Sometimes I'd like a real tactile keyboard, the ones that click, but I don't know where to find those anymore. I actually have one in my basement, but many years ago I spilled a plastic bonding agent on the keys, and while the board still functions, the keys are all grimy.
I picked up a Focus FK-2001 a few months ago...it's nice and clicky. PC Club had a stack of 'em one day...don't know if they still do, but if not, Price Watch had a couple of vendors that were selling them for around $20. This keyboard model has been around nearly forever, and for good reason.
Re:Saw it on NSF a couple days ago...
on
Keyless Keyboard
·
· Score: 1
For those that haven't seen it, this thing has a base shaped kinda like a Microsoft Natural Keyboard, but instead of keys, it's got a dome-looking articulation for each hand. The "domes" are moved in an x-y axis independently of each other. Moving the "domes" in combinations of positions correspond to the alpha-numeric key symbols as on a conventional keyboard.
With only 64 combinations of positions (not counting the possibility of leaving one of the domes centered, which could add another 16 combinations), it won't be able to deliver the full range of key combinations unless there's some "prefix" for the function keys, PrtSc, Ins/Del/Home/etc. It'd be like typing through the keyboard of a TI-99/4A or something similar that had a small number of keys (40-something for the TI, for instance). Lots of two-key combinations were used for common functions, IIRC (it's been twelve years since I had to leave my TI behind:-| ). Combine that with no visual clue for what's what and it seems it'd be a cast-iron b*tch to learn to use with any proficiency. (It'd probably be on the same level of difficulty as learning sign language...not impossible, but not something most people bother to pick up unless it's absolutely essential.)
Don't give the election up to Bush, either. Gore won the popular vote. The last time I checked, we still live in a democracy.
Bzzt! We absolutely do not live in a democracy. As others have pointed out already, our system of government was designed as a representative republic. It was set up that way for good reason...the founding fathers knew that democracy was one step removed from mob rule (does the phrase "tyranny of the majority" ring a bell?).
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner.
I read that message and couldn't figure it out either. A libertarian going to Gore?!? Heck, why not go all the way and vote Nader?
He is what those of us on the right would call a "seminar caller." Such an individual is one who calls a talk show (let's use Rush Limbaugh as an example) and usually claims to be a Republican (especially a "moderate Republican," a species also known as "RINO," for "Republican In Name Only") who has some misgivings about the conservative candidate du jour. After some back-and-forth dialogue between Rush and the caller, it's readily apparent that the caller is really a pinko Democrat who's been put up to the call by his party bosses; he's been coached on the things to say that (they believe) will get the caller on the air (never mind that most decent talk shows welcome opposing points of view as a way for the host to play off the caller and look good by comparison:-) ).
It would seem that/. has been visited by what we could thus call a "seminar poster." Claiming to be a Libertarian is a new twist. As I see it, on many (most?) of the issues that matter, Libertarians usually track closer to Republicans than to Democrats. Hell, I've even voted for a Libertarian candidate or two (usually to avoid voting for a RINO, though the usual unfortunate effect is that the Democrat wins), and on the previously mentioned Presidential Candidate Selector, the candidate they said tracks closest to my views was Howard Phillips at 63%. (Dubya and Dick Cheney were close at 53% and 60% respectively, vs. Algore and Holy Joe at 18% and 28%. Go ahead and call me the Anti-Nader, too, as he placed dead last at 5%. Amusing stuff, that candidate selector, even if the results weren't much of a surprise.)
Many people view technology as a replacement for good teachers.
They've been saying this since the '80s, when "educational software" was something along the lines of "electronic flashcards" running on an Apple II or other computer of that time and there was this fuzzy, nebulous concept called "computer literacy" about which so-called "educators" didn't have a clue. I suspect that things have gotten no better since then. Kids ought to have a solid grasp of the basics (reading, writing, math, etc.) before they're let anywhere near a computer. You wouldn't let a third-grader use a calculator in place of learning the multiplication table, would you?
Technology is a tool. It can be used properly or it can be misused. (The same can be said of other things, such as guns, but that's beyond the scope of this thread.) So far, it's mainly been misused by ed-school types who took up teaching because an education degree was easier to get than one in underwater basket-weaving. As long as substandard teachers (and not all of them are substandard, but a shockingly large number fit this description) continue to botch the education of the next generation, and as long as the institutions remain in place that perpetuate this situation, all the computers in the world aren't going to teach Johnny how to read, write, calculate, and think.
I probably shouldn't feed this troll, but here goes...
You've got to be kidding me. Freedom. He ain't for freedom Charlie. In fact, he's the antithesis of freedom.
Hmm...last time I checked, Dubya wasn't out to gut the Constitution. Last time I checked, Dubya wasn't of the mindset to tell people the government knows better than they do what to do with their money. Last time I checked, Dubya doesn't intend to grab your guns, tell you what car to drive, etc.
On the other hand, when "Holy Joe" Lieberman visited town last week, he had some union thugs suspend the First Amendment at UNLV:
Wasn't that a matter of Red H*t's borken kernel image, mistaking an Athlon for a P!!!? That sounds more like a software issue than a chipset issue. Since people are running Linux on Athlons (not me, yet...fastest I have is a 450-MHz K6-III), you would think the reviewers would've done whatever it is these other people are doing. (Recompiled kernel? Kernel hack?)
Ah the good old days when slashdot was good, USENET was free of spam, you could leave your front door unlocked, and floppy disks worked... *sigh*
I have 15-year-old 5.25" DSDD floppies for my Apple IIs that are still perfectly readable, yet some 3.5" DSHD floppies nowadays don't seem to last 15 days before they go tango-uniform. (Some of those 5.25" floppies saw fairly heavy use, too, as I went about six years with only a DuoDisk for storage before getting a hard drive for it.) The copy of DR DOS 6.0 I bought eight or nine years ago on 5.25" DSHD floppies is still good, too. Maybe we should junk the 3.5" floppy and go back to 5.25" floppies.:-)
if there are any reputable cable-access providers around.
I've been using Cox Express (not Cox@Home) in Las Vegas since the beginning of the year, and I know some people who've had it since it was introduced a couple of years ago.
I've never had any problems with the service, I nearly always get the bandwidth I bought, and there's no rule banning the operation of servers on their network.
I run my website (such as it is:-) ) on my computer, I have mail delivered directly to my mail server, and I can log in (via ssh) from anywhere with an Internet connection. News service is subcontracted to Remarq, so there are no problems there either.
For high-speed net access on the cheap in Vegas, it's the best bet out there at this time.
(disclaimer: I'm not an employee or a shill for Cox. I just like the service I've gotten, which may be atypical when compared to what more than a few people in other locations say about their cable-modem service. You did ask if anybody wasn't getting shafted, though...)
In most cases, uploads and downloads don't interfere with each other. They're different data streams. Try it sometime.
Back in the day when I was running a BBS connected to FidoNet, the preferred protocols for transferring mail and echoes were bidirectional...stuff got sent and received at the same time to minimize long-distance phone bills and maximize a BBS's availability to callers. As long as you weren't using a modem with grossly asymmetric transmit/receive speeds (such as one of USR's HST modems, which ran at speeds up to 16.8 kbps in one direction but only 300 or 450 bps in the other), you'd get decent speeds both ways. There were also bidirectional file-transfer protocols available to callers, such as HSLink. (With me being the leech that I was, though, I usually stuck with ZMODEM.:-) Hell, I even still use ZMODEM occasionally today for the odd task or two.)
Theoretically, the same ought to hold true over your Internet connection with file transfers today. In practice, though, if you're on a dial-up connection, some modems handle bidirectional traffic better than others. In some (mainly cheaper) modems, not enough processing power is available in the modem's controller to keep up maximum speed both ways. If you're sucking down MP3s/pr0n/warez at 5 kbps and then someone starts sucking files off of your computer, odds are good you'll see at least a slight drop in your download speed. If you're using a winmodem of some kind, it gets even worse as the modem now has to contend with everything else going on in your computer for processor time.
(Of course, we're all using cable modems or DSL now.:-) These seem to not be affected by this problem as much. About the only time I notice a speed deficiency is if I'm logged into my server from someplace else while it's in the middle of a download...it sometimes takes a second or two for keystrokes from the ssh client to get through. Screen updates, though, are still quick (4x faster than dial-up).)
Cats are only "required" (in practice - I think the law actually mandates a year) on cars less the 25 years old. Any older and the vehicle is considered a "classic", at which point no emissions test is needed.
It depends on where you are...here in Nevada, all vehicles built from 1968 onward are subject to annual smog checks if garaged in the state's two urban counties (Clark and Washoe). They're tested for carbon monoxide and hydrocarbon emissions, with older vehicles subject to less stringent restrictions. AFAIK, there are no exceptions, other than that 1967 and earlier model-year cars aren't tested.
It's not a "treadmill" or dyno test like they use in some places, though...they just stick a sensor up the tailpipe, run the engine at 2500 rpm for a couple of minutes, and then run it at idle for a minute. I've heard horror stories about the places that do the other type of smog check.
Using a cable connection for running a server is generally a Bad Idea (tm), considering
you typically must use DHCP, which means you won't have a static IP (no matter how satic that IP appears, it can go away quite easily at any time), and thus makes it hard to handle DNS for your domain and point it to an IP, and
Most cable providers restrict the running of services on their networks, unless you upgrade to a business plan. You certainly don't want your mail server to disappear some day simply because the administration caught on that you were Breaking their AUP.
For the first problem, dyndns.org handles that pretty nicely. You can even set up a backup MX as part of your record so your mail gets routed elsewhere if your server goes tango-uniform. Changes get propagated through quickly on the dynamic service (static IP changes take longer).
As for the second problem, Cox has been pretty cool about it. There's nothing that says you can't run a server, and since your connection is rate-limited to whatever you bought (I pay $40/month for 512 kbps downstream/128 kbps upstream), they don't have to worry too much about k1dd13z setting up warez/pr0n sites and bogging down their network. I still use their SMTP server for outbound mail, but inbound mail goes straight to the K6-2 box in my coat^H^H^H^Hserver closet. (Reverse DNS still looks something like dhcp085.18.lvcm.com, but that hasn't been a problem for anything that I can recall.) I suppose Cox isn't like most cable-modem providers...don't know what they're like in other markets, let alone what other companies are like (they bought the system here in Las Vegas when they bought the local cable company), so YMMV.
So basically extending the remailer type of thing with a proxy like anonymizer that is better able to handle traffic and which is based on a standalone application? How trustworthy are they? Has there been any actual evidence that they will protect your information from being captured?
These are the guys who figured out a way to get a P!!! to send out its serial number even if that capability was supposedly shut off in the BIOS, something Intel insisted could never happen. (/. covered it in this article about a year and a half ago.) I would characterize that as a white-hat activitity (though INTC was able to convince a few anti-virus companies otherwise).
umm, i think you are being a bit picky. this is talking about lazy
admins not repairing computers, just blowing away the whole system and
re-installing..
Is it necessarily laziness, or is it a matter of getting a (l)user up and going again as soon as possible? Yes, if you can figure out what's going on and actually fix the problem in 15 minutes, that's all well and good. If something has been done to the machine, though, that will take
more than that to hunt down and repair, you're better off spending 5 minutes running Ghost and 10 minutes redetecting hardware than spending half an hour or more on something that might not be fixable anyway.
Bean-counters tend to only care that their stuff works; they don't care much about how, as long as their "precious" downtime is minimized.
If you think about it, it's not too different than the approach we take nowadays to fixing hardware. When's the last time you did component-level repair on a motherboard or an add-in card? It's usually faster and cheaper to R^2 (remove and replace) it than to find the part that
failed. (Only time I've fixed a motherboard was when I plugged the wrong type of USB cable in and blew the fuse feeding power to the keyboard port. I had already swapped the customer's motherboard out, but figured out the problem on my own time
and got the board working again, more for sh*ts and grins than anything else.)
I've been up for 4 days, 7 hours and 22 minutes. I don't think I'm going to make it to 48 days but I'll be damned if I'll be beaten by Windows.
Since I began tracking them with the Uptimes Project, the two servers I maintain at work (a dual PII-266 and a PII-350, both running NT4 SP6) have a maximum uptime between them of just under 42 days. I had a DVD/MP3 player box at home once running Win95 OSR2 that seemed like it was up a few weeks before it needed a reboot, but I don't have any hard numbers for it.
By comparison, my home workstation (a K6-III 450 running SuSE Linux 6.3 and Win98 (the latter under VMware)) has been up 46 days and counting. The home server (a K6-2 300 running SuSE 6.4) would've been up longer than that if I hadn't taken it down a few times to test my UPS (wanted to make sure it'd shut down if the power went out). A mail server I set up for work (a P5-166 running SuSE 6.3) hits 200 days tomorrow.
Of the top 25 active hosts on the Uptimes Project, only one runs Windows (NT, specifically...don't know which version). 10 of the other machines run *BSD, 8 run Linux, 5 run SunOS, and 1 runs NetWare. The longest uptime belongs to a 386 running NetBSD, which has been up nearly 1609 days...about 4 years, 5 months.
Unfortunatlly sometimes building a system yourself is more expensive then buying one already assembled, even at a computer show.
True, but at least if you're building yourself, you know you're getting good parts and not whatever sh*t the OEM could get at a price that enabled him to meet a price target. It's a sure-fire method to avoid WinHardware, Piece-o'-Sh^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HPC Chips motherboards, processors from companIes that waNt To gEt a Lock on the market, etc. If you're so inclined, it also enables you to avoid the "Windows tax" that many OEMs try to impose (with Microsoft's encouragement, it would seem).
The first machine I built, way back in the day, was a 286-12 on which I installed DR DOS 6.0. That, I think, is the only OS for which I've ever paid money. I picked up OS/2 Warp 3 at the IBM booth at Fall Comdex '94, Microsoft provided me with NFRs of both Win95 and Win98 (since I was working for Best Buy at the time those came out), and Linux is free from any FTP site. (I paid for the boxed SuSE 5.3 once...I guess that means DR DOS isn't the only OS for which I've paid money.:-) )
I thought the Panasonic Toughbook might've been such a thing, but it uses a magnesium case, not a titanium case. It's still an unusual feature, though...back in the day, NeXT clothed its boxen in magnesium, and that's the only other computer I know about that uses any kind of "exotic metal" as a case material. As for titanium, RhinoSkin has titanium cases for Palm organizers.
_/_ / v \ (IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail) \_^_/
In case anyone cares, Z80's are also used on Commodore's A2090 series Amiga hard disk controller as an intelligent control processor.:)
In addition to the Z80 coprocessor cards from way back, a couple of expansion cards of more recent design for the Apple II used the Z180, which was one of the Z80's successors. The RamFAST is a caching SCSI controller that uses a Z180 as the cache controller. The SecondSight is a VGA card that uses a Z180 to translate the Apple II's native video modes into something that the card's video controller (an Oak OTI067, IIRC) can understand and display on any VGA monitor. (Software that knows how can also drive the SecondSight at 640x480 high-color, 1024x768 8-bit color, or any ordinary VGA mode in between.)
The bits posted above about the ZX81 using the processor to generate the display are interesting...didn't know that, but then the last time I played with one of those was maybe 15 years ago. (And you thought UMA video was horrible...)
_/_ / v \ (IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail) \_^_/
uhm, will they sell me a 70's era tv that has UHF channels still on the "dial"?
Last time I checked, current TVs still tune up to channel 69. (Channels 70-84 were removed sometime in the mid-to-late 80s to keep people from using TVs to listen in on cellular-phone conversations, or something like that.) It's a good thing they do, too, since the local UPN station hasn't been on cable since it started up. You have to break out Ye Olde Rabbite Eares to watch Voyager. (That changes next month...finally!)
Hopefully it could put out a signal on a channel other than 33, though, as that channel is used by another local UHF broadcaster.
_/_ / v \ (IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail) \_^_/
You can also get magic little strippers that nip off the insulation perfectly... but they're about $50 and only work for one specific wire size.
They're available for less than that. A wire-wrapping tool I picked up at Rat Shack a few years ago has a stripper in the handle (the spinner pops off the top and the stripper slides inside). It couldn't have cost more than a few dollars. (It only works for one particular wire size, but so does the tool you mentioned.)
_/_ / v \ (IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail) \_^_/
It's been up 18 days now, which is
also impressing the techies in our M$ shop.
Either they're easily impressed or profoundly incompetent if they can't keep an NT box going more than 18 days. A couple of servers (here and here) at work have been up a maximum of about seven weeks since we began tracking them with uptimes.net, and they had some longer uptimes before that. (I don't think they ever went as long as the 187 days (and counting) that our mail server, which runs SuSE Linux 6.3, has been up, though...I'm not claiming that NT is an über-stable OS on the same level as Linux, but decent admins should be able to get more than 18 days out of it. Hell, I've gotten more uptime out of Win9x than that!)
_/_ / v \ (IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail) \_^_/
Now, how do we in the USA get that "Best of Scrapheap" vidio? At eleven Pounds (fifteen Dollars) I would buy it, but Amazon.com does not have it.
Several people have posted links, but unless you have a multi-system TV and VCR, you'll be unable to watch the tape as it's in PAL format. Play it in an NTSC VCR and you'll get garbage. Now, if it was on DVD and you had a region-free DVD player...
_/_ / v \ (IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail) \_^_/
I think most mailers that send fancy mail also include a text attachment by default, thank Bob
Netscrape doesn't. It'll send HTML-only messages. When Mutt receives such a message, it says something along the lines of "attachment type text/html not supported"...at this point, it's somewhat viewable if you pipe the attachment into Lynx. Since it adds nothing to the content of email, though, it'd be better if email programs dropped the ability to send HTML in email.
You: But my email won't look pretty. Me: Tough sh*t. You want pretty mail? Go back where you came from, AOLer.
You: Your mail reader doesn't handle HTML? Get with the program! Me: Yeah, well at least email viruses won't knock me down...:-)
_/_ / v \ (IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail) \_^_/
Slashdot Mirror
I picked up a Focus FK-2001 a few months ago...it's nice and clicky. PC Club had a stack of 'em one day...don't know if they still do, but if not, Price Watch had a couple of vendors that were selling them for around $20. This keyboard model has been around nearly forever, and for good reason.
With only 64 combinations of positions (not counting the possibility of leaving one of the domes centered, which could add another 16 combinations), it won't be able to deliver the full range of key combinations unless there's some "prefix" for the function keys, PrtSc, Ins/Del/Home/etc. It'd be like typing through the keyboard of a TI-99/4A or something similar that had a small number of keys (40-something for the TI, for instance). Lots of two-key combinations were used for common functions, IIRC (it's been twelve years since I had to leave my TI behind :-| ). Combine that with no visual clue for what's what and it seems it'd be a cast-iron b*tch to learn to use with any proficiency. (It'd probably be on the same level of difficulty as learning sign language...not impossible, but not something most people bother to pick up unless it's absolutely essential.)
Bzzt! We absolutely do not live in a democracy. As others have pointed out already, our system of government was designed as a representative republic. It was set up that way for good reason...the founding fathers knew that democracy was one step removed from mob rule (does the phrase "tyranny of the majority" ring a bell?).
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner.
He is what those of us on the right would call a "seminar caller." Such an individual is one who calls a talk show (let's use Rush Limbaugh as an example) and usually claims to be a Republican (especially a "moderate Republican," a species also known as "RINO," for "Republican In Name Only") who has some misgivings about the conservative candidate du jour. After some back-and-forth dialogue between Rush and the caller, it's readily apparent that the caller is really a pinko Democrat who's been put up to the call by his party bosses; he's been coached on the things to say that (they believe) will get the caller on the air (never mind that most decent talk shows welcome opposing points of view as a way for the host to play off the caller and look good by comparison :-) ).
It would seem that /. has been visited by what we could thus call a "seminar poster." Claiming to be a Libertarian is a new twist. As I see it, on many (most?) of the issues that matter, Libertarians usually track closer to Republicans than to Democrats. Hell, I've even voted for a Libertarian candidate or two (usually to avoid voting for a RINO, though the usual unfortunate effect is that the Democrat wins), and on the previously mentioned Presidential Candidate Selector, the candidate they said tracks closest to my views was Howard Phillips at 63%. (Dubya and Dick Cheney were close at 53% and 60% respectively, vs. Algore and Holy Joe at 18% and 28%. Go ahead and call me the Anti-Nader, too, as he placed dead last at 5%. Amusing stuff, that candidate selector, even if the results weren't much of a surprise.)
They've been saying this since the '80s, when "educational software" was something along the lines of "electronic flashcards" running on an Apple II or other computer of that time and there was this fuzzy, nebulous concept called "computer literacy" about which so-called "educators" didn't have a clue. I suspect that things have gotten no better since then. Kids ought to have a solid grasp of the basics (reading, writing, math, etc.) before they're let anywhere near a computer. You wouldn't let a third-grader use a calculator in place of learning the multiplication table, would you?
Technology is a tool. It can be used properly or it can be misused. (The same can be said of other things, such as guns, but that's beyond the scope of this thread.) So far, it's mainly been misused by ed-school types who took up teaching because an education degree was easier to get than one in underwater basket-weaving. As long as substandard teachers (and not all of them are substandard, but a shockingly large number fit this description) continue to botch the education of the next generation, and as long as the institutions remain in place that perpetuate this situation, all the computers in the world aren't going to teach Johnny how to read, write, calculate, and think.
Hmm...last time I checked, Dubya wasn't out to gut the Constitution. Last time I checked, Dubya wasn't of the mindset to tell people the government knows better than they do what to do with their money. Last time I checked, Dubya doesn't intend to grab your guns, tell you what car to drive, etc.
On the other hand, when "Holy Joe" Lieberman visited town last week, he had some union thugs suspend the First Amendment at UNLV:
http://www.unlv.edu/ry/ne ws. html?stories/today/n4.html
Is this the caliber of individual you want in the White House, or in the line of succession?
I stand by my original assertion.
Wasn't that a matter of Red H*t's borken kernel image, mistaking an Athlon for a P!!!? That sounds more like a software issue than a chipset issue. Since people are running Linux on Athlons (not me, yet...fastest I have is a 450-MHz K6-III), you would think the reviewers would've done whatever it is these other people are doing. (Recompiled kernel? Kernel hack?)
I have 15-year-old 5.25" DSDD floppies for my Apple IIs that are still perfectly readable, yet some 3.5" DSHD floppies nowadays don't seem to last 15 days before they go tango-uniform. (Some of those 5.25" floppies saw fairly heavy use, too, as I went about six years with only a DuoDisk for storage before getting a hard drive for it.) The copy of DR DOS 6.0 I bought eight or nine years ago on 5.25" DSHD floppies is still good, too. Maybe we should junk the 3.5" floppy and go back to 5.25" floppies. :-)
I've been using Cox Express (not Cox@Home) in Las Vegas since the beginning of the year, and I know some people who've had it since it was introduced a couple of years ago. I've never had any problems with the service, I nearly always get the bandwidth I bought, and there's no rule banning the operation of servers on their network. I run my website (such as it is :-) ) on my computer, I have mail delivered directly to my mail server, and I can log in (via ssh) from anywhere with an Internet connection. News service is subcontracted to Remarq, so there are no problems there either.
For high-speed net access on the cheap in Vegas, it's the best bet out there at this time.
(disclaimer: I'm not an employee or a shill for Cox. I just like the service I've gotten, which may be atypical when compared to what more than a few people in other locations say about their cable-modem service. You did ask if anybody wasn't getting shafted, though...)
Back in the day when I was running a BBS connected to FidoNet, the preferred protocols for transferring mail and echoes were bidirectional...stuff got sent and received at the same time to minimize long-distance phone bills and maximize a BBS's availability to callers. As long as you weren't using a modem with grossly asymmetric transmit/receive speeds (such as one of USR's HST modems, which ran at speeds up to 16.8 kbps in one direction but only 300 or 450 bps in the other), you'd get decent speeds both ways. There were also bidirectional file-transfer protocols available to callers, such as HSLink. (With me being the leech that I was, though, I usually stuck with ZMODEM. :-) Hell, I even still use ZMODEM occasionally today for the odd task or two.)
Theoretically, the same ought to hold true over your Internet connection with file transfers today. In practice, though, if you're on a dial-up connection, some modems handle bidirectional traffic better than others. In some (mainly cheaper) modems, not enough processing power is available in the modem's controller to keep up maximum speed both ways. If you're sucking down MP3s/pr0n/warez at 5 kbps and then someone starts sucking files off of your computer, odds are good you'll see at least a slight drop in your download speed. If you're using a winmodem of some kind, it gets even worse as the modem now has to contend with everything else going on in your computer for processor time.
(Of course, we're all using cable modems or DSL now. :-) These seem to not be affected by this problem as much. About the only time I notice a speed deficiency is if I'm logged into my server from someplace else while it's in the middle of a download...it sometimes takes a second or two for keystrokes from the ssh client to get through. Screen updates, though, are still quick (4x faster than dial-up).)
It depends on where you are...here in Nevada, all vehicles built from 1968 onward are subject to annual smog checks if garaged in the state's two urban counties (Clark and Washoe). They're tested for carbon monoxide and hydrocarbon emissions, with older vehicles subject to less stringent restrictions. AFAIK, there are no exceptions, other than that 1967 and earlier model-year cars aren't tested.
It's not a "treadmill" or dyno test like they use in some places, though...they just stick a sensor up the tailpipe, run the engine at 2500 rpm for a couple of minutes, and then run it at idle for a minute. I've heard horror stories about the places that do the other type of smog check.
For the first problem, dyndns.org handles that pretty nicely. You can even set up a backup MX as part of your record so your mail gets routed elsewhere if your server goes tango-uniform. Changes get propagated through quickly on the dynamic service (static IP changes take longer).
As for the second problem, Cox has been pretty cool about it. There's nothing that says you can't run a server, and since your connection is rate-limited to whatever you bought (I pay $40/month for 512 kbps downstream/128 kbps upstream), they don't have to worry too much about k1dd13z setting up warez/pr0n sites and bogging down their network. I still use their SMTP server for outbound mail, but inbound mail goes straight to the K6-2 box in my coat^H^H^H^Hserver closet. (Reverse DNS still looks something like dhcp085.18.lvcm.com, but that hasn't been a problem for anything that I can recall.) I suppose Cox isn't like most cable-modem providers...don't know what they're like in other markets, let alone what other companies are like (they bought the system here in Las Vegas when they bought the local cable company), so YMMV.
These are the guys who figured out a way to get a P!!! to send out its serial number even if that capability was supposedly shut off in the BIOS, something Intel insisted could never happen. (/. covered it in this article about a year and a half ago.) I would characterize that as a white-hat activitity (though INTC was able to convince a few anti-virus companies otherwise).
Is it necessarily laziness, or is it a matter of getting a (l)user up and going again as soon as possible? Yes, if you can figure out what's going on and actually fix the problem in 15 minutes, that's all well and good. If something has been done to the machine, though, that will take more than that to hunt down and repair, you're better off spending 5 minutes running Ghost and 10 minutes redetecting hardware than spending half an hour or more on something that might not be fixable anyway. Bean-counters tend to only care that their stuff works; they don't care much about how, as long as their "precious" downtime is minimized.
If you think about it, it's not too different than the approach we take nowadays to fixing hardware. When's the last time you did component-level repair on a motherboard or an add-in card? It's usually faster and cheaper to R^2 (remove and replace) it than to find the part that failed. (Only time I've fixed a motherboard was when I plugged the wrong type of USB cable in and blew the fuse feeding power to the keyboard port. I had already swapped the customer's motherboard out, but figured out the problem on my own time and got the board working again, more for sh*ts and grins than anything else.)
Since I began tracking them with the Uptimes Project, the two servers I maintain at work (a dual PII-266 and a PII-350, both running NT4 SP6) have a maximum uptime between them of just under 42 days. I had a DVD/MP3 player box at home once running Win95 OSR2 that seemed like it was up a few weeks before it needed a reboot, but I don't have any hard numbers for it.
By comparison, my home workstation (a K6-III 450 running SuSE Linux 6.3 and Win98 (the latter under VMware)) has been up 46 days and counting. The home server (a K6-2 300 running SuSE 6.4) would've been up longer than that if I hadn't taken it down a few times to test my UPS (wanted to make sure it'd shut down if the power went out). A mail server I set up for work (a P5-166 running SuSE 6.3) hits 200 days tomorrow.
Of the top 25 active hosts on the Uptimes Project, only one runs Windows (NT, specifically...don't know which version). 10 of the other machines run *BSD, 8 run Linux, 5 run SunOS, and 1 runs NetWare. The longest uptime belongs to a 386 running NetBSD, which has been up nearly 1609 days...about 4 years, 5 months.
True, but at least if you're building yourself, you know you're getting good parts and not whatever sh*t the OEM could get at a price that enabled him to meet a price target. It's a sure-fire method to avoid WinHardware, Piece-o'-Sh^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HPC Chips motherboards, processors from companIes that waNt To gEt a Lock on the market, etc. If you're so inclined, it also enables you to avoid the "Windows tax" that many OEMs try to impose (with Microsoft's encouragement, it would seem).
The first machine I built, way back in the day, was a 286-12 on which I installed DR DOS 6.0. That, I think, is the only OS for which I've ever paid money. I picked up OS/2 Warp 3 at the IBM booth at Fall Comdex '94, Microsoft provided me with NFRs of both Win95 and Win98 (since I was working for Best Buy at the time those came out), and Linux is free from any FTP site. (I paid for the boxed SuSE 5.3 once...I guess that means DR DOS isn't the only OS for which I've paid money. :-) )
Has anybody ever made such a beast?
I thought the Panasonic Toughbook might've been such a thing, but it uses a magnesium case, not a titanium case. It's still an unusual feature, though...back in the day, NeXT clothed its boxen in magnesium, and that's the only other computer I know about that uses any kind of "exotic metal" as a case material. As for titanium, RhinoSkin has titanium cases for Palm organizers.
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In addition to the Z80 coprocessor cards from way back, a couple of expansion cards of more recent design for the Apple II used the Z180, which was one of the Z80's successors. The RamFAST is a caching SCSI controller that uses a Z180 as the cache controller. The SecondSight is a VGA card that uses a Z180 to translate the Apple II's native video modes into something that the card's video controller (an Oak OTI067, IIRC) can understand and display on any VGA monitor. (Software that knows how can also drive the SecondSight at 640x480 high-color, 1024x768 8-bit color, or any ordinary VGA mode in between.)
The bits posted above about the ZX81 using the processor to generate the display are interesting...didn't know that, but then the last time I played with one of those was maybe 15 years ago. (And you thought UMA video was horrible...)
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Last time I checked, current TVs still tune up to channel 69. (Channels 70-84 were removed sometime in the mid-to-late 80s to keep people from using TVs to listen in on cellular-phone conversations, or something like that.) It's a good thing they do, too, since the local UPN station hasn't been on cable since it started up. You have to break out Ye Olde Rabbite Eares to watch Voyager. (That changes next month...finally!)
Hopefully it could put out a signal on a channel other than 33, though, as that channel is used by another local UHF broadcaster.
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They're available for less than that. A wire-wrapping tool I picked up at Rat Shack a few years ago has a stripper in the handle (the spinner pops off the top and the stripper slides inside). It couldn't have cost more than a few dollars. (It only works for one particular wire size, but so does the tool you mentioned.)
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Um...given that "LESS THAN" isn't a valid keyword in any BASIC I've ever seen (try "<" instead), your example doesn't hold.
Spelling errors are a minor annoyance, but not as much as the never-ending "CmdrTaco/Hemos/you is/are a non-spelling moron" messages.
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Either they're easily impressed or profoundly incompetent if they can't keep an NT box going more than 18 days. A couple of servers (here and here) at work have been up a maximum of about seven weeks since we began tracking them with uptimes.net, and they had some longer uptimes before that. (I don't think they ever went as long as the 187 days (and counting) that our mail server, which runs SuSE Linux 6.3, has been up, though...I'm not claiming that NT is an über-stable OS on the same level as Linux, but decent admins should be able to get more than 18 days out of it. Hell, I've gotten more uptime out of Win9x than that!)
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Several people have posted links, but unless you have a multi-system TV and VCR, you'll be unable to watch the tape as it's in PAL format. Play it in an NTSC VCR and you'll get garbage. Now, if it was on DVD and you had a region-free DVD player...
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Netscrape doesn't. It'll send HTML-only messages. When Mutt receives such a message, it says something along the lines of "attachment type text/html not supported"...at this point, it's somewhat viewable if you pipe the attachment into Lynx. Since it adds nothing to the content of email, though, it'd be better if email programs dropped the ability to send HTML in email.
You: But my email won't look pretty.
Me: Tough sh*t. You want pretty mail? Go back where you came from, AOLer.
You: Your mail reader doesn't handle HTML? Get with the program!
Me: Yeah, well at least email viruses won't knock me down...:-)
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(Whoever came up with the idea that HTML in email was a good idea ought to be shot.)
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