For all the whiners asking why someone would do this, I'm rather glad he did. I've been holding off on installing Fink on my main machine pending some sort of horror story. Nice to see it works this cleanly. In fact, I just finished installing it on my iMac.
(Not that I expect it to be a patch on the NetBSD package system, but it's a nice start, at least.)
Despite me apparent and informed knowledge of the matter at hand
I spent almost a year working as a phone jockey in a Verizon InfoPlead ("You'll beg us to make it stop!") DSL support call center. In that time I did not have a _single_ customer willing to admit that they did not have extensive knowledge of computers that clearly exceeded my own.
Is it possible you knew more than the poor drone on the other end of the phone? Yes. But is it also possible that he was just following procedure because 90% of the people calling and throwing buzzwords don't know what the fuck they're talking about? Also yes.
--saint
(Incidentally, check out vcw4ever.tripod.com for one of my old co-worker's takes on the Verizon experience.)
Re:Apple reminds me more of Commodore every day
on
Apple releases iPod
·
· Score: 1
They're living on borrowed time.
Wow, I believe that's the 15th anniversary of the first time someone told me that. Thanks for your acumen and insight, oracle.
--saint
(No, I don't want an iPod, but I'm getting really annoyed at this shit lately.)
I assume you're talking about the Sony DVMC-DA2 ($400)? If so, are you getting full screen, full rate DV out of it?
That's the one. I don't have a whole lot of hands on experience with it (I work for the ITS dept at a college, and the Media Center handles most of the goodies like this), but I know it's a very nice box for importing and translation. For instance, we were using it with a VCR and a Superdrive on a G4 to copy old VHS tapes onto DVDs for faculty members.
Worked beautifully, if one ignores the fact that this really highlights the poor picture quality of tape. It's sort of like the first time I heard CDs rather than cassettes on a decent stereo system.
But more importantly, Debian/PPC is doing great. I can't think of any glaring PPC-specific bugs in either Woody or Sid right now.
Incidentally, for older mac hardware, the Debian port to m68k Macintosh is wonderful as well. So far as I know it's the only natively english distro for the old Mac II and Quadra series. Check it out if you've got an old Apple box in the closet.
If an "Internet Bandwidth Commune" is your goal, don't lose sight of the inescapable truth that somewhere, sometime, eventually SOMEONE will have to pay for it.:(
I think the money will just magically appear if you use the term Linux enough, though.
I'd love to see the TV tuner coming in on that FireWire, rather than as a card. Then you could move it from box to box, as you like. I noticed ATI is selling the ATI TV-Wonder for USB but it only has 320 x 200 or so resolution. I wonder if they'll upgrade it to FireWire.
Sony has a couple of boxes for importing video via FireWire. I don't know about Linux support, but we use them here on iMacs to bring in video from Laserdisks and VCRs with no problem.
OpenBSD can run anything Linux can that's not Linux-specific
Hey, just out of curiosity, does OpenBSD have the same Linux compatibility engine that Free and NetBSD do? I haven't run it myself, but I know that the Linux-compiled version of Opera runs like a champ on my NetBSD box.
In Slashdotland, SCSI is for wimps and striping buggy ATA-100 disks using buggy ATA drivers and untested software is not only standard practice, but is considered best practice.
And Linux is the best Unix ever, as evidenced by IBM's not-at-all-sarcastic comment that they'll switch to it as soon as it can handle load as well as AIX.
any computer in the house can get to it (well the macs can't, but I'm working on setting up some sort of mac compatible solution alongside samba).
For what it's worth, I've got all of my mp3s on a central NetBSD server. On the server I'm running Samba, netatalk, and NFS -- so any kind of computer can access the shares. I don't know what OS you're using for your server, but it shouldn't be too difficult to set the same thing up. And the protocols don't step on each other's toes at all.
(netatalk is especially nice; mounts the mp3 directory right on the desktop when I log in with the user who has that set as their home directory.)
the computer labs bought about 100 machines all with Zip drives installed, and one by one they all gave the "click" and died. all further disks inserted into the drive would be munged. eventually, someone figured out that something mechanical would break inside the drive if you inserted a standard 3 inch floppy into the drive. Thus why, one by one, they all almost died, because the students would come in and screw em up....
As I'm sure everyone here agrees, floppies are total dogshit in terms of reliability and capacity. So, at the college I work for, there are almost no floppy drives to be had on the Macintosh machines. We put one USB floppy on one machine in each lab, and Zips (and sometimes CD-RWs) on every machine. You'd think this would encourage students to not use floppies, right?
So far, the only change I've seen is that I spend three hours a week instead of one wandering around the campus with a pair of forceps fishing floppy disks out of Zip drives. Drives labeled "THIS IS A ZIP DRIVE. DO NOT PUT FLOPPY DISKS IN IT."
I have a IBM 75GXP DTLA-307075 75Gb on my iMac SE/400 for over 6 months without a single problem. I was concerned about the heat that 7200 RPM would give out being that the iMacs are fan-less, but nothing of the sort.
Coincidentally, that's the same model that I've got the DeskStar in (and am typing this reply from). Glad to hear it's working out.
First, then you can't have some student put up a porn site at namethisschool.net while the university's site is at namethisschool.edu or something.
I don't know if you meant this as a hypothetical or not, but it does happen. I work for the IS department at Canisius College and a few years ago someone bought canisius.com and set up a porn site there. It was pretty interesting trying to explain that to the people in publications and promotion.
"No, you don't want to put canisius.com on any of the literature. No, don't go there. Just trust me."
I'm thinking of throwing linux on there in a bit, but find myself hesitating because of several reasons. One is bloat.
Try NetBSD instead. It's a very bare-bones operating system, so only the bare essentials are installed by default. Once that's done, you can pick and choose exactly what you want from a beautiful package system.
(I ran a mail/ftp/web server for months on a 230 meg drive with this. And had half the drive free when I moved it to different hardware.)
They have a policy not to call their employee's employees, but associates. Like that really means they have any say in the company.
Yeah, the supermarket by my apartment has the same policy. Similarly, I don't see too many acne-ridden 16 year old cart jockeys making boardroom decisions.
In a similar vein, my father is essentially a foreman in a rather blue-collar line of work. But they keep changing his job title to shit like "coach" and "team leader" so that everyone will automatically assume that the manager to employee barrier is gone.
Reminds me of when Mao started calling all the farmers "workers."
(Dammit -- mod the other one down. That's what I get for posting from unfamiliar machines and not using preview)
Under COBRA (The Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act) passed by Congress in l985, some laid-off or terminated workers (those fired for reasons other than gross misconduct) are entitled to continuation of health benefits for extended periods of time. COBRA doesn't cover companies with fewer than 20 employees, and it doesn't cover all workers terminated under all circumstances. If the company goes bankrupt, for example, COBRA doesn't apply at all. You have to check and see if you're eligible.)
COBRA, my ass. When I got laid off earlier this year I found out I could keep my health benefits for slightly more than my rent, paid every month.
Oh, and I'm single. That's not even for the "family plan," which was a good _double_ my half of the rent.
Somehow, this doesn't seem like a terribly helpful program to the typical tech worker who's been dropped like a used tampon or a worn out dream.
Morals and Layoffs[ United States ]Posted by JonKatz on Tuesday September 25, @09:45AM
from the do-they-owe-you-anything dept.
Technology is the momma of the modern workplace, its creator, from the Industrial Revolution to the blessedly short-lived dot.com era. It has re-shaped work, making it cleaner, more mobile and flexible, safer -- but much less secure. Jobs now change as often as the market fluctuates, as mergers and takeovers shift the landscape, as the market bumps up and down, as marketing tracks our desires and dislikes, needs and whims. Technology makes it possible for companies to shift jobs all over the world, and redefine themselves in weeks and months. Qwest tossed 4,000 workers two weeks ago. The very idea of job security seems a casualty of the tech-driven global economy, with its continuous down-sizing, changing ownership and management goals, lateral strategies and evolving needs. Now we add terrorist attacks and a recession. The new corporate work ethic is change -- measured, defined and executed by corporate hierarchies. Do they owe anything to the people they dump?
Radical changes in modern institutional structure have ushered in an era of short-term, contract, or episodic labor, writes economist Richard Sennett in his book The Corrosion of Character. Corporations have sought to remove layers of bureaucracy, to become "flatter and more flexible" organizations. In place of pyramid-style organizations, management wants now to think of organizations as networks. This means many more layoffs, writes Sennett, and also that promotions and dismissals tend not to be based any longer on fixed rules, since tasks are fluid, and the network is constantly redefining its structure.
Executives are paid more and more to re-shape companies, and work becomes less stable in direct proportion. Workers have never been more powerless, their tenure more fragile. Tech workers, many of whom came of age in an era of growth and full employment, are learning the lessons of the real world quickly. Tasks and missions are temporal, the people employed to execute them highly disposable. Work and workers are both flexible and expendable.
One of the most shocking and widely accepted tenets of the new techno-workplace is that the well-run company, the one that wants to compete in the global economy, has to be so fluid, evolving and responsive to change that thousands of employees can get dumped at one whack and it's not even controversial. That's a pretty long trek from the capitalist ethic that only a few years ago valued corporate loyalty as much as profits, and touted the company-employee bond.
And it raises all sorts of new questions -- especially for a generation of tech workers experiencing layoffs for the first time.
In the Corporate Republic, where corporations fund the political system, control most mass media, write legislation, and now dominate entertainment and culture (and soon, much of technology, from bio-tech to Net access), there are few agreed-upon rules about layoffs. Hardly any would get far in Washington, the world headquarters of corporate lobbying. (Congress, allegedly the public's lobbyists, are scrambling to get campaign funds from corporate donors.)
Unions, already on the wane, have never gained much hold in the Tech Nation, populated by educated, mobile, skilled and independent-minded workers. Some tech companies are comparatively generous -- extending health plans beyond the federal requirements with some benefits extending past a layoff date.
Cisco has offered to pay its laid-off workers for an additional year if they work for charities the company supports. It's nice, but it isn't the same as job security. And even that kind of moral responsibility is rare.
Under COBRA (The Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act) passed by Congress in l985, some laid-off or terminated workers (those fired for reasons other than gross misconduct) are entitled to continuation of health benefits for extended periods of time. COBRA doesn't cover companies with fewer than 20 employees, and it doesn't cover all workers terminated under all circumstances. If the company goes bankrupt, for example, COBRA doesn't apply at all. You have to check and see if you're eligible.)
COBRA, my ass. When I got laid off earlier this year I found out I could keep my health benefits for slightly more than my rent, paid every month.
Oh, and I'm single. That's not even for the "family plan," which was a good _double_ my half of the rent.
Somehow, this doesn't seem like a terribly helpful program to the typical tech worker who's been dropped like a used tampon or a worn out dream.
Well, if this "Akron-based company" treated their employees anything like my last employer did, it's no surprise. We were told three months ahead of time that we were being laid off, and then security guards were stationed inside the building to watch us all the time.
Nothing quite like making your employees feel like criminals when it comes to making them want to steal things.
--saint
(I know, this is probably chock full o' poor grammar. I just got to work and I'm working on my first cup of coffee. Deal with it.)
My own experience of Apple is that by the time the thing comes down to a sensible price, it's no longer supported, and will not run current OSes or software.
I know, I shouldn't feed the trolls, but --
I assume by "current OSes" you mean the lickable goodness that is Mac OS X. The oldest supported machine for this, as far as I know, is the desktop model G3 powermac.
Available from a reseller, macofalltrades.com, this unit costs $499 and includes a USB card. So there's all the legacy ports, USB -- pretty much everything you need except FireWire. 128 megs of RAM and a 4 gig drive, not huge, but definitely usable.
(And these guys aren't that cheap compared to the Pricewatch fodder people usually post here. I just thought of them because my main machine is a refurbed iMac I bought from them last year and they do splendid work.)
On ebay, on the other hand, a G3 desktop goes for about half that. (As I write this, there is an auction for the same machine with 64 meg of RAM ending in four hours, currently at 202.50)
Throw in some standard memory (say, an extra 256 megs for 40 dollars or so) and a bigger drive if you want one, and you've got a machine that runs anything Apple sells.
Traditionally, things haven't been this way, so I do understand the "Apples are expensive" knee-jerk response. But the pace of speed bumps and upgrades from Apple in the last couple of years has really made items on the used and refurb markets very attractive from a price point of view.
Call yourself a 'Computer Programmer' instead and everyone will be happier and will not be confused anymore.
Katzian as it sounds, I prefer "geek" as a replacement for the tarnished term "hacker." It conveys the same sense of fixity and focus on a subject to the exclusion of other things.
(I can still remember my way around the town in bards tale 1, but not it's name! That was AGES ago.)
Skara Brae, if I recall correctly. The second game brought you to another land, where the cities all had Biblical names (Ephesus, Phillipi, etc.) and then the third was back in Skara Brae.
Time to jump on eBay and see if I can find an old Atari ST to play this stuff on, I think.
Slashdot Mirror
For all the whiners asking why someone would do this, I'm rather glad he did. I've been holding off on installing Fink on my main machine pending some sort of horror story. Nice to see it works this cleanly. In fact, I just finished installing it on my iMac.
(Not that I expect it to be a patch on the NetBSD package system, but it's a nice start, at least.)
--saint
From the CNN article:
The system promises fewer computer crashes and will allow users to delete data from their hard drive.
Allows me to delete data? How generous.
Seriously, though, what the hell is this supposed to mean?
--saint
(Glad I use a Mac.)
Despite me apparent and informed knowledge of the matter at hand
I spent almost a year working as a phone jockey in a Verizon InfoPlead ("You'll beg us to make it stop!") DSL support call center. In that time I did not have a _single_ customer willing to admit that they did not have extensive knowledge of computers that clearly exceeded my own.
Is it possible you knew more than the poor drone on the other end of the phone? Yes. But is it also possible that he was just following procedure because 90% of the people calling and throwing buzzwords don't know what the fuck they're talking about? Also yes.
--saint
(Incidentally, check out vcw4ever.tripod.com for one of my old co-worker's takes on the Verizon experience.)
They're living on borrowed time.
Wow, I believe that's the 15th anniversary of the first time someone told me that. Thanks for your acumen and insight, oracle.
--saint
(No, I don't want an iPod, but I'm getting really annoyed at this shit lately.)
I assume you're talking about the Sony DVMC-DA2 ($400)? If so, are you getting full screen, full rate DV out of it?
That's the one. I don't have a whole lot of hands on experience with it (I work for the ITS dept at a college, and the Media Center handles most of the goodies like this), but I know it's a very nice box for importing and translation. For instance, we were using it with a VCR and a Superdrive on a G4 to copy old VHS tapes onto DVDs for faculty members.
Worked beautifully, if one ignores the fact that this really highlights the poor picture quality of tape. It's sort of like the first time I heard CDs rather than cassettes on a decent stereo system.
--saint
But more importantly, Debian/PPC is doing great. I can't think of any glaring PPC-specific bugs in either Woody or Sid right now.
Incidentally, for older mac hardware, the Debian port to m68k Macintosh is wonderful as well. So far as I know it's the only natively english distro for the old Mac II and Quadra series. Check it out if you've got an old Apple box in the closet.
--saint
If an "Internet Bandwidth Commune" is your goal, don't lose sight of the inescapable truth that somewhere, sometime, eventually SOMEONE will have to pay for it. :(
I think the money will just magically appear if you use the term Linux enough, though.
_Surprised at Seven Digits_, indeed.
--saint
I'd love to see the TV tuner coming in on that FireWire, rather than as a card. Then you could move it from box to box, as you like. I noticed ATI is selling the ATI TV-Wonder for USB but it only has 320 x 200 or so resolution. I wonder if they'll upgrade it to FireWire.
Sony has a couple of boxes for importing video via FireWire. I don't know about Linux support, but we use them here on iMacs to bring in video from Laserdisks and VCRs with no problem.
--saint
OpenBSD can run anything Linux can that's not Linux-specific
Hey, just out of curiosity, does OpenBSD have the same Linux compatibility engine that Free and NetBSD do? I haven't run it myself, but I know that the Linux-compiled version of Opera runs like a champ on my NetBSD box.
--saint
In Slashdotland, SCSI is for wimps and striping buggy ATA-100 disks using buggy ATA drivers and untested software is not only standard practice, but is considered best practice.
And Linux is the best Unix ever, as evidenced by IBM's not-at-all-sarcastic comment that they'll switch to it as soon as it can handle load as well as AIX.
Snicker.
(down mod ho!)
--saint
any computer in the house can get to it (well the macs can't, but I'm working on setting up some sort of mac compatible solution alongside samba).
For what it's worth, I've got all of my mp3s on a central NetBSD server. On the server I'm running Samba, netatalk, and NFS -- so any kind of computer can access the shares. I don't know what OS you're using for your server, but it shouldn't be too difficult to set the same thing up. And the protocols don't step on each other's toes at all.
(netatalk is especially nice; mounts the mp3 directory right on the desktop when I log in with the user who has that set as their home directory.)
--saint
the computer labs bought about 100 machines all with Zip drives installed, and one by one they all gave the "click" and died. all further disks inserted into the drive would be munged. eventually, someone figured out that something mechanical would break inside the drive if you inserted a standard 3 inch floppy into the drive. Thus why, one by one, they all almost died, because the students would come in and screw em up....
As I'm sure everyone here agrees, floppies are total dogshit in terms of reliability and capacity. So, at the college I work for, there are almost no floppy drives to be had on the Macintosh machines. We put one USB floppy on one machine in each lab, and Zips (and sometimes CD-RWs) on every machine. You'd think this would encourage students to not use floppies, right?
So far, the only change I've seen is that I spend three hours a week instead of one wandering around the campus with a pair of forceps fishing floppy disks out of Zip drives. Drives labeled "THIS IS A ZIP DRIVE. DO NOT PUT FLOPPY DISKS IN IT."
Oh, the humanity.
--saint
Do you think the son of God could really have created his own operating system without decades of work by Richard Stallman? Pshhha.
To say nothing of all the fashion tips.
"Don't worry, Lord. Chicks dig beards and long hair."
--saint
I have a IBM 75GXP DTLA-307075 75Gb on my iMac SE/400 for over 6 months without a single problem. I was concerned about the heat that 7200 RPM would give out being that the iMacs are fan-less, but nothing of the sort.
Coincidentally, that's the same model that I've got the DeskStar in (and am typing this reply from). Glad to hear it's working out.
--saint
I've got one of these in my iMac at home... it's a little bit clicky, but not too bad. Any other Mac owners with Deskstars? Any problems?
(I gotta admit, the fact that all the tools and such on their web site seem to be unavailable for MacOS certainly doesn't inspire confidence.)
--saint
First, then you can't have some student put up a porn site at namethisschool.net while the university's site is at namethisschool.edu or something.
I don't know if you meant this as a hypothetical or not, but it does happen. I work for the IS department at Canisius College and a few years ago someone bought canisius.com and set up a porn site there. It was pretty interesting trying to explain that to the people in publications and promotion.
"No, you don't want to put canisius.com on any of the literature. No, don't go there. Just trust me."
*scream*
--saint
I'm thinking of throwing linux on there in a bit, but find myself hesitating because of several reasons. One is bloat.
Try NetBSD instead. It's a very bare-bones operating system, so only the bare essentials are installed by default. Once that's done, you can pick and choose exactly what you want from a beautiful package system.
(I ran a mail/ftp/web server for months on a 230 meg drive with this. And had half the drive free when I moved it to different hardware.)
--saint
They have a policy not to call their employee's employees, but associates. Like that really means they have any say in the company.
Yeah, the supermarket by my apartment has the same policy. Similarly, I don't see too many acne-ridden 16 year old cart jockeys making boardroom decisions.
In a similar vein, my father is essentially a foreman in a rather blue-collar line of work. But they keep changing his job title to shit like "coach" and "team leader" so that everyone will automatically assume that the manager to employee barrier is gone.
Reminds me of when Mao started calling all the farmers "workers."
But I'm rambling.
--saint
(Dammit -- mod the other one down. That's what I get for posting from unfamiliar machines and not using preview)
Under COBRA (The Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act) passed by Congress in l985, some laid-off or terminated workers (those fired for reasons other than gross misconduct) are entitled to continuation of health benefits for extended periods of time. COBRA doesn't cover companies with fewer than 20 employees, and it doesn't cover all workers terminated under all circumstances. If the company goes bankrupt, for example, COBRA doesn't apply at all. You have to check and see if you're eligible.)
COBRA, my ass. When I got laid off earlier this year I found out I could keep my health benefits for slightly more than my rent, paid every month.
Oh, and I'm single. That's not even for the "family plan," which was a good _double_ my half of the rent.
Somehow, this doesn't seem like a terribly helpful program to the typical tech worker who's been dropped like a used tampon or a worn out dream.
--saint
Morals and Layoffs[ United States ]Posted by JonKatz on Tuesday September 25, @09:45AM
from the do-they-owe-you-anything dept.
Technology is the momma of the modern workplace, its creator, from the Industrial Revolution to the blessedly short-lived dot.com era. It has re-shaped work, making it cleaner, more mobile and flexible, safer -- but much less secure. Jobs now change as often as the market fluctuates, as mergers and takeovers shift the landscape, as the market bumps up and down, as marketing tracks our desires and dislikes, needs and whims. Technology makes it possible for companies to shift jobs all over the world, and redefine themselves in weeks and months. Qwest tossed 4,000 workers two weeks ago. The very idea of job security seems a casualty of the tech-driven global economy, with its continuous down-sizing, changing ownership and management goals, lateral strategies and evolving needs. Now we add terrorist attacks and a recession. The new corporate work ethic is change -- measured, defined and executed by corporate hierarchies. Do they owe anything to the people they dump?
Radical changes in modern institutional structure have ushered in an era of short-term, contract, or episodic labor, writes economist Richard Sennett in his book The Corrosion of Character. Corporations have sought to remove layers of bureaucracy, to become "flatter and more flexible" organizations. In place of pyramid-style organizations, management wants now to think of organizations as networks. This means many more layoffs, writes Sennett, and also that promotions and dismissals tend not to be based any longer on fixed rules, since tasks are fluid, and the network is constantly redefining its structure.
Executives are paid more and more to re-shape companies, and work becomes less stable in direct proportion. Workers have never been more powerless, their tenure more fragile. Tech workers, many of whom came of age in an era of growth and full employment, are learning the lessons of the real world quickly. Tasks and missions are temporal, the people employed to execute them highly disposable. Work and workers are both flexible and expendable.
One of the most shocking and widely accepted tenets of the new techno-workplace is that the well-run company, the one that wants to compete in the global economy, has to be so fluid, evolving and responsive to change that thousands of employees can get dumped at one whack and it's not even controversial. That's a pretty long trek from the capitalist ethic that only a few years ago valued corporate loyalty as much as profits, and touted the company-employee bond.
And it raises all sorts of new questions -- especially for a generation of tech workers experiencing layoffs for the first time.
In the Corporate Republic, where corporations fund the political system, control most mass media, write legislation, and now dominate entertainment and culture (and soon, much of technology, from bio-tech to Net access), there are few agreed-upon rules about layoffs. Hardly any would get far in Washington, the world headquarters of corporate lobbying. (Congress, allegedly the public's lobbyists, are scrambling to get campaign funds from corporate donors.)
Unions, already on the wane, have never gained much hold in the Tech Nation, populated by educated, mobile, skilled and independent-minded workers. Some tech companies are comparatively generous -- extending health plans beyond the federal requirements with some benefits extending past a layoff date.
Cisco has offered to pay its laid-off workers for an additional year if they work for charities the company supports. It's nice, but it isn't the same as job security. And even that kind of moral responsibility is rare.
Under COBRA (The Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act) passed by Congress in l985, some laid-off or terminated workers (those fired for reasons other than gross misconduct) are entitled to continuation of health benefits for extended periods of time. COBRA doesn't cover companies with fewer than 20 employees, and it doesn't cover all workers terminated under all circumstances. If the company goes bankrupt, for example, COBRA doesn't apply at all. You have to check and see if you're eligible.)
COBRA, my ass. When I got laid off earlier this year I found out I could keep my health benefits for slightly more than my rent, paid every month.
Oh, and I'm single. That's not even for the "family plan," which was a good _double_ my half of the rent.
Somehow, this doesn't seem like a terribly helpful program to the typical tech worker who's been dropped like a used tampon or a worn out dream.
--saint
Well, if this "Akron-based company" treated their employees anything like my last employer did, it's no surprise. We were told three months ahead of time that we were being laid off, and then security guards were stationed inside the building to watch us all the time.
Nothing quite like making your employees feel like criminals when it comes to making them want to steal things.
--saint
(I know, this is probably chock full o' poor grammar. I just got to work and I'm working on my first cup of coffee. Deal with it.)
My own experience of Apple is that by the time the thing comes down to a sensible price, it's no longer supported, and will not run current OSes or software.
I know, I shouldn't feed the trolls, but --
I assume by "current OSes" you mean the lickable goodness that is Mac OS X. The oldest supported machine for this, as far as I know, is the desktop model G3 powermac.
Available from a reseller, macofalltrades.com, this unit costs $499 and includes a USB card. So there's all the legacy ports, USB -- pretty much everything you need except FireWire. 128 megs of RAM and a 4 gig drive, not huge, but definitely usable.
(And these guys aren't that cheap compared to the Pricewatch fodder people usually post here. I just thought of them because my main machine is a refurbed iMac I bought from them last year and they do splendid work.)
On ebay, on the other hand, a G3 desktop goes for about half that. (As I write this, there is an auction for the same machine with 64 meg of RAM ending in four hours, currently at 202.50)
Throw in some standard memory (say, an extra 256 megs for 40 dollars or so) and a bigger drive if you want one, and you've got a machine that runs anything Apple sells.
Traditionally, things haven't been this way, so I do understand the "Apples are expensive" knee-jerk response. But the pace of speed bumps and upgrades from Apple in the last couple of years has really made items on the used and refurb markets very attractive from a price point of view.
--saint
Call yourself a 'Computer Programmer' instead and everyone will be happier and will not be confused anymore.
Katzian as it sounds, I prefer "geek" as a replacement for the tarnished term "hacker." It conveys the same sense of fixity and focus on a subject to the exclusion of other things.
--saint
(who can't program too well.)
(I can still remember my way around the town in bards tale 1, but not it's name! That was AGES ago.)
Skara Brae, if I recall correctly. The second game brought you to another land, where the cities all had Biblical names (Ephesus, Phillipi, etc.) and then the third was back in Skara Brae.
Time to jump on eBay and see if I can find an old Atari ST to play this stuff on, I think.
--saint
I wonder what the polls will say when the backdoor gets compromised and 72% of people get their bank accounts wiped."
Probably that 100% of Slashdot readers are laughing uproariously.
--saint