Actually, there were DOS compatibility options from early in the Mac product life. I remember MacCharlie, a full coprocessor system that ran MSDOS, I think it might have worked even with the original Mac128 but I don't recall. I do recall selling a few units of MacCharlie at my dealership.
What's this about how Wired "accepts contributions from anyone, anywhere"...? You're absolutely kidding, right? Wired is a closed circle, one big circle-jerk of cronies. I call them the "Wired Mafia." The content is all the same people, all the same circle of friends. It's the first group-think magazine.
You are kidding, right? Service is getting to the point where all they say is "throw it away and get a new one." In the early days of microcomputers, we used to do component level repair, for example, diagnosing and replacing individual memory chips, or replacing individual chips on disk drive controllers. It's been many years since that was discontinued in favor of swapping out whole circuit boards. And now that is becoming rare, it's rarely cost effective to replace boards, now the techs just tell you to throw the whole unit away and get a new one. This is a major problem, the IT industry is not manufacturing technology products, they are manufacturing garbage heaps full of unrepairable electronic junk. I would rather buy repairable products that have a longer life, than to pay less for disposable junk.
I always thought the Lena image was a particularly bad test image. It was scanned from a halftone screened CMYK magazine page, which means it had a restricted gamut before it ever went into a scanner, and this was an early, primitive scanner. It is preferable to use an original continuous-tone slide or photographic print scanned by modern equipment for a test image.
Yep, that image has it all, the MacBeth and IT8 charts in the middle, the Kodak step wedges underneath, and several "Shirleys" on the bottom. Everything else is pretty useless.
I'd personally recommend using just the MacBeth and IT8 charts without all the other bullshit.
For many years, Photographers have used test shots of women, they nicknamed her Shirley for no reason I've ever been able to figure out. Oftentimes the woman is a pale redhead, as those particular skin and hair tones are hard to render in print, but easy to see if they are not rendered correctly. Skin tones tend to be pale and even a slight miscalibration will cause dramatic color shifts. After working in prepress a few years, I found that I can tell if a color separation is OK just by looking at the individual C M Y and K negatives, if I look at skin tones in a face. In that regard, one of my favorite test images is "Ole No Moire" that used to come in versions of Photoshop (I don't think it comes in current versions, I haven't seen it in years). Ole no Moire also has step wedges on the image. The one thing it won't do is test out the fancier PostScript features, it's just a bitmap image. I like to create my own step wedge charts in Adobe Illustrator, so I can test exactly the features I want to see. There are other sorts of high-tech test images, like the IT8 test pattern. Of course, a printout of this is absolutely unintelligible except to a colorimeter, but if you have a full color calibration system, these are essential. A more general color guide used by photographers is the MacBeth ColorChart, which is a set of 24 basic colors and greys, they're all chosen carefully so that if the color balance is wrong, at least one color will stand out as mismatched when you compare it to the original chart.
Yep, that was the first thing I thought of. Why bother sending up a complex piloted aircraft to lift a rocket into the upper atmosphere? All you need is the altitude. Just float it up on a baloon, when it gets up high enough, blast off. I poked around the research papers and it doesn't look like anyone's launched any serious rockoons since the first 1957-60 experiments by Van Allen. I guess baloons don't have enough Right Stuff compared to piloted aircraft and air-launch platforms.
The screen shot looks more like the notoriously bad ColorStudio interface, back from the days of Photoshop 1.0. Now that's really awful, not being as good as v1.0 products in a market that's up to v8.0 or more.
I've been doing that for years. I just flip the plastic light switch on my wall, the single polymer molecule in the plastic switch knob seems to turn the lights on and off quite nicely.
CRTs still rule some markets
on
Are CRTs History?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
In many segments of the market, CRTs are still the standard, and as long as these markets demand CRTs, there will be a supply. For example, most critical prepress, photography, and design work is still best done on CRTs, LCDs don't have sufficient gamut, color accuracy, or consistency across the entire screen compared to CRTs. So manufacturers like LaCie are producing CRTs with advanced color calibration features that are unmatched by any LCD on the market. I'll stick with CRTs for now. I'm still using a Sony Multiscan 300sf that I bought for big money sometime around 1994, it's still in perfect shape. I don't expect any LCDs to hold up for 10 years. I first used this screen on a Mac IIcx, then on a Mac 8100/110, and now on my dual 1Ghz G4. I expect to use it when I buy a new dual G5 Mac in a few months. Hell, I expect it might still be in perfect shape when I buy a G6. Sony Trinitrons last forever. Best money I ever spent.
I read your entire reply, and it is meaningless gibberish. You're obviously no physicist, or the concept of determinism in measuring radioactive decay would not be any part of your argument. Go study Heisenberg. And then go study some mathematics and cryptography, and come back with an explanation about why you need deterministic processes to produce randomness. Hint: you don't.
Please elaborate on the specific mathematics of your allegation, so I can submit an application to revoke Werner Heisenberg's 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics, and have it re-awarded to you.
I don't understand why people think it's so expensive to make a circuit that produces truly random numbers. Radioactive decay is the absolute gold standard of randomness. I remember seeing a project in someplace like Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar that showed how to use a small radioactive source as a randomness generator, IIRC the total cost was about $25. You can buy commercial radioactive random generators for about $150, for example the RM-60 from: http://www.aw-el.com/ If any hardware manufacturer wanted to incorporate this sort of feature into a chip, it would probably cost about $5 in mass quantities. But the general PC market hasn't demanded this level of true randomness.
I've seen old overheads in almost every thrift store I've visited lately. They're all over the place. I bet you'd find them at flea markets and almost every other used crap sale on earth.
Well, it was a long time ago when I was a coder, but I not only read Knuth, our team used his code structures as the fundamental design of portions of our software. We turned some of his code into libraries so we didn't have to reinvent Knuth's wheel over and over. Our basic required-reading-and-comprehension bookset was Knuth's Vol 3 Searching and Sorting, and Wirth's "Data Structures + Algorithms = Programs." Our design and code teams spent a lot of time discussing these books and implementing the ideas, and our code always turned out really clean.
Yeah, I used to have a multimeter, back when I was young and foolish. Then after a few near-death experiences with electrocution, I refused to work with any electrics ever again. Then someone swiped my multimeter and I never replaced it. If I need electric work, I'll hire a pro, or just throw it away and get a new one.
I checked into the story of the bad cables back when it happened. It was hard to get details, but I finally found out part of the story. One guy at the cable assembly plant, a new hire at a subcontractor, misunderstood the cable wiring instructions, and every single cable he made was defective. I was unable to determine how large a percentage of the total cable production run was defective, but it was rumored to be about 25% of the all cables produced during the time this guy was working production. ALL the cables were wired in such a way that they would smoke and burn. Many wiring fires were reported in newly delivered IBM PCs before the source was discovered. IBM wasn't too specific on the nature of the defect, it wasn't just a short, it was some odd thing that wouldn't trip the breaker, but would melt the cable and catch fire. Yes, I could go out and buy a continuity tester to solve the problem, if I was interested in spending money to salvage 25 cables I never use anyway. I've started accumulating a NEW box of power cords I never use. I'm going to throw out all the old cords in a couple months when I move. I just hope nobody salvages them from the trash.
I have a box of misc cables, I sorted it and found 25 spare power cords. But ONE of the cables is suspect. Back in the early days of the IBM PC, they announced a major recall of power cords. Tens of thousands of power cords were shipped before it was discovered one idiot worker was wiring the hot wire directly to ground, and would definitely cause a short, maybe a fire. The store I worked pulled all the defective cables before they got to customers, but not before one got to ME. I am certain that one of my spare cables is one of the recalled cables, but I have never been able to determine which one. I never used the cable, it went right into my spares box before I learned of the recall. So I'm afraid of touching ANY of my spare power cords, for fear of playing russian roulette.
OK, I'll buy that, if there is some logical reason why irrational numbers NEVER repeat. The Mathworld page either doesn't explain that, or explains it so cryptically I didn't get it. I even searched linked pages about cyclical numbers, decimal expansion, etc. Now I remember why I didn't take second-year calculus.
Reason? Pi isn't a random sequence, it's a ratio, like 80/81. Go find an extended precision calculator and you'll find 80/81 equals 0.98765432109876543210... and it is my conjecture that Pi shows a similar repeat, although vastly extended due to it being a limit of sums of ratios.. jeez it's been a long time since I took calculus, or I'd have a better way to express this. Sorry.
A truly random number is statistically required to repeat sequences of such and such small fraction of the size of the number.
It is a conjecture, its a bad one. Infinitely long random numbers beg for really long repeated sequences.
Perhaps I explained my conjecture badly. I'm not talking about repeats of long sequences, I'm talking about a repeat of the ENTIRE sequence of digits up to the point of repeat. Given that Pi is an infinitely long sequence, it cannot help but repeat. But this all depends on math of cardinal infinites that is beyond my abilities. A math geek would know this stuff off the top of their head.
Of COURSE Pi isn't random, it's a transcendental number with no end. And I have a crackpot theory about that.
Most representations of Pi start like 3.141592653589793... but Pi will run on to an infinite number of digits. HOWEVER, somewhere, someplace way WAY down the sequence, it will certainly start repeating the ENTIRE sequence again, like 3.14159....3141592653589793.... Sure you'll find a short number of substrings of Pi's digits, but if you could truly calculate it out to infinity, surely at some point you'd find Pi is a repeating number.
A truly random number would never repeat a sequence no matter how many digits were in the sequence.
Some math-head, please check my conjecture. If it isn't based on a totally bad premise, please accept it as "Sakusha's Conjecture" and I await its proof sometime in the next century or two.
I noticed that if you try to buy an iPod through Amazon.com, it ships from an affiliated vendor: Tiger Direct. And it's much cheaper than the Apple Store. Watch their source of supply dry up instantly. You can't work with Apple and against Apple at the same time and expect to get away with it.
It is obvious that Tiger direct has been well aware of Apple's policies and strategies for a long time. There's no reason for them to have filed this lawsuit now, except to piggyback Apple's publicity. This suit will be quashed quickly.
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Actually, there were DOS compatibility options from early in the Mac product life. I remember MacCharlie, a full coprocessor system that ran MSDOS, I think it might have worked even with the original Mac128 but I don't recall. I do recall selling a few units of MacCharlie at my dealership.
You don't have to buy the magazine to buy a vision of the future.
What's this about how Wired "accepts contributions from anyone, anywhere"...? You're absolutely kidding, right? Wired is a closed circle, one big circle-jerk of cronies. I call them the "Wired Mafia." The content is all the same people, all the same circle of friends. It's the first group-think magazine.
Make her pay for the laptop out of her own pocket. I guarantee she'll take a LOT better care of it if it's HER money that paid for it.
You are kidding, right? Service is getting to the point where all they say is "throw it away and get a new one."
In the early days of microcomputers, we used to do component level repair, for example, diagnosing and replacing individual memory chips, or replacing individual chips on disk drive controllers. It's been many years since that was discontinued in favor of swapping out whole circuit boards. And now that is becoming rare, it's rarely cost effective to replace boards, now the techs just tell you to throw the whole unit away and get a new one.
This is a major problem, the IT industry is not manufacturing technology products, they are manufacturing garbage heaps full of unrepairable electronic junk. I would rather buy repairable products that have a longer life, than to pay less for disposable junk.
I always thought the Lena image was a particularly bad test image. It was scanned from a halftone screened CMYK magazine page, which means it had a restricted gamut before it ever went into a scanner, and this was an early, primitive scanner.
It is preferable to use an original continuous-tone slide or photographic print scanned by modern equipment for a test image.
Yep, that image has it all, the MacBeth and IT8 charts in the middle, the Kodak step wedges underneath, and several "Shirleys" on the bottom. Everything else is pretty useless.
I'd personally recommend using just the MacBeth and IT8 charts without all the other bullshit.
For many years, Photographers have used test shots of women, they nicknamed her Shirley for no reason I've ever been able to figure out. Oftentimes the woman is a pale redhead, as those particular skin and hair tones are hard to render in print, but easy to see if they are not rendered correctly. Skin tones tend to be pale and even a slight miscalibration will cause dramatic color shifts. After working in prepress a few years, I found that I can tell if a color separation is OK just by looking at the individual C M Y and K negatives, if I look at skin tones in a face.
In that regard, one of my favorite test images is "Ole No Moire" that used to come in versions of Photoshop (I don't think it comes in current versions, I haven't seen it in years). Ole no Moire also has step wedges on the image. The one thing it won't do is test out the fancier PostScript features, it's just a bitmap image. I like to create my own step wedge charts in Adobe Illustrator, so I can test exactly the features I want to see.
There are other sorts of high-tech test images, like the IT8 test pattern. Of course, a printout of this is absolutely unintelligible except to a colorimeter, but if you have a full color calibration system, these are essential. A more general color guide used by photographers is the MacBeth ColorChart, which is a set of 24 basic colors and greys, they're all chosen carefully so that if the color balance is wrong, at least one color will stand out as mismatched when you compare it to the original chart.
Yep, that was the first thing I thought of. Why bother sending up a complex piloted aircraft to lift a rocket into the upper atmosphere? All you need is the altitude. Just float it up on a baloon, when it gets up high enough, blast off.
I poked around the research papers and it doesn't look like anyone's launched any serious rockoons since the first 1957-60 experiments by Van Allen. I guess baloons don't have enough Right Stuff compared to piloted aircraft and air-launch platforms.
The screen shot looks more like the notoriously bad ColorStudio interface, back from the days of Photoshop 1.0. Now that's really awful, not being as good as v1.0 products in a market that's up to v8.0 or more.
I've been doing that for years. I just flip the plastic light switch on my wall, the single polymer molecule in the plastic switch knob seems to turn the lights on and off quite nicely.
In many segments of the market, CRTs are still the standard, and as long as these markets demand CRTs, there will be a supply. For example, most critical prepress, photography, and design work is still best done on CRTs, LCDs don't have sufficient gamut, color accuracy, or consistency across the entire screen compared to CRTs. So manufacturers like LaCie are producing CRTs with advanced color calibration features that are unmatched by any LCD on the market.
I'll stick with CRTs for now. I'm still using a Sony Multiscan 300sf that I bought for big money sometime around 1994, it's still in perfect shape. I don't expect any LCDs to hold up for 10 years. I first used this screen on a Mac IIcx, then on a Mac 8100/110, and now on my dual 1Ghz G4. I expect to use it when I buy a new dual G5 Mac in a few months. Hell, I expect it might still be in perfect shape when I buy a G6. Sony Trinitrons last forever. Best money I ever spent.
I read your entire reply, and it is meaningless gibberish. You're obviously no physicist, or the concept of determinism in measuring radioactive decay would not be any part of your argument. Go study Heisenberg. And then go study some mathematics and cryptography, and come back with an explanation about why you need deterministic processes to produce randomness. Hint: you don't.
Please elaborate on the specific mathematics of your allegation, so I can submit an application to revoke Werner Heisenberg's 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics, and have it re-awarded to you.
I don't understand why people think it's so expensive to make a circuit that produces truly random numbers. Radioactive decay is the absolute gold standard of randomness. I remember seeing a project in someplace like Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar that showed how to use a small radioactive source as a randomness generator, IIRC the total cost was about $25. You can buy commercial radioactive random generators for about $150, for example the RM-60 from:
http://www.aw-el.com/
If any hardware manufacturer wanted to incorporate this sort of feature into a chip, it would probably cost about $5 in mass quantities. But the general PC market hasn't demanded this level of true randomness.
I've seen old overheads in almost every thrift store I've visited lately. They're all over the place. I bet you'd find them at flea markets and almost every other used crap sale on earth.
Did you even try to find one before posting?
Well, it was a long time ago when I was a coder, but I not only read Knuth, our team used his code structures as the fundamental design of portions of our software. We turned some of his code into libraries so we didn't have to reinvent Knuth's wheel over and over. Our basic required-reading-and-comprehension bookset was Knuth's Vol 3 Searching and Sorting, and Wirth's "Data Structures + Algorithms = Programs." Our design and code teams spent a lot of time discussing these books and implementing the ideas, and our code always turned out really clean.
Yeah, I used to have a multimeter, back when I was young and foolish. Then after a few near-death experiences with electrocution, I refused to work with any electrics ever again. Then someone swiped my multimeter and I never replaced it. If I need electric work, I'll hire a pro, or just throw it away and get a new one.
I checked into the story of the bad cables back when it happened. It was hard to get details, but I finally found out part of the story. One guy at the cable assembly plant, a new hire at a subcontractor, misunderstood the cable wiring instructions, and every single cable he made was defective. I was unable to determine how large a percentage of the total cable production run was defective, but it was rumored to be about 25% of the all cables produced during the time this guy was working production. ALL the cables were wired in such a way that they would smoke and burn. Many wiring fires were reported in newly delivered IBM PCs before the source was discovered. IBM wasn't too specific on the nature of the defect, it wasn't just a short, it was some odd thing that wouldn't trip the breaker, but would melt the cable and catch fire.
Yes, I could go out and buy a continuity tester to solve the problem, if I was interested in spending money to salvage 25 cables I never use anyway. I've started accumulating a NEW box of power cords I never use. I'm going to throw out all the old cords in a couple months when I move. I just hope nobody salvages them from the trash.
I have a box of misc cables, I sorted it and found 25 spare power cords. But ONE of the cables is suspect. Back in the early days of the IBM PC, they announced a major recall of power cords. Tens of thousands of power cords were shipped before it was discovered one idiot worker was wiring the hot wire directly to ground, and would definitely cause a short, maybe a fire. The store I worked pulled all the defective cables before they got to customers, but not before one got to ME. I am certain that one of my spare cables is one of the recalled cables, but I have never been able to determine which one. I never used the cable, it went right into my spares box before I learned of the recall. So I'm afraid of touching ANY of my spare power cords, for fear of playing russian roulette.
OK, I'll buy that, if there is some logical reason why irrational numbers NEVER repeat. The Mathworld page either doesn't explain that, or explains it so cryptically I didn't get it. I even searched linked pages about cyclical numbers, decimal expansion, etc. Now I remember why I didn't take second-year calculus.
Reason? Pi isn't a random sequence, it's a ratio, like 80/81. Go find an extended precision calculator and you'll find 80/81 equals 0.98765432109876543210... and it is my conjecture that Pi shows a similar repeat, although vastly extended due to it being a limit of sums of ratios.. jeez it's been a long time since I took calculus, or I'd have a better way to express this. Sorry.
Perhaps I explained my conjecture badly. I'm not talking about repeats of long sequences, I'm talking about a repeat of the ENTIRE sequence of digits up to the point of repeat. Given that Pi is an infinitely long sequence, it cannot help but repeat. But this all depends on math of cardinal infinites that is beyond my abilities. A math geek would know this stuff off the top of their head.
Of COURSE Pi isn't random, it's a transcendental number with no end. And I have a crackpot theory about that.
Most representations of Pi start like 3.141592653589793... but Pi will run on to an infinite number of digits. HOWEVER, somewhere, someplace way WAY down the sequence, it will certainly start repeating the ENTIRE sequence again, like 3.14159....3141592653589793....
Sure you'll find a short number of substrings of Pi's digits, but if you could truly calculate it out to infinity, surely at some point you'd find Pi is a repeating number.
A truly random number would never repeat a sequence no matter how many digits were in the sequence.
Some math-head, please check my conjecture. If it isn't based on a totally bad premise, please accept it as "Sakusha's Conjecture" and I await its proof sometime in the next century or two.
I noticed that if you try to buy an iPod through Amazon.com, it ships from an affiliated vendor: Tiger Direct. And it's much cheaper than the Apple Store. Watch their source of supply dry up instantly. You can't work with Apple and against Apple at the same time and expect to get away with it.
It is obvious that Tiger direct has been well aware of Apple's policies and strategies for a long time. There's no reason for them to have filed this lawsuit now, except to piggyback Apple's publicity. This suit will be quashed quickly.