I did a temp job cleanup detail at a factory that made... metal powder. The idea is the stuff can be stamped into parts and heat-treated until it's solid. Funny, at the time my father worked at a factory that USED the stuff. But anyway.
So the main grinder, well I guess it's a grinder, a big hundred-foot-long horizontal spinning thing that looks like a scale model of Babylon 5, one end of it leaks. Metal powder mixed with oil and water drips down from the bearing at the north end, and guess whose job it becomes to scoop that out. "Clean" it out they said. Not sure what they mean, while it runs it refills the pile, no way around it.
Thus two days of shoveling metal mud. Stuff so dense it broke the buckets we were shoveling it into. Nearly caused accidents when they brought in the overhead crane to lift up the bin we were told to put the stuff in, it was too heavy for the crane. Now, I'm down there shoveling this, more or less underneath this Babylon 5 contraption and its insane noises. Right next to my head runs a trough of BOILING oil. Beneath me, the metal mud that runs off from the bearing has caked up and formed layers of black metal rock on the floor. Rivers of mud and oil run along it through eroded chasms from various leaks in the machinery above. It's dim yellow down there, where the lights don't reach, clouds of steam obscure everything, and you don't need to guess how hot it was.
In short, a day in Hell. Very nearly literally.
Oh, and did I mention that the factory air was constantly full of metal dust, so fine it goes right through dust masks and many layers of clothing. I rusted for three days afterwards. The orange color from the rusted metal powder wouldn't wash off! Maybe there was a trick to cleaning it off that I was never told.
This job lasted two days and I counted myself reasonably lucky it was only a temp thing. Do we have no more to say for ourselves as a species than to make people work their entire lives in such conditions?
EDO being static is news to me, I thought it was just a faster type of dynamic. But we aren't talking about EDO. These babies used 60 or 70ns DRAM. Generally 4MB on the board with ONE socket for a SIMM up to 32MB - some Power Macs did interleave but the 68K machines never did. Care to speculate on the clock speed of that RAM? Now contemplate the amount of data OS X will want to move through that. Putting EDO in that socket, even if it worked, wouldn't speed it up anyway because it still THINKS it's the older stuff.
OS X wants as much as you can give it - 64MB is the absolute minimum, 128MB to make it useful, 512MB before it straightens up and runs right. That's what I meant by "oodles". That, and we're talking about machines that can't hold 64MB to begin with, much less the 128 or 512 that OS X will want before it becomes useful. (By "useful" I mean "you don't see individual pixels being written to the screen one by one anymore.")
OSX requires:
- PCI
- Open Firmware
- a PPC 603 or 604 or later
- oodles of RAM (64 minimum).
Running it on a legacy Mac - that is, anything older than a Power Mac 9500 - would involve somehow getting around these. You'd have to:
- write an Open Firmware bios for the machine and trick it into booting via it
- write drivers for the machine's onboard video so that it LOOKS to the OS like a PCI card behind a bridge chip (repeat for sound, network, etc)
- get a 603 or later (OS X 10.2 needs a G3 or later), some of the upgrades for 68K machines could only go to a 601
- provide for 64 or 128MB RAM on a machine whose motherboard is limited to 36. Oh, and endure the sluggishness of 72-pin RAM.
Of course Apple probably won't make this available for anything other than OS X. But even if they did... how many LC520-vintage Macs does it take, clustered, to equal the raw computing power found in, say, an iPod? (A modern Apple MOUSE probably has a more powerful CPU than some of the older Macs.)
If there is a law of diminishing returns trying to cluster old hardware to keep it useful, I think an LC520 is well past it.
Besides, if you want to do it, see if Linux will run on those 520s and... yes, you guessed it... build a Beowulf cluster out of 'em.
Actually 24fps isn't all that smooth. I can think of a few shots in ALL the Lord of the Rings movies - usually vertical pans or other rapid tracking shots - that looked very choppy. Not a problem on DVD, but in the theater, the whole damn screen seems to flash, as essentially the whole frame changes 24 times a second.
Fast-moving objects at 24fps don't always "move" fluidly across the cinema screen, all too often you get 24 flickery copies of the object, because your eyes are not quite tracking the motion, you're seeing the object blink out at one location and blink in at another. Now, in a rapid camera pan, especially a vertical one where you're trying to cover more "ground" with the narrow aspect of the frame, you get 24 flickery copies of the WHOLE FRAME stuttering up the screen. It looks unsteady or "blurry" to the eye, though every frame may be razor-sharp.
We may only "see" at 22-30fps, but we are affected by problems well beyond that, whether it be fluorescent lights about to conk out, or monitors that "only" refesh at 75hz. For motion to appear smooth and comfortable we'd really have to get to the point of having 120fps video.
Dude. It's Star Wars. Sound in space. Parsecs as both distance and time. Laser swords. Lasers with recoil. Interplanetary travel at sublight speeds (Naboo to Tattooine with no hyperdrive). Ships that need airfoils in space. Compass directions on starmaps? Deal with it.
In some cultures, skulls mean LIFE, not death. To a Maya priest, for example, a building emblazoned with skulls and crossbones would look like a holy place, an altar or king's temple or someplace similarly inviting. Imagine our descendants are cannibals: a building covered in skulls would, to them, mean "restaurant."
They have something most dot coms lack: a good business model.
One wonders how good a business model can possibly be, if they have to keep changing it constantly. "Oh, we don't have to charge you a fee, we just invest your money..." "...okay, that wasn't working, now we have to charge you fees..." "...oh, and you can't accept credit cards unless you get our Pay Extra to Accept Credit Cards package..."
secondly Amiga CD-32 - a spectacular waste of money that went up against Sega and lost,
In North America anyway. But in Europe, particularly Britain and Germany, the CD32 was doing a remarkably good job handing Sega's ass to it on a plate, right up until Commodore disappeared out from under it.
I had the R-2000, but never let it bite me. I let it bite down crooked on a GIJoe once, damn thing had so much torque that, with the left and right sides of the jaw not biting evenly, it fucking pried itself off the motor and its jaw went flying. It wasn't broken, amazingly. Which kinda hinted to me that if I ever got my hand caught in there, a) the motor would not stop until it had torqued the jaws apart, and b) the plastic not break until it had gone through my hand. So I treated it with a bit more care after that.:-)
I tried one of those in the store and had to put it down and walk away after 30 seconds. I tried the various presents but they all felt uncomfortable and unpleasant.
If I want FF in a mouse, I want it to feel similar to, for example, assembling a high quality plastic toy, where you can feel a subtle change when the parts actually lock together. This mouse felt more like... I dunno, like metal pinging against metal. Like head sweeps on a particularly loud hard drive. Or like someone flipping rubber bands at it while I was using it. And the vibrations went right up into the center of my hand, right into the carpal tunnel, and stayed there for many minutes afterward. In 30 seconds it was uncomfortable; after couple minutes I guess it would have been excruciating.
Why does the whole mouse vibrate? Wouldn't it work better to have the mouse button actually move slightly under your fingertip? Mouse over an object onscreen and the button "gives" slightly, say, 1/5th the distance downward needed to actually click the button. Not even enough to be visible but enough that you can feel it. In fact it shouldn't change the force necessary to click the button - the switch itself should move too. Meanwhile, save the vibrating mouse for Quake.
One possible reason why drive-up ATMs have Braille dots is that it's cost-advantageous to use the same components to build drive-up and indoor ATMs (and indoor ATMs if I recall are required by law to have Braille). It's easier for the company to simply manufacture all their ATMs with the same buttons. Plus, as someone else mentioned, the driver isn't always the person who uses the drive-up ATM; a blind person could sit in the back seat and use it.
However, the question remains as to how useful Braille buttons are, drive-up or otherwise, on a device whose feedback to the user is entirely visual.
Fat chance. The problem isn't that you have to divide up Israel fairly and equitably - the problem is that there's a couple of major religions born there. The followers of those religions are of the opinion (delusion) that God has promised that land to THEM - so it is therefore their sacred duty to occupy that land and throw out the followers of those Other Religions because they're obviously working for Satan.
I don't think the situation will ever be resolved.
Now it's what, 70? 80? One reason we're living longer now is because the general public has been made aware of what is "bad" for your body.
And yet, just TRY to buy a week's worth of groceries that doesn't include a numbered FD&C food dye. The longer average lifespan is due to improvements in medicine that have made a lot of formerly deadly childhood diseases a bit less lethal.
Our awareness of what's good/bad for us isn't really doing us much good - so you dodge fatty foods and sugar, now you're dealing with aspartame and Olestra. Dodge that and now you're dealing with MSG and FD&C Red 40. Dodge THAT and now it's pesticides and genetically modified corn sneaking into the food supply. All things considered I'd say the average person's diet 100 years ago is probably healthier than the average person's diet today.
Well, the tape trick came about because some later-model Amiga drives were ordinary PC high-density floppy drives that DID have the sensor. The Amiga wouldn't use the drive in high-density mode, but the drive could get confused by the sensor state, and would more or less attempt to read/write a 720K track/sector pattern with a high-density bias.
I don't know the ST well enough to know if this was ever a problem on it.
OK, I've heard this quote a lot, and while it's hilarious, I have a sixth sense that says Bill Gates never actually said it.
Now, I've spoken to people who were there to hear, firsthand, Bill at a big computer show (SIGGRAPH?) in the early 90s, remark that "it's impossible to write a preemptive multitasking OS that runs in less than 4MB RAM" - while there were computers on the show floor doing precisely that. But that's not quite the same quote, and though I can imagine it evolving over the years to "640K oughta be enough" I just don't think that's what happened.
Any ideas? Anyone know where the quote supposedly appeared?
Slashdot tends to self-select a somewhat left-leaning readership. Ones who tire of constantly liberal bents to the headlines probably leave sooner rather than later - after all, there's PLENTY of places to get news that's been filtered by people with, if not a conservative bent, at least a desire to appeal to a conservative audience. Not like Slashdot's editors are unbiased or anything, but most of us are comfortable with the political slant here. Especially where it pertains to big companies that want to take not just our money, but our rights.
...and replace it with what ? Until these people propose something better instead I think we are going to be better off with what we have now.
Of course we would. Isn't that the simplest definition of a conservative - one who thinks status quo is Latin for "good enough"?
Some of us don't buy it. Myself, I don't care much for socialism as an antidote to corporatism - someone needs to think of a NEW economic model that allows for personal advancement the way capitalism does, without requiring every company to strip the planet dry and burn out all its workers in the process. But the point is, corporatism (a cult, founded on the belief that one can't just make money, one must make ALL the money and one goes to Hell if one leaves a single dollar unmade somewhere) is a danger to the species, psychologically (as we sell more of our souls in exchange for whiter teeth and summer blockbusters), physically (corn syrup and Red 40 are hazardous to our health), and ecologically (no really, despite what certain radio hosts tell you, we really ARE ruining the planet). There is a desire among some people to see corporatism - not necessarily capitalism, mind you - burned down. Perhaps instead of condemning such ideas with the "L" word, you should actually THINK about what people have to gain from suggesting such things.
Slashdot Mirror
I did a temp job cleanup detail at a factory that made... metal powder. The idea is the stuff can be stamped into parts and heat-treated until it's solid. Funny, at the time my father worked at a factory that USED the stuff. But anyway.
So the main grinder, well I guess it's a grinder, a big hundred-foot-long horizontal spinning thing that looks like a scale model of Babylon 5, one end of it leaks. Metal powder mixed with oil and water drips down from the bearing at the north end, and guess whose job it becomes to scoop that out. "Clean" it out they said. Not sure what they mean, while it runs it refills the pile, no way around it.
Thus two days of shoveling metal mud. Stuff so dense it broke the buckets we were shoveling it into. Nearly caused accidents when they brought in the overhead crane to lift up the bin we were told to put the stuff in, it was too heavy for the crane. Now, I'm down there shoveling this, more or less underneath this Babylon 5 contraption and its insane noises. Right next to my head runs a trough of BOILING oil. Beneath me, the metal mud that runs off from the bearing has caked up and formed layers of black metal rock on the floor. Rivers of mud and oil run along it through eroded chasms from various leaks in the machinery above. It's dim yellow down there, where the lights don't reach, clouds of steam obscure everything, and you don't need to guess how hot it was.
In short, a day in Hell. Very nearly literally.
Oh, and did I mention that the factory air was constantly full of metal dust, so fine it goes right through dust masks and many layers of clothing. I rusted for three days afterwards. The orange color from the rusted metal powder wouldn't wash off! Maybe there was a trick to cleaning it off that I was never told.
This job lasted two days and I counted myself reasonably lucky it was only a temp thing. Do we have no more to say for ourselves as a species than to make people work their entire lives in such conditions?
EDO being static is news to me, I thought it was just a faster type of dynamic. But we aren't talking about EDO. These babies used 60 or 70ns DRAM. Generally 4MB on the board with ONE socket for a SIMM up to 32MB - some Power Macs did interleave but the 68K machines never did. Care to speculate on the clock speed of that RAM? Now contemplate the amount of data OS X will want to move through that. Putting EDO in that socket, even if it worked, wouldn't speed it up anyway because it still THINKS it's the older stuff.
OS X wants as much as you can give it - 64MB is the absolute minimum, 128MB to make it useful, 512MB before it straightens up and runs right. That's what I meant by "oodles". That, and we're talking about machines that can't hold 64MB to begin with, much less the 128 or 512 that OS X will want before it becomes useful. (By "useful" I mean "you don't see individual pixels being written to the screen one by one anymore.")
OSX requires:
- PCI
- Open Firmware
- a PPC 603 or 604 or later
- oodles of RAM (64 minimum).
Running it on a legacy Mac - that is, anything older than a Power Mac 9500 - would involve somehow getting around these. You'd have to:
- write an Open Firmware bios for the machine and trick it into booting via it
- write drivers for the machine's onboard video so that it LOOKS to the OS like a PCI card behind a bridge chip (repeat for sound, network, etc)
- get a 603 or later (OS X 10.2 needs a G3 or later), some of the upgrades for 68K machines could only go to a 601
- provide for 64 or 128MB RAM on a machine whose motherboard is limited to 36. Oh, and endure the sluggishness of 72-pin RAM.
OS X is not OS 9 and it is not Red Hat.
Of course Apple probably won't make this available for anything other than OS X. But even if they did... how many LC520-vintage Macs does it take, clustered, to equal the raw computing power found in, say, an iPod? (A modern Apple MOUSE probably has a more powerful CPU than some of the older Macs.)
If there is a law of diminishing returns trying to cluster old hardware to keep it useful, I think an LC520 is well past it.
Besides, if you want to do it, see if Linux will run on those 520s and... yes, you guessed it... build a Beowulf cluster out of 'em.
That's exactly what happened to the Japanese Mars orbiter Nozumi. Its fuel froze. Repeatedly.
> PAL systems tend to have much more garish advertising - lots of bright oranges that you just can't see in the US:-(.
Two words: Colin Baker.
Actually 24fps isn't all that smooth. I can think of a few shots in ALL the Lord of the Rings movies - usually vertical pans or other rapid tracking shots - that looked very choppy. Not a problem on DVD, but in the theater, the whole damn screen seems to flash, as essentially the whole frame changes 24 times a second.
Fast-moving objects at 24fps don't always "move" fluidly across the cinema screen, all too often you get 24 flickery copies of the object, because your eyes are not quite tracking the motion, you're seeing the object blink out at one location and blink in at another. Now, in a rapid camera pan, especially a vertical one where you're trying to cover more "ground" with the narrow aspect of the frame, you get 24 flickery copies of the WHOLE FRAME stuttering up the screen. It looks unsteady or "blurry" to the eye, though every frame may be razor-sharp.
We may only "see" at 22-30fps, but we are affected by problems well beyond that, whether it be fluorescent lights about to conk out, or monitors that "only" refesh at 75hz. For motion to appear smooth and comfortable we'd really have to get to the point of having 120fps video.
What if we hadn't supported Saddam in the 1980s in the first place?
After being butchered by studios, Martin Koerber and Alpha-Omega have restored most of the scenes and score.
What's the subject of that sentence?
Dude. It's Star Wars. Sound in space. Parsecs as both distance and time. Laser swords. Lasers with recoil. Interplanetary travel at sublight speeds (Naboo to Tattooine with no hyperdrive). Ships that need airfoils in space. Compass directions on starmaps? Deal with it.
In some cultures, skulls mean LIFE, not death. To a Maya priest, for example, a building emblazoned with skulls and crossbones would look like a holy place, an altar or king's temple or someplace similarly inviting. Imagine our descendants are cannibals: a building covered in skulls would, to them, mean "restaurant."
They have something most dot coms lack: a good business model.
One wonders how good a business model can possibly be, if they have to keep changing it constantly. "Oh, we don't have to charge you a fee, we just invest your money..." "...okay, that wasn't working, now we have to charge you fees..." "...oh, and you can't accept credit cards unless you get our Pay Extra to Accept Credit Cards package..."
secondly Amiga CD-32 - a spectacular waste of money that went up against Sega and lost,
In North America anyway. But in Europe, particularly Britain and Germany, the CD32 was doing a remarkably good job handing Sega's ass to it on a plate, right up until Commodore disappeared out from under it.
I had the R-2000, but never let it bite me. I let it bite down crooked on a GIJoe once, damn thing had so much torque that, with the left and right sides of the jaw not biting evenly, it fucking pried itself off the motor and its jaw went flying. It wasn't broken, amazingly. Which kinda hinted to me that if I ever got my hand caught in there, a) the motor would not stop until it had torqued the jaws apart, and b) the plastic not break until it had gone through my hand. So I treated it with a bit more care after that. :-)
I've heard that Indianapolis was #9 on the Soviet list of sites to nuke, due to pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly. Not to scare you or anything...
Sure. Just don't forget to include the giant bullseye on each.
I tried one of those in the store and had to put it down and walk away after 30 seconds. I tried the various presents but they all felt uncomfortable and unpleasant.
If I want FF in a mouse, I want it to feel similar to, for example, assembling a high quality plastic toy, where you can feel a subtle change when the parts actually lock together. This mouse felt more like... I dunno, like metal pinging against metal. Like head sweeps on a particularly loud hard drive. Or like someone flipping rubber bands at it while I was using it. And the vibrations went right up into the center of my hand, right into the carpal tunnel, and stayed there for many minutes afterward. In 30 seconds it was uncomfortable; after couple minutes I guess it would have been excruciating.
Why does the whole mouse vibrate? Wouldn't it work better to have the mouse button actually move slightly under your fingertip? Mouse over an object onscreen and the button "gives" slightly, say, 1/5th the distance downward needed to actually click the button. Not even enough to be visible but enough that you can feel it. In fact it shouldn't change the force necessary to click the button - the switch itself should move too. Meanwhile, save the vibrating mouse for Quake.
One possible reason why drive-up ATMs have Braille dots is that it's cost-advantageous to use the same components to build drive-up and indoor ATMs (and indoor ATMs if I recall are required by law to have Braille). It's easier for the company to simply manufacture all their ATMs with the same buttons. Plus, as someone else mentioned, the driver isn't always the person who uses the drive-up ATM; a blind person could sit in the back seat and use it.
However, the question remains as to how useful Braille buttons are, drive-up or otherwise, on a device whose feedback to the user is entirely visual.
Fat chance. The problem isn't that you have to divide up Israel fairly and equitably - the problem is that there's a couple of major religions born there. The followers of those religions are of the opinion (delusion) that God has promised that land to THEM - so it is therefore their sacred duty to occupy that land and throw out the followers of those Other Religions because they're obviously working for Satan.
I don't think the situation will ever be resolved.
Now it's what, 70? 80? One reason we're living longer now is because the general public has been made aware of what is "bad" for your body.
And yet, just TRY to buy a week's worth of groceries that doesn't include a numbered FD&C food dye. The longer average lifespan is due to improvements in medicine that have made a lot of formerly deadly childhood diseases a bit less lethal.
Our awareness of what's good/bad for us isn't really doing us much good - so you dodge fatty foods and sugar, now you're dealing with aspartame and Olestra. Dodge that and now you're dealing with MSG and FD&C Red 40. Dodge THAT and now it's pesticides and genetically modified corn sneaking into the food supply. All things considered I'd say the average person's diet 100 years ago is probably healthier than the average person's diet today.
worth the time to dl/install/fuck with it.
It must be time to go to bed, I read this and thought "dl/install/fuck" was some kind of search/replace.
Well, the tape trick came about because some later-model Amiga drives were ordinary PC high-density floppy drives that DID have the sensor. The Amiga wouldn't use the drive in high-density mode, but the drive could get confused by the sensor state, and would more or less attempt to read/write a 720K track/sector pattern with a high-density bias.
I don't know the ST well enough to know if this was ever a problem on it.
OK, I've heard this quote a lot, and while it's hilarious, I have a sixth sense that says Bill Gates never actually said it.
Now, I've spoken to people who were there to hear, firsthand, Bill at a big computer show (SIGGRAPH?) in the early 90s, remark that "it's impossible to write a preemptive multitasking OS that runs in less than 4MB RAM" - while there were computers on the show floor doing precisely that. But that's not quite the same quote, and though I can imagine it evolving over the years to "640K oughta be enough" I just don't think that's what happened.
Any ideas? Anyone know where the quote supposedly appeared?
although finding discs for the 720k floppy drive is a pain in the ass
Can't you just do the old Amiga trick, put tape over the high-density hole and format it to 720K on a PC?
Slashdot tends to self-select a somewhat left-leaning readership. Ones who tire of constantly liberal bents to the headlines probably leave sooner rather than later - after all, there's PLENTY of places to get news that's been filtered by people with, if not a conservative bent, at least a desire to appeal to a conservative audience. Not like Slashdot's editors are unbiased or anything, but most of us are comfortable with the political slant here. Especially where it pertains to big companies that want to take not just our money, but our rights.
...and replace it with what ? Until these people propose something better instead I think we are going to be better off with what we have now.
Of course we would. Isn't that the simplest definition of a conservative - one who thinks status quo is Latin for "good enough"?
Some of us don't buy it. Myself, I don't care much for socialism as an antidote to corporatism - someone needs to think of a NEW economic model that allows for personal advancement the way capitalism does, without requiring every company to strip the planet dry and burn out all its workers in the process. But the point is, corporatism (a cult, founded on the belief that one can't just make money, one must make ALL the money and one goes to Hell if one leaves a single dollar unmade somewhere) is a danger to the species, psychologically (as we sell more of our souls in exchange for whiter teeth and summer blockbusters), physically (corn syrup and Red 40 are hazardous to our health), and ecologically (no really, despite what certain radio hosts tell you, we really ARE ruining the planet). There is a desire among some people to see corporatism - not necessarily capitalism, mind you - burned down. Perhaps instead of condemning such ideas with the "L" word, you should actually THINK about what people have to gain from suggesting such things.