When the ambient light is really low, the IIIx backlight is pretty good.
But under almost any other lighting condition, it's really useless. My Palm Pilot Pro is far superior to the IIIx in that respect.
Sometimes, you do need that little extra contrast to view the screen clearly, and that IIIx scheme just doesn't cut it.
Despite the funky backlight, I do like my IIIx. I've had it for years and will replace it with something newer only when it finally craps out for good.
The big problem is that the dust is so fine, it'd be very difficult to wipe it off with anything akin to a windshield wiper. You might remove the dust, but the grit would scratch the glass, eventually causing enough opacity that the panels would eventually be rendered useless.
One thought I had was to gradually apply a charge to the solar panels and then suddenly apply an opposite charge, causing the dust to be repelled from the surface, to be carried away by the Martian winds.
I've no idea if it would actually work or not, but it seemed an elegant solution that didn't require any moving parts.
"Dr. Bull says, "It gives people totally private worlds." While that may be true, it also removes people from social interaction, which is vital for mental health."
Bullshit!
There is plenty of social interaction in the average day. The Walkman/iPod allows you to use it as a gateway to that interaction.
"Being Morally Opposed To The Walkman Carries With It Certain Responibilities" by Penn Jillette
I was leaving my business manager's office. The elevator arrived right away and I got on to find there was another passenger. She was black, she had a beautiful smile, her headphones blended with her hair, and she was listening to some pop love song on her Walkman. It was loud, but I couldn't make it out. Maybe I'd never heard it before, but it was a love song. I smiled, slipped on my super-cool candy-red headphones, and turned the Clash's London Calling way up.
We had ridden together for several floors when we were joined by one of those bicycle delvery guys. He had a little hay, the tight black bicycle pants with the reinforced crotch;he was Hispanic and had the little tiny headphones that fit right in the ear so you can only see a couple little spots of blue and some wires coming out of the ears. He looked at us, wrote something on a manila encelope, put it in his backpack, and turned up his music. I have no way of knowing what he was listening to, because "Revolution Rock" was filling my head. But whatever it was he was enjoying it. We swayed our heards together in different rhythms.
The three of us rode a few more floors, then we were joined by a businesswoman type. She had on one of those female biz suits, and her hair and makeup were soft and natural. I think she ran every morning or at least took a dance class. Through the light tint of her glasses, I saw her look at each of us and roll her eyes up. Then she started shaking her head like we wern't going to notice. My fellow passengers didn't notice, but i slipped my headphones down around my neck and said, "It must sound like Charles Ives out here, huh? Is it too loud for you?"
She gave me this little condescending smile through her tastefully lipsticked mouth and said, "You people just cut yourselves off from everybody, don't you? I mean, it's really bad enough that no one even makes eye contact anymore, but you people just walk around in your own little worlds. We're a culture of very lonely people. It's sad. It's really very sad."
Since the other two people in the elevator were in their own respective little worlds, I appointed myself spokesperson for us three lonely people. "You were really dying for some human contact here, wern't you? Huh? You walked on this elevator and said to yourself, 'Oh, Jiminy Cricket! I really wanted to talk to this delivery boy, this receptionist and this big ugly sone of a bitch with a square head. But, alas, they've cut themselves off from my personal contact. I guess I can't have any meaningful dialouge with them. Darn!' You don't give a yuppie-tweed fuck about the three of us! You just need something sensitive and humanitarian to talk about over your fuckin' power lunch... I'll make a deal with you - we'll take our headphones off and we'll listen to you, but you better have something to say. And when you ask him what kind of bike he has and he tells you, you better really care. And you better keep us entertained... do a little fuckin' dance if you have to! When each of use walked onto the elevator, we smiled at one another and you just rolled your fuckin' eyes. So, you want personal contact? Shoot!"
So, this was another elevator ride in the big city during which I didn't fall in love, make a friend or even set myself up to get laid.
At the time, the cassette tape drive and cartridges were the norm. Floppy drives were available for other hobbyist computers but they were hideously expensive. As were the computers. Remember, at the time, the Macintosh retailed for over US$2000. The C64 retailed for almost US$600, as I recall.
So, Commodore wasn't really ready fort he demand for floppy drives. Particularly floppy drives for the VIC=20! The first Commodore drive for the VIC=20 was the VIC 1540.
It later evolved into the VIC1541 and thence to the "generic" Commodore 1541 drive.
As it had to use the serial line, there were hardware considerations that came into play. And frankly, CBM felt that there really wasn't going to be a huge market for floppy drives that cost as much as the computer.
They were wrong, as sales of the C64 went stratospheric. Economies of scale came into play and the price of the computer rapidly dropped, as did the price of the drive.
So... why spend the money to improve the drive when they sold all they could make and the demand exceeded the supply?
Jack Tramiel, the owner of Commodore Business Machines was a penny pinching tightwad. If he could make the hardware cheaper to make and keep the profit margin high, so be it. But R&D was not a high priority, per se.
(Which kind of makes the C128 something of an anomaly. Designed in house, along with a superior disk drive. CBM bought the Amiga from an outside company.)
Finally, they got stuck with the design I/O of the drive as too many software companies were using the quirks of the drive (it's an intelligent device. 6502 CPU and 2K of RAM, you can actually program the drive to do whacky things!) for copy protection and software based fastload routines, there was no real incentive to mess with the design to improve disk I/O.
Also, there was a brisk third party trade in hardware I/0 speedups, so again, there was no incentive for CBM to really do anything.
So, I wouldn't say there was a bad initial design, more of just not anticipating the demand for floppy drives that would soon occur.
Now, for their "Business Machines" side of the company, they did have several models of floppy drives. One of which, the SFD-1001, if I recall the number aright, was a drive that could stash one megabyte of data on a 5.25" floppy drive. It used the IEEE 488 (?) standard and there were interface devices for the C64 and 128 that would allow the SFD to be used. These were VERY popular with folks running C64 based BBS systems.
CBM also had several 8" floppy drives for their line of CP/M machines.
OK, I know them as FIM, Forwarding Information Mark, the little barcode up by the postage area that tells the automated sorters that this piece has a ZIP+4 barcode.
I could be using the wrong terminology, though.
I know there are several types of this particular code, one for ZIP+4, one for Business Reply Mail, etc.
If you would be willing to elucidate, I would be glad to read what you have to say. I'm always eager to learn.
"Does anyone still use the Commodore 64 for anything serious?"
Yep, I do. I use it for address labels (printed on my 24 pin dot matrix printer) as well as for most of my letter-writting needs. In the time it takes to get the Macintosh booted and for the LaserWriter to spit out the letter, the 128 has not only been used to write the letter, spell check it and print it, it has also printed the mailing label. Of course, if it's someone I regularly send mail to, then the 128, using a different application, prints the address, return address, ZIP+4 and FIM barcodes.
I also play games on the 128, mainly in 64 mode. I lament that there is no official version of TEMPEST for the 64.
And what's this crap about "simple games"? Geeze, you know, real time ray-tracing blood sprays do not make a game better than something written 20 years ago for an 8-bit one megahertz machine.
"With ten-year old 286 and 386 laptops selling for $50, why would anyone want to spend time developing and using a Commodore 64 now?"
Gee, because it's FUN? It's easy, yet challenging? That one can bang on the silicon via an ML monitor while the program is actually running and can see the results instantly, without having to recompile the code?
There's something about an OS that doesn't actively fight you at every step that's appealing. The 64/128 is a stable platform for a lot of applications that Windows, and yes, even the Mac, would do well to imitate in simplicity, ease of use and stability.
"A good deal of Civil War-era photography was not photography in the sense that we understand it today. Typically, you will find:
ambrotypes daguerreotypes ferrotypes or tintypes
None of these methods have exposure or development methods such as what we use today with print film."
However, the end result is still an image that we here in the 21st Century would call a photograph.
All those techniques you mention rely upon a photosensitive emulsion on a solid substrate, reacting to light focussed upon it by a lens, and then chemically processed to make the image visable and stable.
It wasn't a "toilet seat" like you have in your bathroom. It was a fiberglass enclosure for a chemical toilet unit installed in an ORION C-3 aircraft. The seat was an integral part of the enclosure.
It cost ~US$600 due to the fact that there were less than 50 needed and as such, were essntially handmade by skilled craftsmenn/women.
It was more cost effective to have them handmade, rather than set up a factory assembly line or some other automated set up.
There are many valid examples of govt waste in spending. This is NOT one of them.
"Matthew Brady wasn't even born in the "late 1800s," he was born in the 1820s (1823 to be exact). The US Civil War took place in the early 1860s."
So Brady was 40 or so when he was taking photographs of events during the Civil War. If there were no cameras, as you claim, I ask again, what was he using to take all those photographs?
You're the one claiming that there was nobody using any photographic cameras in the late 1800s.
"...I've owned a range of portable music devices and I'd never ever buy another one that couldn't just handle my entire library at once.
A quick bit of math; Assume 1MB/minute, 2Gig = 2048 minutes = 34 hours. That's somewhere between 3 days and a week. I've gone a month without connecting my iPod to my library. "
For someone like myself, who doesn't feel the need to carry my whole collection with me at one time, nor brag about it, a 2gig iPod at an affordable price would suit me just fine.
I swear, the size of one's iPod hard drive is now the "I've got the biggest dick!" of the 21st Century.
It works just fine, and I find that the scrollwheel as button causes me no distress whatsoever.
I'm using USB Overdrive as the driver for the mouse.
This lets me program each button for a specific function for whatever application I happen to be using at the time. For example, clicked wheel up & down controls the volume in SoundJam MP, my MP3 player of choice. The same function also lets me scroll through the playlist one song at a time. Yet, when in a browser window, a clicked up or down scrolls up or down a page at a time/scroll left right.
Mac OS and a multi button/scrollwheel mouse. It doesn't get much better than that.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah. the backlight is really annoying at times.
When the ambient light is really low, the IIIx backlight is pretty good.
But under almost any other lighting condition, it's really useless. My Palm Pilot Pro is far superior to the IIIx in that respect.
Sometimes, you do need that little extra contrast to view the screen clearly, and that IIIx scheme just doesn't cut it.
Despite the funky backlight, I do like my IIIx. I've had it for years and will replace it with something newer only when it finally craps out for good.
Spend the extra US$5.00 and get a Palm IIIx.
4MB of RAM!
And, if you install FlashPro, you get an extra 800 K or so of storage.
The big problem is that the dust is so fine, it'd be very difficult to wipe it off with anything akin to a windshield wiper. You might remove the dust, but the grit would scratch the glass, eventually causing enough opacity that the panels would eventually be rendered useless.
One thought I had was to gradually apply a charge to the solar panels and then suddenly apply an opposite charge, causing the dust to be repelled from the surface, to be carried away by the Martian winds.
I've no idea if it would actually work or not, but it seemed an elegant solution that didn't require any moving parts.
"Dr. Bull says, "It gives people totally private worlds." While that may be true, it also removes people from social interaction, which is vital for mental health."
Bullshit!
There is plenty of social interaction in the average day. The Walkman/iPod allows you to use it as a gateway to that interaction.
"Being Morally Opposed To The Walkman Carries With It Certain Responibilities"
by Penn Jillette
I was leaving my business manager's office. The elevator arrived right away and I got on to find there was another passenger. She was black, she had a beautiful smile, her headphones blended with her hair, and she was listening to some pop love song on her Walkman. It was loud, but I couldn't make it out. Maybe I'd never heard it before, but it was a love song. I smiled, slipped on my super-cool candy-red headphones, and turned the Clash's London Calling way up.
We had ridden together for several floors when we were joined by one of those bicycle delvery guys. He had a little hay, the tight black bicycle pants with the reinforced crotch;he was Hispanic and had the little tiny headphones that fit right in the ear so you can only see a couple little spots of blue and some wires coming out of the ears. He looked at us, wrote something on a manila encelope, put it in his backpack, and turned up his music. I have no way of knowing what he was listening to, because "Revolution Rock" was filling my head. But whatever it was he was enjoying it. We swayed our heards together in different rhythms.
The three of us rode a few more floors, then we were joined by a businesswoman type. She had on one of those female biz suits, and her hair and makeup were soft and natural. I think she ran every morning or at least took a dance class. Through the light tint of her glasses, I saw her look at each of us and roll her eyes up. Then she started shaking her head like we wern't going to notice. My fellow passengers didn't notice, but i slipped my headphones down around my neck and said, "It must sound like Charles Ives out here, huh? Is it too loud for you?"
She gave me this little condescending smile through her tastefully lipsticked mouth and said, "You people just cut yourselves off from everybody, don't you? I mean, it's really bad enough that no one even makes eye contact anymore, but you people just walk around in your own little worlds. We're a culture of very lonely people. It's sad. It's really very sad."
Since the other two people in the elevator were in their own respective little worlds, I appointed myself spokesperson for us three lonely people. "You were really dying for some human contact here, wern't you? Huh? You walked on this elevator and said to yourself, 'Oh, Jiminy Cricket! I really wanted to talk to this delivery boy, this receptionist and this big ugly sone of a bitch with a square head. But, alas, they've cut themselves off from my personal contact. I guess I can't have any meaningful dialouge with them. Darn!' You don't give a yuppie-tweed fuck about the three of us! You just need something sensitive and humanitarian to talk about over your fuckin' power lunch... I'll make a deal with you - we'll take our headphones off and we'll listen to you, but you better have something to say. And when you ask him what kind of bike he has and he tells you, you better really care. And you better keep us entertained... do a little fuckin' dance if you have to! When each of use walked onto the elevator, we smiled at one another and you just rolled your fuckin' eyes. So, you want personal contact? Shoot!"
So, this was another elevator ride in the big city during which I didn't fall in love, make a friend or even set myself up to get laid.
But I do enjoy the Clash.
{nelson_muntz}
HA-ha!
{/nelson_muntz}
Hey, everybody, come and look at the A.C. who didn't get the joke, got all bent out of shape, and made a great big ass of himself!
"Any fool can use a computer. Many do."
Ted Nelson
At the time, the cassette tape drive and cartridges were the norm. Floppy drives were available for other hobbyist computers but they were hideously expensive. As were the computers. Remember, at the time, the Macintosh retailed for over US$2000. The C64 retailed for almost US$600, as I recall.
So, Commodore wasn't really ready fort he demand for floppy drives. Particularly floppy drives for the VIC=20! The first Commodore drive for the VIC=20 was the VIC 1540.
It later evolved into the VIC1541 and thence to the "generic" Commodore 1541 drive.
As it had to use the serial line, there were hardware considerations that came into play. And frankly, CBM felt that there really wasn't going to be a huge market for floppy drives that cost as much as the computer.
They were wrong, as sales of the C64 went stratospheric. Economies of scale came into play and the price of the computer rapidly dropped, as did the price of the drive.
So... why spend the money to improve the drive when they sold all they could make and the demand exceeded the supply?
Jack Tramiel, the owner of Commodore Business Machines was a penny pinching tightwad. If he could make the hardware cheaper to make and keep the profit margin high, so be it. But R&D was not a high priority, per se.
(Which kind of makes the C128 something of an anomaly. Designed in house, along with a superior disk drive. CBM bought the Amiga from an outside company.)
Finally, they got stuck with the design I/O of the drive as too many software companies were using the quirks of the drive (it's an intelligent device. 6502 CPU and 2K of RAM, you can actually program the drive to do whacky things!) for copy protection and software based fastload routines, there was no real incentive to mess with the design to improve disk I/O.
Also, there was a brisk third party trade in hardware I/0 speedups, so again, there was no incentive for CBM to really do anything.
So, I wouldn't say there was a bad initial design, more of just not anticipating the demand for floppy drives that would soon occur.
Now, for their "Business Machines" side of the company, they did have several models of floppy drives. One of which, the SFD-1001, if I recall the number aright, was a drive that could stash one megabyte of data on a 5.25" floppy drive. It used the IEEE 488 (?) standard and there were interface devices for the C64 and 128 that would allow the SFD to be used. These were VERY popular with folks running C64 based BBS systems.
CBM also had several 8" floppy drives for their line of CP/M machines.
Thanks for the info!
DPBC is a new one to me. Time to Google and get the specs so I can do a little more coding on the 128.
OK, I know them as FIM, Forwarding Information Mark, the little barcode up by the postage area that tells the automated sorters that this piece has a ZIP+4 barcode.
I could be using the wrong terminology, though.
I know there are several types of this particular code, one for ZIP+4, one for Business Reply Mail, etc.
If you would be willing to elucidate, I would be glad to read what you have to say. I'm always eager to learn.
One Word:
JiffyDOS!
FastLoad
WarpSpeed
Super SnapShot
(OK, that was two words)
There were a ton of options for the slow disk I/O.
So Simonetta sez:
"Does anyone still use the Commodore 64 for anything serious?"
Yep, I do. I use it for address labels (printed on my 24 pin dot matrix printer) as well as for most of my letter-writting needs. In the time it takes to get the Macintosh booted and for the LaserWriter to spit out the letter, the 128 has not only been used to write the letter, spell check it and print it, it has also printed the mailing label. Of course, if it's someone I regularly send mail to, then the 128, using a different application, prints the address, return address, ZIP+4 and FIM barcodes.
I also play games on the 128, mainly in 64 mode. I lament that there is no official version of TEMPEST for the 64.
And what's this crap about "simple games"? Geeze, you know, real time ray-tracing blood sprays do not make a game better than something written 20 years ago for an 8-bit one megahertz machine.
"With ten-year old 286 and 386 laptops selling for $50, why would anyone want to spend time developing and using a Commodore 64 now?"
Gee, because it's FUN? It's easy, yet challenging? That one can bang on the silicon via an ML monitor while the program is actually running and can see the results instantly, without having to recompile the code?
There's something about an OS that doesn't actively fight you at every step that's appealing. The 64/128 is a stable platform for a lot of applications that Windows, and yes, even the Mac, would do well to imitate in simplicity, ease of use and stability.
I had to modify the lyric to better fit as a reply to the whiny complaint about the Titanic movie.
I'll never forgive SciFi for cancedlling MST3K, and for the insult of replacing it with Lexx and Black Scorpion.
With apologies to Mystery Science Theater 3000:
"If you're wondering how they really lived and other history facts, you should say to yourself, 'It's just a show, I should really just relax!'"
Ah, bu tyou forget, the hacker who created the virus that brought down the invading aliens computer was an MIT graduate with a hangover.
Saving the world with a PowerBook and a hangover is easy.
Now problem sets, on the other hand...
"Your right to fist ends at my anus!"
So by your "logic", no one is buying BMW or Jaguar automobiles, instead, they are buying Yugos.
Because, as you say, "Nobody cares about quality."
You're a Windows luser, aren't you?
So PONA-Boy sez:
"A good deal of Civil War-era photography was not photography in the sense that we understand it today. Typically, you will find:
ambrotypes
daguerreotypes
ferrotypes or tintypes
None of these methods have exposure or development methods such as what we use today with print film."
However, the end result is still an image that we here in the 21st Century would call a photograph.
All those techniques you mention rely upon a photosensitive emulsion on a solid substrate, reacting to light focussed upon it by a lens, and then chemically processed to make the image visable and stable.
And that's not a "photograph" because...?
So MoFoQ sez:
"...and the $600 toilet seat..."
It wasn't a "toilet seat" like you have in your bathroom. It was a fiberglass enclosure for a chemical toilet unit installed in an ORION C-3 aircraft. The seat was an integral part of the enclosure.
It cost ~US$600 due to the fact that there were less than 50 needed and as such, were essntially handmade by skilled craftsmenn/women.
It was more cost effective to have them handmade, rather than set up a factory assembly line or some other automated set up.
There are many valid examples of govt waste in spending. This is NOT one of them.
The blacked out bits are because the panoramic camera can't "see" that part of the rover.
To use an analogy, if you're standing up and looking straight ahead, you can't see your shoes.
Unless you're Ronald McDonald, of course.
so sakusha sez:
"Matthew Brady wasn't even born in the "late 1800s," he was born in the 1820s (1823 to be exact). The US Civil War took place in the early 1860s."
So Brady was 40 or so when he was taking photographs of events during the Civil War. If there were no cameras, as you claim, I ask again, what was he using to take all those photographs?
You're the one claiming that there was nobody using any photographic cameras in the late 1800s.
What brand of crack are you smoking?
So sakusha sez:
"He is correct, nobody was using ANY sort of photographic camera in the "late 1800s."
So, what, Matthew Brady was using an Etch-a-Sketch to make all those images during the Civil War?
So Kris_J sez:
"...I've owned a range of portable music devices and I'd never ever buy another one that couldn't just handle my entire library at once.
A quick bit of math; Assume 1MB/minute, 2Gig = 2048 minutes = 34 hours. That's somewhere between 3 days and a week. I've gone a month without connecting my iPod to my library. "
For someone like myself, who doesn't feel the need to carry my whole collection with me at one time, nor brag about it, a 2gig iPod at an affordable price would suit me just fine.
I swear, the size of one's iPod hard drive is now the "I've got the biggest dick!" of the 21st Century.
And don't forget...
"In Soviet Russia, Walgreens hacks YOU!"
It works just fine, and I find that the scrollwheel as button causes me no distress whatsoever.
I'm using USB Overdrive as the driver for the mouse.
This lets me program each button for a specific function for whatever application I happen to be using at the time. For example, clicked wheel up & down controls the volume in SoundJam MP, my MP3 player of choice. The same function also lets me scroll through the playlist one song at a time. Yet, when in a browser window, a clicked up or down scrolls up or down a page at a time/scroll left right.
Mac OS and a multi button/scrollwheel mouse. It doesn't get much better than that.
So BigBlockMopar sez:
"either my Pickett Microline 120 or my TI SR-40.
Ah, the murderer and its victim, reunited in your desk drawer."
Well, desktop, actually. As for murderer, the culprit would be the HP-35, not my T.I. SR-40. T.I. wishes they were the first.
I need to get a battery and chager for my 35 one of these days.
I also do need to get a better slide rule. The Pickett is just fine, but after all, it IS just a Microline.
Thanks for the tip about LyME! That's a new one to me.