it was the beta version of win 3.1 i believe and it would not function correctly with dr. dos because they crippled it.
It wasn't just the beta version...Novell (they had bought Digital Research by this point) sent me a couple of floppies (5.25" DD) with an update to DR DOS 6 to deal with issues in the final version of Win3.1 (not that I needed them since I used DESQview). I still have them around here someplace...
The Whitehouse wouldn't have anything against Nevada would it?
Don't believe what you read in City Life...it's one of those left-wing "alternative" rags that they give away because they can't get anybody to pay for it. I'd recommend the Review-Journal for a more balanced view of what happens in Las Vegas.
As for me, I think Harry Reid screwed the pooch. Yucca Mountain has been inevitable since the passage of the Screw Nevada Bill in 1987. He should've worked toward getting something for the people of Nevada, along the lines of the fund established in Alaska when the oil pipeline was put in. Instead, he seems to think that he can bluster his way into stopping the dump. Instead of working to make sure there's an upside for Nevada, he's just about guaranteed that about all we'll be getting is everybody else's nuke waste. (The only upside I can see for that is if a method of transmutation is developed that would allow the buried waste to be retrieved and reprocessed.)
Look at life in a positive light and we might finally stop bitching and get productive.
But if everybody did that, the professional-whiner class (environmentalist wackos, so-called civil rights "advocates," Democrats, etc.) would have to go get real jobs since nobody would pay any attention to them. Actually solving the problems they allege would put them out of work, so instead they troll with their tales of doom and gloom.
I have some installations of Win95, WIn98SE,
NT 3.51 Server and NT 5.02 Workstation (aka stock
Win2k SP2) - does it run on these, too?
I've not tried it on anything other than Win2K, but it runs fairly well on that. I have it installed on my machines at work so that I can ssh into one of our Linux servers and work on the Linux side of the software that I'm writing (Win32 clients, but Linux on the server since putting a Windows box directly on the Internet is a Bad Idea). I've run emacs, DDD, and Konqueror over the SSH connection without any issues.
the worst keyboard is a tie between the atari 800
membrane
The 400 had the membrane "keyboard." The 800 had a keyboard with real keys.
The chiclet keyboard on the CoCo wasn't that great, either. The CoCo 2 and CoCo 3 were built with real keyboards.
IIRC, the TI-99/4 (not 99/4A) had calculator keys for its keyboard (not too surprising, seeing how TI was (and still is) one of the biggest calculator manufacturers). The 99/4A had a real keyboard...a small one with only 40-some-odd keys, but it used real keys.
There's always someone who goes on about the old IBM keyboards, and while their movement and feedback are greatly superior to $bundled_crapboard they aren't anywhere nearly as comfortable to use as a good ergonomic split keyboard like the original Microsoft Natural...
Ick...when I worked as a tech at Best Buy, those keyboards were foisted on us at the front bench. It took forever to get up to anything approximating a respectable typing speed, and I never was able to type as quickly or accurately on one of them as I can with a regular keyboard. (One of them also had the hideous diamond-pattern arrow keys...whoever was responsible for that abomination should be drawn and quartered.)
You can have my Model M after you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
I think I can assemble the perfect keyboard. I suppose I should try the ps2->usb adapter that came with my mouse, but it seems that there might be more to it than that... if it doesn't work, I'll just order the adapter thing from usbgear... yay! With the adapter, it ends up being about $75 per keyboard, though.:|
Why not just use the PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports on your computer? That's why they're there. It'll save you a ton of money. (Unless you're stuck with some ghey machine that uses USB for everything, but then you have other problems...)
Start putting strings (like the entire logon sequence) onto a single key.
Yeah, that's smart...that way, someone can open Notepad, press a key by accident, and get your password. Programming other stuff into a keyboard is OK, but I don't think I'd want to turn a keyboard into a rootkit.
Speaking of IBM keyboards, I'm scared I'm getting fossilised now -- I managed to read "Selective" as "Selectric" in the story title.
The typing class I took in high school used IBM Correcting Selectric IIIs...does this officially make me an Olde Pfarte now? (1987 doesn't seem that long ago...)
(Even though the typewriters had one-button error correction and photocopiers were readily available, we still had to learn how to use correcting tape and carbon paper (for copying). Our teacher was a fossil, even then. Still, I got better at typing than I ever would've gotten just by pounding programs from Nibble into my Apple IIe.)
These guys have a bin full of keyboards in their warehouse of various models...IBM Model M, Gateway AnyKey, weird keyboards for terminals and word processors, el-cheapo generics, etc. I even found an Apple Extended Keyboard in there once (still need an ADB cable to hook it to my IIGS). $1 each, and I'd guess that if you ordered over the net, you could ask them to make sure they get you a Model M. (As for me, since they're about a mile from where I work, I can head over there any time.:-) ) You might need to clean it up a little bit, but that's no big deal.
You could also grab one off of a random eBay seller...I paid $8 that way for the one I'm typing on right now. I paid more for shipping than for the keyboard itself, but $20 for a solid keyboard isn't a bad deal IMHO.
Apple may not consider their Macs as being personal computers...
Funny, when you consider that the box that my Apple IIe came in years ago said "the personal computer" on all four sides. Then again, their slogan at the time was "Apple II Forever," and look how that turned out. (I still have a "stealth IIGS" made from that first IIe, another IIe, and a II+.)
I recently started scanning pictures with the intent of creating an HTML-based gallery on a CD that could be passed around.
The best gallery creator I found was Curator...
Sounds not too different from the script I cobbled together to do that. I already posted about it in reply to another message, so I won't repeat myself here. It's not fully automated, but enough of it is for it to be useful (HTML is auto-generated from text, but you'll want to batch-process your images down to a smaller size for preview. Something like for i in *.jpg; do djpeg $i | pnmscale -xysize 640 480 | cjpeg -Q 40 >`echo $i | sed "s/.jpg/-s.jpg/"`; done will do the job.)
instead of img003.jpg
summer 1965 grandpaw-timmy-danny-and the boat at frelling lake.jpg
A better approach would be to slap together some HTML to put together a "slide show" that will call up each photo with some captions. I doubt that HTML will go away any time soon, and if it does, as long as you're not using a monstrosity like FrontPage to produce your HTML, you could easily read the image description out of the raw HTML. If your camera cranks out somewhat large images (I shoot at 2048x1360 with a Nikon Coolpix 995), you can crank out reduced-size images which the user can click to view the full-size images. That way, I don't have to remember that dscn0187.jpg is a '66 Olds 442 W-30 in an auto museum.
Here's a tip if you're shooting pictures in museums and such: since they usually have signs that tell you what you're looking at, take a picture of the sign as well. Capture it at high resolution, but you can probably get away with compressing it. You can batch-process the images into monochrome, feed them into an OCR program, and get most of your text. It'll be like putting the museum (or at least the exhibits you saw) on a CD.
(Toward this end, I threw together an awk script that automates generation of HTML from a set of text files that describe your photos. Given a set of text files that associate one or more images with a description, it produces standards-compliant HTML 4 with full-size image links and previous/next links for navigation through a group of images. If anyone's interested, I can send the script and some sample files to demonstrate it.)
The best way to print 'cheaply' for a DIY setup is probably an Epson 8xx series (870 if you can find it) with a bulk continuous ink system, such as the one at www.missupply.com (there are others).
You forgot to factor in the cost of a new printer every few months when the print heads in that piece of sh*t clog up...unless you can wait the couple or three weeks it'll spend at service getting fixed. You'd have to be nuts to recommend an Epson inkjet to anybody. (Back when I was working for The Man, we'd usually have to replace the demo Epsons once every month or two in order to have working demos. With HP, Lexmark, or Canon, OTOH, a particular demo printer would usually last at least until it was discontinued.)
Do you really trust your family's history to the idea that JPEGs, for example, will still be readable in 2102?
Why not? It's a standard image format, not some proprietary monstrosity. There's plenty of information available on it so that you could write a decoder for it. Hell, I've written a JPEG encoder and decoder myself from the specs; it's not as fast as the IJG software and it doesn't handle all of the different varieties of JPEG coding, but it works with the most common features and shows that you can do a JPEG implementation by yourself if push comes to shove. I don't think it'll come to that, though.
I'm not so sure that's a great idea...for a while, I was stuck maintaining a couple of Redh*t servers that had been set up by someone who didn't have a fscking clue what he was doing. (That I had never used Redh*t (and never would use Redh*t) was an added complication.) That was no fun at all. (I eventually nuked both machines and built LFS on them.)
Does PNG support multiple images in one file? Don't take this as a troll...I've had fax software that would store all the pages of an incoming fax in a single TIFF file that could be viewed/printed/etc. Does PNG support a similar capability?
(For images on a website that you don't want to put through JPEG losses, PNG rocks.)
Where else can the manufacturer of a product hold you under a contract you did not sign, and change the terms of that contract at any time without notifying you or getting your agreement on the changes?
Maybe instead of the Borg, we should consider identifying Microsoft with another sci-fi villain:
Calrissian, take the Princess and the Wookiee to my ship.
You said they'd be left in the city under my supervision!
I'm altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further.
Never had one at home...my parents thought video games were a total waste of time. That didn't stop me from playing them at other people's houses, though.
I picked one up off of eBay last year, along with sticks, paddles, a driving controller, and some games. Just like old computers, old video-game machines are dirt cheap—and much more fun than emulators. (A cartridge that could be loaded with downloaded ROMs and played would be nice, though...doesn't somebody make such a device?)
The keys in the middle of the keyboard are also a bunch of weird sizes. Maybe they did that so each half of the keyboard could be fixed in place. I think it would've been better if they'd taken an approach similar to the Palm keyboard, where you unfold the keyboard and then slide the two halves together so that you get the standard layout. I suppose the people who somehow manage to type on those weird-ass split keyboards (Microsoft Natural, etc.) won't be too bothered by the keyboard on this notebook, but it's definitely not a keyboard for the rest of us.
Hey, I resemble that remark...
on
Built For Use
·
· Score: 2
Flashing lights are great for Las Vegas, but who wants to work in Las Vegas?
Better here than in the People's Republic of California.:-)
I also think the article forgot to mention you can install Critical Update Notification in Windows 98/ME/2000/XP that automatically flags you about security and other important updates whenever you log onto the Internet.
Actually, Critical Update Notification has been superseded by Automatic Updates. Instead of telling you that you need to go download some updates, it'll download them and tell you that they need to be installed.
(Of course, to add Automatic Updates, you need to have checked the Windows Update site sometime in the past month or two. The luser who's been running unpatched Win98 for the past four years isn't too likely to have done that.)
As opposed to every idiot and her brother shredding flags on their radio antennae, because it's the thing to do. And disrespectful to the flag to boot.
Can't argue with that. I think most of them mean well, but there's a woeful lack of knowledge about how the flag should be displayed. (Between the Boy Scouts and Air Force JROTC, I think I picked up a fairly decent grasp on the matter. It's not something that either organization spent a substantial amount of time covering, either, because there's not that much to the Flag Code.)
Most of that seems to have fallen by the wayside as we've gotten further away from 9/11. While it's nice that people aren't "shredding flags on their radio antennae," it is somewhat disappointing that we didn't see more of a long-term change in people's attitudes and priorities.
My point is that enforced patriotism leads to tyranny.
I don't know if patriotism is something that can be "enforced." However, I don't think it's unreasonable to question why somebody would choose to live in a country that he hates. (I'm still waiting for Barbra Streisand and Alec Baldwin to leave the country, like they said they would.)
Slashdot Mirror
It wasn't just the beta version...Novell (they had bought Digital Research by this point) sent me a couple of floppies (5.25" DD) with an update to DR DOS 6 to deal with issues in the final version of Win3.1 (not that I needed them since I used DESQview). I still have them around here someplace...
Don't believe what you read in City Life...it's one of those left-wing "alternative" rags that they give away because they can't get anybody to pay for it. I'd recommend the Review-Journal for a more balanced view of what happens in Las Vegas.
As for me, I think Harry Reid screwed the pooch. Yucca Mountain has been inevitable since the passage of the Screw Nevada Bill in 1987. He should've worked toward getting something for the people of Nevada, along the lines of the fund established in Alaska when the oil pipeline was put in. Instead, he seems to think that he can bluster his way into stopping the dump. Instead of working to make sure there's an upside for Nevada, he's just about guaranteed that about all we'll be getting is everybody else's nuke waste. (The only upside I can see for that is if a method of transmutation is developed that would allow the buried waste to be retrieved and reprocessed.)
But if everybody did that, the professional-whiner class (environmentalist wackos, so-called civil rights "advocates," Democrats, etc.) would have to go get real jobs since nobody would pay any attention to them. Actually solving the problems they allege would put them out of work, so instead they troll with their tales of doom and gloom.
I've not tried it on anything other than Win2K, but it runs fairly well on that. I have it installed on my machines at work so that I can ssh into one of our Linux servers and work on the Linux side of the software that I'm writing (Win32 clients, but Linux on the server since putting a Windows box directly on the Internet is a Bad Idea). I've run emacs, DDD, and Konqueror over the SSH connection without any issues.
The 400 had the membrane "keyboard." The 800 had a keyboard with real keys.
The chiclet keyboard on the CoCo wasn't that great, either. The CoCo 2 and CoCo 3 were built with real keyboards.
IIRC, the TI-99/4 (not 99/4A) had calculator keys for its keyboard (not too surprising, seeing how TI was (and still is) one of the biggest calculator manufacturers). The 99/4A had a real keyboard...a small one with only 40-some-odd keys, but it used real keys.
Ick...when I worked as a tech at Best Buy, those keyboards were foisted on us at the front bench. It took forever to get up to anything approximating a respectable typing speed, and I never was able to type as quickly or accurately on one of them as I can with a regular keyboard. (One of them also had the hideous diamond-pattern arrow keys...whoever was responsible for that abomination should be drawn and quartered.)
You can have my Model M after you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
Why not just use the PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports on your computer? That's why they're there. It'll save you a ton of money. (Unless you're stuck with some ghey machine that uses USB for everything, but then you have other problems...)
Yeah, that's smart...that way, someone can open Notepad, press a key by accident, and get your password. Programming other stuff into a keyboard is OK, but I don't think I'd want to turn a keyboard into a rootkit.
The typing class I took in high school used IBM Correcting Selectric IIIs...does this officially make me an Olde Pfarte now? (1987 doesn't seem that long ago...)
(Even though the typewriters had one-button error correction and photocopiers were readily available, we still had to learn how to use correcting tape and carbon paper (for copying). Our teacher was a fossil, even then. Still, I got better at typing than I ever would've gotten just by pounding programs from Nibble into my Apple IIe.)
These guys have a bin full of keyboards in their warehouse of various models...IBM Model M, Gateway AnyKey, weird keyboards for terminals and word processors, el-cheapo generics, etc. I even found an Apple Extended Keyboard in there once (still need an ADB cable to hook it to my IIGS). $1 each, and I'd guess that if you ordered over the net, you could ask them to make sure they get you a Model M. (As for me, since they're about a mile from where I work, I can head over there any time. :-) ) You might need to clean it up a little bit, but that's no big deal.
You could also grab one off of a random eBay seller...I paid $8 that way for the one I'm typing on right now. I paid more for shipping than for the keyboard itself, but $20 for a solid keyboard isn't a bad deal IMHO.
Funny, when you consider that the box that my Apple IIe came in years ago said "the personal computer" on all four sides. Then again, their slogan at the time was "Apple II Forever," and look how that turned out. (I still have a "stealth IIGS" made from that first IIe, another IIe, and a II+.)
Sounds not too different from the script I cobbled together to do that. I already posted about it in reply to another message, so I won't repeat myself here. It's not fully automated, but enough of it is for it to be useful (HTML is auto-generated from text, but you'll want to batch-process your images down to a smaller size for preview. Something like for i in *.jpg; do djpeg $i | pnmscale -xysize 640 480 | cjpeg -Q 40 >`echo $i | sed "s/.jpg/-s.jpg/"`; done will do the job.)
A better approach would be to slap together some HTML to put together a "slide show" that will call up each photo with some captions. I doubt that HTML will go away any time soon, and if it does, as long as you're not using a monstrosity like FrontPage to produce your HTML, you could easily read the image description out of the raw HTML. If your camera cranks out somewhat large images (I shoot at 2048x1360 with a Nikon Coolpix 995), you can crank out reduced-size images which the user can click to view the full-size images. That way, I don't have to remember that dscn0187.jpg is a '66 Olds 442 W-30 in an auto museum.
Here's a tip if you're shooting pictures in museums and such: since they usually have signs that tell you what you're looking at, take a picture of the sign as well. Capture it at high resolution, but you can probably get away with compressing it. You can batch-process the images into monochrome, feed them into an OCR program, and get most of your text. It'll be like putting the museum (or at least the exhibits you saw) on a CD.
(Toward this end, I threw together an awk script that automates generation of HTML from a set of text files that describe your photos. Given a set of text files that associate one or more images with a description, it produces standards-compliant HTML 4 with full-size image links and previous/next links for navigation through a group of images. If anyone's interested, I can send the script and some sample files to demonstrate it.)
You forgot to factor in the cost of a new printer every few months when the print heads in that piece of sh*t clog up...unless you can wait the couple or three weeks it'll spend at service getting fixed. You'd have to be nuts to recommend an Epson inkjet to anybody. (Back when I was working for The Man, we'd usually have to replace the demo Epsons once every month or two in order to have working demos. With HP, Lexmark, or Canon, OTOH, a particular demo printer would usually last at least until it was discontinued.)
Why not? It's a standard image format, not some proprietary monstrosity. There's plenty of information available on it so that you could write a decoder for it. Hell, I've written a JPEG encoder and decoder myself from the specs; it's not as fast as the IJG software and it doesn't handle all of the different varieties of JPEG coding, but it works with the most common features and shows that you can do a JPEG implementation by yourself if push comes to shove. I don't think it'll come to that, though.
I'm not so sure that's a great idea...for a while, I was stuck maintaining a couple of Redh*t servers that had been set up by someone who didn't have a fscking clue what he was doing. (That I had never used Redh*t (and never would use Redh*t) was an added complication.) That was no fun at all. (I eventually nuked both machines and built LFS on them.)
Does PNG support multiple images in one file? Don't take this as a troll...I've had fax software that would store all the pages of an incoming fax in a single TIFF file that could be viewed/printed/etc. Does PNG support a similar capability?
(For images on a website that you don't want to put through JPEG losses, PNG rocks.)
Maybe instead of the Borg, we should consider identifying Microsoft with another sci-fi villain:
That's nothing new...the F-117 wouldn't get off the ground without its computers.
Never had one at home...my parents thought video games were a total waste of time. That didn't stop me from playing them at other people's houses, though.
I picked one up off of eBay last year, along with sticks, paddles, a driving controller, and some games. Just like old computers, old video-game machines are dirt cheap—and much more fun than emulators. (A cartridge that could be loaded with downloaded ROMs and played would be nice, though...doesn't somebody make such a device?)
The keys in the middle of the keyboard are also a bunch of weird sizes. Maybe they did that so each half of the keyboard could be fixed in place. I think it would've been better if they'd taken an approach similar to the Palm keyboard, where you unfold the keyboard and then slide the two halves together so that you get the standard layout. I suppose the people who somehow manage to type on those weird-ass split keyboards (Microsoft Natural, etc.) won't be too bothered by the keyboard on this notebook, but it's definitely not a keyboard for the rest of us.
Better here than in the People's Republic of California. :-)
Actually, Critical Update Notification has been superseded by Automatic Updates. Instead of telling you that you need to go download some updates, it'll download them and tell you that they need to be installed.
(Of course, to add Automatic Updates, you need to have checked the Windows Update site sometime in the past month or two. The luser who's been running unpatched Win98 for the past four years isn't too likely to have done that.)
If they know of someone who can cram 10 Mb/s into a IIe, they should let me know...I could use it. :-)
(For the humor-impaired, since the bus speed in a IIe is somewhere close to 1.0 MHz, you're not going to get there as 10 Mb/s=1.25 MB/s>1.0 MB/s.)
Can't argue with that. I think most of them mean well, but there's a woeful lack of knowledge about how the flag should be displayed. (Between the Boy Scouts and Air Force JROTC, I think I picked up a fairly decent grasp on the matter. It's not something that either organization spent a substantial amount of time covering, either, because there's not that much to the Flag Code.)
Most of that seems to have fallen by the wayside as we've gotten further away from 9/11. While it's nice that people aren't "shredding flags on their radio antennae," it is somewhat disappointing that we didn't see more of a long-term change in people's attitudes and priorities.
I don't know if patriotism is something that can be "enforced." However, I don't think it's unreasonable to question why somebody would choose to live in a country that he hates. (I'm still waiting for Barbra Streisand and Alec Baldwin to leave the country, like they said they would.)