Brought home in October 1985, as an early Christmas present when I was in 7th grade.
128K RAM, single 5.25" floppy, no HD, running DOS 2.11 or so. What a piece of shit that thing was. It wasn't even 100% PC-compatible, it was more like 85-90%. And of course most of the stuff I really wanted to run on it needed that extra 10-15%-- I remember saving up for weeks to buy a copy of F-15 Strike Eagle, only to find out it wouldn't run. Man, was I pissed off that day.
In late 1990 or so I upgraded it with a 640K 3rd-party RAM upgrade and 10MB hard drive on an expansion card. One year later I got a Mac LC as I prepared to start college, and 10 minutes after getting it out of the box I knew I'd be an Apple customer for life.
The Tandy was relegated to the closet, and then I later threw out all but the motherboard and keyboard. I screwed them together and hung the thing on the wall in my office because, hey, it was my first computer.
First, Apple will probably never base their machines on x86. Secondly, even if they did switch to x86, OS X will never, never, never run on any hardware that Apple has not produced-- so surrender the fantasy of running OS X on some homebuilt shitbox. The major selling point of the Mac is the "it just works" factor-- the tight integration between Apple software and Apple hardware. They won't be able to deliver that if they suddenly have to support hundreds of varieties of commodity hardware flying out of factories in East Bumblefuck, Asia. Microsoft has blown through umpteen billion dollars over damn near twenty years in their attempt to do it, and they still haven't got it right.
Nothing says, "You did so receive payment for that bill, you fucktards!" quite like a cancelled check.
I'm all for automating every aspect of my life, but the one exception I make is bill payment. I just don't like the idea of giving many entities the ability to remove funds from my checking account. They can assure me all they want that it will never happen without my consent, but I'm not buying it.
I've even had problems with monthy charges to my credit card-- a couple years ago Cingular was supposed to put my cellphone bill on my credit card automatically every month, which happened with no problems for a while. Then they stopped automatically charging me AND started tacking on hefty late fees for nonpayment (and no, my CC on file had not expired or been declined, Cingular just stopped putting the transaction through). After the second time I had to call up to yell at them about this, I went right out and got a new cellphone from AT&T, who have given me no problems at all. Cingular was pathetically desperate to keep my business, too, it took me 20 minutes to convince the CSR that I absolutely, positively wanted to sever my business relationship with them no matter what they offered me to stay.
~Philly
Re:35 min. NY to LA passenger flights? Keep dreami
on
The Future of Flight
·
· Score: 1
Heating is a problem but not as big as you are making out.
Mach 2 is not Mach 3. I suggest you read chapter 9 and the beginning of chapter 15 of Skunk Works, which detail the development of the SR-71 and mention the conceptual predecessor to the HyperSoar, respectively.
Here are a few excerpts:
"At the nose the heat would be 800 degrees... 1200 degrees on the engine cowlings... 620 degrees on the cockpit windshield, which was hot enough to melt lead."
"...without effective and fail-safe cooling the pilot could bake a cake in his lap."
"Do you know what would've happened if we tried to fly much faster than [Mach 3.2]? The airplane's surface would have come apart from heat friction. And that was titanium. Do you have something stronger? And by the way, our crew wore space suits and we still worried about boiling them alive if our air-conditioning system failed."
Considering these quotes come from the guy who was the lead thermodynamacist on the SR-71 project, I think it's safe to take them at face value.
~Philly
35 min. NY to LA passenger flights? Keep dreaming!
on
The Future of Flight
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
When they were designing the SR-71, the Skunk Works had a hell of a time designing the life support systems for the pilot-- and that's just one guy in a space suit. At Mach 3, the heat generated by air friction is sufficient that if the cockpit air conditioning system fails, he's in deep shit. If you're reading this and you think in your lifetime you're going to see passengers flying in casual clothes more than three times faster than the SR-71, you'd better think again.
Even if it does become technically feasible, so few people will be able to afford it that it would be completely impractical to try to build a passenger transportation business around it.
I've set up two of these in a very quiet conference room. When running normally, they barely make a peep. When the monitor is asleep, you wouldn't even be able to tell it was on without the power light on the front panel.
When the G5 is in target disk mode, however, the fan control software does not load. The fans start faster than normal and rather quickly ramp up to full speed-- presumably that is a fail-safe in the hardware. When those fans are going full blast, you can feel the air moving for quite an impressive distance behind the G5.
As for whether that many fans is overkill or not, look at it this way: Apple's previous Power Mac case form factor was in use since 1999 (about 4.5 years). With the G5 enclosure, I think it appears overengineered to us now but was designed with an eye toward housing future CPUs in years to come-- CPUs that will really need all that cooling capability.
Most spammers can now be sued under the criminal code, either for fraud (Nigerian scam) or for cracking the machines they're using to send the spam.
Yes, but it's usually difficult and time consuming to track down the spammers. The laws need to include liability for the companies who actually sell their products via spam. Currently they can just plead ignorance "Hey, we didn't know that this guy we paid to do our marketing was sending spam via cracked PCs!"-- if they can be penalized financially via a civil suit for marketing their product via spam, they'll be a lot more careful about who they hire to do their marketing, spammers will lose business, and spamming will become unprofitable.
Since we'll never be allowed to hunt down and kill the tools who actually buy the shit marketed via spam and make the business model viable, this is the next best thing.
You can strap it to your arm with the included holder
I'm sure someone makes an armband-style case for iPod owners who want one.
No movable parts so no skipping unlike the ipod
The iPod has 32MB of cache. The average song encoded at a 128K bit rate is 4MB. So about 6 to 10 songs should fit into the iPod cache. I suppose skipping could become an issue for the iPod if you strap it to a running paint shaker and listen to it for a while.
The Ipod is overkill in terms of storage (The Iriver can hold 5-50 cds depending on the sampled bitrate but normally I'd say around 6-10)
Says you. I have a 30GB iPod, and I like being able to carry around my entire CD collection in my shirt pocket. No matter where I am, I can listen to any song I want, any time I want.
The Ipod is too big & heavy
The size of a deck of cards and the weight of 2 CDs is too big and heavy? Do you have severely atrophied muscles because you've been in a coma for the last 10 years, or something?
The Ipod battery fails after about 18 months and costs over $100 to replace
Lies, all lies. Some people have had battery problems, not everyone. The majority of people with original 5GB iPods who posted when this was brought up a week or two ago are having ZERO problems. And if $100 is too rich for your blood, you can replace the iPod battery yourself for $50.
The Ipod is just a notebook/laptop hard drive in a clean looking case but just as fragile as any other hard drive
I haven't read of anyone who has had issues because of drive fragility. People who are really concerned about it can buy a case. I prefer to just take good care of my stuff.
I've read nothing but excellent reviews for the Iriver mp3 player and own one and it's the best I've ever had.
I've read nothing but excellent reviews for the iPod, and own one, and it's the best I've ever had. Neener neener neener!
I don't agree with the argument that you get more storage for the same price from an Ipod. What's the use if it's overkill? If it was an external hard drive or something along those lines I'd agree but it's not.
Ummmm, the iPod is an external hard drive. You can store anything on it, you can even install an OS on it and boot from it. For someone who claims to have had an iPod, you sure don't seem to know much about them.
My company got them for those of us who work in the field, and most of us dislike them. The Java app/tracking service we use is called Telenav
Once that app is running (the i88s phones we have don't have the ability to auto-launch a Java app so it must be manually launched in the morning), it transmits the phone's GPS location every few minutes. My company's traffic manager can pull up a map in her web browser and see where all of us are at any given time.
Here's why we don't like the GPS crap: it completely rapes the battery. The original batteries in the i88s phones were getting sucked dry after being on for about 6 hours. We got new high capacity batteries for them which last the whole day, but by 5pm they are just about drained-- if you forget to plug the phone in to charge that night when you get home, you're screwed the next day. Our old i1000 phones could go 3 days before needing a charge.
Also, the GPS is a little laggy, so the navigation function doesn't work well. If you're driving at highway speeds, it doesn't tell you where to turn until you have already passed that intersection. D'oh!
I don't see what the big deal is. The networks are already handling TiVo in their own way.
Yeah, they're drivingaway 18-to-34 year-old males, the demographic segment most likely to own a TiVo.
How? Shitty programming that doesn't interest men. One lame reality show after another. Even the basic cable mainstays are sissifying their shows-- I used to watch Discovery and TLC a lot, now practically all they have are semi-disguised "decorating" shows and junk like "A Dating Story."
The only network with shows I actually watch is FOX, and even they do dumb shit like "Skin"-- maybe it was an interesting show somewhat aimed at men, but you're not gonna beat Monday Night Football with anything acceptable enough to be run on broadcast television-- and you might not even beat it with Naked Lesbian Jell-O Wrestling.
Spike TV actually has the right idea-- they ran a James Bond movie marathon during most of the holiday weekend, and unless it was Simpsons time or there was something more interesting on the History Channel, that's what I "watched" if I had the TV on while I was doing something else.
I know the difference, but you have to account for the dullards who dominate the population. Remember, we are a country where coffee cups have to say "Caution- Hot!"
apple is like disney, they go after anyone that looks like they are makeing a similar product.
Not everyone, just the people who blatantly rip off Apple designs in an attempt to fool consumers. The concept is called "trade dress."
Trade dress is why Apple sued eMachines and Future Power over their eOne and ePower iMac knockoffs. Check Google Images for "emachines eone" and "future power epower," and see how similar they are to the original iMac.
Now look at Samsung's iPod knockoff. Trade dress is also applicable here. It's pretty obvious to me that Samsung started with the iPod design and made what they believed to be enough changes to avoid legal action. You can bet that they would have made it white, if they thought they could get away with it.
space debris' orbitals are pretty easily predictable, why not shoot them out of orbit with a projectile?
Because the idea is to have less crap floating around in Earth orbit, not more. If the collision between one of your projectiles and its target is of sufficient force, the debris will become a scattered cloud of fragments. Something the size of the fingernail on your pinky put a crater into the windshield of one of the shuttles, do we really want a cloud of them up there?
The laser beam idea might be feasible, but then again, maybe not. SDI turned out to be a lot harder to create than everyone thought, and that dealt with large moving objects traveling predictable paths. Plus you've got to worry about something that you don't want to hit being in the line of fire, which is slightly less of a concern when what you want to hit are nuclear warheads heading for your cities.
Call me crazy, but I think the idea of a few autonomous space trash trucks cruising around up there and picking up errant junk seems like the way to go, once technology has advanced sufficiently to permit it.
If there was a bit of junk on the freeway it would be picked up and moved and in space we just avoid it.
Well, yeah. There's a slight cost differential between dispatching a Highways Department crew and sending up something able to find and catch a paint chip or something moving at orbital velocity.
Surely if we keep polluting space then there eventually won't be another orbit.
If the problem gets bad enough, surely The Powers That Be will devise some sort of autonomous craft able to detect debris down to the smallest paint chip, give chase, and collect it. Possibly even catch larger debris and guide it into a more quickly deteriorating orbit so it will burn up in the atmosphere. Once its debris hopper is full, it would change orbit so it too burned up on re-entry.
For all we know this might even already be on the drawing board somewhere-- it's probably just a matter of waiting for some of the needed technologies to catch up with the design-- like fast propulsion and agile maneuverability without having to turn the craft into a giant fuel tank.
I'm a firm believer that anything that sends those fucking Bible-thumping loonies into a tizzy is a good thing.
But I'm not crazy about the idea of being lojacked, because I can see the good old U.S. Government abusing such technology-- like making RFID implants mandatory for everyone, and sprinkling RFID readers all over the place, in every doorway, parking meter, fire hydrant, and other such everyday objects that people see so often they no longer even notice them.
Slashdot Mirror
Brought home in October 1985, as an early Christmas present when I was in 7th grade.
128K RAM, single 5.25" floppy, no HD, running DOS 2.11 or so. What a piece of shit that thing was. It wasn't even 100% PC-compatible, it was more like 85-90%. And of course most of the stuff I really wanted to run on it needed that extra 10-15%-- I remember saving up for weeks to buy a copy of F-15 Strike Eagle, only to find out it wouldn't run. Man, was I pissed off that day.
In late 1990 or so I upgraded it with a 640K 3rd-party RAM upgrade and 10MB hard drive on an expansion card. One year later I got a Mac LC as I prepared to start college, and 10 minutes after getting it out of the box I knew I'd be an Apple customer for life.
The Tandy was relegated to the closet, and then I later threw out all but the motherboard and keyboard. I screwed them together and hung the thing on the wall in my office because, hey, it was my first computer.
~Philly
...I guess this will be the most popular download within the next few days.
~Philly
First, Apple will probably never base their machines on x86.
Secondly, even if they did switch to x86, OS X will never, never, never run on any hardware that Apple has not produced-- so surrender the fantasy of running OS X on some homebuilt shitbox. The major selling point of the Mac is the "it just works" factor-- the tight integration between Apple software and Apple hardware. They won't be able to deliver that if they suddenly have to support hundreds of varieties of commodity hardware flying out of factories in East Bumblefuck, Asia. Microsoft has blown through umpteen billion dollars over damn near twenty years in their attempt to do it, and they still haven't got it right.
~Philly
Don't forget, "The prudes write the obscenity laws"
One more reason to be glad you don't live in L.A.
~Philly
Nothing says, "You did so receive payment for that bill, you fucktards!" quite like a cancelled check.
I'm all for automating every aspect of my life, but the one exception I make is bill payment. I just don't like the idea of giving many entities the ability to remove funds from my checking account. They can assure me all they want that it will never happen without my consent, but I'm not buying it.
I've even had problems with monthy charges to my credit card-- a couple years ago Cingular was supposed to put my cellphone bill on my credit card automatically every month, which happened with no problems for a while. Then they stopped automatically charging me AND started tacking on hefty late fees for nonpayment (and no, my CC on file had not expired or been declined, Cingular just stopped putting the transaction through). After the second time I had to call up to yell at them about this, I went right out and got a new cellphone from AT&T, who have given me no problems at all. Cingular was pathetically desperate to keep my business, too, it took me 20 minutes to convince the CSR that I absolutely, positively wanted to sever my business relationship with them no matter what they offered me to stay.
~Philly
Heating is a problem but not as big as you are making out.
Mach 2 is not Mach 3. I suggest you read chapter 9 and the beginning of chapter 15 of Skunk Works, which detail the development of the SR-71 and mention the conceptual predecessor to the HyperSoar, respectively.
Here are a few excerpts:
"At the nose the heat would be 800 degrees... 1200 degrees on the engine cowlings... 620 degrees on the cockpit windshield, which was hot enough to melt lead."
"...without effective and fail-safe cooling the pilot could bake a cake in his lap."
"Do you know what would've happened if we tried to fly much faster than [Mach 3.2]? The airplane's surface would have come apart from heat friction. And that was titanium. Do you have something stronger? And by the way, our crew wore space suits and we still worried about boiling them alive if our air-conditioning system failed."
Considering these quotes come from the guy who was the lead thermodynamacist on the SR-71 project, I think it's safe to take them at face value.
~Philly
When they were designing the SR-71, the Skunk Works had a hell of a time designing the life support systems for the pilot-- and that's just one guy in a space suit. At Mach 3, the heat generated by air friction is sufficient that if the cockpit air conditioning system fails, he's in deep shit. If you're reading this and you think in your lifetime you're going to see passengers flying in casual clothes more than three times faster than the SR-71, you'd better think again.
Even if it does become technically feasible, so few people will be able to afford it that it would be completely impractical to try to build a passenger transportation business around it.
~Philly
I've set up two of these in a very quiet conference room. When running normally, they barely make a peep. When the monitor is asleep, you wouldn't even be able to tell it was on without the power light on the front panel.
When the G5 is in target disk mode, however, the fan control software does not load. The fans start faster than normal and rather quickly ramp up to full speed-- presumably that is a fail-safe in the hardware. When those fans are going full blast, you can feel the air moving for quite an impressive distance behind the G5.
As for whether that many fans is overkill or not, look at it this way: Apple's previous Power Mac case form factor was in use since 1999 (about 4.5 years). With the G5 enclosure, I think it appears overengineered to us now but was designed with an eye toward housing future CPUs in years to come-- CPUs that will really need all that cooling capability.
~Philly
I bet a couple rolls of duct tape and some plastic would be quite useful in Space!
Memo to Captain Obvious:
Duct tape has already saved the day for NASA on more than one occasion.
~Philly
Most spammers can now be sued under the criminal code, either for fraud (Nigerian scam) or for cracking the machines they're using to send the spam.
Yes, but it's usually difficult and time consuming to track down the spammers. The laws need to include liability for the companies who actually sell their products via spam. Currently they can just plead ignorance "Hey, we didn't know that this guy we paid to do our marketing was sending spam via cracked PCs!"-- if they can be penalized financially via a civil suit for marketing their product via spam, they'll be a lot more careful about who they hire to do their marketing, spammers will lose business, and spamming will become unprofitable.
Since we'll never be allowed to hunt down and kill the tools who actually buy the shit marketed via spam and make the business model viable, this is the next best thing.
~Philly
You can strap it to your arm with the included holder
I'm sure someone makes an armband-style case for iPod owners who want one.
No movable parts so no skipping unlike the ipod
The iPod has 32MB of cache. The average song encoded at a 128K bit rate is 4MB. So about 6 to 10 songs should fit into the iPod cache. I suppose skipping could become an issue for the iPod if you strap it to a running paint shaker and listen to it for a while.
The Ipod is overkill in terms of storage (The Iriver can hold 5-50 cds depending on the sampled bitrate but normally I'd say around 6-10)
Says you. I have a 30GB iPod, and I like being able to carry around my entire CD collection in my shirt pocket. No matter where I am, I can listen to any song I want, any time I want.
The Ipod is too big & heavy
The size of a deck of cards and the weight of 2 CDs is too big and heavy? Do you have severely atrophied muscles because you've been in a coma for the last 10 years, or something?
The Ipod battery fails after about 18 months and costs over $100 to replace
Lies, all lies. Some people have had battery problems, not everyone. The majority of people with original 5GB iPods who posted when this was brought up a week or two ago are having ZERO problems. And if $100 is too rich for your blood, you can replace the iPod battery yourself for $50.
The Ipod is just a notebook/laptop hard drive in a clean looking case but just as fragile as any other hard drive
I haven't read of anyone who has had issues because of drive fragility. People who are really concerned about it can buy a case. I prefer to just take good care of my stuff.
I've read nothing but excellent reviews for the Iriver mp3 player and own one and it's the best I've ever had.
I've read nothing but excellent reviews for the iPod, and own one, and it's the best I've ever had. Neener neener neener!
I don't agree with the argument that you get more storage for the same price from an Ipod. What's the use if it's overkill? If it was an external hard drive or something along those lines I'd agree but it's not.
Ummmm, the iPod is an external hard drive. You can store anything on it, you can even install an OS on it and boot from it. For someone who claims to have had an iPod, you sure don't seem to know much about them.
~Philly
Just remember that you can't replace the battery if it dies.
Uh huh. I guess I'm just imagining this do-it-yourself site, and Apple's official battery replacement program.
~Philly
Mac news site Macintouch has a bunch of discounts available via Amazon links. Here are the ones for the iPod:
iPod 10GB: $284.05
iPod 20GB: $379.05
iPod 40GB: $474.05
~Philly
Looks pretty good.
~Philly
My company got them for those of us who work in the field, and most of us dislike them. The Java app/tracking service we use is called Telenav
Once that app is running (the i88s phones we have don't have the ability to auto-launch a Java app so it must be manually launched in the morning), it transmits the phone's GPS location every few minutes. My company's traffic manager can pull up a map in her web browser and see where all of us are at any given time.
Here's why we don't like the GPS crap: it completely rapes the battery. The original batteries in the i88s phones were getting sucked dry after being on for about 6 hours. We got new high capacity batteries for them which last the whole day, but by 5pm they are just about drained-- if you forget to plug the phone in to charge that night when you get home, you're screwed the next day. Our old i1000 phones could go 3 days before needing a charge.
Also, the GPS is a little laggy, so the navigation function doesn't work well. If you're driving at highway speeds, it doesn't tell you where to turn until you have already passed that intersection. D'oh!
~Philly
I got the a similar e-mail from Speakeasy. I currently have 1.5M down/384K up. In January they will be upgrading it to 1.5M down/768K up.
~Philly
"Windows is the best OS because the most people use it."
~Philly
I don't see what the big deal is. The networks are already handling TiVo in their own way.
Yeah, they're driving away 18-to-34 year-old males, the demographic segment most likely to own a TiVo.
How? Shitty programming that doesn't interest men. One lame reality show after another. Even the basic cable mainstays are sissifying their shows-- I used to watch Discovery and TLC a lot, now practically all they have are semi-disguised "decorating" shows and junk like "A Dating Story."
The only network with shows I actually watch is FOX, and even they do dumb shit like "Skin"-- maybe it was an interesting show somewhat aimed at men, but you're not gonna beat Monday Night Football with anything acceptable enough to be run on broadcast television-- and you might not even beat it with Naked Lesbian Jell-O Wrestling.
Spike TV actually has the right idea-- they ran a James Bond movie marathon during most of the holiday weekend, and unless it was Simpsons time or there was something more interesting on the History Channel, that's what I "watched" if I had the TV on while I was doing something else.
~Philly
There are other ways to advertise on TV besides commerical breaks, advertisers will just have to adapt.
Yeah, they could adapt just like the RIAA adapted... by buying laws to make whatever threatens their ancient business model illegal.
Broadcasters and advertisers: You bastards can take my TiVo when you pry the remote from my cold, dead fingers!
~Philly
They're not the same, but there are similarities.
I know the difference, but you have to account for the dullards who dominate the population. Remember, we are a country where coffee cups have to say "Caution- Hot!"
~Philly
Commodore 64 ethernet card
Commodore 64 web browser
How useful these really are, I don't know. But they exist.
~Philly
apple is like disney, they go after anyone that looks like they are makeing a similar product.
Not everyone, just the people who blatantly rip off Apple designs in an attempt to fool consumers. The concept is called "trade dress."
Trade dress is why Apple sued eMachines and Future Power over their eOne and ePower iMac knockoffs. Check Google Images for "emachines eone" and "future power epower," and see how similar they are to the original iMac.
Now look at Samsung's iPod knockoff. Trade dress is also applicable here. It's pretty obvious to me that Samsung started with the iPod design and made what they believed to be enough changes to avoid legal action. You can bet that they would have made it white, if they thought they could get away with it.
~Philly
space debris' orbitals are pretty easily predictable, why not shoot them out of orbit with a projectile?
Because the idea is to have less crap floating around in Earth orbit, not more. If the collision between one of your projectiles and its target is of sufficient force, the debris will become a scattered cloud of fragments. Something the size of the fingernail on your pinky put a crater into the windshield of one of the shuttles, do we really want a cloud of them up there?
The laser beam idea might be feasible, but then again, maybe not. SDI turned out to be a lot harder to create than everyone thought, and that dealt with large moving objects traveling predictable paths. Plus you've got to worry about something that you don't want to hit being in the line of fire, which is slightly less of a concern when what you want to hit are nuclear warheads heading for your cities.
Call me crazy, but I think the idea of a few autonomous space trash trucks cruising around up there and picking up errant junk seems like the way to go, once technology has advanced sufficiently to permit it.
~Philly
If there was a bit of junk on the freeway it would be picked up and moved and in space we just avoid it.
Well, yeah. There's a slight cost differential between dispatching a Highways Department crew and sending up something able to find and catch a paint chip or something moving at orbital velocity.
Surely if we keep polluting space then there eventually won't be another orbit.
If the problem gets bad enough, surely The Powers That Be will devise some sort of autonomous craft able to detect debris down to the smallest paint chip, give chase, and collect it. Possibly even catch larger debris and guide it into a more quickly deteriorating orbit so it will burn up in the atmosphere. Once its debris hopper is full, it would change orbit so it too burned up on re-entry.
For all we know this might even already be on the drawing board somewhere-- it's probably just a matter of waiting for some of the needed technologies to catch up with the design-- like fast propulsion and agile maneuverability without having to turn the craft into a giant fuel tank.
~Philly
I'm a firm believer that anything that sends those fucking Bible-thumping loonies into a tizzy is a good thing.
But I'm not crazy about the idea of being lojacked, because I can see the good old U.S. Government abusing such technology-- like making RFID implants mandatory for everyone, and sprinkling RFID readers all over the place, in every doorway, parking meter, fire hydrant, and other such everyday objects that people see so often they no longer even notice them.
~Philly