At one point, I had one of the newer Timex/Sinclairs. You're right, it had twice the ram. That would be 2K.
Every bit of RAM was important in these machines. If your program put text up on the screen, the amount of memory used up ended at the last character on the line (a five character line would use six bytes, a twelve character line used 13). So it was possible to run out of memory while running a program by: 1) using too much memory for the program, 2) using too much memory for the data, 3) putting too many characters on the screen at the same time (or some combination of the above).
Mine definitely wasn't 'stock' when I got through with it. I couldn't stand the membrane keyboard, so I rewired an old ASCII keyboard (the kind with a reed switch for each key) and put the whole Timex/Sinclair into the keyboard housing.
These Sinclair machines used a Z-80 processor. So it's conceivable (but just barely) that they could be coerced into being compatable with the GameBoy.
Actually, Star Trek (particularly "The Next Degeneration" and later) is a situation comedy. Like the Brady Bunch or M.A.S.H. or Seinfeld (or Gilligan's Island or Lost In Space). Basically the outer space set is used in place of Mayberry, etc. as a setting for Human(oid) interactions. Mostly it revolves around situations regular humans could find themselves in. That's how Sitcoms get the audiences to relate to the programme and buy into the story. Star Wars, of course, is a movie. Have they made a Saturday Morning cartoon Star Wars yet? They definitely should, if they haven't. It's sugar-frosted-flakes material to the max. And plastic toys galore. Maybe even a cameo appearance by Barney could be arranged.
The special effects alone are a milestone in the history of film.
As the earlier writer said, it has had a bad influence. People now go to films and come away mostly remembering if the special effects were good or bad. Clue- there's more to drama than special effects. Good actors can get away with a bare stage.
As for speculative vision, who cares?
Oh well, I guess you win. Science fiction definitely isn't supposed to have speculative vision.
When was the last time I saw people camping out for more than a week for a new Star Trek (or any other) movie?
Those were fans. Not the movie, even though they tried their hardest to be a part of it. Besides, the movie was an excuse to camp out, for the most part. The life-deprived need that sorta stuff to get by.
In any "IBM-type" machine before the AT ('286) there was no standard real-time clock. To get "real time" datestamping, unless you manually entered the time at bootup, you had to buy a third party ISA card with the clock and battery on it.
My TRS-80 Model 100 had a Year-1986 problem. The day-of-week shifted off into error with the year set at anything 1986 or above. The friend who I sold it to loves it and uses it regularly.
Yes, I remember there were academic types back then who looked down on homebrew stuff. (they fooled around with this thing called Unix that no mere mortal could afford. Of course, this meant they didn't really OWN any computing equipment....) The only way to get onto the 'net' back then, was to use University computer time or work for a Defense contractor. CompuServe was $12 an hour if you wanted a > 300 baud connection.
Your first modem was 2400 baud? That makes you newcomer to the modem scene.
An 8MHz 8088 machine is TURBO. The original PCs ran at 4.77 MHz. I remember when I got my first taste of speed running one of those 8 MHz screamers.
I ran a fairly active BBS on a 4.77 MHz 8088 box with a 5 MB hard drive and all 640K of RAM (expensive because a 256K x 1 chip was like $12 or so) in the late 80's. To own a substancial chunk of "cyberspace" back then (I must have owned at least.01% of it) just meant putting in a second phone line and broadcasting the number. My board had enough traffic that I ended up sponsoring a bowling league (that's a league, not just a team) based out of members of the BBS. Those were the days when 1200 baud was what the higher-end people were using.
I have two SYM-1 (cousins of the Kim 1) single board 'personal' computers. Do they qualify if I write a little program on them (using the hex keypad, of course) to record sales at a lemonade stand? They are much older than those 'fancy' newer PCs that have ASCII keyboards and screens. I believe they date from about 1978. (one of them I bought complete, in the original carton, at a swapmeet a few years back for $10)
I'm not sure I would trade them for the big bux, though. They're as obsolete as they're ever going to get. (and still they're even upgradable- I believe there are unfilled sockets to add an additional 6K of RAM on both of them) The new hardware can only go down in value from this point on.
I've been meaning to hook them together and write some sort of deathmatch game to play between them. Maybe a Doom clone or something. They're probably not powerful enough (6502 with 2K of RAM) to run anything Quakelike.
And when you want to print a page from Netscape, it reloads the page for the printer from the network. When saving a permanent copy of a slow-to-load page (the kind of page you WANT to print since you're not sure you'll ever have the patience to load it again), it's extremely frustrating. All the info was downloaded to display the page that's on the bloody screen. It, to me at least, seems most stooooopid. What's the cache for, if not for things like this???
No. Running SNES9x does not mean you've already lost. But if Sony had, instead of developing their own gaming platform, instead developed an emulator to run Nintendo games, they would have already lost before shipping the first console.
As the previous writer said, Emulation is a form of flattery. It's the action of a "Me Too" company without the vision to do their own development.
You are making ridiculous claims. Microsoft does not have to convince companies not to produce software for the Macintosh. Apple did that themselves by sheer incompetence.
No company is going to try to develop for the Microsoft platforms, to run on thousands of types of computers sold by as many vendors, and go through all the hoops that involves (a rather baroque API, and tons of hardware variations) and then spend the same amount of time developing a version for the 5% of their customers using a totally different operating system. It just doesn't make business sense any more.
I'm not sure what you mean when you say Linus decided to allow binary-only kernel modules. How can they be prevented? Granted, there will be problems with version compatability, but if Joe-Blow Software Inc. decided to distribute a Kernel module that was binary-only (say just for the matter of the arguement, a WinModem driver produced by Microsoft and available commercially from them) how would Linus prevent it from being loaded? By some sort of string or identifier that has to be in place in the module? That means nothing in an open source kernel, as it can be disabled if present. I don't see that Linus _allowed_ anything.
WinModems are a very special case. The DSP for WinModems is done by the x86 chip, and requires deep integration with the kernel. They hog a significant amount of the processing power of the machine they are used in. Historically WinModems come from an Intel initiative they called "NativeSignalProcessing" which was hyped a few years back as leading to machines where the modem, the sound card, all sorts of peripherals were going to be embedded into the core of the OS. It turned out to be much more difficult, extremely more difficult, than they had thought. I believe the case now is that WinModems were about the only thing that came out of the "NSP" project, at a significant cost. I don't think anybody will try it again. It would certainly be a waste to put much effort into reimplementing it on Linux. It just costs too much, processor-wise to be doing real-time DSP in the kernel. Notice that WinModems only exist on kludge OSes like Windows 9x, and not at all for NT. In an multitasking environment like NT or Linux, with much more rigid protection of processes from one another, it just isn't possible for a kernel hack like the WinModems to hog resources when they need to without taking the whole system down.
As always, I'll ask people to please correct me if I'm wrong on any of the details of this. There seems to be a continuous WinModem thread going somewhere and I definitely don't follow it closely. I just try to put a cap on it whenever it gets raised because I think its nuts to waste resources (or even bandwidth here) on bad hardware like the WinModems.
For a complete novice who is adept with DOS stuff, one easy way to get the install files across to the laptop is to put a smallish DOS partition on the laptop's hard drive. Then drag the files you need over to the machine with laplink or related tool. I always use an NFS install these days, but way-back-when at the point when I didn't have ethernet or anything for my first laptop install, I did it that way.
I have also used this method to go "the other way" on occasion. When you want to add Windows to a machine that already has a networked Linux on it, you can just drag the Win95 install directory over from the CD-ROM on another machine. This is nice for installing Win on a machine that doesn't have a CD. But be SURE you make a Linux bootdisk for the machine before installing the Windows as it will zonk your boot record. You'll have to boot from this disk to get into your Linux system to edit and re-install Lilo after Win has done it's damage.
It's important for beginners to know how to go both ways, even tho these days I personally find the idea of a dual boot system repulsive. (that's what Ethernet and crowded rooms full of too many machines are for!)
I have had good luck using plain old FIPS, and just letting it do it's thing. I split a 1.4MB drive on my laptop between Windows 95 and Slackware that way once. I suppose it doesn't work that way anymore with Fat32 though (I don't know, though, please correct me if I'm wrong)
It's particularly important now that RedHat has stopped putting the manual online as a postscript image, as they did with Version 4.2. They're getting more commercial now, coming up with angles to convince people to buy the box instead of the $1.99 Cheapbytes disk. I guess we can't blame them for wanting renumeration for some of their work.
**Warning, the following is a rather partisan endorsement of NetBSD****
In my experience, NetBSD is the easiest system I have installed. I downloaded all the tgz files needed from the NetBSD ftp site, put them on a Linux box configured as an NFS server, put my el-cheapo PCMCIA network card into my laptop, made a NetBSD boot diskette into the laptop, and booted it into the install scripts. NetBSD directly supports most PCMCIA network cards on a laptop directly in the kernel, not with a bolted-on package as with Linux.
The other reason NetBSD was so much easier to install is that the base install comes out of about ten (aprox.) clean *.tgz files, not a whole mess of different packages from all over. Packages are installed after you have a good base system installed. And if you're willing to build all your packages from source, you can put the whole pkgsrc tree onto your machine somewhere. If you want LyX and haven't put a single other package onto your system, you just go to the LyX folder and type "make && make install". It takes awhile, but it builds and installs all dependent packages (TeX, and huge amounts of other stuff) beneath LyX before proceeding on to LyX itself. It's very clean. Some of the RPM-based Linux systems work kind of the same (and Debian drags you into a morass that checks dependencies on first install) but none that I have seen is as clean as with NetBSD.
I'd pick Slackware as the second easiest install, but only if you know the buttons to push. I can have a Slack system up and running in maybe 20 minutes.
If you go into your account configuration you will see that you can easily set your account so you see no AC posts. Perhaps that would be a better thing to do instead of forking the discussion (like I just helped you do. yikes!)
I wouldn't be without vi for quick in-and-out work. Half the time I'm telnetted into an OS/2 box and just need to quickly edit one config file or script. vi does stuff like that great. However, for longer editing sessions I prefer Emacs or Textpad (a product for Win machines). For quick and simple when generating new files the best thing is cat > filename.txt on Unix, or copy con > filename.txt on DOS or OS/2.
There are some historic roots to the 'bloat' in StarOffice, in comparison to ApplixWare. StarDivision comes to Linux from the Windows world (most of their earlier products are for Windows/DOS machines. Applix comes to Linux from the Unix world. I purchased a copy of Applix about a year ago, and it's pretty good. The apps are separate, linked by a common toolbar, not one big "Aircraft Carrier" deck that takes over the whole desktop as with StarOffice. ApplixWare is resource-light enough that I used it successfully awhile back with Linux on my 486-50 laptop (28 MB of RAM). I'll expose my bias however, by saying that my favorite "Office Suite" is Microsoft Office 4.3. MS hasn't made a thing since then that wasn't a pig, and less reliable. The company I work for still uses Office 4.3 throughout the company, but is soon switching to Office 2000, which I really don't look forward to.
I'm a technical person, though, so I don't "live" in a "Office Suite" environment. Our programming people still work in OS/2 with Emacs. (the main product my group works on is part of an Embedded OS/2 product) And we're rated one of the top 30 companies to work for in the US.
I only hope I never have to work with you. I could get by with just a text processor and SC for a spreadsheet. But I would just be getting by. Heck, I could get by with a pad of paper and a calculator.
You claim that StarOffice would be $0 to support versus $6500 for Office? Do you have little elves who come in at night and do the maintanence for free? Part of support costs is training.
You sound like the skinflint boss from h*ll, to be blunt. (which you do so eloquently)
This may be a somewhat discussion-diverting thought, but is the Alpha really a server-oriented processor at heart in the first place? I always thought that while it's got nice I/O bandwidth, that the Alpha really shines at floating point performance, which isn't a particularly critical benchmark for server operations. So even if Compaq was folding back on the Alpha (which they are not) I don't see that it would have anything to do with their server strategy. Isn't Alpha primarily for high end scientific workstations, 3-D stuff, etc?
Re:I drove to work in my PSD. My Computer Runs Lin
on
GNU Inside?
·
· Score: 1
Actually, whatever type of CPU you have runs your computer. The Linux Kernel just gives it directions.
Re:Gnu + penguin concept?
on
GNU Inside?
·
· Score: 1
How about a penguin riding on the back of a GNU? That scales pretty well, if done right, and it shows the proper relationship (or not- let the flames commence, I guess)
Slashdot Mirror
At one point, I had one of the newer Timex/Sinclairs. You're right, it had twice the ram. That would be 2K.
Every bit of RAM was important in these machines. If your program put text up on the screen, the amount of memory used up ended at the last character on the line (a five character line would use six bytes, a twelve character line used 13). So it was possible to run out of memory while running a program by: 1) using too much memory for the program, 2) using too much memory for the data, 3) putting too many characters on the screen at the same time (or some combination of the above).
Mine definitely wasn't 'stock' when I got through with it. I couldn't stand the membrane keyboard, so I rewired an old ASCII keyboard (the kind with a reed switch for each key) and put the whole Timex/Sinclair into the keyboard housing.
These Sinclair machines used a Z-80 processor. So it's conceivable (but just barely) that they could be coerced into being compatable with the GameBoy.
Actually, Star Trek (particularly "The Next Degeneration" and later) is a situation comedy. Like the Brady Bunch or M.A.S.H. or Seinfeld (or Gilligan's Island or Lost In Space). Basically the outer space set is used in place of Mayberry, etc. as a setting for Human(oid) interactions. Mostly it revolves around situations regular humans could find themselves in. That's how Sitcoms get the audiences to relate to the programme and buy into the story. Star Wars, of course, is a movie. Have they made a Saturday Morning cartoon Star Wars yet? They definitely should, if they haven't. It's sugar-frosted-flakes material to the max. And plastic toys galore. Maybe even a cameo appearance by Barney could be arranged.
The special effects alone are a milestone in the history of film.
As the earlier writer said, it has had a bad influence. People now go to films and come away mostly remembering if the special effects were good or bad. Clue- there's more to drama than special effects. Good actors can get away with a bare stage.
As for speculative vision, who cares?
Oh well, I guess you win. Science fiction definitely isn't supposed to have speculative vision.
When was the last time I saw people camping out for more than a week for a new Star Trek (or any other) movie?
Those were fans. Not the movie, even though they tried their hardest to be a part of it. Besides, the movie was an excuse to camp out, for the most part. The life-deprived need that sorta stuff to get by.
Y2K problems??
In any "IBM-type" machine before the AT ('286) there was no standard real-time clock. To get "real time" datestamping, unless you manually entered the time at bootup, you had to buy a third party ISA card with the clock and battery on it.
My TRS-80 Model 100 had a Year-1986 problem. The day-of-week shifted off into error with the year set at anything 1986 or above. The friend who I sold it to loves it and uses it regularly.
Yes, I remember there were academic types back then who looked down on homebrew stuff. (they fooled around with this thing called Unix that no mere mortal could afford. Of course, this meant they didn't really OWN any computing equipment....) The only way to get onto the 'net' back then, was to use University computer time or work for a Defense contractor. CompuServe was $12 an hour if you wanted a > 300 baud connection.
Your first modem was 2400 baud? That makes you newcomer to the modem scene.
An 8MHz 8088 machine is TURBO. The original PCs ran at 4.77 MHz. I remember when I got my first taste of speed running one of those 8 MHz screamers.
.01% of it) just meant putting in a second phone line and broadcasting the number. My board had enough traffic that I ended up sponsoring a bowling league (that's a league, not just a team) based out of members of the BBS. Those were the days when 1200 baud was what the higher-end people were using.
I ran a fairly active BBS on a 4.77 MHz 8088 box with a 5 MB hard drive and all 640K of RAM (expensive because a 256K x 1 chip was like $12 or so) in the late 80's. To own a substancial chunk of "cyberspace" back then (I must have owned at least
Melbert
I have two SYM-1 (cousins of the Kim 1) single board 'personal' computers. Do they qualify if I write a little program on them (using the hex keypad, of course) to record sales at a lemonade stand? They are much older than those 'fancy' newer PCs that have ASCII keyboards and screens. I believe they date from about 1978. (one of them I bought complete, in the original carton, at a swapmeet a few years back for $10)
I'm not sure I would trade them for the big bux, though. They're as obsolete as they're ever going to get. (and still they're even upgradable- I believe there are unfilled sockets to add an additional 6K of RAM on both of them) The new hardware can only go down in value from this point on.
I've been meaning to hook them together and write some sort of deathmatch game to play between them. Maybe a Doom clone or something. They're probably not powerful enough (6502 with 2K of RAM) to run anything Quakelike.
Melbert
And when you want to print a page from Netscape, it reloads the page for the printer from the network. When saving a permanent copy of a slow-to-load page (the kind of page you WANT to print since you're not sure you'll ever have the patience to load it again), it's extremely frustrating. All the info was downloaded to display the page that's on the bloody screen. It, to me at least, seems most stooooopid. What's the cache for, if not for things like this???
No. Running SNES9x does not mean you've already lost. But if Sony had, instead of developing their own gaming platform, instead developed an emulator to run Nintendo games, they would have already lost before shipping the first console.
As the previous writer said, Emulation is a form of flattery. It's the action of a "Me Too" company without the vision to do their own development.
You are making ridiculous claims. Microsoft does not have to convince companies not to produce software for the Macintosh. Apple did that themselves by sheer incompetence.
No company is going to try to develop for the Microsoft platforms, to run on thousands of types of computers sold by as many vendors, and go through all the hoops that involves (a rather baroque API, and tons of hardware variations) and then spend the same amount of time developing a version for the 5% of their customers using a totally different operating system. It just doesn't make business sense any more.
I'm not sure what you mean when you say Linus decided to allow binary-only kernel modules. How can they be prevented? Granted, there will be problems with version compatability, but if Joe-Blow Software Inc. decided to distribute a Kernel module that was binary-only (say just for the matter of the arguement, a WinModem driver produced by Microsoft and available commercially from them) how would Linus prevent it from being loaded? By some sort of string or identifier that has to be in place in the module? That means nothing in an open source kernel, as it can be disabled if present. I don't see that Linus _allowed_ anything.
WinModems are a very special case. The DSP for WinModems is done by the x86 chip, and requires deep integration with the kernel. They hog a significant amount of the processing power of the machine they are used in. Historically WinModems come from an Intel initiative they called "NativeSignalProcessing" which was hyped a few years back as leading to machines where the modem, the sound card, all sorts of peripherals were going to be embedded into the core of the OS. It turned out to be much more difficult, extremely more difficult, than they had thought. I believe the case now is that WinModems were about the only thing that came out of the "NSP" project, at a significant cost. I don't think anybody will try it again. It would certainly be a waste to put much effort into reimplementing it on Linux. It just costs too much, processor-wise to be doing real-time DSP in the kernel. Notice that WinModems only exist on kludge OSes like Windows 9x, and not at all for NT. In an multitasking environment like NT or Linux, with much more rigid protection of processes from one another, it just isn't possible for a kernel hack like the WinModems to hog resources when they need to without taking the whole system down.
As always, I'll ask people to please correct me if I'm wrong on any of the details of this. There seems to be a continuous WinModem thread going somewhere and I definitely don't follow it closely. I just try to put a cap on it whenever it gets raised because I think its nuts to waste resources (or even bandwidth here) on bad hardware like the WinModems.
For a complete novice who is adept with DOS stuff, one easy way to get the install files across to the laptop is to put a smallish DOS partition on the laptop's hard drive. Then drag the files you need over to the machine with laplink or related tool. I always use an NFS install these days, but way-back-when at the point when I didn't have ethernet or anything for my first laptop install, I did it that way.
I have also used this method to go "the other way" on occasion. When you want to add Windows to a machine that already has a networked Linux on it, you can just drag the Win95 install directory over from the CD-ROM on another machine. This is nice for installing Win on a machine that doesn't have a CD. But be SURE you make a Linux bootdisk for the machine before installing the Windows as it will zonk your boot record. You'll have to boot from this disk to get into your Linux system to edit and re-install Lilo after Win has done it's damage.
It's important for beginners to know how to go both ways, even tho these days I personally find the idea of a dual boot system repulsive. (that's what Ethernet and crowded rooms full of too many machines are for!)
I have had good luck using plain old FIPS, and just letting it do it's thing. I split a 1.4MB drive on my laptop between Windows 95 and Slackware that way once. I suppose it doesn't work that way anymore with Fat32 though (I don't know, though, please correct me if I'm wrong)
It's particularly important now that RedHat has stopped putting the manual online as a postscript image, as they did with Version 4.2. They're getting more commercial now, coming up with angles to convince people to buy the box instead of the $1.99 Cheapbytes disk. I guess we can't blame them for wanting renumeration for some of their work.
**Warning, the following is a rather partisan endorsement of NetBSD****
In my experience, NetBSD is the easiest system I have installed. I downloaded all the tgz files needed from the NetBSD ftp site, put them on a Linux box configured as an NFS server, put my el-cheapo PCMCIA network card into my laptop, made a NetBSD boot diskette into the laptop, and booted it into the install scripts. NetBSD directly supports most PCMCIA network cards on a laptop directly in the kernel, not with a bolted-on package as with Linux.
The other reason NetBSD was so much easier to install is that the base install comes out of about ten (aprox.) clean *.tgz files, not a whole mess of different packages from all over. Packages are installed after you have a good base system installed. And if you're willing to build all your packages from source, you can put the whole pkgsrc tree onto your machine somewhere. If you want LyX and haven't put a single other package onto your system, you just go to the LyX folder and type "make && make install". It takes awhile, but it builds and installs all dependent packages (TeX, and huge amounts of other stuff) beneath LyX before proceeding on to LyX itself. It's very clean. Some of the RPM-based Linux systems work kind of the same (and Debian drags you into a morass that checks dependencies on first install) but none that I have seen is as clean as with NetBSD.
I'd pick Slackware as the second easiest install, but only if you know the buttons to push. I can have a Slack system up and running in maybe 20 minutes.
If you go into your account configuration you will see that you can easily set your account so you see no AC posts. Perhaps that would be a better thing to do instead of forking the discussion (like I just helped you do. yikes!)
Is Slackware 4 really out now!?!
/etc.
Yay! 3.6 was really, really starting to show it's age. And I can't stomach what those other distributions have been doing to
Or being hurled headlong into a maze during package selection with Debian.
The Subgenius must have slack.
I wouldn't be without vi for quick in-and-out work. Half the time I'm telnetted into an OS/2 box and just need to quickly edit one config file or script. vi does stuff like that great. However, for longer editing sessions I prefer Emacs or Textpad (a product for Win machines). For quick and simple when generating new files the best thing is cat > filename.txt on Unix, or copy con > filename.txt on DOS or OS/2.
There are some historic roots to the 'bloat' in StarOffice, in comparison to ApplixWare. StarDivision comes to Linux from the Windows world (most of their earlier products are for Windows/DOS machines. Applix comes to Linux from the Unix world. I purchased a copy of Applix about a year ago, and it's pretty good. The apps are separate, linked by a common toolbar, not one big "Aircraft Carrier" deck that takes over the whole desktop as with StarOffice. ApplixWare is resource-light enough that I used it successfully awhile back with Linux on my 486-50 laptop (28 MB of RAM). I'll expose my bias however, by saying that my favorite "Office Suite" is Microsoft Office 4.3. MS hasn't made a thing since then that wasn't a pig, and less reliable. The company I work for still uses Office 4.3 throughout the company, but is soon switching to Office 2000, which I really don't look forward to.
I'm a technical person, though, so I don't "live" in a "Office Suite" environment. Our programming people still work in OS/2 with Emacs. (the main product my group works on is part of an Embedded OS/2 product) And we're rated one of the top 30 companies to work for in the US.
Yikes,
I thought only Microsoft "forced" users to upgrade from IE 3 to IE 4.
I only hope I never have to work with you. I could get by with just a text processor and SC for a spreadsheet. But I would just be getting by. Heck, I could get by with a pad of paper and a calculator.
You claim that StarOffice would be $0 to support versus $6500 for Office? Do you have little elves who come in at night and do the maintanence for free? Part of support costs is training.
You sound like the skinflint boss from h*ll, to be blunt. (which you do so eloquently)
This may be a somewhat discussion-diverting thought, but is the Alpha really a server-oriented processor at heart in the first place? I always thought that while it's got nice I/O bandwidth, that the Alpha really shines at floating point performance, which isn't a particularly critical benchmark for server operations. So even if Compaq was folding back on the Alpha (which they are not) I don't see that it would have anything to do with their server strategy. Isn't Alpha primarily for high end scientific workstations, 3-D stuff, etc?
Actually, whatever type of CPU you have runs your computer. The Linux Kernel just gives it directions.
How about a penguin riding on the back of a GNU? That scales pretty well, if done right, and it shows the proper relationship (or not- let the flames commence, I guess)