Notice how many years it took ANYONE to discover this.
Correction: how many years it took anyone to discover and announce this. Just because it was only now announced doesn't mean someone didn't know about it two years ago and kept quiet about it.
Some people are very against the optical connectors for digital out and swear by the RCA jack digital outputs instead. The reason they cite is Jitter, however it's more a technical probelm than it is anything you'll actually hear. Personally I get a kick out of having fiber optics connecting my components.
Anybody who refers to a digital connection having "jitter" doesn't understand the technology.
The real reason to go with coax over digital is that you can use regular video cables instead of more expensive, and shorter, optical cables. Not all cables will work on the coax connection, but a given cable either will or won't work; there is no qualitative element involved. Plus, I hear that the optical cables use plastic fibers rather than glass, which probably explains why they aren't very long.
So go with coax, because it's going to be cheaper and more reliable.
The iMac isn't a system designed to appeal to males. It's designed to appeal to females, who generally don't want to mess with hooking up pieces of a system. It has the same attractiveness as those TV/VCR combos. I personally would never own one of those, because I know that VCRs wear out a lot faster than TV sets, and now cost almost as much to repair as they do to replace, so therefore I consider them impractical. But my mom keeps saying she wants one.
Exactly. I'm a bit of a Mac bigot myself, but I make a point of complaining to people who ask me about runing Linux on Mac hardware.
If you want to run Linux, especially as a server, get a cheap-ass PC box. An old K6-2 300 makes a fine server. Don't waste Mac hardware on an OS that you can run just as well on cheaper hardware. I don't have as much of a problem with using pre-PCI Macs for Linux, but AFAICT the popular distros only run on PCI Macs.
Save the Mac for desktop GUI stuff, because I haven't yet found anything that compares in useability to OS 8.x-9.x in the Linux world. (FWIW, I was disappointed when Eazel finally came out with... Yet Another Freaking Browser.)
I couldn't get any of the Linux distribs to what i consider a useable state.
If by a "useable state" you mean as a desktop machine with a GUI, I understand what you mean. For me, Linux is my OS, but MacOS is my window manager. Basically, I have a PC running Linux sitting next to my Mac doing all sorts of server type things, but I still use the Mac to do desktop type things.
Unfortunately, I don't find OS X to be all that useable as a desktop yet, in terms of its pathetic clone of the Finder, which throws away all the subtle aspects of useability. Plus that stupid dock, which takes up precious vertical screen space and prevents you from using the both lower corners of the screen when it is short. (An option for a vertical dock dangling from the menu bar would be a small improvement.)
Right now I'm keeping it installed on my Pismo 500 so I can show it off to some Linux folks over the next week or so. Then I'll probably trash it until somebody fixes the problem with the boot managers screwing up RAM Doubler 9.
I know it doesn't come with it, but do a search for "MacTCP Ping". It's old, but it works fine with OS 9.x. It lets you send pings, and it also responds to pings as long as it is running.
Those are maximum ratings. Maybe a full A1000 is rated at 7A, but this one only had four drives installed. Both E4500s had an empty slot, and one only had the default 2 CPUs, but was full of dual 9GB drive modules (the other had 8CPUs). And since this was in an office building, maybe the plug was on a 20A circuit. However, this particular plug was hidden behind a piece of cubicle wall in a lab room, and difficult to reach, so I didn't feel too worried about lusers plugging coffee cup warmers into it. And they're really only for configuration compatibility testing (!), so it's not like there's anything mission critical running on these two boxen.
Since the operative phrase here is "in your own den", that implies a different level of power reliability being required. The point is that you can do it without hiring an electrician, as opposed to, say, a VAX 11/780, which I've heard requires 3-phase power. You don't even need to rack mount them; the two I worked with came shipped in a standalone configuration which worked quite well sitting on the wooden shipping pallets.
With a 500Mhz PB G3 running LinuxPPC, you'll have the fastest notebook available, with impressive battery life, and the bonus of non-dongle ethernet.
And right now (as in this week, until they finish clearing their inventory for the expected G4 models) they're cheap enough to be worth buying. $2200 from the Apple Store web site. (I got mine a couple of weeks ago for $2100 via a special offer to developers.) A mere six months ago it cost $3500.
Consider that those dinky little portable DVD players cost $1000-$1100, and you're getting more than just a laptop. And the current "LG" DVD-ROM drive has a command that disables the RPC-2 region protection until the next reset, so you can easily bypass the evils of region coding, too.
Of course I don't think you'll be able to play DVDs under LinuxPPC for a while. But when OS X is released, you should be able to get most of the benefits of LinuxPPC, at the cost of a bit more RAM.
I might prefer an IBM S/390 for my own den, but it's interesting for those of us at present lacking a computer budget like these demand to read about what makes them so pricey.
Well, save up your pennies, because you can run a well loaded E4500 system (including a nice 21" display) from a single 15A 117 VAC wall plug. I've done it. Two E4500's, a 21" monitor, and a 4-disk A1000 disk unit, to be exact.
Although 220 VAC is preferred to give you higher wattage with less amps, it is definitely not required.
Apple Computer succeeded because it could show that there was no likelihood of confusion between the Apple computers and the Apple records. Both marks were arbitrary within their respective industries and where inherently strong and distinctive.
Actually, Apple Computer had to make a deal with Apple Records saying that they would not go into the music business. This became a bit of an issue when the Mac II was going to use an improved sound chip.
You could press the power button to turn off the machine, but a lot of them these days have Ethernet cards that can turn the system back on.
A better method is the switch inside the circuit breaker box, but that's not a button. Instead, the button on a detonator attached to the hard drive of the machine in question is recommended.
In extreme cases, a MIRV aimed at Redmond may be the only solution.
It's only a matter of time. I made a 7800 dumper and I even tried to make a copy cart of his Sentinel, but I couldn't get the copy cart circuitry right. I know I dumped those two, but right now I'm not exactly full of free time these days. When I run across those files, I'll let the rgvc folks know.
Also FWIW, those two were European releases, so they do NOT have the digital signature required to run on an unmodified USA 7800.
We are sorry, but our site is temporarily unavailable. We are working to
bring the system back up as quickly as possible.
Please check the Announcement Board at
http://www2.ebay.com/aw/announce.shtml
for updates. We will keep you posted as work progresses. We apologize for
the inconvenience and appreciate your patience.
Regards, eBay
Hey, what a great way to keep people from outbidding you... just post about it on/. and beat ebay into the ground until the auction is over! (just kidding about this one, but it really isn't a half bad idea for the less ethically-minded)
You forgot about that other 30% who thinks some random NES or Playstation game is a "classic". The other day, I think I even saw one of the ebay locusts post about something related to the Dreamcast being a "classic"!
If anyone else ever frequents r.g.v.c, you know what I'm talking about, and who Bira Bira and Sum Guy are.
All praise Bira Bira! Death to Mr. Friendly! Cart Dreams of the Reef Store for everyone! Never stop Chasing that Chuckwagon!
2. I think segmented memory should be listed again at least one more time but possibly twice. Including all those dman segment registers and index registers.
Only the "nobody will need to access more than 64k of memory in one chunk" attitude of the segmented memory design. If they had been 32 bits, that would have been just fine. Add to that the 80286, which tried to enforce it, forcing you to choose between real mode with segment arithmetic and protected mode with more than 1 meg of address space. The only option was to reset the CPU, using CMOS to clue in the BIOS that this wasn't a reboot.
4. stack code
If you're referring to what I think you're referring to, that's a more general problem based on the extremely primitive way that C stores strings (a null terminator with no indication of buffer size), combined with downward-growing stacks. Stack 'sploits can still happen even with non-exec stack segments, by writing over return addresses to call well-known library glue code routines.
On the other hand, I do give the mcreitd for ia64, it is a beautiful architecture. Now if they'd only drop IA32 support and make it run fast...
I thought that came from the HP PA-RISC architecture? In other words, I don't think you have Intel to thank for it.
And one last razz to Motorola for missing the opportunity of a lifetime. The way I heard it (from someone who used to work at Motorola) was that when IBM was designing the PC, they asked Motorola and Intel if the 68K/8088 would be ready by a specific date. Motorola didn't want to commit. Intel was ready to commit to anything. Ironically the 68K was ready by the deadline anyhow, but by then it was too late.
This thing is like three years old now. About the right lag time for a Slashdot article, though.
FWIW, the real reason he doesn't want to even try to sell these is because it would be an unholy pain in the butt. This ain't no Heathkit we're talking about here. I've done EPROM mods for the 7800 and ColecoVision, and installed region mods for Saturn and Playstation, and this is way above that. I've also made three cart dumpers, the first was a socket adapter for an EPROM programmer, the next was a rigged TRS-80 Color Computer, and the third was a rigged 7800, and I dumped quite a few rare cartridges with them.
The trickiest part of designing this thing was emulating all the bank switching schemes used on the 2600. There were well over half a dozen different schemes used, plus this emulates the Supercharger, which had its own bank switching scheme. An FPGA was used here to give maximum flexibility with a minimum of chips.
The reason bank switching on the 2600 was so non-standardized is that there was no R/W line, so you had to use special addresses to trigger bank switches, and separate address ranges for reading vs writing any RAM on the cartridge.
And then there were the cartridges with custom chips, like Pitfall II, which had a chip containing the music data, copied to the volume registers at the start of each scan line, and the Supercharger's main chip, which had to be removed from an actual cartridge and insterted into the project. The Stella TIA chip also had to be salvaged from a real 2600.
On top of all that, he's got an 8085 and TMS9918 to control it, and to generate the audio signal for the Supercharger games. That's like putting a second custom video game system into it.
I'd make it a live link, but/. keeps wanting to put blanks in a link that long. Sorry, guys, some URL re-assembly required.
The "Truth" about who Microsoft really is
on
Microsoft Cracked
·
· Score: 5
Any of you with Unix shell access should try:
whois microsoft.com
also whois aol.com ; whois apple.com ; whois whitehouse.gov
How did they do it? Simple. Whenever you register a nameserver IP address, you have to include a domain name for the nameserver. I think the only thing checked is that the IP address pings and the domain name is part of a real domain.
...be bad in the right way. If, for example, the most significant bit of the addressing bus were damaged, you would only have access to half of the chip's memory at a maximum.
It's worse than that. DRAM is addressed by rows and columns, so each address line controls two bits, and not necessarily two adjacent bits.
If an entire address line is bad, it's time to make a keychain holder. At the factory, this type of problem won't even make it out of initial die testing, much less all the way to manufacturing a DIMM.
Moreover, most of the problems I've seen with bad memory have been intermittent random failures related (apparently) to thermal stress and/or specific timing patterns, not fixed "sticky bits".
Ah yes, timing and all that other rot. Two stories here.
My first every memory upgrade was many years ago, adding 4116 RAM to a TRS-80 Expansion Interface. I put it in and it didn't work. When I looked at the address range with the TRSDOS debugger, it contained random values that changed every time I looked at it! I managed to get it to work right by cranking the power supply voltage down into the low 4.x volt range.
And a few months ago, I got some old IBM 72 pin 8MB SIMMs at a computer show that were probably pulls from old PS/2 machines. Some of them worked, some didn't. I didn't realize until a few days later that this was 80ns RAM, and the motherboard only supported 60/70ns RAM. I was lucky to get any of them to work right.
And then there was all that talk about "cosmic rays" messing up DRAM, until eventually it was discovered that the radiation was coming from within the chip itself!
Slashdot Mirror
Some players can be made region-switchable. All the "new" protection does is check the GUI region code in addition to the MPEG region code.
Correction: how many years it took anyone to discover and announce this. Just because it was only now announced doesn't mean someone didn't know about it two years ago and kept quiet about it.
Anybody who refers to a digital connection having "jitter" doesn't understand the technology.
The real reason to go with coax over digital is that you can use regular video cables instead of more expensive, and shorter, optical cables. Not all cables will work on the coax connection, but a given cable either will or won't work; there is no qualitative element involved. Plus, I hear that the optical cables use plastic fibers rather than glass, which probably explains why they aren't very long.
So go with coax, because it's going to be cheaper and more reliable.
The iMac isn't a system designed to appeal to males. It's designed to appeal to females, who generally don't want to mess with hooking up pieces of a system. It has the same attractiveness as those TV/VCR combos. I personally would never own one of those, because I know that VCRs wear out a lot faster than TV sets, and now cost almost as much to repair as they do to replace, so therefore I consider them impractical. But my mom keeps saying she wants one.
If you want to run Linux, especially as a server, get a cheap-ass PC box. An old K6-2 300 makes a fine server. Don't waste Mac hardware on an OS that you can run just as well on cheaper hardware. I don't have as much of a problem with using pre-PCI Macs for Linux, but AFAICT the popular distros only run on PCI Macs.
Save the Mac for desktop GUI stuff, because I haven't yet found anything that compares in useability to OS 8.x-9.x in the Linux world. (FWIW, I was disappointed when Eazel finally came out with... Yet Another Freaking Browser.)
If by a "useable state" you mean as a desktop machine with a GUI, I understand what you mean. For me, Linux is my OS, but MacOS is my window manager. Basically, I have a PC running Linux sitting next to my Mac doing all sorts of server type things, but I still use the Mac to do desktop type things.
Unfortunately, I don't find OS X to be all that useable as a desktop yet, in terms of its pathetic clone of the Finder, which throws away all the subtle aspects of useability. Plus that stupid dock, which takes up precious vertical screen space and prevents you from using the both lower corners of the screen when it is short. (An option for a vertical dock dangling from the menu bar would be a small improvement.)
Right now I'm keeping it installed on my Pismo 500 so I can show it off to some Linux folks over the next week or so. Then I'll probably trash it until somebody fixes the problem with the boot managers screwing up RAM Doubler 9.
I know it doesn't come with it, but do a search for "MacTCP Ping". It's old, but it works fine with OS 9.x. It lets you send pings, and it also responds to pings as long as it is running.
Since the operative phrase here is "in your own den", that implies a different level of power reliability being required. The point is that you can do it without hiring an electrician, as opposed to, say, a VAX 11/780, which I've heard requires 3-phase power. You don't even need to rack mount them; the two I worked with came shipped in a standalone configuration which worked quite well sitting on the wooden shipping pallets.
And right now (as in this week, until they finish clearing their inventory for the expected G4 models) they're cheap enough to be worth buying. $2200 from the Apple Store web site. (I got mine a couple of weeks ago for $2100 via a special offer to developers.) A mere six months ago it cost $3500.
Consider that those dinky little portable DVD players cost $1000-$1100, and you're getting more than just a laptop. And the current "LG" DVD-ROM drive has a command that disables the RPC-2 region protection until the next reset, so you can easily bypass the evils of region coding, too.
Of course I don't think you'll be able to play DVDs under LinuxPPC for a while. But when OS X is released, you should be able to get most of the benefits of LinuxPPC, at the cost of a bit more RAM.
Well, save up your pennies, because you can run a well loaded E4500 system (including a nice 21" display) from a single 15A 117 VAC wall plug. I've done it. Two E4500's, a 21" monitor, and a 4-disk A1000 disk unit, to be exact.
Although 220 VAC is preferred to give you higher wattage with less amps, it is definitely not required.
Actually, Apple Computer had to make a deal with Apple Records saying that they would not go into the music business. This became a bit of an issue when the Mac II was going to use an improved sound chip.
A better method is the switch inside the circuit breaker box, but that's not a button. Instead, the button on a detonator attached to the hard drive of the machine in question is recommended.
In extreme cases, a MIRV aimed at Redmond may be the only solution.
Oops. I found my backup. They're NTSC after all.
Also FWIW, those two were European releases, so they do NOT have the digital signature required to run on an unmodified USA 7800.
We are sorry, but our site is temporarily unavailable. We are working to bring the system back up as quickly as possible.
Please check the Announcement Board at http://www2.ebay.com/aw/announce.shtml for updates. We will keep you posted as work progresses. We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience.
Regards,
eBay
Hey, what a great way to keep people from outbidding you... just post about it on /. and beat ebay into the ground until the auction is over! (just kidding about this one, but it really isn't a half bad idea for the less ethically-minded)
If anyone else ever frequents r.g.v.c, you know what I'm talking about, and who Bira Bira and Sum Guy are.
All praise Bira Bira! Death to Mr. Friendly! Cart Dreams of the Reef Store for everyone! Never stop Chasing that Chuckwagon!
He's got the one that counts. :-)
How much longer until that 2.0 is ready, Matt?
(When I read the headline, I actually thought for a moment it was going to be your auction!)
Only the "nobody will need to access more than 64k of memory in one chunk" attitude of the segmented memory design. If they had been 32 bits, that would have been just fine. Add to that the 80286, which tried to enforce it, forcing you to choose between real mode with segment arithmetic and protected mode with more than 1 meg of address space. The only option was to reset the CPU, using CMOS to clue in the BIOS that this wasn't a reboot.
4. stack code
If you're referring to what I think you're referring to, that's a more general problem based on the extremely primitive way that C stores strings (a null terminator with no indication of buffer size), combined with downward-growing stacks. Stack 'sploits can still happen even with non-exec stack segments, by writing over return addresses to call well-known library glue code routines.
On the other hand, I do give the mcreitd for ia64, it is a beautiful architecture. Now if they'd only drop IA32 support and make it run fast...
I thought that came from the HP PA-RISC architecture? In other words, I don't think you have Intel to thank for it.
And one last razz to Motorola for missing the opportunity of a lifetime. The way I heard it (from someone who used to work at Motorola) was that when IBM was designing the PC, they asked Motorola and Intel if the 68K/8088 would be ready by a specific date. Motorola didn't want to commit. Intel was ready to commit to anything. Ironically the 68K was ready by the deadline anyhow, but by then it was too late.
Oh yeah, that's right, the 2600 version is EdTris. It's been so long I forgot.
FWIW, the real reason he doesn't want to even try to sell these is because it would be an unholy pain in the butt. This ain't no Heathkit we're talking about here. I've done EPROM mods for the 7800 and ColecoVision, and installed region mods for Saturn and Playstation, and this is way above that. I've also made three cart dumpers, the first was a socket adapter for an EPROM programmer, the next was a rigged TRS-80 Color Computer, and the third was a rigged 7800, and I dumped quite a few rare cartridges with them.
The trickiest part of designing this thing was emulating all the bank switching schemes used on the 2600. There were well over half a dozen different schemes used, plus this emulates the Supercharger, which had its own bank switching scheme. An FPGA was used here to give maximum flexibility with a minimum of chips.
The reason bank switching on the 2600 was so non-standardized is that there was no R/W line, so you had to use special addresses to trigger bank switches, and separate address ranges for reading vs writing any RAM on the cartridge.
And then there were the cartridges with custom chips, like Pitfall II, which had a chip containing the music data, copied to the volume registers at the start of each scan line, and the Supercharger's main chip, which had to be removed from an actual cartridge and insterted into the project. The Stella TIA chip also had to be salvaged from a real 2600.
On top of all that, he's got an 8085 and TMS9918 to control it, and to generate the audio signal for the Supercharger games. That's like putting a second custom video game system into it.
Also not mentioned above is that Kevin wrote a Tetris for the 2600.
http://rushlimbaugh.com/home/today/PALMBALLOT.html
I'd make it a live link, but /. keeps wanting to put blanks in a link that long. Sorry, guys, some URL re-assembly required.
whois microsoft.com
also whois aol.com ; whois apple.com ; whois whitehouse.gov
How did they do it? Simple. Whenever you register a nameserver IP address, you have to include a domain name for the nameserver. I think the only thing checked is that the IP address pings and the domain name is part of a real domain.
It's worse than that. DRAM is addressed by rows and columns, so each address line controls two bits, and not necessarily two adjacent bits.
If an entire address line is bad, it's time to make a keychain holder. At the factory, this type of problem won't even make it out of initial die testing, much less all the way to manufacturing a DIMM.
Ah yes, timing and all that other rot. Two stories here.
My first every memory upgrade was many years ago, adding 4116 RAM to a TRS-80 Expansion Interface. I put it in and it didn't work. When I looked at the address range with the TRSDOS debugger, it contained random values that changed every time I looked at it! I managed to get it to work right by cranking the power supply voltage down into the low 4.x volt range.
And a few months ago, I got some old IBM 72 pin 8MB SIMMs at a computer show that were probably pulls from old PS/2 machines. Some of them worked, some didn't. I didn't realize until a few days later that this was 80ns RAM, and the motherboard only supported 60/70ns RAM. I was lucky to get any of them to work right.
And then there was all that talk about "cosmic rays" messing up DRAM, until eventually it was discovered that the radiation was coming from within the chip itself!