Now, based on my experence with commodore 64 people, who spoke alot about high speed modems and why they couldn't be implemented, one concern was the display of text on the screen may have not been able to keep up with I believe they said 9600 baud. I have no FACTS on this subject but this sounds reasonable.
Something like that. Someone recently got 56k working over the user port by blanking the screen. The VIC-II graphics chip steals cycles from the CPU for DMA every 8 scan lines. By setting a bit in the VIC-II that disables the screen, the CPU has more horsepower for bit banging on the user port.
Without blanking the screen, the maximum on a C64 using the user port is between 2400 & 9600bps, depending on how the software is written.
Most power users these days use Swiftlink or Turbo232 cartridges, which eliminate a lot of the bottlenecks of the user port because they plug a real 6551 ACIA into the expansion port (rather than making the CPU emulate one). The theoretical maximum using one of these is about 78,000bps for stock C64 and 157,000bps for one with a SuperCPU (20MHz accelerator), assuming they aren't doing any screen updates, etc. Still, 56kbps is quite possible for a stock machine.
My personal system (C128D w/SuperCPU) gets a PPP connection from my Windows 2000 box over serial @ 115,200bps. It takes longer to load games from floppy than it takes to save them to my CMD hard drive.
The Wings operating system for SuperCPU-powered C64s is supposedly going to be ported to it. It's not exactly a *NIX operating system, but it's pretty damn close.
http://www.king.igs.net/~billnacu/wings/
In the 80's, we would all go to bed praying for pleasant dreams, and that those damn commie bastards wouldn't rain nuclear death down on us from the skies while we slept. Before Glasnost, relations with the Russians consisted mostly of going up to the Iron Curtain and yelling over it, "hey Gorby, we built a bigger one!".
A comedia named Yakov Smirnoff arrived on the scene and made us laugh with his commentary on America ("What a country!") and Russia.
He is mostly remembered today for his one-liners, which were usually in the form:
In America, x does y. In Soviet Russia, y...does x!
Like in the example another poster gave:
In America you can always find a party. In Russia the party always finds you.
Another good one from that Brainyquote site:
In Russia we only had two TV channels. Channel One was propaganda. Channel Two consisted of a KGB officer telling you: Turn back at once to Channel One.
The c64 can't really be overclocked much because everything is so tightly integrated. The VIC-II video chip doesn't run on an asynchronous bus like the graphics cards on a PC. Its clock is high when the CPU's clock is low, and vice-versa. Speeding up the CPU directly would screw up the video timing and make it impossible (or at least difficult) to get a useable video signal out of it. But, there are a few different accelerators out there using the DMA line on the CPU bus to take control of the system. They interact with the 64's custom chips at 1MHz, but offer CPU speeds of up to 20MHz (overclocked 16MHz WDC65C816).
With a CMD hard drive (like the one attached to my Commodore 128), up to 4gb of SCSI goodness can be used. When the new HD-DOS is complete, that number should be much higher.
Hell, Commodore-branded PCs are still being sold (at least, as of a few months ago) by a company named Tulip, which is the most recent owner of the name & logo.
Pick is a database/environment, PickBASIC is a programming language.
Originally, Pick served as a "multivalue" database and operating system. But, in later revisions, it was decided that customers would rather run the database on top of another OS with better security, compatibility, etc. So, modern Pick and Pick variants run on top of NT or various *NIX flavors. I believe Unidata, a Pick-style database, even has a Linux version.
PickBASIC is a compiled BASIC derivative with extensions for database and network access. It's actaully very powerful when used properly, and it makes development a snap.
Unfortunately, being fluent in Pick doesn't exactly open up many door for you career-wise these days. *g*
Pick and Pick-style databases come with PickBASIC as their main programming language. It's more or less just a compiled BASIC with some extensions for database and network functions.
Companies, especially ones that succeed to the level of near monopoly, follow a basic tenet of capitalism--increase profits. The opposite of that is provide your customer with the best service...as that is an expense which affects profit. So by doing the math, you find that captalism says to do as little as possible to make as much money. That is quite adverse to creating a working, complete, and expandable infrastructure.
On the contrary. In a capitalist system, customers who want better service would be free to tell a provider to "shove it" and go with a competitor who may charge more but give better service.
For example, I choose to give my money to smaller Internet providers than to larger ISPs like AOL and MSN. They offer me services I want (usenet, a UNIX shell, no proprietary client). Recently, my ISP decided to go SSH-only on their shell box, which makes it impossible for other box, a souped-up Commodore 128, to connect (it only recently got PPP and telnet). Guess what? My new ISP service should be ready to go this weekend and I'll start the process of redirecting web & mail traffic and eventually closing my current account.
The only reason I cannot reasonably do that with my phone service is that the government, in the interests of "the people", allowed Bell to have a monopoly on the infrastructure in exchange for requiring them to do things such as lay cable to the "last mile", rather than allowing the free market to demand it of them. Think of what sort of solutions a free market could have come up with to meet the "last mile" problem on its own! How about wireless telephones in rural areas, which transmit and receive radio waves to/from centrally-located bases which are patched into the phone network (with Bell getting a small cut for each call they allow in, of course). Yes, we might have had a primative version of the cellular phone way back then had the free market been allowed to say "we will gladly give our money to whomever will give us phone service out here" and someone had an idea of how they could do it. Instead, the government told Bell to lay costly cable to every rural resident and eliminated the chance for a competitor to be innovative in finding a way to meet those customers' demand for phone service at affordable prices.
I, for one, see nothing wrong with a monopoly, except when such a monopoly is created or maintained with the assistance of the government. A regular monopoly can be felled by anyone who can beat them at their own game by being better and/or more affordable. A monopoly like my local phone and cable providers can't, as the government has made it so that they're the only game in town.
I am a the senior programmer for my company and the manager of the programming team. The main problem I see in recruiting is that nobody wants an entry level job.
That's interesting, and I've seen that, especially in workers who changed careers to become rich programmers. But, I've also seen the other side of it. Back in the beginning of the dot-com boom, I was looking for my first programming job and there were none to be had. I was willing to work entry-level for 20-25k a year if it would put experience on my resume (I was living with my parents, so my expenses were low). A few recruiters called me on the phone after I sent them my resume and, after a short conversation about it, I was inevitably told that I didn't have enough experience (the ad said "entry level"?!?!) so they wouldn't be calling me about an interview. After 3-4 months, I eventually got a job at what another former employee calls a "programming sweat shop" that loved hiring inexperienced and untrained programmers (after all, they charged their clients by the hour).
That was when there were 4-5 pages of "Computer/Info Systems" jobs in the Sunday paper. Now, there's 1, and my best friend just graduated college and is looking for his first programming job. I feel sorry for him.
Nope. Hyperlink uses a proxy program running on a shell account to pre-parse the html and convert graphics to a (AFAIK) proprietary format. The resulting code & gfx are then processed & displayed by the 64.
The Wave (see other posts) does PPP & TCP/IP natively, but it requires more than 64k RAM to be installed on the computer.
When you look at it, $16.99 to listen to music that most likely cost a couple thousand dollars to make doesn't sound too shabby. Ever look at the cost of professional musical equipment? DAT recorders, digital mixers, synths, good-quality guitars...everything costs quite a bit of money. Then there's the cost of studio time and staff on top of that.
Despite what Marshall McLuhan claims, the medium is only the message for avante-gard artists and the MIT Media Lab. For the rest of us, content is king, as evidenced by the repeated complaints about Slashdot duplicating stories. The CD may only cost $1 to make, but that only takes into account the cost to make the medium. But the actual content cost many man-hours to write, record, and produce, plus the aforementioned costs of instruments, studio equipment, and (hopefully) voice lessons.
Now, the band down the street may be able to put a pretty slick-sounding demo together for a fraction of that cost using modern PC equipment and a DAT deck, but the band may not sound as good as trained professionals. Also, Stinky's cousin Lou from Toledo may not have the same ear for mixing that a professional has, and if he's bad enough, it could make or break their album.
I used to think CDs should be cheaper because they only cost $1 to manufacture, too. Then I thought about it and realized that if pricing were based on that, all I'd be buying is an empty piece of polyurothane. Granted, the prices have crept up a bit high in recent years, but they still aren't out of my price range yet.
In the same way, you have every right to put up an independent parody web site criticizing your employer, but don't expect to keep your job when they find out.
True, but here in Illinois we have "at-will" employment, which means that my employer has no obligation to continue to employ me and provide me with a salary in exchange for work. I don't publicly criticize my employer because I value the contract between us. I give them my time and energy, and they give me money to buy new computer equipment with. Isn't America great?
On the other hand, we also have "compulsory" education for anyone under 18, which means that they are required by law to attend school unless they are disruptive to the education of others around them.
One could argue that it's for the student's own good, but when I was in school I didn't feel it necessary to have any respect for educators and administrators beyond what I felt they individually earned. After all, students are required by law to spend 6-8 hours a day at school for five days out of the week without any compensation for their time.
Then, they are sent home with several pounds of books and homework and expected to do at least 2-3 hours of homework each night, again without any form of compensation. I still have muscle problems in my shoulder from lugging a camping shoulder bag (the only thing I found that would hold those heavy math & history books without breaking) to and from school every day.
To expect a student to be a prioner of the educational system (that is, after all, what they are...some even have to wear uniforms like felons) and not criticize the authority figures who have power over them is ludicrious. Further, to punish them in school for something extracurricular done using their own resources is seriously overstepping their bounds. Maybe this ruling will send a message to our educators that student are human beings, and that treating a school like a prison is no way to create an environment conductive to rational inquiry, only rote memorization.
Slashdot Mirror
Something you will never hear a Windows user say.
This morning I posted the stuff that I know is out there. If anyone has anything else, email me at the address on the home page.
Thanks,
Dave
Something like that. Someone recently got 56k working over the user port by blanking the screen. The VIC-II graphics chip steals cycles from the CPU for DMA every 8 scan lines. By setting a bit in the VIC-II that disables the screen, the CPU has more horsepower for bit banging on the user port.
Without blanking the screen, the maximum on a C64 using the user port is between 2400 & 9600bps, depending on how the software is written.
Most power users these days use Swiftlink or Turbo232 cartridges, which eliminate a lot of the bottlenecks of the user port because they plug a real 6551 ACIA into the expansion port (rather than making the CPU emulate one). The theoretical maximum using one of these is about 78,000bps for stock C64 and 157,000bps for one with a SuperCPU (20MHz accelerator), assuming they aren't doing any screen updates, etc. Still, 56kbps is quite possible for a stock machine.
My personal system (C128D w/SuperCPU) gets a PPP connection from my Windows 2000 box over serial @ 115,200bps. It takes longer to load games from floppy than it takes to save them to my CMD hard drive.
The Wings operating system for SuperCPU-powered C64s is supposedly going to be ported to it. It's not exactly a *NIX operating system, but it's pretty damn close. http://www.king.igs.net/~billnacu/wings/
Talk to Ray Carlsen at:
http://personalpages.tds.net/~rcarlsen/
He's a Commodore repair guru.
A comedia named Yakov Smirnoff arrived on the scene and made us laugh with his commentary on America ("What a country!") and Russia.
He is mostly remembered today for his one-liners, which were usually in the form:
Like in the example another poster gave:
Another good one from that Brainyquote site:
Outta here,
Compton Q. Groundhog
- Compton Q. Groundhog
The distribution rights to Commodore GEOS are currently held by this gentleman and his company:
s .h tm
http://www.cmdrkey.com/
You can find info on Wheels, the GEOS upgrade at:
http://userdata.ia4u.net/maurice/gbrowse/whshot
Or, check ebay. Copies of GEOS 2.0 show up there all the time, usually for only $10 or so.
The c64 can't really be overclocked much because everything is so tightly integrated. The VIC-II video chip doesn't run on an asynchronous bus like the graphics cards on a PC. Its clock is high when the CPU's clock is low, and vice-versa. Speeding up the CPU directly would screw up the video timing and make it impossible (or at least difficult) to get a useable video signal out of it. But, there are a few different accelerators out there using the DMA line on the CPU bus to take control of the system. They interact with the 64's custom chips at 1MHz, but offer CPU speeds of up to 20MHz (overclocked 16MHz WDC65C816).
With a CMD hard drive (like the one attached to my Commodore 128), up to 4gb of SCSI goodness can be used. When the new HD-DOS is complete, that number should be much higher.
Hell, Commodore-branded PCs are still being sold (at least, as of a few months ago) by a company named Tulip, which is the most recent owner of the name & logo.
Pick is a database/environment, PickBASIC is a programming language.
Originally, Pick served as a "multivalue" database and operating system. But, in later revisions, it was decided that customers would rather run the database on top of another OS with better security, compatibility, etc. So, modern Pick and Pick variants run on top of NT or various *NIX flavors. I believe Unidata, a Pick-style database, even has a Linux version.
PickBASIC is a compiled BASIC derivative with extensions for database and network access. It's actaully very powerful when used properly, and it makes development a snap.
Unfortunately, being fluent in Pick doesn't exactly open up many door for you career-wise these days. *g*
Pick and Pick-style databases come with PickBASIC as their main programming language. It's more or less just a compiled BASIC with some extensions for database and network functions.
You'd be surprised what companies run on Pick.
On the contrary. In a capitalist system, customers who want better service would be free to tell a provider to "shove it" and go with a competitor who may charge more but give better service.
For example, I choose to give my money to smaller Internet providers than to larger ISPs like AOL and MSN. They offer me services I want (usenet, a UNIX shell, no proprietary client). Recently, my ISP decided to go SSH-only on their shell box, which makes it impossible for other box, a souped-up Commodore 128, to connect (it only recently got PPP and telnet). Guess what? My new ISP service should be ready to go this weekend and I'll start the process of redirecting web & mail traffic and eventually closing my current account.
The only reason I cannot reasonably do that with my phone service is that the government, in the interests of "the people", allowed Bell to have a monopoly on the infrastructure in exchange for requiring them to do things such as lay cable to the "last mile", rather than allowing the free market to demand it of them. Think of what sort of solutions a free market could have come up with to meet the "last mile" problem on its own! How about wireless telephones in rural areas, which transmit and receive radio waves to/from centrally-located bases which are patched into the phone network (with Bell getting a small cut for each call they allow in, of course). Yes, we might have had a primative version of the cellular phone way back then had the free market been allowed to say "we will gladly give our money to whomever will give us phone service out here" and someone had an idea of how they could do it. Instead, the government told Bell to lay costly cable to every rural resident and eliminated the chance for a competitor to be innovative in finding a way to meet those customers' demand for phone service at affordable prices.
I, for one, see nothing wrong with a monopoly, except when such a monopoly is created or maintained with the assistance of the government. A regular monopoly can be felled by anyone who can beat them at their own game by being better and/or more affordable. A monopoly like my local phone and cable providers can't, as the government has made it so that they're the only game in town.
Outta here,
Compton Q. Groundhog
That's interesting, and I've seen that, especially in workers who changed careers to become rich programmers. But, I've also seen the other side of it. Back in the beginning of the dot-com boom, I was looking for my first programming job and there were none to be had. I was willing to work entry-level for 20-25k a year if it would put experience on my resume (I was living with my parents, so my expenses were low). A few recruiters called me on the phone after I sent them my resume and, after a short conversation about it, I was inevitably told that I didn't have enough experience (the ad said "entry level"?!?!) so they wouldn't be calling me about an interview. After 3-4 months, I eventually got a job at what another former employee calls a "programming sweat shop" that loved hiring inexperienced and untrained programmers (after all, they charged their clients by the hour).
That was when there were 4-5 pages of "Computer/Info Systems" jobs in the Sunday paper. Now, there's 1, and my best friend just graduated college and is looking for his first programming job. I feel sorry for him.
Outta here, Compton Q. GroundhogSo, it would seem, you have the impression that you "deserve" their music?
Nope. Hyperlink uses a proxy program running on a shell account to pre-parse the html and convert graphics to a (AFAIK) proprietary format. The resulting code & gfx are then processed & displayed by the 64. The Wave (see other posts) does PPP & TCP/IP natively, but it requires more than 64k RAM to be installed on the computer.
C64s have had SCSI for a long time (no RAID, sorry). CMD (http://www.cmdweb.com) used to produce them.
When you look at it, $16.99 to listen to music that most likely cost a couple thousand dollars to make doesn't sound too shabby. Ever look at the cost of professional musical equipment? DAT recorders, digital mixers, synths, good-quality guitars...everything costs quite a bit of money. Then there's the cost of studio time and staff on top of that.
Despite what Marshall McLuhan claims, the medium is only the message for avante-gard artists and the MIT Media Lab. For the rest of us, content is king, as evidenced by the repeated complaints about Slashdot duplicating stories. The CD may only cost $1 to make, but that only takes into account the cost to make the medium. But the actual content cost many man-hours to write, record, and produce, plus the aforementioned costs of instruments, studio equipment, and (hopefully) voice lessons.
Now, the band down the street may be able to put a pretty slick-sounding demo together for a fraction of that cost using modern PC equipment and a DAT deck, but the band may not sound as good as trained professionals. Also, Stinky's cousin Lou from Toledo may not have the same ear for mixing that a professional has, and if he's bad enough, it could make or break their album.
I used to think CDs should be cheaper because they only cost $1 to manufacture, too. Then I thought about it and realized that if pricing were based on that, all I'd be buying is an empty piece of polyurothane. Granted, the prices have crept up a bit high in recent years, but they still aren't out of my price range yet.
True, but here in Illinois we have "at-will" employment, which means that my employer has no obligation to continue to employ me and provide me with a salary in exchange for work. I don't publicly criticize my employer because I value the contract between us. I give them my time and energy, and they give me money to buy new computer equipment with. Isn't America great?
On the other hand, we also have "compulsory" education for anyone under 18, which means that they are required by law to attend school unless they are disruptive to the education of others around them.
One could argue that it's for the student's own good, but when I was in school I didn't feel it necessary to have any respect for educators and administrators beyond what I felt they individually earned. After all, students are required by law to spend 6-8 hours a day at school for five days out of the week without any compensation for their time.
Then, they are sent home with several pounds of books and homework and expected to do at least 2-3 hours of homework each night, again without any form of compensation. I still have muscle problems in my shoulder from lugging a camping shoulder bag (the only thing I found that would hold those heavy math & history books without breaking) to and from school every day.
To expect a student to be a prioner of the educational system (that is, after all, what they are...some even have to wear uniforms like felons) and not criticize the authority figures who have power over them is ludicrious. Further, to punish them in school for something extracurricular done using their own resources is seriously overstepping their bounds. Maybe this ruling will send a message to our educators that student are human beings, and that treating a school like a prison is no way to create an environment conductive to rational inquiry, only rote memorization.