I have one (a Model 100) sitting on a shelf about 10 feet from me. I bought it back around 1984. In fact I think I actually borrowed the money from the bank. It made the rounds with the family but came back to me a few years ago, still working fine.
The keyboard was rather clacky, so I pried the key caps off one day and inserted individually cut pieces of thin foam atop the key switches. Was deathly quiet forever afterwards.
I just bought a new MPC-206E, but that Model 100... it still rules.
You might very well think that (I think I learned that phrase on PBS) but at least in Mir's case there's the "pride of ownership" argument.
"Hey, we're a former superpower on our way to being a third world country, and yet WE, the mighty ROOSHIA, the FROZEN HEARTLAND OF EURASIA, are the only country in the universe able to continuously sustain human life in orbit. And THAT'S A FACT JACK."
I think I'd be able to put up with a few sucky bits. And after a few months Shannon Lucid would start to look pretty sexy, hmm? Built strong, like Rooshian woman.
Me, I feel vaguely used. Even though NASA managed to farm the Space Station out to pretty much every one of the fifty states, thereby insuring its political survival, we seem to have orbited a pretty crappy piece of hardware. Meanwhile all the cool stuff like the inflatable Spacehab module (I pity those poor bastards at Spacehab--why don't they just give up?!?!?) gets shot down, and NASA also thinks space tourism sucks. Whatever. Let's just go back to chipping arrowheads out of flint.
I don't for a minute think that the public has suddenly become more science and technology savvy on the topic of global warming in particular, and certainly not on science and technology in general.
The people that believe in the reality of global warming (or is that just "believe in global warming?") are the same people responsible for the silicone breast implant ban, for gut level reactions against electromagnetic emissions ("radiation") of all kinds, for the regulatory tolerance given to "dietary supplement" manufacturers selling products that from time to time turn out to be poison. And so on.
I'm all in favor of an educated and scientifically literate public, but I don't see how any scientific issue will ever get beyond the black and white banners of a "cause" in this country. Not today, not in the near future.
If you will settle for "open air" type racks,
which are just a pair of rails with no
cabinetry, etc., you can find all kinds of
configurations from Quik-Lok, in all sizes.
They're sturdy, easy to assemble and take
apart, etc. Oh, and relatively cheap (most
offerings in the $50-200 range).
I built a "bang for buck" dual CPU box recently,
2xPIII 866, ASUS CUV4X-DLS, etc., and put it
in a Jinco enclosure with the Jinco 300W "upgrade"
power supply. I also added two 4" case fans.
The drive in it is a 7200rpm IBM (the newest
60gb, 20gb per platter) although I also have a
15krpm Seagate on order (which the specs on
indicate is much quieter than previous fast
spinning drives). The box is very quiet,
comparable to a desktop tower mac, and would
be essentially silent without the case fans,
which produce an unremarkable white "fan" noise.
So, as a satisfied Jinco customer I'll
enthusiastically recommend their cases and dual fan upgrade power supplies.
If you are going it without case fans, I'd
suggest one of the larger upgrade supplies
(probably the 400W) and then at most one CPU.
If you just get one case fan and have it blow
out the back, that will be almost as quiet.
Oddly enough, Darwin has insecure setuid scripts. It also has the setuid race condition kernel bug that has been excised from more civilized Unixen. Until Mac OS X came along, such boxes were becoming scarce. It's like deja vu all over again! It's hard to believe a company would ship a "new" operating system with this same old crap in it.
Here's hoping someone at Apple fixes this before someone else not at Apple finds a way to hack the soon-to-be-masses of Mac OS X boxen en masse.
I was tempted to buy an LCD monitor 2-3 years ago when Apple started pushing them. But there was too much visible ghosting (digital device using analog electronics), it was too expensive, not really enough pixels, etc.
So this year when I needed a monitor small and light enough to put atop a stage piano in my home studio, I revisited the LCD. I bought an NEC 1530V a few months ago and now I am a believer.
The ghosting is gone. Despite the digital-analog-digital signal chain, my 1530V renders native resolution images with eerie precision. I can't see any more of the echoes and fuzziness that were a "feature" of the early generations of analog interface LCD monitors. The monitors's "auto adjust" feature is, from appearances, magical. It must be doing some kind of adaptive filtering that cancels the echoes, sharpens the pixels, etc. I had convinced myself that a digital interface was necessary for high quality but obviously that is no longer true.
The price is right. I paid $700 for my (1024x768) monitor and the same monitor is now more like $550. Prices are expected to drop further through this year.
The picture quality is incredible. Eyestrain from reading slightly fuzzy text, forget that, that's in the past.
Non-native resolutions are not "chunky." They are anti-aliased with a decent interpolative algorithm. Alternate resolutions fill the screen (and the auto-adjust magic works fine on them too) and games look just fine on them. Not perfect, but very good.
The monitor turns on from sleep fast. Just a few seconds for the backlight to turn on.
And you can afford enough pixels. My venerable 20" Trinitron is showing its age, a little fuzzy, the convergence no longer perfect, a little slow to come on and a little dim. I'll be replacing it with a 17-18" 1280x1024 monitor very soon. The question is, whether it will be an 18" NEC or the 17" Samsung with the built-in resizable PIP TV tuner. Both are in the $1000-1250 range now. By year end I expect some 15" LCD monitors to be under $400 and the 17-18" should be $800-1000, maybe one or two going for $750?
My new monitor will be 20-40 lbs lighter than the one it replaces, will be a miserly user of power, will not require degaussing, and will give me all the happy Mac OS X pixels I need.
If you haven't tried an LCD monitor within the past 12 months, now's the time. Where my house is concerned, the CRT is on its way out.
I've seen many of Damian's RFCs and although they describe a very interesting and clever language, they don't describe Perl. Perl is the anti-language. When an MIT-trained programmer can look at Perl and say, "Hmm, this looks pretty good," that won't be Perl any more. I want more intuitively utilitarian junk in Perl. I don't want logic, orthogonality, beauty, and especially not an architecture befitting a "real" programming language.
At the same time, giving Damian money to go forth and do clever things with Perl 5 seems like a great idea to me. He's one of the cleverest and most engaging speakers I've ever encountered, in the programming arena anyway. I think I like the idea of him struggling with Perl 5 (and winning, mostly) better than the idea of him exerting any significant effect on the direction of Perl 6.
Things change, I know, but I'm hopeful that when "they" replace Perl with something completely different, it's not still called Perl. Maybe people could pay Damian to help write NuPerl and then there could be annual bakeoffs with Scheme and C++ and Eiffel. Which no doubt NuPerl would win due to its shameless built-in regex operators and hashes.
But please leave the heart of my anachronistic, idiosyncratic, ugly, yet proletarian and immensely useful, language alone.
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The keyboard was rather clacky, so I pried the key caps off one day and inserted individually cut pieces of thin foam atop the key switches. Was deathly quiet forever afterwards.
I just bought a new MPC-206E, but that Model 100 ... it still rules.
"Hey, we're a former superpower on our way to being a third world country, and yet WE, the mighty ROOSHIA, the FROZEN HEARTLAND OF EURASIA, are the only country in the universe able to continuously sustain human life in orbit. And THAT'S A FACT JACK."
I think I'd be able to put up with a few sucky bits. And after a few months Shannon Lucid would start to look pretty sexy, hmm? Built strong, like Rooshian woman.
Me, I feel vaguely used. Even though NASA managed to farm the Space Station out to pretty much every one of the fifty states, thereby insuring its political survival, we seem to have orbited a pretty crappy piece of hardware. Meanwhile all the cool stuff like the inflatable Spacehab module (I pity those poor bastards at Spacehab--why don't they just give up?!?!?) gets shot down, and NASA also thinks space tourism sucks. Whatever. Let's just go back to chipping arrowheads out of flint.
Must be time to check again on what the definition of "is" is.
-joseph
The people that believe in the reality of global warming (or is that just "believe in global warming?") are the same people responsible for the silicone breast implant ban, for gut level reactions against electromagnetic emissions ("radiation") of all kinds, for the regulatory tolerance given to "dietary supplement" manufacturers selling products that from time to time turn out to be poison. And so on.
I'm all in favor of an educated and scientifically literate public, but I don't see how any scientific issue will ever get beyond the black and white banners of a "cause" in this country. Not today, not in the near future.
-joseph
If you will settle for "open air" type racks, which are just a pair of rails with no cabinetry, etc., you can find all kinds of configurations from Quik-Lok, in all sizes. They're sturdy, easy to assemble and take apart, etc. Oh, and relatively cheap (most offerings in the $50-200 range).
If you are going it without case fans, I'd suggest one of the larger upgrade supplies (probably the 400W) and then at most one CPU. If you just get one case fan and have it blow out the back, that will be almost as quiet.
Here's hoping someone at Apple fixes this before someone else not at Apple finds a way to hack the soon-to-be-masses of Mac OS X boxen en masse.
So this year when I needed a monitor small and light enough to put atop a stage piano in my home studio, I revisited the LCD. I bought an NEC 1530V a few months ago and now I am a believer.
The ghosting is gone. Despite the digital-analog-digital signal chain, my 1530V renders native resolution images with eerie precision. I can't see any more of the echoes and fuzziness that were a "feature" of the early generations of analog interface LCD monitors. The monitors's "auto adjust" feature is, from appearances, magical. It must be doing some kind of adaptive filtering that cancels the echoes, sharpens the pixels, etc. I had convinced myself that a digital interface was necessary for high quality but obviously that is no longer true.
The price is right. I paid $700 for my (1024x768) monitor and the same monitor is now more like $550. Prices are expected to drop further through this year.
The picture quality is incredible. Eyestrain from reading slightly fuzzy text, forget that, that's in the past.
Non-native resolutions are not "chunky." They are anti-aliased with a decent interpolative algorithm. Alternate resolutions fill the screen (and the auto-adjust magic works fine on them too) and games look just fine on them. Not perfect, but very good.
The monitor turns on from sleep fast. Just a few seconds for the backlight to turn on.
And you can afford enough pixels. My venerable 20" Trinitron is showing its age, a little fuzzy, the convergence no longer perfect, a little slow to come on and a little dim. I'll be replacing it with a 17-18" 1280x1024 monitor very soon. The question is, whether it will be an 18" NEC or the 17" Samsung with the built-in resizable PIP TV tuner. Both are in the $1000-1250 range now. By year end I expect some 15" LCD monitors to be under $400 and the 17-18" should be $800-1000, maybe one or two going for $750?
My new monitor will be 20-40 lbs lighter than the one it replaces, will be a miserly user of power, will not require degaussing, and will give me all the happy Mac OS X pixels I need.
If you haven't tried an LCD monitor within the past 12 months, now's the time. Where my house is concerned, the CRT is on its way out.
-joseph
At the same time, giving Damian money to go forth and do clever things with Perl 5 seems like a great idea to me. He's one of the cleverest and most engaging speakers I've ever encountered, in the programming arena anyway. I think I like the idea of him struggling with Perl 5 (and winning, mostly) better than the idea of him exerting any significant effect on the direction of Perl 6.
Things change, I know, but I'm hopeful that when "they" replace Perl with something completely different, it's not still called Perl. Maybe people could pay Damian to help write NuPerl and then there could be annual bakeoffs with Scheme and C++ and Eiffel. Which no doubt NuPerl would win due to its shameless built-in regex operators and hashes.
But please leave the heart of my anachronistic, idiosyncratic, ugly, yet proletarian and immensely useful, language alone.