I'm not upset at all to see the brand go. The first Pentium 60 that I played with was a Packard Bell. Always thought that the machines were 'OK', until I realized what a cheaply built piece of crap that machine was. The keyboard was dropped once off the desk and the '3' key popped out and never quite sat properly again.
I was quite amused about a year or so later when I saw that they were selling machines that fit in the corner of a desk; yes, diagonal if you will. Interesting idea, but what was strange was that this model (along with several other models at the time) were boasting 2 CD-ROM drives. Double-speed, of course. I guess this was around the time when 2x drives were obsolete (quad and 6x were cheap), so they must have been trying to dump their stock of 2x. Two things of interest to a Windows world here: first off, which one could you use with the audio card to play CDs? Secondly, and more appropriate, have you EVER seen a program which could recognize that there was more than one CD-ROM on the machine? Since we're talking a consumer model machine, server applications are not considered.
If I remember correctly, the USRobotics modems (at least the Courier) are powered by an 80186 tied with one or two TI DSPs. Granted the DSPs do most of the work, but the 80186 handles the compression and shaping of the signal. The 80186's, depending on the version of the Courier you're running, is either 20 or 25MHz. The Sportsters, if I am guessing correctly, is simply the same guts as a Courier isn't flash upgradable?
I guess they could make their modems better (ping time, at least) by increasing the MHz of the processors. The part about having to connect to TotalControl or other types of ISP server hardware may sound a little funny, but it has always stood as a fact that modems (since v.32 and v.32bis) perform their best when connected to the same brand/model on the other end of the phone. If you read the older magazines rating the v.34 modems, you'll remember that USRobotics Courier modems were always the top performers. If the article was worth its salt, it would also have performed a speed test against different brands (read: Courier/Zoom, Courier/BrandX, etc); the result was always that the models always got their highest numbers when talking to the same model on the other end.
When I used to play SimCity on my Amiga many moons ago, I used to leave my machine on for days on end so that my city would thrive.
...that Amiga was plugged into an AC outlet...
Now I'm going to start tinkering with SimCity on my PalmIII. I'll probably set up a city again, spend many hours developing my town when I probably should be reading a good book or magazine (isn't that what YOU do on the throne?). I'll probably leave my Pilot chugging away for hours to let my city thrive.
...that Pilot is running on AAA batteries...
All this expense going to Mr. Duracell because I had to let my petri dish past-time city tell me that I have a traffic jam.. Jeez.. Why don't you just put a Tamagotchi on my pilot instead?
(Scary side note: a tamagotchi program DOES exist and it DOES wake up your pilot about 30 times an hour telling you to press the calculator button so it can:FEH: eat!)
What I want to know is if the national average for number of children per family is 2.5, what do they do with the ½ child? Freak shows aren't as popular anymore, and they must have many times more supply than demand in this case.
Maybe the ½ children are hidden away.. I mean, they must be violent; think of the saying "If I had half a mind to <violent act>, I'd <violent act>".. makes 'ya think, eh?
I wouldn't think it would be necessary to fake; the new PalmOS 3.3 ROMs have color APIs built in now, so the emulators would have a fairly easy time imitating a colors screen. Some developer could (and I'm sure the Palm Emulator developers could) write a color application to test out.
..and not that I'm upset about that, because I think it is the one machine that people actually loved. I mean, really.. the machine has been beaten to death over ownership and progress, and the darn thing still has a following! I can't say as much for Atari STs, Apple IIs or C64s, though they all have their numbers (don't get me wrong..)
Open sourcing the OS would be nice, but I don't think much would come out of it other than someone might go out and add memory protection or (ooh!) integrate ShapeShifter into the OS? It'd be like gutting a vintage stereo with modern equipment because the asthetics please you. I would vote for someone to made draggable windows and virtual memory for starters.
I recently dug my old A2500/30 out of the dark to revive a bit. Granted I am just working on backing up my 1.2GB of hard disk storage for use on an emulator, but I get such a kick out of using it again.
I would find that hard to believe that the schematics would have been lost. I'm not a chip engineer, but I imagine that everything is done on CAD systems and numerous backups were made. At least, if anything, Dave Haynie has the schematics from everything he did. If even to go a little further, R.J. Micaels archives or someone has tapes or blueprints or something.
But then again.. what good would it do to reproduce these chips? It would be like PC people going out and brewing up a batch of EGA chips
Color would be very nice. Actually, I think a 256 color set would be appropriate for a PDA; the latest WinCE devices boast 65,536 colors. Why would you need all that color? Are you doing photo editing on your PDA? In addition to doubling the memory requirement for the screen display, you'll also need more juice to power the better LCD.
What I'd like to see in a PDA is simple color support. Yes, more than 16 colors would be great, but I don't really want much. What would be even better is if they could have a black and white (or at least grayscale) mode; what I mean by this is that if you have used one of the color WinCE machines, you'll notice that the backlight is always on. This, I imagine, is the biggest drain of the batteries, but why not have some 16-grayscale mode (translate/dither/whatever) that doesn't require the backlight?
If Handspring / 3Com comes out with one of these things at a reasonable cost, I'd upgrade from my Palm III. --
I've played with a couple of the milestones, but in the last few releases I haven't been able to build one. I primarily test Mozilla out on Solaris, and it just doesn't seem to work very good for me. Despite the complicated ways of running it (set this environment, make this make file, run this script, etc), maybe they could improve (at least) the bug reporting by updaing the 'detailed build instructions for UNIX'?
I'm glad to see the progress that Mozilla has been making. I'm still holding off on using IE4/5, but I do recognize that they are, unfortunately, better now than Netscape 4.x. Wait, let me rephrase that. Better than Netscape 4.5/6/7. I never had any problems with 4.07, but as soon as I switched to 4.51 a few months ago, problems popped up in the worst way. And on the Solaris box that I use, I can't even use the newsgroup module reliably. I do, on the other hand, use Opera a decent amount and I'm pleased with it for the most part.
Can't wait until Mozilla is complete. If I had the time to study the code, I'd contribute to the project; I'm just bogged down with my own stuff as it is.
It doesn't really matter, since there HAS to be a way to unencrypt it even if it is 'time-bombd'.. The only way they could truely blast it is by really deleting it; and I mean overwriting it with 0xFCFCFCFC (or whatever the government accepted way of shredding is).
Let someone trust it, and then watch their horror as someone with a Linux cluster decrypts it and presents it Microsoft-Antitrust-Case Style;-) --
I guess since I've read it on several comments already it could be slightly redundant, but I figure it is worth a thread of its own.
Mindspring is a disease for ISPs.
Now, with that off my back, I can add to the cheer that Netcom subscribers feel. I have had an account with them since 1996, and I felt that they had one of the more dependable services around. Granted there are other services which offered more web space or phone numbers, and granted you paid a little more for Netcom, but they maintained their equipment and things just worked. Since the buy-out, this has no longer been the case. Busy signals are more prevalent, the web page (which used to be fairly easy to navigate) has gone under several changes making it more difficult to find the access numbers (and other member services), and the system just feels slower. I never had problems until the merge.
I miss my cable modem; at least when it was on the fritz, it was still sending stuff over at T1 speeds.
I own a Palm III and I've played with every model out there. Its nice for them to bump the memory up to 4MB, but I think the next release needs something a little more than a better screen or memory.
I guess I have two points to make. One is that I also own a Philips Velo 1 (one of the first CE machines), and my roomate is on his second Casiopiea (first one was stolen, and was the E-10. The new one is an E-100; color version). While I dislike the CE operating system for numerous reasons (real reasons), I do find one thing pretty cool: you can load an MP3 on it, plug headphones in, and listen away. Pilot has no such ability. Yes, I own a RIO, but that's not the point.
The second point I want to make is that recently I have also had an opportunity to play with a new type of PDA; the Motorola StarTac add-on organizer. One of the big complaints of some of my coworkers is that they have to carry around their pager, cell phone, pilot, etc. With the StarTac add-on, they can merge the pilot and cell phone into one device. The limitation is that there is no PocketChess on the train ride home nor can you really do much else other than the standard apps, but for most people, the Schedule, Contacts and ToDo list are all that matter. Additional bonus is that you can use the synchronized contact list to dial the cell phone.
Currently I carry around a pager, Nokia 6120 cell phone, Palm III and the occasional Rio. Now wouldn't it be nice if some of those could merge together? At the least, I'd like it if I could make my cell phone and pilot synchronize their contact lists. I've heard that there is something sort-of out there that lets you do that, but the cable appears to cost as much as a pilot.
Nice improvement on the Vx, but some other features might be nice. --
Funny, I mentioned this in a comment a month or two ago. I just wish I could search out the comment and also the quote from the movie Naked which someone was so courteous to post for me... Something along the lines of how it is written in the bible that the mark will be required to buy, sell or trade and the mark will appear on all goods and on all people. Scary stuff. --
I'm sure this title sums it up for most amiga folks. I personally would have bought one of their new machines, but now I'm really starting NOT to see a future in the Amiga.
Yes, it's a fantastic machine. Yes, I will forever feel the Amiga was the best computer ever built. Yes, I still own mine. No, it won't ever make a true comeback; the days of multiple proprietary machines for the home market is gone.
I now finally believe that the Amiga is gone. Shed a tear. --
I'm certainly glad to hear that a decent IDE is available for Linux. Being that I just about qualify as a 'VIM or death' type coder, I am more comfortable outside of an IDE, but I do use IDEs (MS VC++) regularly. I guess what I would be curious about is how well you can work with a mixed environment with CodeWarrior.
The scenario that I'm interested in is that I typically build things at the command line, but use the source browsers to explore other classes and their methods. The other use is that I create the build environments in the IDE, export a makefile (because there are a lot of dependencies to code; let the IDE do it for you), and then fire it all off by typing 'make' at a command line. Does CodeWarrior fit this situation?
While IDEs are nice, I like the ability for them to simply put a GUI on some parts of the development process. Otherwise, hands off and let me use VIM!:grin:
So I guess this brings new meaning to the term "To build a better mouse trap"...
"Dammit, they've gotten past the laser trip wire, the floor sensing dart guns, the motion detector AND the teddy bear with the fishing wire and bell around it's neck!".. Look out, Cheese.
Regardless if they put it under their SCSL license, it is basically Sun saying to the world, "Hey! Here's our latest attack at Microsoft! FREE Microsoft Office clone! Not only does it work on our machines, but just about ANY machine! Enjoy!"
We don't necesarily need the source code, the fact stands that Sun has a marketing machine and can make it very well known that there is a free MS Office clone out there that works on just about any computer.
Converting people is one thing, but have you seen how much MS Office costs these days? If the features people want are in a freebie, they might just switch. --
I didn't check the article out yet, but I believe that it is a misleading statement. I say this because I have been using the Solaris version for over a week now. There are several 'beta' versions available on the Macromedia site, so I figure they are simply refering to a non-beta release.
My experience with the Solaris Flash plugin is less than delightful. Rather, no sound happens, and I've had very little success with anything dynamic. The only things that appear to work are the example pages from Flash's home page, and only some of the content works (at least with the version I'm using). I believe the only thing that I really saw work was the tabs on a tabbed window.
It'd be nice if they get this all out. JavaScript is quite clunky, and Flash has a nice solution. Unfortunately, it has been Win32 centric (hopefully until now..) --
I've had this discussion with numerous people over the last year or so, and Intel even said a similar statement about that time. Regardless of the HP influences, Intel stated that the Merced was a giant step forward for Intel CPUs, but that the McKinley was the result of the lessons learned while designing and implementing the Merced. Essentially, the McKinley is the Merced done right (or at least, better).
Personally, I have typically waited for a major jump before upgrading my primary computer. From my Apple ][, I went to an Amiga 2500/30. From the Amiga, I jumped to a Pentium Pro (the Pentium was cool, but my Amiga was doing things as well if not better than the first generation of P5 chips). I have no desire to get a Pentium II or !!! chip right now, since they don't really prove anything other than higher clock rates. The Merced is a good candidate, but the McKinley makes more sense.
It was only about a year and a half ago that I read in the news that Intel was coming out with some graphics chips to essentially put S3, Matrox, Diamond (etc) out of business. Reality is, nobody ever really used their chips. Their performance was always behind other products, and buying one of their graphics products was almost a guarantee that you'd have something semi-supported or not at all.
Everyone was worried that Intel would start producing boards with their graphics chips built in (and integrated directly to the bus controller chips). I guess this proves that wrong.
I think 3Dfx and nVida are the only choices, even though 3Dfx looks like the Microsoft-wannabe of the graphics chip world. Matrox, S3 and ATI are great too; I use all three and think they're great.
Personally, I think ICQ has one thing that makes it worth while: you can send a file to someone while you're online with no file size limit (read: Email services limit you to typically 5MB) and you can specify how much bandwidth you want to dedicate to the transfer.
I agree, the ICQ protocol is quite a nasty thing. I think that the program itself is rather ugly (technically); do we really need the sound of a typewriter for every key press? I would venture to say that ICQ is probably one of the biggest hack programs on my NT box (well, next to NT and Netscape 4.5).
It seems that the capabilities of ICQ are that you have 'answering machines' of sorts, instant messages, chat rooms and file transfers. AOL IM 2.0 handles the chat rooms, and the answering machine capability is easially replaced by (duh) E-mail. Now if IM had the file transfer capability, we'd be set, however, I fear how they would get the files between people. Since AOL IM is a server-based system, would they do direct IP connections (basis of many ICQ hacks)? Or would we suffer with oscar being the middle man.
Whatever. I use AOL IM because every friend of mine who has an email address @aol.com is on it. ICQ is neat, but too much. --
3:22pm - Network connections down due to router failure, possibly related to thunderstorms and power failures in the area
2:59pm - Network connections intermittently up
12:40pm - Network connections down due to router failure
11:02am - Services restarted
10:47am - Some services failed after reboot
10:45am - Reboot because the System log was full
10:30am - Network connections down due to router failure
.. The thing is crashing fine on its own (or at least they're not admitting when something does get cracked).. at least put a decent router on the damn thing, you silly 100 billion dollar company! --
I guess in particular, after reading the quickie link of the History of the GUI, I always wanted to play with a copy of Windows 1.0. Now, you can't buy it anywhere, it's certainly not supported, and nobody (now or even then) runs it, so why not make it a free download? Is there still a possibility that they're trying to make money off of it? >snicker<
Seriously, Windows 1.0 is a perfect example of something which has no value these days, and obviously is not supported, so why not make it available. --
Back when I was younger, the smell of french fries and burgers would waft at my nose while playing Asteroids at the local greasy spoon. One thing that I liked to do was put my name in the high score list in such a way that it would spell
T WHO E
So, how will we do that in the internet world?
Alright, so it isn't exactly that great a comment, but it is on topic (somewhat).. --
You rock. Thank you for knowing what I meant in my reference to the movie Naked. For those who never saw it, it's essentially an onslaught of dialogue by a degenerate who reads a lot (pseudo-intellectual?). Highly recommended if you're not easially offended.
Slashdot Mirror
I was quite amused about a year or so later when I saw that they were selling machines that fit in the corner of a desk; yes, diagonal if you will. Interesting idea, but what was strange was that this model (along with several other models at the time) were boasting 2 CD-ROM drives. Double-speed, of course. I guess this was around the time when 2x drives were obsolete (quad and 6x were cheap), so they must have been trying to dump their stock of 2x. Two things of interest to a Windows world here: first off, which one could you use with the audio card to play CDs? Secondly, and more appropriate, have you EVER seen a program which could recognize that there was more than one CD-ROM on the machine? Since we're talking a consumer model machine, server applications are not considered.
--
I guess they could make their modems better (ping time, at least) by increasing the MHz of the processors. The part about having to connect to TotalControl or other types of ISP server hardware may sound a little funny, but it has always stood as a fact that modems (since v.32 and v.32bis) perform their best when connected to the same brand/model on the other end of the phone. If you read the older magazines rating the v.34 modems, you'll remember that USRobotics Courier modems were always the top performers. If the article was worth its salt, it would also have performed a speed test against different brands (read: Courier/Zoom, Courier/BrandX, etc); the result was always that the models always got their highest numbers when talking to the same model on the other end.
Doesn't matter to me, I've got DSL ;-)
--
Now I'm going to start tinkering with SimCity on my PalmIII. I'll probably set up a city again, spend many hours developing my town when I probably should be reading a good book or magazine (isn't that what YOU do on the throne?). I'll probably leave my Pilot chugging away for hours to let my city thrive.
All this expense going to Mr. Duracell because I had to let my petri dish past-time city tell me that I have a traffic jam.. Jeez.. Why don't you just put a Tamagotchi on my pilot instead?
(Scary side note: a tamagotchi program DOES exist and it DOES wake up your pilot about 30 times an hour telling you to press the calculator button so it can :FEH: eat!)
--
Maybe the ½ children are hidden away.. I mean, they must be violent; think of the saying "If I had half a mind to <violent act>, I'd <violent act>" .. makes 'ya think, eh?
--
Getting my money saved for a Palm X ;-)
--
Open sourcing the OS would be nice, but I don't think much would come out of it other than someone might go out and add memory protection or (ooh!) integrate ShapeShifter into the OS? It'd be like gutting a vintage stereo with modern equipment because the asthetics please you. I would vote for someone to made draggable windows and virtual memory for starters.
I recently dug my old A2500/30 out of the dark to revive a bit. Granted I am just working on backing up my 1.2GB of hard disk storage for use on an emulator, but I get such a kick out of using it again.
--
But then again.. what good would it do to reproduce these chips? It would be like PC people going out and brewing up a batch of EGA chips
--
What I'd like to see in a PDA is simple color support. Yes, more than 16 colors would be great, but I don't really want much. What would be even better is if they could have a black and white (or at least grayscale) mode; what I mean by this is that if you have used one of the color WinCE machines, you'll notice that the backlight is always on. This, I imagine, is the biggest drain of the batteries, but why not have some 16-grayscale mode (translate/dither/whatever) that doesn't require the backlight?
If Handspring / 3Com comes out with one of these things at a reasonable cost, I'd upgrade from my Palm III.
--
I'm glad to see the progress that Mozilla has been making. I'm still holding off on using IE4/5, but I do recognize that they are, unfortunately, better now than Netscape 4.x. Wait, let me rephrase that. Better than Netscape 4.5/6/7. I never had any problems with 4.07, but as soon as I switched to 4.51 a few months ago, problems popped up in the worst way. And on the Solaris box that I use, I can't even use the newsgroup module reliably. I do, on the other hand, use Opera a decent amount and I'm pleased with it for the most part.
Can't wait until Mozilla is complete. If I had the time to study the code, I'd contribute to the project; I'm just bogged down with my own stuff as it is.
--
Let someone trust it, and then watch their horror as someone with a Linux cluster decrypts it and presents it Microsoft-Antitrust-Case Style ;-)
--
Mindspring is a disease for ISPs.
Now, with that off my back, I can add to the cheer that Netcom subscribers feel. I have had an account with them since 1996, and I felt that they had one of the more dependable services around. Granted there are other services which offered more web space or phone numbers, and granted you paid a little more for Netcom, but they maintained their equipment and things just worked. Since the buy-out, this has no longer been the case. Busy signals are more prevalent, the web page (which used to be fairly easy to navigate) has gone under several changes making it more difficult to find the access numbers (and other member services), and the system just feels slower. I never had problems until the merge.
I miss my cable modem; at least when it was on the fritz, it was still sending stuff over at T1 speeds.
--
I guess I have two points to make. One is that I also own a Philips Velo 1 (one of the first CE machines), and my roomate is on his second Casiopiea (first one was stolen, and was the E-10. The new one is an E-100; color version). While I dislike the CE operating system for numerous reasons (real reasons), I do find one thing pretty cool: you can load an MP3 on it, plug headphones in, and listen away. Pilot has no such ability. Yes, I own a RIO, but that's not the point.
The second point I want to make is that recently I have also had an opportunity to play with a new type of PDA; the Motorola StarTac add-on organizer. One of the big complaints of some of my coworkers is that they have to carry around their pager, cell phone, pilot, etc. With the StarTac add-on, they can merge the pilot and cell phone into one device. The limitation is that there is no PocketChess on the train ride home nor can you really do much else other than the standard apps, but for most people, the Schedule, Contacts and ToDo list are all that matter. Additional bonus is that you can use the synchronized contact list to dial the cell phone.
Currently I carry around a pager, Nokia 6120 cell phone, Palm III and the occasional Rio. Now wouldn't it be nice if some of those could merge together? At the least, I'd like it if I could make my cell phone and pilot synchronize their contact lists. I've heard that there is something sort-of out there that lets you do that, but the cable appears to cost as much as a pilot.
Nice improvement on the Vx, but some other features might be nice.
--
Funny, I mentioned this in a comment a month or two ago. I just wish I could search out the comment and also the quote from the movie Naked which someone was so courteous to post for me... Something along the lines of how it is written in the bible that the mark will be required to buy, sell or trade and the mark will appear on all goods and on all people. Scary stuff.
--
Yes, it's a fantastic machine. Yes, I will forever feel the Amiga was the best computer ever built. Yes, I still own mine. No, it won't ever make a true comeback; the days of multiple proprietary machines for the home market is gone.
I now finally believe that the Amiga is gone. Shed a tear.
--
The scenario that I'm interested in is that I typically build things at the command line, but use the source browsers to explore other classes and their methods. The other use is that I create the build environments in the IDE, export a makefile (because there are a lot of dependencies to code; let the IDE do it for you), and then fire it all off by typing 'make' at a command line. Does CodeWarrior fit this situation?
While IDEs are nice, I like the ability for them to simply put a GUI on some parts of the development process. Otherwise, hands off and let me use VIM! :grin:
--
"Dammit, they've gotten past the laser trip wire, the floor sensing dart guns, the motion detector AND the teddy bear with the fishing wire and bell around it's neck!" .. Look out, Cheese.
--
We don't necesarily need the source code, the fact stands that Sun has a marketing machine and can make it very well known that there is a free MS Office clone out there that works on just about any computer.
Converting people is one thing, but have you seen how much MS Office costs these days? If the features people want are in a freebie, they might just switch.
--
My experience with the Solaris Flash plugin is less than delightful. Rather, no sound happens, and I've had very little success with anything dynamic. The only things that appear to work are the example pages from Flash's home page, and only some of the content works (at least with the version I'm using). I believe the only thing that I really saw work was the tabs on a tabbed window.
It'd be nice if they get this all out. JavaScript is quite clunky, and Flash has a nice solution. Unfortunately, it has been Win32 centric (hopefully until now..)
--
Personally, I have typically waited for a major jump before upgrading my primary computer. From my Apple ][, I went to an Amiga 2500/30. From the Amiga, I jumped to a Pentium Pro (the Pentium was cool, but my Amiga was doing things as well if not better than the first generation of P5 chips). I have no desire to get a Pentium II or !!! chip right now, since they don't really prove anything other than higher clock rates. The Merced is a good candidate, but the McKinley makes more sense.
Just my 2...
--
Everyone was worried that Intel would start producing boards with their graphics chips built in (and integrated directly to the bus controller chips). I guess this proves that wrong.
I think 3Dfx and nVida are the only choices, even though 3Dfx looks like the Microsoft-wannabe of the graphics chip world. Matrox, S3 and ATI are great too; I use all three and think they're great.
--
I agree, the ICQ protocol is quite a nasty thing. I think that the program itself is rather ugly (technically); do we really need the sound of a typewriter for every key press? I would venture to say that ICQ is probably one of the biggest hack programs on my NT box (well, next to NT and Netscape 4.5).
It seems that the capabilities of ICQ are that you have 'answering machines' of sorts, instant messages, chat rooms and file transfers. AOL IM 2.0 handles the chat rooms, and the answering machine capability is easially replaced by (duh) E-mail. Now if IM had the file transfer capability, we'd be set, however, I fear how they would get the files between people. Since AOL IM is a server-based system, would they do direct IP connections (basis of many ICQ hacks)? Or would we suffer with oscar being the middle man.
Whatever. I use AOL IM because every friend of mine who has an email address @aol.com is on it. ICQ is neat, but too much.
--
--
Seriously, Windows 1.0 is a perfect example of something which has no value these days, and obviously is not supported, so why not make it available.
--
T
WHO
E
So, how will we do that in the internet world?
Alright, so it isn't exactly that great a comment, but it is on topic (somewhat)..
--
Tatty-bye-bye, Bri!
--