I don't really blame JAWS for being so expensive. I would expect (not being a windows developer) that it is a rather difficult thing to get right, and there is a very limited market. This app is pretty nifty, but at least an order of magnitude easier to write.
I wonder if there is or if there should be a clearing house for Free/Open assistive technology projects and Request For Projects. I think it would be astoundingly nifty to work on some of this stuff, but I don't really know where to start.
That's great... for you. Tapes are, I think, generally more reliable than CDRs over the long haul, if you use a new, high quality tape in a clean, properly aligned drive. But tapes pose their own set of problems.
1> The favorite tape formfactor has changed several times in the consumer side of the business, and at least once or twice in the business side. You may not be able to find a drive that plays your tapes ten years from now, at least without a lot of trouble.
2> If you still have your old tape drive, it may well have worn out, broken down, or simply fallen out of adjustment. Tape drives are very fussy things.
3> Tape drives, being very mechanical, are fussy things to begin with. If you want to be sure you can read that data in 10 years, better double check it in at least one other drive today.
4> Tapes wear out. After spooling them back and forth a few thousand times, they just don't work like they used to. IIRC CDRWs do too, so be carefull out there.
5> Tapes don't have a fraction of the installed base of CD-ROMS.
6> Tapes are remain vulnerable to the elements. Not as much to light, but the binder can give out and the tape start flaking. If the drive misfeeds, the tape can get tangled, threatening your data. If you get the tape too near something magnetic, it threatens data integrity, in audio tape you can even get print-tough after a while, where loops of tape affect the contents of their neighbors.
So tapes have their place, but they are hardly the panacea you suggest.
And hard-drive backups? The hard drives I've bought in the last couple years seem to have a MTBF of 18 months. Be careful out there and be sure you know the limits of your media
I think my boss thinks I'm a whimp for not wanting to fiddle with 220+ Volt wiring. He still has the remains of a screwdriver he dropped in a 440 volt box. It is several inches shorter then it used to be and he has a scar on his head to remind him of the mistake.
An old wise man once said: If you have to ask and it can kill you, maim you, or bankrupt you, then you need professional help.
Geeks are used to being able to figure things out. I fix mysterious computer problems, work on my car without training or instructions. I'd even be OK with doing some light wiring when I rewire my house. But I'd guess that the sort of work you're asking about could involve any of the three, in whichever order you choose, seperately or all at once.
I wouldn't mind doing outlets while I remodel my house, but just because I have a few harmless shocks under my belt I don't feel qualified to fiddle with the hot side of an electrical panel. Get a pro or make damn good case why you need to do it yourself... explaining why you are willing to risk your life to get the job done.
1. Deep Breaths! Are you aquainted with Hyperbole? It's a literary device.
2. The most recent transfer of power was about as disorderly as possible without involving the military or spilling blood. The process, such as it was, was almost entirely ad-hoc and evolving.
3. To the extent that any criticism is in bad faith, most criticism in the political context is in bad faith. Just because you agree with your blow-hard politicos and talking heads doesn't mean that they are acting in good faith.
4. Repeat: Deep breaths. Remember: things aren't going to hell in a handbasket, they went a long time ago.
But also: 3) When the insulation fell off, it was traveling at the same speed as the shuttle.
The velocity in in question if of the foam relative to the shuttle. The foam didn't have very long to develop a velocity differential, a second or two at the most.
My experience with AT&T long distance billing was similarly terrible. I work for a company that used to be an AT&T service provider. We have a small switch that we maintain and I was assigned to match the records with the switch with the Call Detail Records that AT&T was sending us for our bill. It was pretty much impossible. A fair percentage of calls had wildly differing call lengths. Most switches were within 60 seconds of ours, but some varried by hours or days. A number of calls in their records simply do not exist in ours in any way.
One month I was asked to investigate a huge jump in our bill (30 or 50 percent as I recall). After spending hours fiddling with my record-matching perl and coming back with nothing, I looked at the datestamps on the records. There were records spanning 14 previous months. Once those were stripped out our bill was as close to right as we could hope to demonstrate.
I'm certain they were using a switching PS. I had mine appart a couple of times and I don't remember there being the requisite size transformer or capacitor to do the trick. Also, since I believe the fan was a late addition, and the ventilation was otherwise rather poor, the heat problem would have been overwhelming.
Finally, I'm no EE, but I never saw a linear PS in any of the PCs from that era that was either small, nor light enough to work in one of these machines. Yes, they seem big an clunky now, but the O1 was remarkably small for its day. They did burn a little space with their disk-storage bays underneath each of the floppies, but otherwise the case was packed pretty tight.
The original Osbourne shipped with single sided, single density drives with a capacity of around 90K.
Later (and moded) versions of the O-1 had double-density, single sided drives that took it up to 180K apice or so. I believe it was the much balleyhooed O-2 that had double sided drives, but it's been too long...
Moreover, the 5" screen was 50 characters wide. This was rather inconvenient, because the standard width of a full line on paper is 72 or so, so every line you typed ended up scrolling the page horizontally, back and forth. It was quite obnoxious. Neither was it amber by default. I'm pretty sure it was black-and-white, though green may have been an option (I'm confusing it with the Kaypro I think). That particular shade of blue-white that the old mono monitors used was rather obnoxious to look at for long periods of time.
The processor was not a Z80 either, it was an 8080. There wasn't much difference, but the Z80 had a few instructions that made life easier and so SW for the Z80 wasn't backward compatible. I don't remember the speed at all, but I doubt it was 4mhz... that came later too. Contemporary machines had were using 2MHZ parts.
I believe it was closer to mid, to lower 20s in weight (the article says 23lbs and that sounds about right). It was a little lighter than many of it's competitors because of the small CRT and because it used a plastic case where Kaypros (for example) used steel.
The worst offender on weight was a Zenith PC, the 160 I believe, which had a rather funny form-factor (the floppy drives were on a shelf that popped up, and which crammed an entire PC compatible into the case, with 7 or 8 full length ISA slots and a full-sized, enclosed powersupply into the case. All told, it weighed in at over 40 lbs.
Anyway, the Osbourne 2 was really going to be a huge improvement over the Ozzy-1, because it had a 80 char wide, 7" screen, and, as I recall, double-sided, double density disk drives that would have been at least 360K appiece (I believe that it was closer to 380K). It was probably going to still weigh a tonne, but it would have had enough features to make it more than a novelty.
I used to have an ad for an Osbourne 3, not that I think it was ever released, and that looked kinda neat. By sticking with a 7" screen and moving to half-height floppies, it ended up being a bit larger than a lunch box. I never saw the weight quoted, but I wager they got it down to 16 or 18 pounds... not light by current standards, but it wasn't until the late 80s that portables using whatever the current chip was at the time fell much beneath that level.
Altogether though, the Ozzy was enough of a PITA to use that I got bored with it quite quickly.
You do realize that you are crossing the great american spiritual and cultural waste-land, right? The reason you don't find many wireless hot-spots is that there aren't many. The whole mid-section of the continent, from the Great Lakes west, is underserved or unserved by everything that a geek in an urban center would consider important. Bring a modem and an account with a nationwide ISP or forget about internet access.
Moreover, the image of the goofy mid-west, full of strange characters and goofy atractions is a myth pomulgated by a sentimental media. There are one or two things to do, though nothing that's stuck in my memory, but in most cases, once you get past a superficial exoticism, these sorts of places are all the same. I have crossed and re-crossed the west, always looking for something to elevate the trip above sheer tedium, and I have yet to find it.
There are two pieces of adivce I can offer, that make trips like this bareable:
1. Stay off the freeway. Every inch of freeway, from Washington to Washington DC looks the same. It takes longer to drive on the US and State highways, but there is enough variety to justify the effort, unless you are in a hurry.
2. State and National Parks are usually worth the effort. The long scar of the Badlands which streches rather farther than I'd expected, is a good example.
There is a long tradition of boom and bust in the tech sector. There was a mainframe bubble, a minicomputer bubble, the home computer bubble that burst in 1984. This is the technology I've been waiting for to start the next tech bubble.
Gary Kildall (who wrote and comercialized CP/M, the first personal computer operating system) was a visionary in this regard (From posts to comp.os.cpm circa 1998/08/07. see google groups for the complete thread.
Previously in this newsgroup, MaoN.Hibitor spake thus:
: Too bad he's (Gary) not around any more to tell us the story... : I met him one night in a restaurant in Austin TX, he was very drunk, : said he was someone notable from the early PC days. I just thought : he was someone who wandered in from a 6th street bar, he was trying : to tell me how he thought the 'next big thing' was going to be : teledildonics.. Well, yeah, whatever buddy... gotta go... bye.. : I did notice a new black Porsche 911 outside, wondered whose it : was, but didnt think much of the incident until I read a webpage : with Gary's history on it, he had been living in Austin in 92-93. : Weirdness...
On 1998-08-07 Mao N. Hibitor(MaoN.Hibitor) said:
> INSTIGATOR> "Teledildonics," indeed.
> INSTIGATOR> Had you, perchance, been ingesting an overabundance of the
> INSTIGATOR> substance alluded to by your nom de plume on that particular
> INSTIGATOR> evening?
>
>HEH...
>Nope, but Gary did buy me a beer...
>I guess he heard about the Robot Group, and came down to
>one of our meetings, it was about closing time when he wandered
>in and noticed us sitting in the back of the room with a bunch
>of electro gadgets on the table. He was quite serious about
>TD. This was just as the Internet was getting big, but before
>the WWW and Mosaic wore popular. I agreed that sex would sell,
>but didnt think mechanical accessories would prove feasable.
>OTOH, Gary may just have been 10-15 years ahead of the times...
>Up the net bandwidth a bit, provide the USB interface for your
>fav toy, and there you are... (or maybe not... but there are
>an infinite variety of folks on the net these days, and I'd say that
>about 1/3 of them are looking for digitalized porn... there's a
>market)
I've been making routine 300 mile trips between my house and Chicago with no AC, in 90-95 degree heat. On the last trip I drank between 2 and 3 gallons of water/pepsi. Even so, I had no need to piss for most of the way. I would be trilled to have at least one 80oz drink with me, and might well carry two or three on a hot day.
They should have no trouble at all moving to the absolute latest release of Mozilla and to XFree 4.2. I've been developing a Linux kit for a very similar Curuso/32Mb flash device, and I have the Mozilla 0.9.8, a pared down copy of XFree 4.2, and XMMS, and have room for a few MB of more-or-less flash friendly persistent storage to keep bookmarks and the ilk in.
I don't know how much you've used some of the fine divx encoders out there, but I have a bit of experience with them. Using the standard packages for linux, I could encode TV at 320x240x29fps at 500-700 kbps in aproximately real time on a Dual Celeron 500.
The process encoding video used one processor completely, the one attacking audio used about 10% of the second processor. Compressing it to a lower bandwidth will require a bit more CPU power to handle. Notwithstanding, you should be able to get acceptible results out of a Athlon 1.4Ghz box.
If one really needs to slim the bandwidth or CPU requirements, you can cut the frame-rate in half, which will be noticeable, but not yet painfull to watch, and trim the resolution. There is no question in my mind that I can get a far more tolerable aproximation of TV quality for the same price-point with off-the-shelf hardware.
The ARP storm on @Home let up here in Chicago about 8:45 AM CDT. I would say that I am still seeing an above-average number of ARP who-has packets, but far less frequently now.
I can still contact several servers that recently probed me, so I trust they haven't been booted my @Home, but something significant has happened.
I noticed this afternoon that my recieve light was always on on my cablemodem too. It is continual arps, which I just realized were the product of infected computers trying to scan non-existent addresses, which the routers have to try to resolve.
I spent a few hours hacking at something like this. It isn't terribly hard to do these days. You need:
600 MHZ celeron or better
video capture card
VCR from http://www.stack.nl/~brama/vcr/
That is enough to record arbitrary programming. You will need an interface to tvguide.com, which should take two to four hours for a good perler. Then you need to write a scheduler script to manage the vcr program, based on the data from tvguide.com. You could use cron, or at, but would have to keep from having consecutive programs step on each other's toes.
Actually, there was unix for the TRS80 model 16. In my case, I took a Model 2 and added a hard drive and the M68000 borads from a model 16 (a lot of people at the time perfered running their model 16 boxen as model twos). Then I was able to load the machine up with Microsoft Xenix for the TRS80. Even in 1992 it hadn't been a supported configuration for half a decade, but Xenix was a more-or-less real System 7 unix, with a wretched c compiler and no networking to speak of.
At one point Robert Dinse was running a rather large BBS in Seattle (Eskimo North) off of one of these, with a weird aftermarket (homebrew?) memory card that took him up to at least 4MB, maybe more. This supported hundreds of users total, tens simultaneously, compiling stuff, doing usenet, and basically being computer people back in the golden age.
I will also note that when Eskimo North moved up to a Sun, they also aquired a 56k leased line, making them one of the first ISPs. It was also $12 or $15 a month, making it by far the cheapest ISP I'd ever met. Those were definitely days, if not actually the days.
I hope they hand out good maps. I recently tried to get my kicks down that once noble highway. For the first thousand or so miles, it turns out to be almost unfollowably convoluted. For the next thousand, someone has put a freeway on top of large chunks of it.
The quality of the road is remarkably good, at least considering that some of the road surface is more than half a century old. That dosen't mean it isn't rather scary in spots, as when you troop out across the wilderness on the dirt trail that leads into New Mexico, but that is about the best bit of the whole trip.
Lastly, I wouldn't be eager to cross into California along the old route from Friday untill... maybe late Monday. Traffic through the mountain pass, like when, on my trip across, a thousand bikers took over a hamlet that didn't show up on maps, makes the trip somewhat unpleasant. Then the final jump, the one across the California border, ends up being on the freeway anyway.
So... I'm sure the race organisers know what they are doing. God help them if they don't.
he he he he hah hah hah ha heh heh ha hah ha ha haa ha.
Ok. That link was hysterical. I only read the first couple of paragraphs for fear of waking up the neighbors with my laughter.
This isn't so.
The GPL falls if there is no copyright, yes, but the GPL exists to fix a legal bias towards non-cooperation. Were there no legal bias (copyright law), there would be no need of the GPL. There might be needs for similar structures, but the GPL would be no more necessary for a copyrightless world than crutches are for someone after they are healed.
I've been playing with Mandrake cooker a bit this week. Expect to see a feature like this provided by the urpm package. You tell it where to look for RPMs and it builds a catalog of what everything provides. Then it will manage installing everything you need for a given package.
I drive a 1991 chevy caprice (a retired cop car). The 1990s caprice/impalla is probably the fundamentally ugliest car on the road today, but with the modified corvette engine they put in this thing, the outer awfulness just melts away.
I can second (or N) this. I run a G400 at home, and with the release of XFree 4.0.2, everything works right, right out of the box. 32 Bit color, OpenGL. I think that dual-heading is probably pretty easy on it too.
I've got a pair of TNT2 cards at work, doing dual-head at 1600x1200, and for 2d performance, I have 0 compaints. They were no trouble to set up, and pretty well Just Work. The 3d stuff is proprietary though, so it may not always work with your libraries, your version of the kernel, and your rev of X. I've been a linux user for over seven years now, and in every case, an open source solution will work better than a closed one in the long run, no matter what the vendor promises.
James Mitchell
> If the old Bell Labs is imploding, it would be a terrible shame.
Imploding? If I'm not mistaken it has imploded. As the stock price fell, senior management started taking desperate measures in hopes of shoring it up. As part of this, the Lucent Microelectronics division, which accounts for a good bit of work at the Labs, was spun off, as were consumer and business products (a rough rememberance). Products too, like Plan 9, have been sold. At this point Lucent is doing more-or-less only telco switching and wireless, rather circumscribing what remains for The Labs to do.
The fact is that it was probably time for the old gaurd to leave. I suspect there isn't much left for them.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't really blame JAWS for being so expensive. I would expect (not being a windows developer) that it is a rather difficult thing to get right, and there is a very limited market. This app is pretty nifty, but at least an order of magnitude easier to write.
I wonder if there is or if there should be a clearing house for Free/Open assistive technology projects and Request For Projects. I think it would be astoundingly nifty to work on some of this stuff, but I don't really know where to start.
That's great... for you. Tapes are, I think, generally more reliable than CDRs over the long haul, if you use a new, high quality tape in a clean, properly aligned drive. But tapes pose their own set of problems.
1> The favorite tape formfactor has changed several times in the consumer side of the business, and at least once or twice in the business side. You may not be able to find a drive that plays your tapes ten years from now, at least without a lot of trouble.
2> If you still have your old tape drive, it may well have worn out, broken down, or simply fallen out of adjustment. Tape drives are very fussy things.
3> Tape drives, being very mechanical, are fussy things to begin with. If you want to be sure you can read that data in 10 years, better double check it in at least one other drive today.
4> Tapes wear out. After spooling them back and forth a few thousand times, they just don't work like they used to. IIRC CDRWs do too, so be carefull out there.
5> Tapes don't have a fraction of the installed base of CD-ROMS.
6> Tapes are remain vulnerable to the elements. Not as much to light, but the binder can give out and the tape start flaking. If the drive misfeeds, the tape can get tangled, threatening your data. If you get the tape too near something magnetic, it threatens data integrity, in audio tape you can even get print-tough after a while, where loops of tape affect the contents of their neighbors.
So tapes have their place, but they are hardly the panacea you suggest.
And hard-drive backups? The hard drives I've bought in the last couple years seem to have a MTBF of 18 months. Be careful out there and be sure you know the limits of your media
I think my boss thinks I'm a whimp for not wanting to fiddle with 220+ Volt wiring. He still has the remains of a screwdriver he dropped in a 440 volt box. It is several inches shorter then it used to be and he has a scar on his head to remind him of the mistake.
An old wise man once said:
If you have to ask and it can kill you, maim you, or bankrupt you, then you need professional help.
Geeks are used to being able to figure things out. I fix mysterious computer problems, work on my car without training or instructions. I'd even be OK with doing some light wiring when I rewire my house. But I'd guess that the sort of work you're asking about could involve any of the three, in whichever order you choose, seperately or all at once.
I wouldn't mind doing outlets while I remodel my house, but just because I have a few harmless shocks under my belt I don't feel qualified to fiddle with the hot side of an electrical panel. Get a pro or make damn good case why you need to do it yourself... explaining why you are willing to risk your life to get the job done.
1. Deep Breaths! Are you aquainted with Hyperbole? It's a literary device.
2. The most recent transfer of power was about as disorderly as possible without involving the military or spilling blood. The process, such as it was, was almost entirely ad-hoc and evolving.
3. To the extent that any criticism is in bad faith, most criticism in the political context is in bad faith. Just because you agree with your blow-hard politicos and talking heads doesn't mean that they are acting in good faith.
4. Repeat: Deep breaths. Remember: things aren't going to hell in a handbasket, they went a long time ago.
But also:
3) When the insulation fell off, it was traveling at the same speed as the shuttle.
The velocity in in question if of the foam relative to the shuttle. The foam didn't have very long to develop a velocity differential, a second or two at the most.
My experience with AT&T long distance billing was similarly terrible. I work for a company that used to be an AT&T service provider. We have a small switch that we maintain and I was assigned to match the records with the switch with the Call Detail Records that AT&T was sending us for our bill. It was pretty much impossible. A fair percentage of calls had wildly differing call lengths. Most switches were within 60 seconds of ours, but some varried by hours or days. A number of calls in their records simply do not exist in ours in any way.
One month I was asked to investigate a huge jump in our bill (30 or 50 percent as I recall). After spending hours fiddling with my record-matching perl and coming back with nothing, I looked at the datestamps on the records. There were records spanning 14 previous months. Once those were stripped out our bill was as close to right as we could hope to demonstrate.
I'm certain they were using a switching PS. I had mine appart a couple of times and I don't remember there being the requisite size transformer or capacitor to do the trick. Also, since I believe the fan was a late addition, and the ventilation was otherwise rather poor, the heat problem would have been overwhelming.
Finally, I'm no EE, but I never saw a linear PS in any of the PCs from that era that was either small, nor light enough to work in one of these machines. Yes, they seem big an clunky now, but the O1 was remarkably small for its day. They did burn a little space with their disk-storage bays underneath each of the floppies, but otherwise the case was packed pretty tight.
360K floppies? If only!
The original Osbourne shipped with single sided, single density drives with a capacity of around 90K.
Later (and moded) versions of the O-1 had double-density, single sided drives that took it up to 180K apice or so. I believe it was the much balleyhooed O-2 that had double sided drives, but it's been too long...
Moreover, the 5" screen was 50 characters wide. This was rather inconvenient, because the standard width of a full line on paper is 72 or so, so every line you typed ended up scrolling the page horizontally, back and forth. It was quite obnoxious. Neither was it amber by default. I'm pretty sure it was black-and-white, though green may have been an option (I'm confusing it with the Kaypro I think). That particular shade of blue-white that the old mono monitors used was rather obnoxious to look at for long periods of time.
The processor was not a Z80 either, it was an 8080. There wasn't much difference, but the Z80 had a few instructions that made life easier and so SW for the Z80 wasn't backward compatible. I don't remember the speed at all, but I doubt it was 4mhz... that came later too. Contemporary machines had were using 2MHZ parts.
I believe it was closer to mid, to lower 20s in weight (the article says 23lbs and that sounds about right). It was a little lighter than many of it's competitors because of the small CRT and because it used a plastic case where Kaypros (for example) used steel.
The worst offender on weight was a Zenith PC, the 160 I believe, which had a rather funny form-factor (the floppy drives were on a shelf that popped up, and which crammed an entire PC compatible into the case, with 7 or 8 full length ISA slots and a full-sized, enclosed powersupply into the case. All told, it weighed in at over 40 lbs.
Anyway, the Osbourne 2 was really going to be a huge improvement over the Ozzy-1, because it had a 80 char wide, 7" screen, and, as I recall, double-sided, double density disk drives that would have been at least 360K appiece (I believe that it was closer to 380K). It was probably going to still weigh a tonne, but it would have had enough features to make it more than a novelty.
I used to have an ad for an Osbourne 3, not that I think it was ever released, and that looked kinda neat. By sticking with a 7" screen and moving to half-height floppies, it ended up being a bit larger than a lunch box. I never saw the weight quoted, but I wager they got it down to 16 or 18 pounds... not light by current standards, but it wasn't until the late 80s that portables using whatever the current chip was at the time fell much beneath that level.
Altogether though, the Ozzy was enough of a PITA to use that I got bored with it quite quickly.
You do realize that you are crossing the great american spiritual and cultural waste-land, right? The reason you don't find many wireless hot-spots is that there aren't many. The whole mid-section of the continent, from the Great Lakes west, is underserved or unserved by everything that a geek in an urban center would consider important. Bring a modem and an account with a nationwide ISP or forget about internet access.
Moreover, the image of the goofy mid-west, full of strange characters and goofy atractions is a myth pomulgated by a sentimental media. There are one or two things to do, though nothing that's stuck in my memory, but in most cases, once you get past a superficial exoticism, these sorts of places are all the same. I have crossed and re-crossed the west, always looking for something to elevate the trip above sheer tedium, and I have yet to find it.
There are two pieces of adivce I can offer, that make trips like this bareable:
1. Stay off the freeway. Every inch of freeway, from Washington to Washington DC looks the same. It takes longer to drive on the US and State highways, but there is enough variety to justify the effort, unless you are in a hurry.
2. State and National Parks are usually worth the effort. The long scar of the Badlands which streches rather farther than I'd expected, is a good example.
Good luck and may your god have mercy.
There is a long tradition of boom and bust in the tech sector. There was a mainframe bubble, a minicomputer bubble, the home computer bubble that burst in 1984. This is the technology I've been waiting for to start the next tech bubble.
.
Gary Kildall (who wrote and comercialized CP/M, the first personal computer operating system) was a visionary in this regard (From posts to comp.os.cpm circa 1998/08/07. see google groups for the complete thread
Previously in this newsgroup, MaoN.Hibitor spake thus:
: Too bad he's (Gary) not around any more to tell us the story...
: I met him one night in a restaurant in Austin TX, he was very drunk,
: said he was someone notable from the early PC days. I just thought
: he was someone who wandered in from a 6th street bar, he was trying
: to tell me how he thought the 'next big thing' was going to be
: teledildonics.. Well, yeah, whatever buddy... gotta go... bye..
: I did notice a new black Porsche 911 outside, wondered whose it
: was, but didnt think much of the incident until I read a webpage
: with Gary's history on it, he had been living in Austin in 92-93.
: Weirdness...
On 1998-08-07 Mao N. Hibitor(MaoN.Hibitor) said:
> INSTIGATOR> "Teledildonics," indeed.
> INSTIGATOR> Had you, perchance, been ingesting an overabundance of the
> INSTIGATOR> substance alluded to by your nom de plume on that particular
> INSTIGATOR> evening?
>
>HEH...
>Nope, but Gary did buy me a beer...
>I guess he heard about the Robot Group, and came down to
>one of our meetings, it was about closing time when he wandered
>in and noticed us sitting in the back of the room with a bunch
>of electro gadgets on the table. He was quite serious about
>TD. This was just as the Internet was getting big, but before
>the WWW and Mosaic wore popular. I agreed that sex would sell,
>but didnt think mechanical accessories would prove feasable.
>OTOH, Gary may just have been 10-15 years ahead of the times...
>Up the net bandwidth a bit, provide the USB interface for your
>fav toy, and there you are... (or maybe not... but there are
>an infinite variety of folks on the net these days, and I'd say that
>about 1/3 of them are looking for digitalized porn... there's a
>market)
I've been making routine 300 mile trips between my house and Chicago with no AC, in 90-95 degree heat. On the last trip I drank between 2 and 3 gallons of water/pepsi. Even so, I had no need to piss for most of the way. I would be trilled to have at least one 80oz drink with me, and might well carry two or three on a hot day.
They should have no trouble at all moving to the absolute latest release of Mozilla and to XFree 4.2. I've been developing a Linux kit for a very similar Curuso/32Mb flash device, and I have the Mozilla 0.9.8, a pared down copy of XFree 4.2, and XMMS, and have room for a few MB of more-or-less flash friendly persistent storage to keep bookmarks and the ilk in.
I don't know how much you've used some of the fine divx encoders out there, but I have a bit of experience with them. Using the standard packages for linux, I could encode TV at 320x240x29fps at 500-700 kbps in aproximately real time on a Dual Celeron 500.
The process encoding video used one processor completely, the one attacking audio used about 10% of the second processor. Compressing it to a lower bandwidth will require a bit more CPU power to handle. Notwithstanding, you should be able to get acceptible results out of a Athlon 1.4Ghz box.
If one really needs to slim the bandwidth or CPU requirements, you can cut the frame-rate in half, which will be noticeable, but not yet painfull to watch, and trim the resolution. There is no question in my mind that I can get a far more tolerable aproximation of TV quality for the same price-point with off-the-shelf hardware.
The ARP storm on @Home let up here in Chicago about 8:45 AM CDT. I would say that I am still seeing an above-average number of ARP who-has packets, but far less frequently now. I can still contact several servers that recently probed me, so I trust they haven't been booted my @Home, but something significant has happened.
I noticed this afternoon that my recieve light was always on on my cablemodem too. It is continual arps, which I just realized were the product of infected computers trying to scan non-existent addresses, which the routers have to try to resolve.
I spent a few hours hacking at something like this. It isn't terribly hard to do these days. You need:
600 MHZ celeron or better
video capture card
VCR from http://www.stack.nl/~brama/vcr/
That is enough to record arbitrary programming. You will need an interface to tvguide.com, which should take two to four hours for a good perler. Then you need to write a scheduler script to manage the vcr program, based on the data from tvguide.com. You could use cron, or at, but would have to keep from having consecutive programs step on each other's toes.
Actually, there was unix for the TRS80 model 16. In my case, I took a Model 2 and added a hard drive and the M68000 borads from a model 16 (a lot of people at the time perfered running their model 16 boxen as model twos). Then I was able to load the machine up with Microsoft Xenix for the TRS80. Even in 1992 it hadn't been a supported configuration for half a decade, but Xenix was a more-or-less real System 7 unix, with a wretched c compiler and no networking to speak of. At one point Robert Dinse was running a rather large BBS in Seattle (Eskimo North) off of one of these, with a weird aftermarket (homebrew?) memory card that took him up to at least 4MB, maybe more. This supported hundreds of users total, tens simultaneously, compiling stuff, doing usenet, and basically being computer people back in the golden age. I will also note that when Eskimo North moved up to a Sun, they also aquired a 56k leased line, making them one of the first ISPs. It was also $12 or $15 a month, making it by far the cheapest ISP I'd ever met. Those were definitely days, if not actually the days.
I hope they hand out good maps. I recently tried to get my kicks down that once noble highway. For the first thousand or so miles, it turns out to be almost unfollowably convoluted. For the next thousand, someone has put a freeway on top of large chunks of it.
The quality of the road is remarkably good, at least considering that some of the road surface is more than half a century old. That dosen't mean it isn't rather scary in spots, as when you troop out across the wilderness on the dirt trail that leads into New Mexico, but that is about the best bit of the whole trip.
Lastly, I wouldn't be eager to cross into California along the old route from Friday untill... maybe late Monday. Traffic through the mountain pass, like when, on my trip across, a thousand bikers took over a hamlet that didn't show up on maps, makes the trip somewhat unpleasant. Then the final jump, the one across the California border, ends up being on the freeway anyway.
So... I'm sure the race organisers know what they are doing. God help them if they don't.
he he he he hah hah hah ha heh heh ha hah ha ha haa ha. Ok. That link was hysterical. I only read the first couple of paragraphs for fear of waking up the neighbors with my laughter.
When I was a teen I read the Jargon File religiously. A few months ago I met ESR at a dinner as well. The bits I read seem entirely authentic.
As for the actual content, I see it as Mr Raymond's latest pass at writing a quick, practical guide to a topic that many find confuddling.
This isn't so. The GPL falls if there is no copyright, yes, but the GPL exists to fix a legal bias towards non-cooperation. Were there no legal bias (copyright law), there would be no need of the GPL. There might be needs for similar structures, but the GPL would be no more necessary for a copyrightless world than crutches are for someone after they are healed.
I've been playing with Mandrake cooker a bit this week. Expect to see a feature like this provided by the urpm package. You tell it where to look for RPMs and it builds a catalog of what everything provides. Then it will manage installing everything you need for a given package.
I drive a 1991 chevy caprice (a retired cop car). The 1990s caprice/impalla is probably the fundamentally ugliest car on the road today, but with the modified corvette engine they put in this thing, the outer awfulness just melts away.
I can second (or N) this. I run a G400 at home, and with the release of XFree 4.0.2, everything works right, right out of the box. 32 Bit color, OpenGL. I think that dual-heading is probably pretty easy on it too. I've got a pair of TNT2 cards at work, doing dual-head at 1600x1200, and for 2d performance, I have 0 compaints. They were no trouble to set up, and pretty well Just Work. The 3d stuff is proprietary though, so it may not always work with your libraries, your version of the kernel, and your rev of X. I've been a linux user for over seven years now, and in every case, an open source solution will work better than a closed one in the long run, no matter what the vendor promises. James Mitchell
Imploding? If I'm not mistaken it has imploded. As the stock price fell, senior management started taking desperate measures in hopes of shoring it up. As part of this, the Lucent Microelectronics division, which accounts for a good bit of work at the Labs, was spun off, as were consumer and business products (a rough rememberance). Products too, like Plan 9, have been sold. At this point Lucent is doing more-or-less only telco switching and wireless, rather circumscribing what remains for The Labs to do.
The fact is that it was probably time for the old gaurd to leave. I suspect there isn't much left for them.
James Mitchell