If there is going to be a comment on this story like "This is a secret Microsoft plan to steal your puppies", then could someone please explain what the Gates foundation actually does that could be construed as shady? From what I've seen, the guy, who happens to be one of the richest people in the world, is giving away a lot of his money to help put computers in schools and libraries that can't afford it themselves. OK, so they're not running Linux. OK, so they're not Macintoshes. It doesn't cost the guy a dime to put Windows in these places, does it? Also, remember what desktop operating system has 90% of the market and as a result most people would be familiar with.
I thought about dual 6502s at some point. While it would be a useless thing to do, I think as long as you could isolate the stacks of the two, it just might be possible. The stacks are hard coded to 0x0100-0x01FF, from what I remember. You might also have to remain in the 64KB limit as well, since I believe most 6502 bank switching support is in hardware, so unless the rest of your board figures out what processor is doing the R/W. The rest would be easy enough to deal with in software.
There are very few shortcuts (I've stumbled across a few that weren't documented) so every action takes several slow key presses to get to
The scan forward/reverse is VERY unpredictable (you see the same frame for 2 seconds, then skip through 15 seconds in about 3, and then get stuck on another frame for a few seconds, etc.)
The subscription feature means you find a show you want, then tell it to record it daily/weekly and how many to save. This works, somewhat.
By default, it assumes you want to keep everything "until I delete", but doesn't let you change that default behavior.
The guide page is 40% taken up by useless ads. Hey, I'm already paying a premium for your DVR service, give me the whole screen for the guide!
The guides take over the whole screen (Scientific Atlanta boxes do not do this).
No progress indicator (where you are in the recording), so you don't know how far you are into the program and how much is left.
I've never liked the Motorola cable boxes. They've always been rather poor in design and performance. The Scientific Atlanta boxes are the perfect example of what a digitial cable system should provide; the menus don't take over the screen and the ones that do zoom the current broadcast into the top left 1/4 of the screen. Supposedly the dual tuner Motorola box is going to be available this summer, but I hope they improved the interface and user experience.
Probably also worth mentioning that in the movie, the car had a whine sort-of like a turbo charger, which the car did not have. Also, the ripping, gutteral roar of the engine was sampled from another engine, because this V6 sounded (obviously) more like a family car's six (in other words, not a very impressive sound).
I've driven two different DeLoreans in the past, and no, they're not speed demons. However, they DO look cool as heck.
You can find a LOT of information on the car at http://delorean.com. Good hour of reading or so.
I guess you can always tell an elitist from his sweeping overgeneralizations.
You're missing the point, or maybe I wasn't clear enough about it. My point being that whenever there is a story or thread that talks about the 2600, there is always someone saying how the NES was better. Then you also find people talking about the 2600 on NES threads. It goes both ways. The thing is, when we talk about these old systems, we're hitting largely on a nostalgia trip for most people. I owned both systems when they came out (and a Pong variation before that) and I enjoyed both. However, I would figure that if given the choice, one would tend to go with their first system before something else (again, this nostalgia thing; wanting to be that young person you once were). The 10 year difference is an observation; seeing how the 2600 and NES introductions are separated by several years, you get a different age group that hits the right age for the "first system".
Again, this is just my opinion. You're entitled to call it elitist, but that is not what I meant to convey.
Personally, I think that if he had been given absolute control over Apple in the 80s, things would probably have turned out better for Apple. I have no evidence to back that up obviously.
At the same time, however, I think Jobs had a lot of professional growth during the 12 years he wasn't at apple. He was making many decisions in the early 80's that were right in some regards, but not thought out enough; for example:
Not requiring a fan in the Apple III. This, and some design specs of the case, apparently was his decision. As we all know, the III was a failure. I believe the "no II compatibility" was also his, though I don't remember off hand. The compatibility and the hardware failures due to the heat build-up were the two major contributors to this.
No expandibility of the original Mac 128k. He was adamant against memory expansion. Sure, this goes back to Jef Raskin's "book of Macintosh", but it was obvious fairly quickly that the machine was too limited by memory. Burrell Smith (original digital board designer) "secretly" made the original board capable of 512KB, but had to hide it from Steve. If you've never used an original 128k mac, you wouldn't quite understand this.
Believe me, I do appreciate what the guy does for the company. However, he has certainly "grown up" from his earlier days at Apple.
I think you have to realize two things that make these programs for the 2600 meaningful (besides pure nostalgia for people over 30):
The Atari 2600 was the first widely successful system. Yes, you laugh when you see the "Degenetron" type graphics, but for those of us who were old enough to appreciate these machines when they were out, it was fantastic.
The Atari 2600 is extremely difficult to program for. Sure, the NES appeals to people in their low-to-mid 20s because it was their first system, but it was a breeze to program for comparatively.
I guess I need to expand on that second point. Given the right tools, anyone could program something of 8-bit NES quality that looks and plays decently. However, to do something amazing on the Atari 2600 requires an in-depth knowledge of the 2600's hardware and the timing of every instruction of the 6502 processor (well, 6507). Heck, you didn't have a frame buffer to work with; you had to spend time actually drawing the pixels on the screen for EVERY refresh!
I guess you can always tell the 2600 from the NES people by a 10-year difference in age.
If Microsoft starts to release the Xbox next before Sony releases the PS3, then all Sony has to do is start leaking rumors that they will be releasing the PS3 at about the same time Xbox next is going to be released. Then all the people more interested in Sony will wait it out, instead of buying an Xbox next in the short run.
Dumbest thing?
Actually, I'd say it was quite impressive for the time. Remember, in the early to mid-80's, nobody really had CDs, and I don't recall ever seeing a CD player attached to a home computer until maybe 1988 (and they were expensive!)
Of course, if this piece of information does get used in a court of law, the RIAA is going to say that the sales went up because the steps they have been taking against piracy. I would imagine that they'd never admit to a variable quality level; it'd challenge the validity of their previous arguments.
I have had this node on Everything called "Saving Your Eyes" for about two years now. The text is below:
This is really targetted at Computer Users who complain about how their eyes hurt, especially after a long day of staring at the computer monitor.
I have had 15/20 vision all my life, and I've also been a heavy user of computers since 1979. People ask how the heck I have maintained my eyesight. It is really simple: turn the brightness down!
Here are my tips for adjusting your computer monitor:
Display an image that contains a lot of BLACK, not grey, but black image. A perfect example is your boot loader, like lilo, if it doesn't have graphics. The black background should be black, not a shade of grey. If it is, turn down the brightness on your monitor. That is the dial that usually has a picture of a sun (or a circle with lines coming out from it).
Now turn down the contrast all the way. That is the dial with the half-filled circle. Turn it up until you can read the text without straining.
Now, if your monitor supports color temperature, adjust it to the 6000 or 6500 setting. This has a bit of a yellowish hue to the white, but you'll appreciate it later.
That's it. Note that if you are working on computer graphics, this will NOT make the colors bright and pretty, so you'll probably have to go back to the eye-killing settings. But if you're a coder who is just doing text and web browsing all day, USE THIS. Your eyes will thank you for it.
Even better: do the same thing I mentioned above, but with an LCD screen. CRT monitors are worse for your eyes than LCD.
If you're playing first person shooters like Quake, you will probably have to crank up the brightness dial. Just remember to turn it back down later!
A Quick Bit on Color Schemes
When I originally wrote this node, I was focusing only on monitor settings. The above works fine for any monitor going back to monochrome CRTs from the 1970s, but with the advent of configurable color window managers like Windows where you have a choice of color settings, I have one more piece of advice. Get off that default scheme!
Ever since Windows 1.0, there has been a default color scheme. Somewhere around Windows 2.0 you were able to change it, but most people never do it and they leave it with the default settings. These default settings are BRIGHT white backgrounds with the blue title bars. In my opinion, this color setting isn't optimial for your eyes. Of course, we're not just limited to Windows, but since the majority of people use it, I'll at least start with it for my point.
Without going into technical and difficult to apply color preferences, I suggest trying one scheme that has been in Windows since Windows 95: the 'Plum (high color)' scheme. The point of using this scheme is that the window decorations are not the typical bright grey, and the window backgrounds are off-white. You may not care for the purple accenting, but that's not the point of this scheme, in my mind. Give it a shot for an hour and see if it works for you.
What I've strived for is the perfect balance of colors on my desktop. A lot of people don't know how, and don't bother with adjusting their appearance settings. Granted after you've been using one scheme for a while, it might feel too foreign to have a different scheme. But try it, it might help even more.
This is a Wall Street Journal article, not a computer focused article. This is just a sign that Wall Street is waking up to the fact that Windows isn't worth the money they've been spending. Ever since Microsoft released XP with these new tighter contracts, businesses who hadn't previously cared about alternatives now care. We've already seen some Microsoft replacing going on, this article is probably a harbinger of more.
I've been a daily reader of WSJ for years, and my impression is that Lee Gomes and Walter Mossberg are both VERY in tune with technology and quite unbiased. I've seen them both praise and condemn the major vendors (MS, IBM, Apple, HP, Dell, etc), and have been very reasonable every time.
It seems that the trend in their writing, as of the last few years, is that at least Mossberg is coming to prefer Apple, and they tend to dislike a lot of what comes out of Microsoft. By this, I mean that when they review products that MS produces, they have had impressions that lean in various weights to the negative. Note that this is not simply MS bashing, but they back up their statements with concrete examples.
There is far too much to write about what they've covered over the years, but if you feel the need to read their work their regular columns are: Lee Gomes is a front page of the Marketplace section on Mondays, Mossberg (same place) on Thursdays and Mossberg also has a "Personal Technology" story in the Personal Journal section on Wednesdays. Note that they tend to do most of their technology news in the Thursday paper. You can also sometimes catch Mossberg on CNN or market watch channels when technology issues are discussed.
I don't think floppies were supposed to last 25 years.
No, I don't think they were, but amazingly many of them still survive (at least, in my collection).
I attribute it to the low density that these things are written at. The media was built to last (to some degree) back then, since most people didn't have hard drives, CD-ROMs, etc. to back up to. Combine that with the large size of the medium, the large size of the drive heads and low rotational speed; I think these factors combined is a bit like writing with marker and large print on a piece of newspaper. Though the paper will deteriorate over time, you'll still be able to read it. If the print was smaller and written with a sharp point, you'd miss some of the words (where the deterioration happens).
You hit the nail on the head: it takes a lot of time.
I spent several weeks tending to Seaman on an almost-daily basis so I could at least say that I "finished" the game. Its been a year now since I last left him in an "almost left the small pool in the mostly drained tank", but mostly due to the fact that I have to find the memory card that he was stored on after a move:-) Time to turn the clock back to 2003.
Did anyone ever play the voice-controlled DC game "Seaman"? That was voice controlled - you had to make an fish-type creature evolve.
That wasn't QUITE voice control, since you did many things with the controller; you had a virtual "hand" that you operated. The microphone was used more for voice recognition, i.e. when speaking with the Seaman.
A fine line of difference, but I wouldn't call Seaman "voice controlled".
In some stations, you can see where the bathrooms used to be. They only existed in the stations, NOT the trains themselves. They have been long closed (late 60's, I think) and were either turned into storage closets or in some cases a window was created and they became newspaper stands.
The job a computer serves is what deems it a workstation or server. Just because a computer isn't rack mounted (as in 1U, 2U, etc.) doesn't mean it can't be a server, nor can you not use a rack mounted machine as your desktop (provided you've got K/V/M capability). You didn't dispute this in your message, and I'm not implying that you wouldn't agree with this, I'm just stating this point.
Now the fact that these cluster nodes (probably a better term) happen to be desktop form factor, that doesn't mean that they should be loaded to the gill. When purchasing quantity, the consumer is typically allowed some flexibility whether it be in the form of a discount or some other customization. In this case, I don't see why Apple wouldn't have allowed them to ship with the lowest grade CD-ROM drive (or DVD, if that is what OSX ships on) and maybe even a lower grade video card. Granted, Apple doesn't offer anything lower than a Radeon 9600 on the web page today, but maybe some alternative could have been made (9000/9100's?).
Of course, if the XServe G5 was available at the time, it would have only made sense from the beginning to use those. I appreciate that they're upgrading now and you can at least get these machines "slightly used" with what you would expect for a consumer purchase. The point of my original post was that I was saying that it was a shame that such a powerful video card was essentially going to waste in the 1100 nodes at the time.
What they need, and don't seem to address here, is the support for more than 15 categories! They use a 4-bit field for every record, which maps to a table of category names (i.e. Personal, Business, etc.)
For contacts, 15 is not a big deal. However, if anyone wants to make some serious use of the Tasks component, you can easily assign a category for every project you track, and that runs over 15 in no time. I know I'm not the only person who has complained about this before.
Looking at the specs of those machines, it seems that there is a Radeon 9600 in every G5. Now I know that OS X takes advantage of 3D hardware, but as a server, this is almost a wasted expense, especially considering the number of servers that they bought.
What would be spiffy if there was a way that they could do SOME of the math on the GPUs. I never saw a product that could do that, but it would be rather fast. No?
Unfortunately, those things were not built for the abuse a typical Golden Tee track ball takes. Sure, it might be fine for Centipede, but the glass-shattering pounding that Golden Tee players are known for will surely pulverize any Logitech or Kensington trackball.
Besides durability, the other problem is that consumer grade track balls are all designed for the ball to be removed, typically without any locking mechanism. Commercial grade track balls are semi-permanently bolted into their motion detection frame.
The closest I ever got to a tamagotchi was playing Sonic Adventure on a Dreamcast and letting one of those annoying Chao's live in my VMU for a week. Complete waste of time I tell you.
Then again, it was kind of interesting to be playing a game on a device 1/8th the size of a Game Boy:-)
Amen. I had trouble after years of using a mouse, and I decided to switch to a Kensington track ball; specifically, the Expert Mouse Pro (the kind where the ball is about the size of a pool ball; i.e. 2" diameter). It is a bit awkward to get used to, and it is annoying in some situations (where you have to do a lot of precision point-and-click), but for general desktop, development and navigation use, it is fine. Expect to pay around $70-$90 USD for one of these things.
Part of it lies with the fact that the graphics chip in the ColecoVision was more powerful than the Atari's Stella chip (though I've seen Stella produce prettier graphics, it took quite a bag of tricks to do it and make it playable).
The other part of the problem was that Coleco made a lot of those ports. Point in case, Donkey Kong. Coleco intentionally "crippled" the Atari and Intellivision ports to sell more ColecoVisions. You got two screens on the Atari, but 3 (of 4) on Coleco. Mario also looked like a blob of red with a white nose on the 2600.
Regardless, back in those days, the ColecoVision had the best graphics. It was just simple evolution of the technology.
Wasn't Resident Evil ported to (at least) the PlayStation? I never owned a PSone or PS2, but I could have sworn that I saw R.E. on a PSone a few years back.
Slashdot Mirror
If there is going to be a comment on this story like "This is a secret Microsoft plan to steal your puppies", then could someone please explain what the Gates foundation actually does that could be construed as shady? From what I've seen, the guy, who happens to be one of the richest people in the world, is giving away a lot of his money to help put computers in schools and libraries that can't afford it themselves. OK, so they're not running Linux. OK, so they're not Macintoshes. It doesn't cost the guy a dime to put Windows in these places, does it? Also, remember what desktop operating system has 90% of the market and as a result most people would be familiar with.
Of course, it begs the question: why?
I've never liked the Motorola cable boxes. They've always been rather poor in design and performance. The Scientific Atlanta boxes are the perfect example of what a digitial cable system should provide; the menus don't take over the screen and the ones that do zoom the current broadcast into the top left 1/4 of the screen. Supposedly the dual tuner Motorola box is going to be available this summer, but I hope they improved the interface and user experience.
I've driven two different DeLoreans in the past, and no, they're not speed demons. However, they DO look cool as heck.
You can find a LOT of information on the car at http://delorean.com. Good hour of reading or so.
You're missing the point, or maybe I wasn't clear enough about it. My point being that whenever there is a story or thread that talks about the 2600, there is always someone saying how the NES was better. Then you also find people talking about the 2600 on NES threads. It goes both ways. The thing is, when we talk about these old systems, we're hitting largely on a nostalgia trip for most people. I owned both systems when they came out (and a Pong variation before that) and I enjoyed both. However, I would figure that if given the choice, one would tend to go with their first system before something else (again, this nostalgia thing; wanting to be that young person you once were). The 10 year difference is an observation; seeing how the 2600 and NES introductions are separated by several years, you get a different age group that hits the right age for the "first system".
Again, this is just my opinion. You're entitled to call it elitist, but that is not what I meant to convey.
At the same time, however, I think Jobs had a lot of professional growth during the 12 years he wasn't at apple. He was making many decisions in the early 80's that were right in some regards, but not thought out enough; for example:
Believe me, I do appreciate what the guy does for the company. However, he has certainly "grown up" from his earlier days at Apple.
- The Atari 2600 was the first widely successful system. Yes, you laugh when you see the "Degenetron" type graphics, but for those of us who were old enough to appreciate these machines when they were out, it was fantastic.
- The Atari 2600 is extremely difficult to program for. Sure, the NES appeals to people in their low-to-mid 20s because it was their first system, but it was a breeze to program for comparatively.
I guess I need to expand on that second point. Given the right tools, anyone could program something of 8-bit NES quality that looks and plays decently. However, to do something amazing on the Atari 2600 requires an in-depth knowledge of the 2600's hardware and the timing of every instruction of the 6502 processor (well, 6507). Heck, you didn't have a frame buffer to work with; you had to spend time actually drawing the pixels on the screen for EVERY refresh!I guess you can always tell the 2600 from the NES people by a 10-year difference in age.
Hey, it worked for cripping the Dreamcast...
Always wanted to go to one of these shows, but never had the motivation to go to Las Vegas just for that.
Dumbest thing? Actually, I'd say it was quite impressive for the time. Remember, in the early to mid-80's, nobody really had CDs, and I don't recall ever seeing a CD player attached to a home computer until maybe 1988 (and they were expensive!)
Of course, if this piece of information does get used in a court of law, the RIAA is going to say that the sales went up because the steps they have been taking against piracy. I would imagine that they'd never admit to a variable quality level; it'd challenge the validity of their previous arguments.
This is really targetted at Computer Users who complain about how their eyes hurt, especially after a long day of staring at the computer monitor.
I have had 15/20 vision all my life, and I've also been a heavy user of computers since 1979. People ask how the heck I have maintained my eyesight. It is really simple: turn the brightness down!
Here are my tips for adjusting your computer monitor:
That's it. Note that if you are working on computer graphics, this will NOT make the colors bright and pretty, so you'll probably have to go back to the eye-killing settings. But if you're a coder who is just doing text and web browsing all day, USE THIS. Your eyes will thank you for it.
Even better: do the same thing I mentioned above, but with an LCD screen. CRT monitors are worse for your eyes than LCD.
If you're playing first person shooters like Quake, you will probably have to crank up the brightness dial. Just remember to turn it back down later!
A Quick Bit on Color Schemes
When I originally wrote this node, I was focusing only on monitor settings. The above works fine for any monitor going back to monochrome CRTs from the 1970s, but with the advent of configurable color window managers like Windows where you have a choice of color settings, I have one more piece of advice. Get off that default scheme!
Ever since Windows 1.0, there has been a default color scheme. Somewhere around Windows 2.0 you were able to change it, but most people never do it and they leave it with the default settings. These default settings are BRIGHT white backgrounds with the blue title bars. In my opinion, this color setting isn't optimial for your eyes. Of course, we're not just limited to Windows, but since the majority of people use it, I'll at least start with it for my point.
Without going into technical and difficult to apply color preferences, I suggest trying one scheme that has been in Windows since Windows 95: the 'Plum (high color)' scheme. The point of using this scheme is that the window decorations are not the typical bright grey, and the window backgrounds are off-white. You may not care for the purple accenting, but that's not the point of this scheme, in my mind. Give it a shot for an hour and see if it works for you.
What I've strived for is the perfect balance of colors on my desktop. A lot of people don't know how, and don't bother with adjusting their appearance settings. Granted after you've been using one scheme for a while, it might feel too foreign to have a different scheme. But try it, it might help even more.
I've been a daily reader of WSJ for years, and my impression is that Lee Gomes and Walter Mossberg are both VERY in tune with technology and quite unbiased. I've seen them both praise and condemn the major vendors (MS, IBM, Apple, HP, Dell, etc), and have been very reasonable every time.
It seems that the trend in their writing, as of the last few years, is that at least Mossberg is coming to prefer Apple, and they tend to dislike a lot of what comes out of Microsoft. By this, I mean that when they review products that MS produces, they have had impressions that lean in various weights to the negative. Note that this is not simply MS bashing, but they back up their statements with concrete examples.
There is far too much to write about what they've covered over the years, but if you feel the need to read their work their regular columns are: Lee Gomes is a front page of the Marketplace section on Mondays, Mossberg (same place) on Thursdays and Mossberg also has a "Personal Technology" story in the Personal Journal section on Wednesdays. Note that they tend to do most of their technology news in the Thursday paper. You can also sometimes catch Mossberg on CNN or market watch channels when technology issues are discussed.
No, I don't think they were, but amazingly many of them still survive (at least, in my collection).
I attribute it to the low density that these things are written at. The media was built to last (to some degree) back then, since most people didn't have hard drives, CD-ROMs, etc. to back up to. Combine that with the large size of the medium, the large size of the drive heads and low rotational speed; I think these factors combined is a bit like writing with marker and large print on a piece of newspaper. Though the paper will deteriorate over time, you'll still be able to read it. If the print was smaller and written with a sharp point, you'd miss some of the words (where the deterioration happens).
My guess, at least.
I spent several weeks tending to Seaman on an almost-daily basis so I could at least say that I "finished" the game. Its been a year now since I last left him in an "almost left the small pool in the mostly drained tank", but mostly due to the fact that I have to find the memory card that he was stored on after a move :-) Time to turn the clock back to 2003.
That wasn't QUITE voice control, since you did many things with the controller; you had a virtual "hand" that you operated. The microphone was used more for voice recognition, i.e. when speaking with the Seaman.
A fine line of difference, but I wouldn't call Seaman "voice controlled".
In some stations, you can see where the bathrooms used to be. They only existed in the stations, NOT the trains themselves. They have been long closed (late 60's, I think) and were either turned into storage closets or in some cases a window was created and they became newspaper stands.
Now the fact that these cluster nodes (probably a better term) happen to be desktop form factor, that doesn't mean that they should be loaded to the gill. When purchasing quantity, the consumer is typically allowed some flexibility whether it be in the form of a discount or some other customization. In this case, I don't see why Apple wouldn't have allowed them to ship with the lowest grade CD-ROM drive (or DVD, if that is what OSX ships on) and maybe even a lower grade video card. Granted, Apple doesn't offer anything lower than a Radeon 9600 on the web page today, but maybe some alternative could have been made (9000/9100's?).
Of course, if the XServe G5 was available at the time, it would have only made sense from the beginning to use those. I appreciate that they're upgrading now and you can at least get these machines "slightly used" with what you would expect for a consumer purchase. The point of my original post was that I was saying that it was a shame that such a powerful video card was essentially going to waste in the 1100 nodes at the time.
For contacts, 15 is not a big deal. However, if anyone wants to make some serious use of the Tasks component, you can easily assign a category for every project you track, and that runs over 15 in no time. I know I'm not the only person who has complained about this before.
What would be spiffy if there was a way that they could do SOME of the math on the GPUs. I never saw a product that could do that, but it would be rather fast. No?
Besides durability, the other problem is that consumer grade track balls are all designed for the ball to be removed, typically without any locking mechanism. Commercial grade track balls are semi-permanently bolted into their motion detection frame.
Then again, it was kind of interesting to be playing a game on a device 1/8th the size of a Game Boy :-)
Amen. I had trouble after years of using a mouse, and I decided to switch to a Kensington track ball; specifically, the Expert Mouse Pro (the kind where the ball is about the size of a pool ball; i.e. 2" diameter). It is a bit awkward to get used to, and it is annoying in some situations (where you have to do a lot of precision point-and-click), but for general desktop, development and navigation use, it is fine. Expect to pay around $70-$90 USD for one of these things.
The other part of the problem was that Coleco made a lot of those ports. Point in case, Donkey Kong. Coleco intentionally "crippled" the Atari and Intellivision ports to sell more ColecoVisions. You got two screens on the Atari, but 3 (of 4) on Coleco. Mario also looked like a blob of red with a white nose on the 2600.
Regardless, back in those days, the ColecoVision had the best graphics. It was just simple evolution of the technology.
Wasn't Resident Evil ported to (at least) the PlayStation? I never owned a PSone or PS2, but I could have sworn that I saw R.E. on a PSone a few years back.