I've a Newton MP 2100 which lasts about 1 month when using normal Alkaline AA batteries. I now use Energizer Lithium batteries (No. L91) and get about 3 months usage before I need to replace them.
The second benefit is the Lithium batteries weigh a lot less than alkaline.
The downside is they do cost a bit more than alkaline, about $10 for 4.
Somebody coming across a Playstation will probably be like somebody coming across an Atari 2600 today. Today we go "cool" and play the old favorites of Adventure, Superman, Space Invaders, Yars Revenge, Breakout, Warlords, etc. In 20 years it'll be "wow" and we'll play our old favorites of Spyro, Crash, Einhander, etc.
Of course, there might be an issue as the transition to HDTV should be complete. NTSC will no longer be a standard and might not be supported by the TV sets of 2019:-)
My favorite part of this article talkes about the ease of installing OS/2 compared to installing Windows in that OS/2 does not require you to install DOS first to use the CD: Note that in no case do you have to install DOS and a CD driver first, like Microsoft requires for Windows 95, 98, and NT.
I've found this to be true when I've installed 95 on a new machine I built(I used the 95 partition to run Windows software under OS/2 using Win32-OS/2, now known as Odin). I've not installed 98 or NT so I don't know if the DOS requirement is valid for them.
Zecharia Sitchen has written a series of books that cover the existance of Nibiru, a planet with an elliptical orbit that comes close to the earth every 3,600 years. The return of this planet closely parallels jumps in the human experience(beginnings of agriculture, metalworking, etc).
News of the death of OS/2 has been gathering for a while.
News of OS/2's death has been gleefully pronounced by the media on practically an annual basis for quite a number of years. They've been wrong all along, why should this time be any different?
I've yet to see an official IBM statement to this regard, and as I mentioned before in this forum, IBM does not talk about their future plans. The new software and fix packs being released by IBM tell me that they are still supporting OS/2.
Personally I upgraded to Windows 3.1 from OS/2. I found OS/2 hard to install and upgrade, sketchily documented, bloated, and lacking in device drivers.
Personally, when I first tried running Linux it was extremely hard to install, and likewise the documentation was hard to follow and the device driver situation was very poor. As with Linux, this has changed in the current version of OS/2. There are lots of device drivers, a quick check of IBM's OS/2 Device Driver Pack reveals: 6332 products listed in this database. 55 NEW products added in the last 30 days. 947 product entries have been UPDATE in the last 30 days.
So, as I've said before - 55 new and 947 updated device drivers says a lot more about IBM's commitment to OS/2 than the lack of a formal announcement. As for bloated, sure it required more memory than Windows 3 did. That's not to hard to understand considuring that OS/2 included Win3 as a subset of it's features...
Not missed at all. It could have been good but lacked finish.
This statement leads me to beleive that you've gave up on OS/2 before learning the WPS. The only finish it lacked was a spit-polish on the graphics with Pretty icons and such. Microsoft has known all along that most people want something that looks good rather than something that works well.
Wow, your right. There has been OS/2 coverage, an April fools joke and two articles about the Win32-OS2 converter, with lots of discussion about how it could be utilized by Linux users. I wonder how I could have overlooked them:-)
While I appreciate the ability to customize Slashdot to include the headings from OS/2 News and Rumours and Warpcast, the lack of OS/2 coverage at Slashdot has always been a major disappointment. After all, the byline is News for Nerds, not News for Linux Users, and OS/2 users(like myself) tend to be rather nerdly:-)
Anyway, I don't see this as a death knell for OS/2. IBM has a habit of saying NOTHING about what their plans are until it's just about to bear fruit. I suspect this is a result of their dealings with the DOJ, and can only hope that Microsoft will behave in a similiar fashion after the DOJ finishes with them(ie: no more vaporware announcements.) I consider the fact that IBM is still releasing fix packs, and other items for OS/2, to say a lot more about IBM's support of OS/2 than any lack of news from IBM. These items are things such as the just released Java 1.1.8 update and the beta of Netscape 4.6. It's rather hard to pronounce something dead if the vendor is actively updating it.
I suggest waiting to see what comes out at Warpstock (one of those OS/2 related news items I would have expected to see grace Slashdot's front page). IBM plans to have representatives there and I'm sure the OS/2 users will be after them for information. Weither or not it's something us OS/2 users would care to hear remains to be seen.
and the custom circuitry it contained that made Amiga what it was. You cannot just take the Amiga and run it on top of any old OS without losing a criticial piece of what the Amiga was.
Video was one of the things the Amiga did best. The reason it did it best was that the video chip had it's own language(the copper list), and could be made to do things when the raster reached specific locations on the screen. This makes for very smooth animation as you can guarantee the image won't be updated while it's in the middle of being drawn. The screen could also concurrently show multiple resolutions and/or color depths at the same time by changing the settings via the copper list.
On PC's there's no way to know where the scan line is, so the image is often changed while it's still being displayed. This is really noticable when an image is moving left/right as the image will appear to have a seam where the motion isn't in sync.
that we get (I live in Houston) over the earthquakes that California gets. At least with a hurricane you know it's coming and can choose to leave with the important things(friends and family) intact.
The three emulators I've ported to OS/2 (for Atari 2600, Coleco Vision, Sega Master System/Game Gear) only run at the proper speed if the target frame rate is 60fps(or 50fps for PAL based video games). As such, even the oldest console systems could acheive 60fps.
Game consoles running at 320x200 can run non-interlaced, and if they are then they get 60fps. Same as the C=64 did. One of the Genesis' Sonic The Hedgehog games included a two player mode which split the screen in half by going into an interlaced mode. It's extremely noticeble and distracting when the display is interlaced, and as such I'd have to say that 99% of the games on a console are running non-interlaced.
The Playstation has a Link Cable that allows two systems to be linked together for head-to-head games where each system has it's own display. I don't know how many games use it, but the option is there.
What I've read on the Playstation 2 indicates that it will allow you to hook up to a computer monitor as well as an HDTV set. Sure HDTV isn't prevalent at the moment, but I suspect that a lot of sets will be sold in January 2000 for the HDTV broadcast of the Super Bowl. Everyone I know who's seen HDTV sets on display(all the Best Buy's here in Houston have them set up) are extremely impressed with the image quantity and want one as soon as the price drops(current sets are around $8000, new sets coming out this fall will be around $4000)
Of course, the target market for consoles games is not the same as the target market for PC games. Also console games also have the benefit of having a known set of hardware to work with, and can drive the hardware harder than a PC game that has to worry about which video/sound card is currently in the users machine.
As I've learned in my years of programming[egads, did I say that?:-) ], sometimes the time and effort involved in deciphering existing code is better spent rewriting the code from scratch.
I suspect that if a group got together and started to hack out a "truly" open-source browser, where the public peer review starts at the beginning instead of at version 4.x, that something useable would result in fairly short time.
One of my favorite features on the Amiga was the ability to have multiple Screens, similiar in concept to multiple Windows. Unlike most current systems which have virtual desktops which all run at the same resolution/color depth, each Amiga Screen could have a different resolution and/or color depth. Programs could be set up to open on an existing screen, or to create a new screen if their run-time requirements are not met on an existing screen. Great for programs that require a specific color depth which, more often than not, is different than the color depth the desktop is running at.
I've missed that feature for a long time in the current PC world. That is until I made a Be partition on my OS/2 box.
This feature is a boon to web site developers. They can have multiple screens set up with common resolution/color depths. The browser window can then be dragged to the different screens. The program will correctly adjust to the new resolution and color depth, and the site can easily be viewed as it appears under other users' systems.
TI's DLP page has a lot of info. We've got a DLP(Digital Light Processing) projector at work and I am very impressed with the image it produces. Much cleaner than an LCD projector.
Cheap HDTV sooner than you think!
on
PBS Goes Digital
·
· Score: 1
Hauppauge is coming out with a new HDTV tuner for the PC, with an expected list price of $500. Adding the card to your existing PC(and maybe a bigger monitor) is a lot less than the current sets.
This makes one wonder, if Hauppauge can come out with an HDTV tuner card for only $500, then why are the HDTV tuner's for the current sets going for $1500??? (yep - the tuner is sold seperately on a lot of the current HDTV sets)
Hopefully the OS/2 drivers for Hauppauge's WinTV card can be updated to support the new tuner:-)
I have the collector's edition of Fantasia on LD which has a hole punched in it. It was in the "clearance rack" at a store that was clearing out of some of their LD stock a few years back. All clearance items were marked in such a was so as to denote no-return.
At least they were smart enough to take the contents outside of the box before putting the whole in it. The extra's(picture book, etc) would not have survived the drill very well:-)
I've been picking up movies on Laser Disk(LD) for $5-7 a piece.
A couple comments on LD and DVD
The picture quality jump from VHS to LD (75% better) greatly exceeds the picture quality jump from LD to DVD(only 14% better)*
LD quality exceeded broadcast quality for it's day(NTSC), DVD does not(HDTV)
DVD's replacements, HD-DVD and UD-DVD (ultra-definition 4000x2000!), are already in the works. This implies that DVD will have a much shorter lifespan than LD.
* Resolution comparision based on NTSC. For NTSC, all images have 525 lines of vertical resolution. Horizontal resultion varies with the source material: VHS=240, Broadcast=330, LD = 420, DVD = 480. Resolution information from Secrets of Home Theater.
My first Newton was the MP110. It worked well enough, but you quickly ran out of screen when writing longer words on it. The size also limited the amount of information the Newton could display. The screen was monochrome at 320x240
My current Newton is the MP2100, and boy what a difference the slightly larger form makes. The screen is 16 greyscale at 320x480. The DPI is higher on the MP2100, so even though the resolution is twice the MP110, the screen isn't twice as big.
Slashdot Mirror
The second benefit is the Lithium batteries weigh a lot less than alkaline.
The downside is they do cost a bit more than alkaline, about $10 for 4.
I'm a long-time OS/2 user and would like to know:
- OS/2 will have hardware OpenGL support(via the Sci-Tech drivers)
- OpenGL apps port extremely easily
- and Id is behind OpenGL big time
what is the possiblity(In light of the response to 1) of seeing future products ported to OS/2?I also run Linux and BeOS(my Thinkpad 1452 is set to Quad-Boot 98[for DVD movies], OS/2, BeOS, and Linux), but I prefer to use OS/2.
Somebody coming across a Playstation will probably be like somebody coming across an Atari 2600 today. Today we go "cool" and play the old favorites of Adventure, Superman, Space Invaders, Yars Revenge, Breakout, Warlords, etc. In 20 years it'll be "wow" and we'll play our old favorites of Spyro, Crash, Einhander, etc.
Of course, there might be an issue as the transition to HDTV should be complete. NTSC will no longer be a standard and might not be supported by the TV sets of 2019 :-)
Byte has an article this week, OS/2: The Little Engine That Could, that touches on OS ease of installation in OS/2 Is Hard To Install...Not!
My favorite part of this article talkes about the ease of installing OS/2 compared to installing Windows in that OS/2 does not require you to install DOS first to use the CD: Note that in no case do you have to install DOS and a CD driver first, like Microsoft requires for Windows 95, 98, and NT.
I've found this to be true when I've installed 95 on a new machine I built(I used the 95 partition to run Windows software under OS/2 using Win32-OS/2, now known as Odin). I've not installed 98 or NT so I don't know if the DOS requirement is valid for them.
Zecharia Sitchen has written a series of books that cover the existance of Nibiru, a planet with an elliptical orbit that comes close to the earth every 3,600 years. The return of this planet closely parallels jumps in the human experience(beginnings of agriculture, metalworking, etc).
News of the death of OS/2 has been gathering for a while.
News of OS/2's death has been gleefully pronounced by the media on practically an annual basis for quite a number of years. They've been wrong all along, why should this time be any different?
I've yet to see an official IBM statement to this regard, and as I mentioned before in this forum, IBM does not talk about their future plans. The new software and fix packs being released by IBM tell me that they are still supporting OS/2.
Personally I upgraded to Windows 3.1 from OS/2. I found OS/2 hard to install and upgrade, sketchily documented, bloated, and lacking in device drivers.
Personally, when I first tried running Linux it was extremely hard to install, and likewise the documentation was hard to follow and the device driver situation was very poor. As with Linux, this has changed in the current version of OS/2. There are lots of device drivers, a quick check of IBM's OS/2 Device Driver Pack reveals:
6332 products listed in this database.
55 NEW products added in the last 30 days.
947 product entries have been UPDATE in the last 30 days.
So, as I've said before - 55 new and 947 updated device drivers says a lot more about IBM's commitment to OS/2 than the lack of a formal announcement. As for bloated, sure it required more memory than Windows 3 did. That's not to hard to understand considuring that OS/2 included Win3 as a subset of it's features...
Not missed at all. It could have been good but lacked finish.
This statement leads me to beleive that you've gave up on OS/2 before learning the WPS. The only finish it lacked was a spit-polish on the graphics with Pretty icons and such. Microsoft has known all along that most people want something that looks good rather than something that works well.
- OS2/Windows Converter? - well I'll be, OS/2 coverage
:-) - QuickieWorld - no OS/2 coverage, must have hit on the OS-Wars T-Shirt
- Cool PC Cases - no OS/2 reference
- Win32-OS/2 source to be released - well I'll be, OS/2 coverage
:-) - Friday Quickies - a link to a non-OS/2 article at OS/2 E-Zine
- Linux in an OS/2 DOS box! - gee, an April fools joke. I suspect it only made it due to the Linux factor
- RedHat at ZDNet - no OS/2 reference
Wow, your right. There has been OS/2 coverage, an April fools joke and two articles about the Win32-OS2 converter, with lots of discussion about how it could be utilized by Linux users. I wonder how I could have overlooked themWhile I appreciate the ability to customize Slashdot to include the headings from OS/2 News and Rumours and Warpcast, the lack of OS/2 coverage at Slashdot has always been a major disappointment. After all, the byline is News for Nerds, not News for Linux Users, and OS/2 users(like myself) tend to be rather nerdly :-)
Anyway, I don't see this as a death knell for OS/2. IBM has a habit of saying NOTHING about what their plans are until it's just about to bear fruit. I suspect this is a result of their dealings with the DOJ, and can only hope that Microsoft will behave in a similiar fashion after the DOJ finishes with them(ie: no more vaporware announcements.) I consider the fact that IBM is still releasing fix packs, and other items for OS/2, to say a lot more about IBM's support of OS/2 than any lack of news from IBM. These items are things such as the just released Java 1.1.8 update and the beta of Netscape 4.6. It's rather hard to pronounce something dead if the vendor is actively updating it.
I suggest waiting to see what comes out at Warpstock (one of those OS/2 related news items I would have expected to see grace Slashdot's front page). IBM plans to have representatives there and I'm sure the OS/2 users will be after them for information. Weither or not it's something us OS/2 users would care to hear remains to be seen.
The Fullway site has a nice FAQ which mentions this:
Q: Must I modify my playstation in any way ?
A: Our MP3 card supports both modified and un-modified playstations. For un-modified playstation, booting with an original CD is required.
however I don't recall who the company was.
Nerds for News :-)
and the custom circuitry it contained that made Amiga what it was. You cannot just take the Amiga and run it on top of any old OS without losing a criticial piece of what the Amiga was.
Video was one of the things the Amiga did best. The reason it did it best was that the video chip had it's own language(the copper list), and could be made to do things when the raster reached specific locations on the screen. This makes for very smooth animation as you can guarantee the image won't be updated while it's in the middle of being drawn. The screen could also concurrently show multiple resolutions and/or color depths at the same time by changing the settings via the copper list.
On PC's there's no way to know where the scan line is, so the image is often changed while it's still being displayed. This is really noticable when an image is moving left/right as the image will appear to have a seam where the motion isn't in sync.
that we get (I live in Houston) over the earthquakes that California gets. At least with a hurricane you know it's coming and can choose to leave with the important things(friends and family) intact.
They got smart and dropped NT?!?!
Does this mean we have to take Army Intelligence off the Official Oxymoron List :-)
I think it would be a mistake to diverge from X, it's networkable capabilities are unique and is one of the reason's I'm interested in Linux.
The three emulators I've ported to OS/2 (for Atari 2600, Coleco Vision, Sega Master System/Game Gear) only run at the proper speed if the target frame rate is 60fps(or 50fps for PAL based video games). As such, even the oldest console systems could acheive 60fps.
Game consoles running at 320x200 can run non-interlaced, and if they are then they get 60fps. Same as the C=64 did. One of the Genesis' Sonic The Hedgehog games included a two player mode which split the screen in half by going into an interlaced mode. It's extremely noticeble and distracting when the display is interlaced, and as such I'd have to say that 99% of the games on a console are running non-interlaced.
The Playstation has a Link Cable that allows two systems to be linked together for head-to-head games where each system has it's own display. I don't know how many games use it, but the option is there.
What I've read on the Playstation 2 indicates that it will allow you to hook up to a computer monitor as well as an HDTV set. Sure HDTV isn't prevalent at the moment, but I suspect that a lot of sets will be sold in January 2000 for the HDTV broadcast of the Super Bowl. Everyone I know who's seen HDTV sets on display(all the Best Buy's here in Houston have them set up) are extremely impressed with the image quantity and want one as soon as the price drops(current sets are around $8000, new sets coming out this fall will be around $4000)
Of course, the target market for consoles games is not the same as the target market for PC games. Also console games also have the benefit of having a known set of hardware to work with, and can drive the hardware harder than a PC game that has to worry about which video/sound card is currently in the users machine.
As I've learned in my years of programming[egads, did I say that? :-) ], sometimes the time and effort involved in deciphering existing code is better spent rewriting the code from scratch.
I suspect that if a group got together and started to hack out a "truly" open-source browser, where the public peer review starts at the beginning instead of at version 4.x, that something useable would result in fairly short time.
One of my favorite features on the Amiga was the ability to have multiple Screens, similiar in concept to multiple Windows. Unlike most current systems which have virtual desktops which all run at the same resolution/color depth, each Amiga Screen could have a different resolution and/or color depth. Programs could be set up to open on an existing screen, or to create a new screen if their run-time requirements are not met on an existing screen. Great for programs that require a specific color depth which, more often than not, is different than the color depth the desktop is running at.
I've missed that feature for a long time in the current PC world. That is until I made a Be partition on my OS/2 box.
This feature is a boon to web site developers. They can have multiple screens set up with common resolution/color depths. The browser window can then be dragged to the different screens. The program will correctly adjust to the new resolution and color depth, and the site can easily be viewed as it appears under other users' systems.
TI's DLP page has a lot of info. We've got a DLP(Digital Light Processing) projector at work and I am very impressed with the image it produces. Much cleaner than an LCD projector.
Hauppauge is coming out with a new HDTV tuner for the PC, with an expected list price of $500. Adding the card to your existing PC(and maybe a bigger monitor) is a lot less than the current sets.
This makes one wonder, if Hauppauge can come out with an HDTV tuner card for only $500, then why are the HDTV tuner's for the current sets going for $1500??? (yep - the tuner is sold seperately on a lot of the current HDTV sets)
Hopefully the OS/2 drivers for Hauppauge's WinTV card can be updated to support the new tuner :-)
I have the collector's edition of Fantasia on LD which has a hole punched in it. It was in the "clearance rack" at a store that was clearing out of some of their LD stock a few years back. All clearance items were marked in such a was so as to denote no-return.
At least they were smart enough to take the contents outside of the box before putting the whole in it. The extra's(picture book, etc) would not have survived the drill very well :-)
I've been picking up movies on Laser Disk(LD) for $5-7 a piece.
A couple comments on LD and DVD
* Resolution comparision based on NTSC. For NTSC, all images have 525 lines of vertical resolution. Horizontal resultion varies with the source material: VHS=240, Broadcast=330, LD = 420, DVD = 480. Resolution information from Secrets of Home Theater.
My first Newton was the MP110. It worked well enough, but you quickly ran out of screen when writing longer words on it. The size also limited the amount of information the Newton could display. The screen was monochrome at 320x240
My current Newton is the MP2100, and boy what a difference the slightly larger form makes. The screen is 16 greyscale at 320x480. The DPI is higher on the MP2100, so even though the resolution is twice the MP110, the screen isn't twice as big.
they are instead running some variation of Windows:-) As such, they don't gain the power benefits of the CPU's idle state.
off-topic: battery life on laptops is one place that OS/2 and Linux really shine at :-)