and it's now possible to have the computer "phone home".
* I thought Space War was first implemented on the TX-O, not the PDP-1.
* Systems never mentioned: RCA Studio II (the only pre-2600 cartridge system not mentioned), Emerson Arcadia 2001 (with sound effects that must have been programmed by a tone-deaf person; you have to hear it to understand just how bad they are), APF M-1000, Atari Lynx.
More random stuff: :)
* When Atari finally released the 7800 in 1986, the units had been sitting in a warehouse, ready for sale for two years, since being cancelled in 1984 because "nobody wanted to buy video games any more". Sure, nobody wanted to buy crappy 2600 games any more... but Nintendo was foolish enough to release a system anyhow.
* I had one of those old Coleco Telstar units when I was a kid. One thing about it was that if you slid the game select switch to just the right position, you got a version of the "hockey" game where one side had three paddles instead of two.
* And FWIW, a few years back I found a (very thick) book by Tab Books which covers the design of TTL-based (as in no CPU) games. Very interesting what you can do without a CPU, but it really takes a Woz to get that kind of stuff right. (IIRC, Woz designed the coin-op Breakout machine.)
I was recently lucky enough to find the Laserdisc set last month for $25 at an antiques store I check about twice a year. (They usually go for $50 or so on ebay.) Region codes? What region codes? And it's the NTSC version, and supposedly includes those same deleted scenes, too.
If so, I believe it's a lot less so than the original iMac. The LCD screen necessarily raises the price by at least $200, and with a 700 G4, it's no slouch. In my opinion, the only thing truly under-specced is the RAM. They should have included 256 megs, what with current prices for PC-100 SDRAM (I doubt they're using anything better than PC-100). The SODIMM slot doesn't look like it has room for a double-height module and an AirPort card at the same time, so it'll be limited to adding either 256 megs or an expensive 512 megs (as opposed to a cheap double-height 512 meg module) in the near future.
I wouldn't get one as a server, but duhhhh, in no way was it intended to be a server.
It's the old "import an animal to destroy a local pest" problem all over again.
I haven't seen this happen much, but a chip can blow its lid too. The best example I have seen is an old Colecovision that must have been hit with a surge from lightning. A third of the chips in that thing had popped their tops, and one capacitor was very singed. But LEDs are still much easier to explode than chips.
So basically, if you want to try this at home kids, get a few junk jumbo LEDs, a 5 volt non-switching power supply, and if you're smart, a nailboard to pop them from a distance.
This isn't just a patent issue. Patents don't cover that little logo that says "CD Digital Audio", trademarks do. All they have to do is keep enforcing it, and it will stay in effect. The result is still that "broken" audio CDs will not be able to use the official logo.
Considering how many spams are sent through open relays, which are usually caused by someone (often in east Asia) doing a default install which includes a five-year-old version of Sendmail, or using some broken utility to generate their sendmail.cf file (which can also result in an open relay, since that stuff gets upgraded along with Sendmail), and of which the person running the computer may not even know is running (thanks to the glory days of RedHat turning every inet daemon on by default), the number of broken servers will probably increase at a much higher rate than the servers that get upgraded.
Every time I go to a used book store, or a thrift store, and see years-old distros of Linux on the shelf, I shudder at the thought of how much 'sploitable stuff is permanently etched into those old CD-ROMs.
You can load Yellow Dog Linux on it. If you just have to have Gnome or KDE, nothing is stopping you. So what's your problem with that? Besides, OS X is no slouch. I've gotten real spoiled by the MacOS 9 Finder, but as of 10.1.2 OS X's user interface has become tolerable. And it doesn't crash either (except that the AirPort drivers cause a kernel panic when I wake up my PowerBook at work if I don't remember to turn AirPort off before putting it to sleep.)
Given the size of the X-Box controller, will this be another controller that only works for people with hands the size of Andre the Giant's hands?
As I was trying to say, here's all the info from that page:
M8545LL/A
IMAC 750 MHz - G3 / 256 MB PC 100 SDRAM / 20 GB DD / écran 15'' CRT / carte ATI Rage 128 (16MB) / CDROM 24x Ethernet / Modem Graphite ou Indigo.
Prix indicatif CLG 899
M3731LL/A(DVD) ou M3732LL/A(CDRW)
IMAC 1Go - G3 / 256 MB PC 133 SDRAM / 40 GB DD / écran 14,1'' LCD / carte ATI RADEON 7000 (16MB) / DVD-ROM ou CDRW / Ethernet / Modem
Prix indicatif CLG 1459
M3733LL/A
IMAC 1Go - G3 / 512 MB PC 133 SDRAM / 60 GB DD / écran 14,1'' LCD / carte ATI RADEON 7000 (16MB) / DVD-ROM et CDRW / Ethernet / Modem
Prix indicatif CLG 1659
Price: 256MB/24X CD-ROM M8545LL/A 899EUR, 256MB/DVD-ROM M3731LL/A or CD-RW M3732LL/A 1459EUR, 512MB/DVD-ROM and CD-RW M3733LL/A 1659EUR. These are apprently French prices, and I don't know whether they include VAT. Dollar prices should be of the same magnitude.
Maybe Time Canada's picture was of the legendary AirMac? It looks like a damn lamp with an LCD screen attached. It's clearly intended to take the place of the Cube as the l33t d3sign3r Mac.
Then all you get is a full-page blank square with a little puzzle piece inside.
Just wait until Apple sues Slashdot for copying the Aqua user interface.
Seems that whenever someone picks you as a "Friend", you go on to his "Fans" list. It would be kinda cool if there were a way to know who has the biggest Fans list. Right now, a certain cleverly named person already has over a dozen.
...or find a place to live that's real close to a CO. I bought a house that's about 7000 feet, but my DSL comes off of a Remote Terminal that's presumably in the big beige box down the street about 500 feet away. (I wonder if SBC can offer the 6 Mbit ADSL download speeds from RT DSLAMS.)
One thing the article doesn't mention is if lower speeds are available at longer distances, or if the technology supports repeater boxes in un-air conditioned cabines.
Actually you can run plain 10-base T over Cat-3, but you're limited to 100 meters (300 feet) because of the timing restrictions of the collision detection. I'm sure CSMA/CD is the first thing that went out the window with LRE.