Now don't laugh, but this guy really needs a mimeograph machine. I saw the perfect machine for this guy, a digital 4-color mimeograph, at a conference about 10 years ago. I went to a computer conference for school tech admins, some company (I forgot who) was demoing a high-speed CMYK mimeograph that had digital input in PostScript. I guess they figured schools were familiar with mimeography and were prepared for this weird hybrid beast. This was back in the early days of direct-to-plate, and they'd adapted their mimeo machines to direct-to-stencil. It was designed for large-run 4color low rez jobs, and produced about newspaper-quality CMYK printing on plain paper. The system laser-etched all 4 colors of mimeo stencils right in place on the roller, then at the end of the run, you had to pull the stencils off the roller and toss them. They ran it for a few seconds and it cranked out pages at an astonishing rate.
I never thought much about high-end mimeography until a few years later when I spent a few months in Japan attending school. The office had two B&W copy machines, one regular copier, and one for long runs. The long-run machine was an advanced mimeograph, similar to the fancy 4C one I'd seen at the show years earlier. I was told it was cheaper to use a mimeo for 25+ pages, but it would cost more if you only wanted 1 or 2 pages, due to the extra cost of the dispoable stencils. But ultimately, this guy just needs to buy a real printing press, or job out the work to the local instant printers. Using laser printers for a mass printing job is wasteful of resources. Your laser printer consumes a hell of a lot more electricity and expensive consumables than your local ink-and-paper instant printer facilty. Save the environment, support your local pressman!
There is a lot more to printing than writing device drivers. I've been using CUPS on MacOS X for quite a while, since there are no other drivers for my old Epson 1520. I'm a bit dissatisfied with the color management abilities of CUPS. Sure it has custom color tables, but no real way to integrate with Colorsync or other color profiling systems. I can turn off all color management in CUPS, hoping it prints a relatively neutral profile, and then let Colorsync work it's profile to that, but you don't really get the full dynamic range compared to real official Epson drivers with real official Colorsync. So I'm not even getting as good quality color output and matching as with MacOS 9. Oh well, I suppose I'll have to get a new printer with proper drivers one of these days, but I like my old 4color printer for press proofing, I can't stand 6 or 7 color printer proofs when I'm targeting CMYK film output.
Did they even THINK about what their law means? Pro-cop games would be banned too. Any game with cops as the protagonist also have to include criminals who would attempt to commit violence against the cops. So no more "Darryl Gates SWAT 3 Elite Edition" either.
Actually, I remember ONE Mac128 PS that died. I didn't count it because it was a constantly running demo machine, inside a display case in our front window that was closed up and got up to 120 degrees in the summer. I figured this shouldn't count, it died because of deliberate abuse. Maybe I'm just lucky, I've never owned a single piece of Apple hardware that failed, and most of my customers can say exactly the same thing.
Apple has always had a major thing about its power supplies. This goes way back to the earliest days of the company. I was a repair tech back in the early days of the Apple II, one of the highest failure rates was the power supply. There was no reset switch so people liked to flip the switch on and off to reset the A2 when it hung. This resulted in a ton of switch failures, and of course the PS was a closed module, and being an official Apple repair center, we couldn't just replace the $3 switch, we had to swap the $80 power supply. The result was a lot of disgruntled customers. Since that time, Apple has always overkilled the design of their PS units. They're always more reliable than anything you'd find in a pee cee. While I'm no longer a HW tech, I've dealt with hundreds of macs since '84 and I've never even HEARD of a unit with a PS failure.
You can change the frequency 100k times per second, but as long as you're broadcasting, your position can always be detected. You don't need to decode the content, you just need to know their location. It's not armies like the Iraqis you need to worry about. It's the Russians and Chinese you need to worry about, their spies already stole our codes.
Come to think of it, they don't even need to crack the codes. If the units continuously broadcast position info via radio, standard radio location techniques would be sufficient. You wouldn't necessarily be able to tell which units were high-value targets, but it's enough of a risk. Maybe small burst transmissions would do the job, but these units seem to be in continuous communication.
Isn't it a little risky to put location transponders on all your military units? If the enemy cracks your transponder codes, they can easily target you.
I heard exactly this same sort of story when I was living in downtown LA and the Whittier Quake happened (6.1 on the Richter scale IIRC). I wonder when that was, hmm.. must've been around 85 or 86? They said the Whittier Fault had the same potential to liquify the downtown subsoil. When it hit, I was in an unreinforced brick building just a couple of miles from the epicenter, I couldn't believe how much the ceiling beams shook, I thought the building was about to collapse. But anyway, I wonder just what is the big picture, there are a other newly discovered faults like the Whittier fault right through the downtown area, that's probably how that area originally became the flatter LA basin area, due to the repeated liquefaction of soil during quakes and subsequent resettling.
He was pretty much responsible for creating the current Japanese system of government.
Umm.. NO. The Japanese Constitution was written by a bunch of international scholars who worked in the Occupation forces as technical advisors, including the famous Viennese woman Beate Sirota, who managed to slip in the women's suffrage clause (despite vehement Japanese objections). The Japanese constitution was drawn from various historic constitutions of the US, Russia, Germany, and France, amongst others. Go read "Embracing Defeat" by John Dower if you want the full story.
Don't forget that the Japanese models of the Zaurus also have handwriting input for English characters, not just kanji. I've never seen anything as accurate as the kanji recognition in my Zaurus, and I have an ancient model (PI-6600). Beginners might be afraid of the kanji input because you have to enter in correct stroke order. And they're right, the Zaurus is not for beginners, if only because there are no English menus. But for intermediate and advanced students, they're great. You get to a point where you can correctly draw almost any kanji you see, even unfamiliar ones, and that makes it incredibly rapid and easy to use.
Why are you even considering the world editions of the Zaurus? The Japanese models have full support for Japanese chars, plus nice dictionaries. But these models are sold only inside Japan (or through gray market), the world models don't have equivalent features.
I poked around the site and didn't see much of anything I could read and study. Seems to be a bunch of placeholders for old classes that are closed and expired, and private content not yet released.
Yes, you're right, the preannouncement wasn't really what killed the company. I commented about this somewhere else in the thread. Osborne gave a lot of latitude to his management, perhaps more than he should have. Like that bit about spending $1Million to buy parts to finish $150k of old motherboards into computers. A few "small" blunders like this as you're cash-poor and transitioning to a new product line, and your "professional" management have driven your company into the ground. Other companies of that day, like Kaypro, weren't much better. A lot of them had trouble managing growth. I remember when Kaypro discovered they had several million dollars in unreturned service parts sitting in dealerships like mine. They put out an urgent call to clear out all parts destined for return to their parts depot, IIRC they collected over $10M and the incoming parts arrived in such volume they had to put up tents in the parking lot to sort them all out. Turned out that a huge percentage of Kaypro's capital was tied up in just unrepaired parts. Ooops.
A friend of mine had an Osborne 1, that was some of the first paid work I did with computers, getting his Wordstar and Mailmerge cranking out direct mail, and stuffing envelopes. I can still feel the eyestrain from working on that dinky TV monitor, and the mental strain of trying to do word processing in a 40col environment. One of my first real professional gigs was as an Osborne technician. I was a specialist in getting the floppy drives working, which was a lot of work getting the guts assembled and disassembled correctly, it was so jammed together it was a tech's nightmare. And they got bashed around a lot so everyone needed a lot of service on the floppies, which weren't built for that kind of abuse. I still have videotapes of osborne service procedures, they were recorded on some odd video format, IVHS, and we had to buy a special player to use them. Apparently this was some early form of copy protection. People loved their osbornes, I had a lot of clients that attached the early Corvus 20Mb and 5Mb hard drives, and just unplugged for portable use. It was nice kit, but Kaypro aggressively moved into low-end CPM portables and ate up that market. When the Compaq came out, it pretty much killed any market for CPM portables. What I remember most about Adam Osborne was as a writer. I first learned programming and digital circuitry from Osborne's early microprocessor books, I still have the books and now they're collector's items. I remember buying his business memoir "Hypergrowth" for 99 cents on the remainders shelf, and thinking how ironic that was. Osborne was a model for early information businesses, they aggregated money around people with ideas and the ability to publish them and mass produce. And he was also a parable for the dotcom era's excesses and of drinking too much of one's own koolaid. I still remember Osborne's story of shutting down the production of the Osborne 1. The announcement of the Osborne II killed the prior model sales, causing a premature cash crunch as they tried to dump the last of the old generation. Since that day, the damage caused by prematurely announcing new models and cannibalizing existing sales has been known as "the Osborne effect." Some quantity like $150k of motherboards were left over when the old line was killed, but they'd run out of plastic bezels and case parts, so the $150k of PCBs were left in stock, unused, with no way to turn them into complete machines. Some middle manager got the idea to order new bezels, but the dies had all been discarded. He authorized new production, and by the time his activities came to light, he's spent some insane amount like over a million bucks making new dies so he could make bezels to make those $150k of motherboards into a salable product. Product nobody wanted anyway. Ooops.
This is a stupid idea. They say that air conditioning is inefficient, but they could have easily done it efficiently with ductwork. I've worked with quick-couplings on megawatt lasers, and I can just give em one tip: couplings fail more often than computers. Just wait til they spring a leak because some idiot forgets to twist the ring properly, and he floods the whole rack.
I miss the old Journal of the New York Academy of the Sciences, a/k/a The Sciences. It was an incredibly entertaining magazine, and illustrated solely with fine art. It surely must have been a major undertaking for an art director to illustrate articles about abstract math & physics, biology, etc. solely with paintings, sculpture, etc. but it worked incredibly well, it was inspiring. But alas the NYAS ran into hard economic times and suspended the magazine. There is some discussion of bringing it back.
Liberty = Big Brother knows all Freedom = Imprisonment Life = Death
Re:I didn't know liberals were so easy to alienate
on
Salon Asks for Help
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Hey, it's not the printing of hyperconservatives that offends the Salon readers. There are plenty of outlets for their writings (and most of what appears in Salon has already been published elsewhere). Its being expected to PAY someone to insult me. I refuse to subsidize hatemongers like Horowitz. If Salon dies because of it, tough shit, they should have known better. And BTW Mr. AC, what ever makes you think the WaPo is a liberal newspaper? Even Woodward is a suckup to Bush.
Salon committed suicide by alienating its core readership of liberals, when they brought on hyperconservatives like Sullivan and Horowitz. Note to editors: if you don't want to lose your subscribers, don't print essays that call them treasonous and anti-american. You could see the writing on the wall when Salon hooked up with notorious blowhard Dave Winer. I bet they threw $200k down the Userland rathole, that would have been enough to pay the rent.
Ah.. Well, it was my understanding that they're making new chips with full code compatibility but smaller support systems. IIRC, I saw a full Z80 system with video out that could be done with 5 chips, but that was a long time ago. I haven't worked with that sort of hardware in ages, so my memory could be wrong, of course.
Damn, you beat me to it, I was going to point out iSync. Palm is a special case, their engineers are primarily some ex-Apple employees, and they hate Steve Jobs. They deliberately botched Mac compatibility. So Apple stepped in and fixed the problem with iSync. And it's FREE. But it doesn't seem like iSync is this guy's solution, he sounds like he's running OS 9. Yes, OS 9 is dying, but not Apple. By this same logic, Microsoft is dying because Windows 95 is losing market share.
I weep when I read "Stars need to look elsewhere to finance the rock-star lifestyle." NOT. Impoverished singer whines she can't afford Vera Wang designer dresses anymore. Tough shit.
Slashdot Mirror
Now don't laugh, but this guy really needs a mimeograph machine. I saw the perfect machine for this guy, a digital 4-color mimeograph, at a conference about 10 years ago. I went to a computer conference for school tech admins, some company (I forgot who) was demoing a high-speed CMYK mimeograph that had digital input in PostScript. I guess they figured schools were familiar with mimeography and were prepared for this weird hybrid beast. This was back in the early days of direct-to-plate, and they'd adapted their mimeo machines to direct-to-stencil. It was designed for large-run 4color low rez jobs, and produced about newspaper-quality CMYK printing on plain paper. The system laser-etched all 4 colors of mimeo stencils right in place on the roller, then at the end of the run, you had to pull the stencils off the roller and toss them. They ran it for a few seconds and it cranked out pages at an astonishing rate.
I never thought much about high-end mimeography until a few years later when I spent a few months in Japan attending school. The office had two B&W copy machines, one regular copier, and one for long runs. The long-run machine was an advanced mimeograph, similar to the fancy 4C one I'd seen at the show years earlier. I was told it was cheaper to use a mimeo for 25+ pages, but it would cost more if you only wanted 1 or 2 pages, due to the extra cost of the dispoable stencils.
But ultimately, this guy just needs to buy a real printing press, or job out the work to the local instant printers. Using laser printers for a mass printing job is wasteful of resources. Your laser printer consumes a hell of a lot more electricity and expensive consumables than your local ink-and-paper instant printer facilty. Save the environment, support your local pressman!
There is a lot more to printing than writing device drivers. I've been using CUPS on MacOS X for quite a while, since there are no other drivers for my old Epson 1520. I'm a bit dissatisfied with the color management abilities of CUPS. Sure it has custom color tables, but no real way to integrate with Colorsync or other color profiling systems. I can turn off all color management in CUPS, hoping it prints a relatively neutral profile, and then let Colorsync work it's profile to that, but you don't really get the full dynamic range compared to real official Epson drivers with real official Colorsync. So I'm not even getting as good quality color output and matching as with MacOS 9. Oh well, I suppose I'll have to get a new printer with proper drivers one of these days, but I like my old 4color printer for press proofing, I can't stand 6 or 7 color printer proofs when I'm targeting CMYK film output.
I have postulated a new law, entitled "Ender's Law"
"Every time the subject of science fiction is raised on Slashdot, Ender's Game will be mentioned in the first 10 messages."
I think Slashcode needs an Ender filter, just like it has a First Post filter.
Did they even THINK about what their law means? Pro-cop games would be banned too. Any game with cops as the protagonist also have to include criminals who would attempt to commit violence against the cops. So no more "Darryl Gates SWAT 3 Elite Edition" either.
Actually, I remember ONE Mac128 PS that died. I didn't count it because it was a constantly running demo machine, inside a display case in our front window that was closed up and got up to 120 degrees in the summer. I figured this shouldn't count, it died because of deliberate abuse. Maybe I'm just lucky, I've never owned a single piece of Apple hardware that failed, and most of my customers can say exactly the same thing.
Apple has always had a major thing about its power supplies. This goes way back to the earliest days of the company. I was a repair tech back in the early days of the Apple II, one of the highest failure rates was the power supply. There was no reset switch so people liked to flip the switch on and off to reset the A2 when it hung. This resulted in a ton of switch failures, and of course the PS was a closed module, and being an official Apple repair center, we couldn't just replace the $3 switch, we had to swap the $80 power supply. The result was a lot of disgruntled customers.
Since that time, Apple has always overkilled the design of their PS units. They're always more reliable than anything you'd find in a pee cee. While I'm no longer a HW tech, I've dealt with hundreds of macs since '84 and I've never even HEARD of a unit with a PS failure.
You can change the frequency 100k times per second, but as long as you're broadcasting, your position can always be detected. You don't need to decode the content, you just need to know their location.
It's not armies like the Iraqis you need to worry about. It's the Russians and Chinese you need to worry about, their spies already stole our codes.
Come to think of it, they don't even need to crack the codes. If the units continuously broadcast position info via radio, standard radio location techniques would be sufficient. You wouldn't necessarily be able to tell which units were high-value targets, but it's enough of a risk. Maybe small burst transmissions would do the job, but these units seem to be in continuous communication.
Isn't it a little risky to put location transponders on all your military units? If the enemy cracks your transponder codes, they can easily target you.
I heard exactly this same sort of story when I was living in downtown LA and the Whittier Quake happened (6.1 on the Richter scale IIRC). I wonder when that was, hmm.. must've been around 85 or 86? They said the Whittier Fault had the same potential to liquify the downtown subsoil. When it hit, I was in an unreinforced brick building just a couple of miles from the epicenter, I couldn't believe how much the ceiling beams shook, I thought the building was about to collapse. But anyway, I wonder just what is the big picture, there are a other newly discovered faults like the Whittier fault right through the downtown area, that's probably how that area originally became the flatter LA basin area, due to the repeated liquefaction of soil during quakes and subsequent resettling.
Umm.. NO. The Japanese Constitution was written by a bunch of international scholars who worked in the Occupation forces as technical advisors, including the famous Viennese woman Beate Sirota, who managed to slip in the women's suffrage clause (despite vehement Japanese objections). The Japanese constitution was drawn from various historic constitutions of the US, Russia, Germany, and France, amongst others. Go read "Embracing Defeat" by John Dower if you want the full story.
Don't forget that the Japanese models of the Zaurus also have handwriting input for English characters, not just kanji. I've never seen anything as accurate as the kanji recognition in my Zaurus, and I have an ancient model (PI-6600). Beginners might be afraid of the kanji input because you have to enter in correct stroke order. And they're right, the Zaurus is not for beginners, if only because there are no English menus. But for intermediate and advanced students, they're great. You get to a point where you can correctly draw almost any kanji you see, even unfamiliar ones, and that makes it incredibly rapid and easy to use.
Why are you even considering the world editions of the Zaurus? The Japanese models have full support for Japanese chars, plus nice dictionaries. But these models are sold only inside Japan (or through gray market), the world models don't have equivalent features.
I poked around the site and didn't see much of anything I could read and study. Seems to be a bunch of placeholders for old classes that are closed and expired, and private content not yet released.
Yes, you're right, the preannouncement wasn't really what killed the company. I commented about this somewhere else in the thread.
Osborne gave a lot of latitude to his management, perhaps more than he should have. Like that bit about spending $1Million to buy parts to finish $150k of old motherboards into computers. A few "small" blunders like this as you're cash-poor and transitioning to a new product line, and your "professional" management have driven your company into the ground.
Other companies of that day, like Kaypro, weren't much better. A lot of them had trouble managing growth. I remember when Kaypro discovered they had several million dollars in unreturned service parts sitting in dealerships like mine. They put out an urgent call to clear out all parts destined for return to their parts depot, IIRC they collected over $10M and the incoming parts arrived in such volume they had to put up tents in the parking lot to sort them all out. Turned out that a huge percentage of Kaypro's capital was tied up in just unrepaired parts. Ooops.
A friend of mine had an Osborne 1, that was some of the first paid work I did with computers, getting his Wordstar and Mailmerge cranking out direct mail, and stuffing envelopes. I can still feel the eyestrain from working on that dinky TV monitor, and the mental strain of trying to do word processing in a 40col environment.
One of my first real professional gigs was as an Osborne technician. I was a specialist in getting the floppy drives working, which was a lot of work getting the guts assembled and disassembled correctly, it was so jammed together it was a tech's nightmare. And they got bashed around a lot so everyone needed a lot of service on the floppies, which weren't built for that kind of abuse. I still have videotapes of osborne service procedures, they were recorded on some odd video format, IVHS, and we had to buy a special player to use them. Apparently this was some early form of copy protection.
People loved their osbornes, I had a lot of clients that attached the early Corvus 20Mb and 5Mb hard drives, and just unplugged for portable use. It was nice kit, but Kaypro aggressively moved into low-end CPM portables and ate up that market. When the Compaq came out, it pretty much killed any market for CPM portables.
What I remember most about Adam Osborne was as a writer. I first learned programming and digital circuitry from Osborne's early microprocessor books, I still have the books and now they're collector's items. I remember buying his business memoir "Hypergrowth" for 99 cents on the remainders shelf, and thinking how ironic that was. Osborne was a model for early information businesses, they aggregated money around people with ideas and the ability to publish them and mass produce. And he was also a parable for the dotcom era's excesses and of drinking too much of one's own koolaid. I still remember Osborne's story of shutting down the production of the Osborne 1. The announcement of the Osborne II killed the prior model sales, causing a premature cash crunch as they tried to dump the last of the old generation. Since that day, the damage caused by prematurely announcing new models and cannibalizing existing sales has been known as "the Osborne effect." Some quantity like $150k of motherboards were left over when the old line was killed, but they'd run out of plastic bezels and case parts, so the $150k of PCBs were left in stock, unused, with no way to turn them into complete machines. Some middle manager got the idea to order new bezels, but the dies had all been discarded. He authorized new production, and by the time his activities came to light, he's spent some insane amount like over a million bucks making new dies so he could make bezels to make those $150k of motherboards into a salable product. Product nobody wanted anyway. Ooops.
This is a stupid idea. They say that air conditioning is inefficient, but they could have easily done it efficiently with ductwork.
I've worked with quick-couplings on megawatt lasers, and I can just give em one tip: couplings fail more often than computers. Just wait til they spring a leak because some idiot forgets to twist the ring properly, and he floods the whole rack.
I miss the old Journal of the New York Academy of the Sciences, a/k/a The Sciences. It was an incredibly entertaining magazine, and illustrated solely with fine art. It surely must have been a major undertaking for an art director to illustrate articles about abstract math & physics, biology, etc. solely with paintings, sculpture, etc. but it worked incredibly well, it was inspiring. But alas the NYAS ran into hard economic times and suspended the magazine. There is some discussion of bringing it back.
Liberty = Big Brother knows all
Freedom = Imprisonment
Life = Death
Hey, it's not the printing of hyperconservatives that offends the Salon readers. There are plenty of outlets for their writings (and most of what appears in Salon has already been published elsewhere). Its being expected to PAY someone to insult me. I refuse to subsidize hatemongers like Horowitz. If Salon dies because of it, tough shit, they should have known better.
And BTW Mr. AC, what ever makes you think the WaPo is a liberal newspaper? Even Woodward is a suckup to Bush.
Salon committed suicide by alienating its core readership of liberals, when they brought on hyperconservatives like Sullivan and Horowitz. Note to editors: if you don't want to lose your subscribers, don't print essays that call them treasonous and anti-american.
You could see the writing on the wall when Salon hooked up with notorious blowhard Dave Winer. I bet they threw $200k down the Userland rathole, that would have been enough to pay the rent.
Ah.. Well, it was my understanding that they're making new chips with full code compatibility but smaller support systems. IIRC, I saw a full Z80 system with video out that could be done with 5 chips, but that was a long time ago. I haven't worked with that sort of hardware in ages, so my memory could be wrong, of course.
You know, they STILL make 6502s, what's the point of doing it the hard way?
Damn, you beat me to it, I was going to point out iSync. Palm is a special case, their engineers are primarily some ex-Apple employees, and they hate Steve Jobs. They deliberately botched Mac compatibility. So Apple stepped in and fixed the problem with iSync. And it's FREE.
But it doesn't seem like iSync is this guy's solution, he sounds like he's running OS 9. Yes, OS 9 is dying, but not Apple. By this same logic, Microsoft is dying because Windows 95 is losing market share.
I weep when I read "Stars need to look elsewhere to finance the rock-star lifestyle." NOT. Impoverished singer whines she can't afford Vera Wang designer dresses anymore. Tough shit.