The last time I checked, The Starband satelitte service was compatible with linux - if it works on linux, surely a port to OSX would be easy. (I believe it also worked with linksys routers - if not, one could simply use an ancient PC with USB and ethernet as a router)
Of course, Win95 is limited to 1.99 gbs per partition...
This guy pushes it to the limit - you can't really fit much more onto a Win95 box. Reminds me of the time a dell technician insatlled a new hard drive in my friend's pc. Dell gave him a 12g drive rather than the standard 2gb drive - needless to say, the PC had 6 partitions, and my friend didn't have a clue what to do with them.
Besides, having 24 hard drives has to be good for something.... the server seemed to survive the slashdotting.... for now *evil laughter*
This is quite obvious. Every virus scanner in my memory has had an option to boot off of the CD or create a boot floppy (which can be write protected in the same fashion as all floppies). The CD boots, can do a scan (automatically if you configure autoexec.bat to do so). You can re-burn the cd by placing new definitions on the cd, or tell the program to go get the definitions from another source (ls-120 drive, hard disk, etc.). This has all been possible with norton antivirus since version 2000 (probably earlier. i just never checked)
I remember purchasing a G4 about 2 years ago with the intent to run quickbooks on it, as iniuit advertised the mac version on their website.
The mac version had last been updated in 1996 (this was the year 2000), and wasn't compatible with the windows version. Let's hope the new one's better.
So we can obviously predict that Steve Jobs will become the CEO of Nex for 10 years, drive the company into the ground, move back to Apple, and buy Nex, thus eliminating the competition.
English class, the last week of school. (it should be noted that this English classroom had (old) computers at every desk)
Teacher tells us we can skip the lesson if we tidy up the room. We blindly agree
She tells to windex all the computers, making sure to get 'inside of them' really good.
Now, I know quite a bit about computers, and the teacher obviously didn't know anything. I had offered solutions to problems the computers had presented earlier in the year, only to be told that I was arrogant and insulting the teacher's knowledge, and the teacher hated me since. So, I shut my mouth while I watched in horror as students squirted windex inside monitors and power supplies.
That summer, i spent about 2 weeks working for the school fixing computers. The other 'techies' were astonished as to how most of the computers ended up with bad monitors, motherboards, and power supplies.
It was then that I learned what a pain it is to figure out WHICH parts of the 25 computers in the lab she had destroyed (hmmm... is this PC dead because the monitor just doesn't work, has a bad motherboard, power supply, or video card)
Why does the idea of "microprocessors" sound like overkill in this sense?
Couldn't a few transistors and some LEDs serve the same purpose at a tiny fraction of the cost?
Or couldn't furniture companies hire more proficent people to write and translate assembley instructions, draw understandable diagrams, or number/color-code parts. Quite low-tech, but also quite efficent and useful...
I have an old laptop which I use for a similar purpose: an IBM thinkpad 755, which is a 486/75 with 20mb of RAM, and what is possibly the world's most troublesome video adapter.
Despite these shortcomings, I am still able to run Windows 98 with Word 2000. '98 boots up in about a minute, and word takes about 10 seconds to load. For an 8 year old laptop, that's pretty darn good. The only drawback is that the type is somewat laggy, although the system described in this article should be nearly twice as fast.
Actually, apple released an incomplete build of an early development build of OSX compiled for X86 to ADC members sometime around 4 years ago. It was dubbed as the Apple Rhaposody OS Developer Release 3. It was quite intersesting to pick up the similarities between it and OSX. A ton of information, along with screenshots are posted at this site.
It was really a transitional OS which gap between NextSTEP and OSX. It contains both elements of both OSes. Anybody recognize the chess program at the bottom of the page?
Re:Here's a picture of it
on
Shop Till It Drops
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I find it odd that Mac OS X is repeatedly ignored and stepped on. Sure, we all want end-users to be using a *nix operating system using all sorts of 'standards'. OS X is exactly this - it's idiot-proof, has never randomly crashed in my experience - let's see how it stacks up?
1. No 'best' browser. MacOS has every major browser available for it - IE and Mozilla (and that's all that matters)
2. Prompting for a filesystem scan.
OSX decides to do this stuff automatically whenever it 'needs' to. With HFS+, I haven't had a problem, and I frequently torture the machine by unplugging it without unmounting. I'm still using my original partition tables from 3 years ago.
3. Printing needs to be easier to configure.
There are no widely used standards for printers. I had the unfortunate pleasure of configuring some printers on an antiquated RS-232C network running SCO OpenServer. While it wasn't linux, it was hell - and these were dot-matrix printers. MacOS 9 wasn't much better in terms of support than linux (I eventually got it working using a flaky piece of software, but it wasn't fun). From what I hear, OSX isn't much better. For end-users, Windows wins this round hands down, while people with high-end printers which support stuff like postscript can use 'alternative' operating systems with ease.
4. Make it easy for the user to find out how to do things.
Indeed, linux falls down here. OSX does too. While it doesn't provide the delightfull array of software offered by linux, it doesn't offer a GUI for all of the console tools. OSX can easily mount a SMB share from the command line (VERY easily), but has no GUI. Most commercial Linuxes throw you too many packages to deal with - they either need to organize them logically, or not include them at all.
5. Cleaner redraws.
OSX does this quite nicely. No other OS does.
6. Die stray processes, die!
Every OS does this. It's a programming issue.
7. Easy way of sharing files.
OSX should be able to mount SMB shares easily, since it can be done with an embarrassingly simple command-line command. It can't act as a server, though. No GUI yet.
8. Sound support.
Macs use standardized hardware. Even so, linux has this problem (even though most *good* sound cards can emulate a Sound Blaster)
9. No common editor which supports "soft wrapping."
Huh.... does ANYTHING do this correctly? I have no clue what this guy's talking about
10. No easy way to configure X - especially change resolution on the fly.
Shouldn't this be EASY? For crying out loud, we create what has been repueted to be the world's most secure OS, and we can't change the screen resolution easily. OSX does this with flying colors (as does every other GUI-based OS ever created)
this list would be more appropriately named the Top 10 Things wrong with X Windows.
From my experience, RCN is one of the worst cable companies in existance. They are the ONLY cable provider servicing my area (and the surrounding towns for 30ish miles)
In a recent survey, 85% of those who answered said they were dissatisfied with RCN, and would switch if another provider existed.
When I subscribed to their cable TV service, the broadcasts were fuzzy, we had an extremely limited channel selection (no digital service either), and it was more expensive than satelitte, which is what I now subscribe to. In addition, RCN kept bugging me for several months to resubscribe, refused to cancel service, and finally slammed me with a bil for $500 for a decoder needed to view premium channels - the decoder was given to us free when we subscribed 10 years earlier, and worked for only one year.
Their cable modems have been reported to be even worse. I don't subscribe, but have heard horror stories. Subscribers are given old first-gen modems - their service is supposedly painfully slow, and is only a 1-way connection, requiring a dial-up connection on the upstream side. RCN has promised to invest about 75 million into our area to improve their service - this was several years ago, and they have failed to take any action since making the promise.
Of course, the SF customers seem to like them. I live on the east coast in a small town on the brink between suburbia and the rural areas - it's quite different here.
As for web development, I find OSX to be the perfect OS.
I can edit the source files in my perferred text editor (most *nix editors have been ported), then save it, and view it in Mozilla which invokes Apache, PHP, and MySQL (PostgreSQL also works) to serve the page.
I use a 400mhz G4 tower, which should be about as fast as the new iBooks. I find the speed more then adaquate. Photoshop even runs with all that server software running in the background.
I remember 2-3 years ago when Dell was a highly reputable brand, and a great white-box, CUSTOM PC company. So was gateway (even earlier. does anybody remember their old, huge 486 series pcs?).
Each built PCs custom, by hand. They used good parts, sold direct, and gave the savings to the consumer. They used whatever parts gave the best performance or the biggest bang for the buck.
Now that they're on top, their brand sells itself. They get lazy. They cut corners. They took more profit, they made deals with large-name suppliers (Intel and Dell - while some would argue that Intel beats AMD, AMD certainly has more competitive pricing). Their brand sells itself for a few years. After that, their laziness catches up to them and they decline (compaq did this, IBM did this with their Aptiva line, Dell is about to do this, Gateway is on the virge of doing it (if they already haven't). If anybody's studied the Chinese Dynastic cycle, you know exactly what I'm talking about (if not, you can safely ignore that sentence).
Right now, I would tell my friends to buy a White-Box PC. None listen. They buy a dell, they have a horiffic experience with it, but figure it must be a coincidence since they ARE #1. If they buy a White-Box PC and have an incident, they blame it on the manufacturer, and assume that every PC has serious issues and never buy from the brand again, and tell their friends (while it may be true, 95% of the time, it isn't. companies can't' stay in business if all their products are crappy (yes... even microsoft). Eventually you arrive at the point when one asks themself what IS a good Big-Name PC? I'd tend to reccomend Micron or IBM - they both seem to be big enough to throw the support of a multi-million dollar company behind their products, and offer quality PCs and support.
Of course, look at Apple. Most people get 5+ years of use out of a Mac. Most PCs last for 3. Honestly, I like Macs quite a bit. The only problem is that apple no longer allows the mac clones (which did hurt apples business A LOT, and would hurt apple's business model if allowed to continue (ie. universal standardization, etc)). Either way, Apple makes great computers which commonly outlast their PC counterparts. I know of SEVERAL Apple ][s that are still used DAILY.
Slashdot Mirror
The last time I checked, The Starband satelitte service was compatible with linux - if it works on linux, surely a port to OSX would be easy. (I believe it also worked with linksys routers - if not, one could simply use an ancient PC with USB and ethernet as a router)
Of course, Win95 is limited to 1.99 gbs per partition...
This guy pushes it to the limit - you can't really fit much more onto a Win95 box. Reminds me of the time a dell technician insatlled a new hard drive in my friend's pc. Dell gave him a 12g drive rather than the standard 2gb drive - needless to say, the PC had 6 partitions, and my friend didn't have a clue what to do with them.
Besides, having 24 hard drives has to be good for something.... the server seemed to survive the slashdotting.... for now *evil laughter*
The flight was shortened due to the fact that the company's webserver was located inside the rocket.
Ahh... the slashdot effect is now one step closer to entering orbit.
In other news, every CRT located within two miles of the magnet is now in dire need of a degauss.
This is quite obvious. Every virus scanner in my memory has had an option to boot off of the CD or create a boot floppy (which can be write protected in the same fashion as all floppies). The CD boots, can do a scan (automatically if you configure autoexec.bat to do so). You can re-burn the cd by placing new definitions on the cd, or tell the program to go get the definitions from another source (ls-120 drive, hard disk, etc.). This has all been possible with norton antivirus since version 2000 (probably earlier. i just never checked)
Don't radio waves and microwaves travel faster than light.
I'm sure you could find an old radio or Microwave oven for under $500
I remember purchasing a G4 about 2 years ago with the intent to run quickbooks on it, as iniuit advertised the mac version on their website.
The mac version had last been updated in 1996 (this was the year 2000), and wasn't compatible with the windows version. Let's hope the new one's better.
So we can obviously predict that Steve Jobs will become the CEO of Nex for 10 years, drive the company into the ground, move back to Apple, and buy Nex, thus eliminating the competition.
I can relate to a similar experience:
English class, the last week of school. (it should be noted that this English classroom had (old) computers at every desk)
Teacher tells us we can skip the lesson if we tidy up the room. We blindly agree
She tells to windex all the computers, making sure to get 'inside of them' really good.
Now, I know quite a bit about computers, and the teacher obviously didn't know anything. I had offered solutions to problems the computers had presented earlier in the year, only to be told that I was arrogant and insulting the teacher's knowledge, and the teacher hated me since. So, I shut my mouth while I watched in horror as students squirted windex inside monitors and power supplies.
That summer, i spent about 2 weeks working for the school fixing computers. The other 'techies' were astonished as to how most of the computers ended up with bad monitors, motherboards, and power supplies.
It was then that I learned what a pain it is to figure out WHICH parts of the 25 computers in the lab she had destroyed (hmmm... is this PC dead because the monitor just doesn't work, has a bad motherboard, power supply, or video card)
ET Ping Home. ET Ping Home.
The scary part of that is that I've had worse pings than that on terrestrial servers on my 56k.
Maybe someday, we can /. a server on another planet. Oh what fun!
Why does the idea of "microprocessors" sound like overkill in this sense?
Couldn't a few transistors and some LEDs serve the same purpose at a tiny fraction of the cost?
Or couldn't furniture companies hire more proficent people to write and translate assembley instructions, draw understandable diagrams, or number/color-code parts. Quite low-tech, but also quite efficent and useful...
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these! (Ie. My Living Room!)
I have an old laptop which I use for a similar purpose: an IBM thinkpad 755, which is a 486/75 with 20mb of RAM, and what is possibly the world's most troublesome video adapter.
Despite these shortcomings, I am still able to run Windows 98 with Word 2000. '98 boots up in about a minute, and word takes about 10 seconds to load. For an 8 year old laptop, that's pretty darn good. The only drawback is that the type is somewat laggy, although the system described in this article should be nearly twice as fast.
Actually, apple released an incomplete build of an early development build of OSX compiled for X86 to ADC members sometime around 4 years ago. It was dubbed as the Apple Rhaposody OS Developer Release 3. It was quite intersesting to pick up the similarities between it and OSX. A ton of information, along with screenshots are posted at this site.
It was really a transitional OS which gap between NextSTEP and OSX. It contains both elements of both OSes. Anybody recognize the chess program at the bottom of the page?
Yes it does, it's on the right side of the page.
I believe this is the address used to send error-reporting data after a system crash.
I find it odd that Mac OS X is repeatedly ignored and stepped on. Sure, we all want end-users to be using a *nix operating system using all sorts of 'standards'. OS X is exactly this - it's idiot-proof, has never randomly crashed in my experience - let's see how it stacks up?
1. No 'best' browser.
MacOS has every major browser available for it - IE and Mozilla (and that's all that matters)
2. Prompting for a filesystem scan.
OSX decides to do this stuff automatically whenever it 'needs' to. With HFS+, I haven't had a problem, and I frequently torture the machine by unplugging it without unmounting. I'm still using my original partition tables from 3 years ago.
3. Printing needs to be easier to configure.
There are no widely used standards for printers. I had the unfortunate pleasure of configuring some printers on an antiquated RS-232C network running SCO OpenServer. While it wasn't linux, it was hell - and these were dot-matrix printers. MacOS 9 wasn't much better in terms of support than linux (I eventually got it working using a flaky piece of software, but it wasn't fun). From what I hear, OSX isn't much better. For end-users, Windows wins this round hands down, while people with high-end printers which support stuff like postscript can use 'alternative' operating systems with ease.
4. Make it easy for the user to find out how to do things.
Indeed, linux falls down here. OSX does too. While it doesn't provide the delightfull array of software offered by linux, it doesn't offer a GUI for all of the console tools. OSX can easily mount a SMB share from the command line (VERY easily), but has no GUI. Most commercial Linuxes throw you too many packages to deal with - they either need to organize them logically, or not include them at all.
5. Cleaner redraws.
OSX does this quite nicely. No other OS does.
6. Die stray processes, die!
Every OS does this. It's a programming issue.
7. Easy way of sharing files.
OSX should be able to mount SMB shares easily, since it can be done with an embarrassingly simple command-line command. It can't act as a server, though. No GUI yet.
8. Sound support.
Macs use standardized hardware. Even so, linux has this problem (even though most *good* sound cards can emulate a Sound Blaster)
9. No common editor which supports "soft wrapping."
Huh.... does ANYTHING do this correctly? I have no clue what this guy's talking about
10. No easy way to configure X - especially change resolution on the fly.
Shouldn't this be EASY? For crying out loud, we create what has been repueted to be the world's most secure OS, and we can't change the screen resolution easily. OSX does this with flying colors (as does every other GUI-based OS ever created)
this list would be more appropriately named the Top 10 Things wrong with X Windows.
CompUSA is already advertising the cable in their circular for $25 in 7 feet quantities.
Of course, it's probably going to be cheaper to crimp it yourself, but at over $3 per foot, it's quite expensive.
From my experience, RCN is one of the worst cable companies in existance. They are the ONLY cable provider servicing my area (and the surrounding towns for 30ish miles)
In a recent survey, 85% of those who answered said they were dissatisfied with RCN, and would switch if another provider existed.
When I subscribed to their cable TV service, the broadcasts were fuzzy, we had an extremely limited channel selection (no digital service either), and it was more expensive than satelitte, which is what I now subscribe to. In addition, RCN kept bugging me for several months to resubscribe, refused to cancel service, and finally slammed me with a bil for $500 for a decoder needed to view premium channels - the decoder was given to us free when we subscribed 10 years earlier, and worked for only one year.
Their cable modems have been reported to be even worse. I don't subscribe, but have heard horror stories. Subscribers are given old first-gen modems - their service is supposedly painfully slow, and is only a 1-way connection, requiring a dial-up connection on the upstream side. RCN has promised to invest about 75 million into our area to improve their service - this was several years ago, and they have failed to take any action since making the promise.
Of course, the SF customers seem to like them. I live on the east coast in a small town on the brink between suburbia and the rural areas - it's quite different here.
Why not just build a solar powered vehicle
Why not force a guy to drink a liter of gas, then make him bicycle a ludicrious distance.
Why not build a sailboat and pour the gas overboard?
What about nucler sumbarines?
As for web development, I find OSX to be the perfect OS.
I can edit the source files in my perferred text editor (most *nix editors have been ported), then save it, and view it in Mozilla which invokes Apache, PHP, and MySQL (PostgreSQL also works) to serve the page.
I use a 400mhz G4 tower, which should be about as fast as the new iBooks. I find the speed more then adaquate. Photoshop even runs with all that server software running in the background.
If only the thing had 2 mouse buttons!!
So we needed a team of highly paid government scientists to tell us what is already obvious?
Coming soon: The NASA water-color-detection satelitte array: are the oceans really blue?
And look what happened!
I remember 2-3 years ago when Dell was a highly reputable brand, and a great white-box, CUSTOM PC company. So was gateway (even earlier. does anybody remember their old, huge 486 series pcs?).
Each built PCs custom, by hand. They used good parts, sold direct, and gave the savings to the consumer. They used whatever parts gave the best performance or the biggest bang for the buck.
Now that they're on top, their brand sells itself. They get lazy. They cut corners. They took more profit, they made deals with large-name suppliers (Intel and Dell - while some would argue that Intel beats AMD, AMD certainly has more competitive pricing). Their brand sells itself for a few years. After that, their laziness catches up to them and they decline (compaq did this, IBM did this with their Aptiva line, Dell is about to do this, Gateway is on the virge of doing it (if they already haven't). If anybody's studied the Chinese Dynastic cycle, you know exactly what I'm talking about (if not, you can safely ignore that sentence).
Right now, I would tell my friends to buy a White-Box PC. None listen. They buy a dell, they have a horiffic experience with it, but figure it must be a coincidence since they ARE #1. If they buy a White-Box PC and have an incident, they blame it on the manufacturer, and assume that every PC has serious issues and never buy from the brand again, and tell their friends (while it may be true, 95% of the time, it isn't. companies can't' stay in business if all their products are crappy (yes... even microsoft). Eventually you arrive at the point when one asks themself what IS a good Big-Name PC? I'd tend to reccomend Micron or IBM - they both seem to be big enough to throw the support of a multi-million dollar company behind their products, and offer quality PCs and support.
Of course, look at Apple. Most people get 5+ years of use out of a Mac. Most PCs last for 3. Honestly, I like Macs quite a bit. The only problem is that apple no longer allows the mac clones (which did hurt apples business A LOT, and would hurt apple's business model if allowed to continue (ie. universal standardization, etc)). Either way, Apple makes great computers which commonly outlast their PC counterparts. I know of SEVERAL Apple ][s that are still used DAILY.
Dude, you're gittin a dell!