Of course, who wants all the crap the major OEM's load up anyways?
Indeed...a customer of mine got a Compaq Presario notebook (one of the really skinny models; I don't remember the model # offhand) last Christmas. After sending it back to Compaq to replace the built-in modem (because the bastards @ CompUSA wouldn't take it back), he complained that it ran fairly slow for what was in it (a mid-speed PII). I said it was all the preloaded crap that Compaq put on it. I nuked the hard drive and did a clean install of Win98 with the necessary drivers (modem and display drivers were available from Lucent and ATI, but I had to go to Toshiba's website to get a driver for the ESS sound controller). It ran much faster after that.
Since then, he's also bought a couple of new machines...650-MHz Durons with 7200-rpm hard drives and no WinHardware (one with 128 megs of RAM, the other with 256). OEM Win98 SE CDs were provided with each machine. (I also burned restore CDs for each machine...Ghost is great for that. Pop the CD in and it's restored in less than five minutes.) The new machines have run like champs, and there's no proprietary crap in them like you'd get with a Compaq, Dell, etc.
_/_ / v \ (IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail) \_^_/
This is almost one of those "if a tree falls and nobody's around" types of issues. I think the last time I used an MO drive was around 1990 or so...NeXTcubes booted off of 'em. When I look around at home, at work, and elsewhere, it seems to me that Zip, LS-120, and CD-R(W) have taken the market. Zip and LS-120 are cheaper. CD-R(W) is cheaper and the disks can be read in audio CD players, DVD players, and CD-ROM and DVD-ROM drives. Where does that leave MO?
_/_ / v \ (IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail) \_^_/
Even MS admits that their own browsers didn't hold a candle to Netscape until version 4+. Nobody chose IE3 over NN3 when given a choice. I'm still amazed when I load an NT4 system (which has IE3 by default) just how bad that browser was.
I guess I'm "nobody," then. I've used nearly every final-release version of IE in the past five years (the first one was on the Plus! CD I got along with Win95 when it was released in August that year). I tried some early versions of Netscrape and didn't see anything special in them, especially after they started charging for it. Having never used Netscrape in a serious way, I don't think I was "deprived" of anything worthwhile early on.
Even now, with all my computers at home running Linux instead of Win9x, I'm still running IE 5.5 (under Win98 under VMware). Unlike Netscrape, it won't lock up my computer, hose X, or do any of the other nasty things that Netscrape can do. It's also nice that, coming from a company that likes to "embrace and extend" the standards, it sticks more closely to the standards than Netscrape.
Using IE also means that I'm not supporting AOL, which I view as the biggest evil of all (who here doesn't remember when the AOLers descended on Usenet like the four horsemen of the apocalypse?).
_/_ / v \ (IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail) \_^_/
To mundanes, memory equals space. Just talk to the people who insist that they bought computers with 64GB ram and a 10 meg hard drive.
Maybe "64GB RAM" is still unreasonable (at work, we'll be getting a GHz Athlon soon with 0.5GB RAM), but a computer with a 10-meg HD wouldn't have been unheard of 10-15 years ago...:-)
(Smallest I've ever had was 20 megs in an IBM PC/XT, given to me a few years ago to add to my "collection." The first drive I bought was a 40-megger (and SCSI, too!), which was hooked at first to an Apple IIe. The computer I'm using to type this in has more than 6x that amount...of RAM! How times change...)
I suppose the combination of "64GB ram and a 10 meg hard drive" would be just a little bit unreasonable...
_/_ / v \ (IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail) \_^_/
I recognize the inevitability of this sort of technological development, but it does make me a bit sad. The hands-on process of real film is part of the appeal of the medium as an artistic form, and I, for one, will hate to see it relegated to the sidelines as an obsolete tool.
Photography didn't make painting obsolete. Most people shoot pictures with their cameras, but there are still some people who make their pictures with oil-based paint and canvas. Likewise, digital photography might be the way most people take their snaps in the future, but unless digital cameras get much more sophisticated than they are now, there will be some things you can do with film that can't be duplicated with an image sensor. There will still be a place for film. (Try doing a timed exposure of the stars at night with a digital camera, or of a busy city street at night. You might be able to fake it by shooting video and mashing the frames together with some sort of algorithm, but it probably still wouldn't be the same as just leaving the shutter open for several seconds or minutes.)
In high-school photography class (about 13 or 14 years ago), I made a 35mm pinhole camera out of a small cardboard box, a chunk out of a pie pan, some construction paper and electrician's tape, and part of a toothbrush handle (for the film advance). I loaded it up with Ektachrome 400, shot some pictures around the school, and developed and mounted the film. Several frames actually turned out fairly well (properly lit and in usable focus), for having come from such crude technology. Try doing that with a sensor from a digital camera.
_/_ / v \ (IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail) \_^_/
Perhaps it's CSS that Netscape 4.x doesn't understand correctly?
Netscrape 4.x definitely has some issues with its CSS implementation. Mainly I've seen problems with its interpretation of layout attributes, though it wouldn't surprise me if some text-color attributes might be screwed up as well.
Recent Mozilla builds seem to work much better, as does Internet Explorer.
_/_ / v \ (IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail) \_^_/
The main problem with AMD right now is that the motherboards cost so much more. The Duron/Athlon chips are cheeper but when you have to spend $50 more on the motherboard (than if you bought a PIII or a Celly) it makes the price gap very small.
I just paid a little under $130 for an FIC AZ11. That's not much more than I've paid for reasonably modern (at the time) Socket 7/Super 7/Slot 1 motherboards from reputable manufacturers ("reputable manufacturer" != "PC Chips").
When we can get Socket A mobos for $70, then Intel will be truly useless.
Trademarks are the only type of IP with this requirement [to defend it or lose all rights to it]. If they are having issues with the open source drivers saying "cuecat", then they should just SAY SO and I'm sure that we could come up with a brand new name for the drivers that imply no public association with the people who developed the Radio Shack software.
"QueueFeline" (sorry..."Queue:Feline"), perhaps?
_/_ / v \ (IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail) \_^_/
I know CmdrTaco's spelling isn't always the greatest in the world, but assuming that the text of the DigitalConvergence letter was cut-and-pasted and not retyped...what kind of mickey-mouse outfit are they running if their PR flacks still have jobs after shoveling out such tripe? In addition to the numerous spelling and grammar errors, it appears that the letter is aimed more at lawyer-buzzword compliance than at any kind of truth. Mr. Davis keeps driving home the point that the Linux-based software for the CueCat somehow infringes his company's IP, but he never says exactly how it infringes his company's alleged IP. His usage of "M$" to refer to Microsoft was a nice touch, too...the Redmond giant might not be too popular around here, but a PR flack ought to know better.
Must go to Radio Shack and pick one of these things up so I can start "breaking the law" and "infringing DC's IP..."
#include "Judas Priest--Breaking The Law.mp3"
_/_ / v \ (IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail) \_^_/
You'd think that once someone gives an item away, or sells it for that matter, that you are free to do with it as you wish. There's gotta be something that covers this.
IANAL, but isn't the first-sale doctrine (brought up recently here WRT books) something that would come into play here? (It says that once you purchase something, it is yours to do with as you please and the seller has no control over what you do with it.) If it is applicable, then the proper response to Digital Convergence would be to tell them what they can go do with themselves.
The only snag I can think of here, though, is that nothing is sold to you here...they're giving these scanners away. Would that make any difference?
_/_ / v \ (IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail) \_^_/
It seems that Intel thinks the only thing we care about is raw speed.
Haven't there been some preliminary reports that Willamette will likely not run substantially faster than existing products, despite being clocked considerably faster than current products. Intel's trying to make this into a dick-size contest...the funny thing is that, this time, size really won't matter a damn.
On a slightly related note, if Willamette is to be known informally as P4, what are we going to call the successor to Willamette? P5's already taken (codename for the original Pentium from back in the day), so I propose "Roadkill."
_/_ / v \ (IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail) \_^_/
It still smells like toxic chemicals. Maybe the car companies have found a way to insert magic smellazoids in the exhaust?
They did that long ago...it's called a catalytic converter. Some of 'em (most of 'em, nowadays?) aren't too bad, but I remember the exhaust from Fords up to at least the late 80s or early 90s smelling like rotten eggs. It must've been something in the catalyst Ford used, as none of my cars (various GM makes and models) have smelled like that.
_/_ / v \ (IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail) \_^_/
Me, I go against the grain. I buy something ugly, and build it up myself. I'll most likely build my own hybrid within the next few years. I hope to get my hands on a good 600 hp traction motor from a locomotive. Power that thing with two small V-8s or V-6s (one or both at a time), and I'll have something I'll like.
Sounds interesting, but if you plan on getting full power out of it, you'll more than likely need more than "two small V-8s" (forget about V-6s). A stock late-60s Olds 350, for instance, was good for a little over 300 hp. Two of those would be 620...build them up for high performance and you can get more from 'em, but it seems you'd still have some losses to deal with.
Also, how big a vehicle would you need as a foundation for such a beast? You'd probably need to start with a mid-70s land yacht to get something big enough and strong enough to hold all of it.
_/_ / v \ (IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail) \_^_/
I have about 200 to 230 fonts, and use most of the Adobe line of products. (Specs: Athlon 700, 256MB, FIC board [don't flame, it's the only damned Athlon board I could find local after my Asus went overboard!], ATA/66 drives, Win 2000) I just upgraded to the ATA/66 drives; WOW! Do they make a difference!
A recent experiment I tried with Illustrator 7 (yeah, it's old, but Adobe sent it to me free when it came out and I'm not a hardcore graphics-design geek) on a Duron system I built for somebody indicated that ATA-66 didn't make much difference one way or another. The load time for the default Illustrator 7 install on this box (650-MHz Duron, FIC AZ11, 128MB PC133 SDRAM, WD 20GB 7200rpm HD, ATI Xpert 2000) was about seven seconds, regardless of whether ATA-66 was enabled. I remember it taking more than a minute to load the same install on a 300-MHz K6-2 with 64 megs of RAM and a 5GB hard drive, and a test yesterday on a 400-MHz PII with 192 megs of RAM and a 13GB 5400-rpm HD came up with a load time of about 15 seconds.
I doubt that ATA-66 is making the difference in your system. Having lots of memory helps, as well as speeding up the rate at which you can pull data off the platters in the hard drives. Faster spindle speeds (7200+) help here. RAID ought to help as well, as you can spread accesses across several drives. ATA-66, at this point, seems to be mostly a waste.
_/_ / v \ (IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail) \_^_/
Um...what gave you this idea? The first burner I used was an $800 HP 2x4 SCSI CD-R, and that was cheaper than the $2000-$3000 that the very first CD-Rs cost. The drive I'm using now is a no-name 2x2x6 IDE CD-RW that cost $200 a year and a half ago.
and there isn't good support for all CD drives in linux (largely because of said "competition") and so I dhave to use old DOS drivers from 1995 to get mine to work which means another reboot
What special support do you need? More than a few SCSI burners are supported directly, and a larger number of IDE burners are supported through IDE-SCSI emulation. (I suppose that's no good if you managed to snag the one no-name drive that isn't yet working, though...)
_/_ / v \ (IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail) \_^_/
As long as your 486 m/b has PCI slots (the Biostar 8433UUD in my firewall is such a board), all you should need is a USB card and an OS that supports USB.
If you're stuck with only VLB and/or ISA slots, forget it.
Otherwise I really don't much care and unless it costs less than a standard hard drive I don't care.
Last time I looked, USB cards were somewhere around $40 at places like Best Buy. You can probably find lower prices than that if you look around a bit.
_/_ / v \ (IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail) \_^_/
Whatever happened to keep uptil it breaks manufacturing techniques.
"If our product never breaks, will we have any customers when everybody is using it?"
Planned obsolescence is the game that most industries are playing. The computer industry is probably the worst for this, but as you observe below, it's not the only one.
Hell cars were built tougher back in older times (I know after owning 3 cars and having my Chevrolet Chevette Scooter 1981 last longer than any of them the rest being a 1985 Crysler Plymouth Reliant and a 1992 Ford Tarus Station Wagon).
My first car was an '80 Chevette. Odds are good I'd still be driving it now if an Olde Pharte in a Town Car hadn't cut me off.:-( (OTOH, if I was still driving it today, I wouldn't have the '77 Cutlass Supreme Brougham that I'm driving now, so maybe the accident wasn't entirely a bad thing in the long run. Chevettes are good cars in their own way, but a Rocket 350 is more fun than a 1.6L four-banger.:-) )
_/_ / v \ (IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail) \_^_/
While it might be nice if it were dead. It most certainly isn't. And belive it or not I know plenty of government agencies that still have windowless TN3270 terminals for database lookups.
Some of 'em are still in the private sector, too. My former employer was still using IBM terminals up to sometime within the past 12 months. I think they've converted from terminals to NT workstations, but they still have a 3270 emulator on them for legacy-system access.
_/_ / v \ (IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail) \_^_/
My favorite folks in computer history are the ones who make emulators of old machines. It's possible to have a virtual Commodore 64 on your desk if you run the right emulator. That means you can run your old software without futzing over old hardware. This kind of virtual collecting is pretty cool and arguably the right way that cyber savvy folks should be collecting. Who wants to get into the artificially introduced scarcity of physical goods? Lets leave that for the baseball card and stamp fanatics.
Emulation has its place, but real hardware is more fun, and is ultimately the most accurate representation of what computing "back in the day" was like. I'm slowly accumulating old hardware...my "collection" currently includes three Apple IIs (a II+, a IIe, and a "stealth IIGS" in a IIe case), a VIC-20, a CoCo 2, and a PC/XT. (I wish I hadn't left my TI-99/4A behind in Germany 12 years ago, but I didn't have much say in the matter.)
The only problem is finding space for them all...the only one that's close to set up is the GS (which has been on my desktop for the past 15 years, having started life as a IIe), and right now its monitor is hanging off of one of the x86 boxen (the NEC MultiSync 3D is a versatile beast...one of the few VGA monitors that will sync down to the GS's NTSC-compatible refresh rate). The rest are disconnected and stacked in a couple of "piles." (The XT was last fired up to get an Ethernet adapter and a network client so that it can talk to the Samba servers. Need to test the RamWorks II that came in for the IIe next...)
_/_ / v \ (IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail) \_^_/
I don't know if you could get a formal position, but by all means, start a web site! Even a lucid history with pointers to resources would be nice.
There's a fairly comprehensive history of the Apple II up at http://www.hypermall.com/History. There's tons of info in there if you have any interest in the II (and who here doesn't?:-) ).
(No, I didn't write it...but I have a minor contribution in the section on foreign magazines for the II. The whole series was put together over the course of several months on GEnie (anyone else remember them?) and eventually found its way onto the 'net.)
_/_ / v \ (IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail) \_^_/
Another distinct possibility is that somebody in Redmond has finally realized how much ca$h they could make by selling desktop software for Linux. After all, Office for Macintosh never hurt them...
Isn't Office their main cash cow anyway? Why should they care if you're running Office on Win9x, MacOS, or whatever? If you're running Office of any flavor, they're making their money. Office is to Windows as blades are to a razor.
_/_ / v \ (IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail) \_^_/
The index page for x86-64.org indicated that one of the earlier goals for the project will be to add x86-64 support to gcc (gotta have gcc before you can do anything else). Since x86-64 is a superset of IA-32 (what we're all using already) and 3DNow!, what do you suppose are the possibilities of 3DNow! optimizers finding their way into gcc? For those of us running K6-*s, Athlons, and Durons, this would be a Good Thing (TM), and I suspect it's something would benefit Sledgehammer once it's out.
_/_ / v \ (IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail) \_^_/
TiVo changed the way I handle TV, but its relatively steep price prevents it from becoming as common as napster...
"Relatively steep price?" The one I snagged last weekend (a Philips HDR112) was $300, but a $100 rebate knocks that down to $200. That's about what you'd pay for a decent HiFi VHS VCR (decent == reputable brands such as JVC, Sharp, Sony, Panasonic, etc., not el-cheapo brands such as Symphonic or Craig). The $10/month for service is about what you'd pay for dial-up Internet access (or you can fork over a $200 lump sum and be done with it).
It only took it a couple of days to figure out what type of stuff I watch. At first, it was a bit frustrating to not be able to put in "season passes" for two different programs that each have a showing on at the same time in some time slot you never knew even existed, but it's done a good job so far of catching stuff to watch all by itself. Sehr gut.
_/_ / v \ (IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail) \_^_/
Originally, the price for audio CDRs was much, much higher -- in the $13-$14 range PER DISC.
There is no real reason for this...
...other than to enrich the Hollyweird fat cats.
as the "RIAA Tax" is only 2% of the CD wholesale price
If 2% of wholesale is all they're taking, where's the rest of the money going? I'm not being argumentative...this just sounds fishy.
and the cost of producing an audio CDR is no more then the cost of producing a data CDR.
This is true. The difference in price between the two types is strictly artificial and has no technical merit.
Apparently, the CDR manufacturers have "broken rank" with the RIAA's agenda of discouraging home recording through high priced media. A quick web search now turns up blank audio-only CDRs for $1.13 each.
This is encouraging news for those who bought audio CD-R decks, but when you can find data CD-R spindles at local retailers for about $0.25 each (seen recently at PC Club in Las Vegas), you're still paying too much for audio CD-Rs. (Hell, you can get CD-RWs for less than the $1.13 you mentioned...while passing through Tempe a while back, I saw a 5-pack of CD-RWs at Fry's for $5.)
_/_ / v \ (IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail) \_^_/
Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't record companies get a cut of blank cd sales?
Only of the CD-Rs sold for use in audio CD burners (of the type that plug into your stereo, not the type that plug into your computer). Those burners are rigged to only burn to the special CD-Rs that cost considerably more than the normal variety. They get nothing from those 25-cent-per-disk spindles you pick up in computer stores. If you're interested in not lining the pockets of the RIAA, do all your CD burning from your computer. (The equipment is cheaper anyway, and if you're only working with digital sources, there's no difference in sound quality.)
_/_ / v \ (IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail) \_^_/
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed...a customer of mine got a Compaq Presario notebook (one of the really skinny models; I don't remember the model # offhand) last Christmas. After sending it back to Compaq to replace the built-in modem (because the bastards @ CompUSA wouldn't take it back), he complained that it ran fairly slow for what was in it (a mid-speed PII). I said it was all the preloaded crap that Compaq put on it. I nuked the hard drive and did a clean install of Win98 with the necessary drivers (modem and display drivers were available from Lucent and ATI, but I had to go to Toshiba's website to get a driver for the ESS sound controller). It ran much faster after that.
Since then, he's also bought a couple of new machines...650-MHz Durons with 7200-rpm hard drives and no WinHardware (one with 128 megs of RAM, the other with 256). OEM Win98 SE CDs were provided with each machine. (I also burned restore CDs for each machine...Ghost is great for that. Pop the CD in and it's restored in less than five minutes.) The new machines have run like champs, and there's no proprietary crap in them like you'd get with a Compaq, Dell, etc.
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I guess I'm "nobody," then. I've used nearly every final-release version of IE in the past five years (the first one was on the Plus! CD I got along with Win95 when it was released in August that year). I tried some early versions of Netscrape and didn't see anything special in them, especially after they started charging for it. Having never used Netscrape in a serious way, I don't think I was "deprived" of anything worthwhile early on.
Even now, with all my computers at home running Linux instead of Win9x, I'm still running IE 5.5 (under Win98 under VMware). Unlike Netscrape, it won't lock up my computer, hose X, or do any of the other nasty things that Netscrape can do. It's also nice that, coming from a company that likes to "embrace and extend" the standards, it sticks more closely to the standards than Netscrape.
Using IE also means that I'm not supporting AOL, which I view as the biggest evil of all (who here doesn't remember when the AOLers descended on Usenet like the four horsemen of the apocalypse?).
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Photography didn't make painting obsolete. Most people shoot pictures with their cameras, but there are still some people who make their pictures with oil-based paint and canvas. Likewise, digital photography might be the way most people take their snaps in the future, but unless digital cameras get much more sophisticated than they are now, there will be some things you can do with film that can't be duplicated with an image sensor. There will still be a place for film. (Try doing a timed exposure of the stars at night with a digital camera, or of a busy city street at night. You might be able to fake it by shooting video and mashing the frames together with some sort of algorithm, but it probably still wouldn't be the same as just leaving the shutter open for several seconds or minutes.)
In high-school photography class (about 13 or 14 years ago), I made a 35mm pinhole camera out of a small cardboard box, a chunk out of a pie pan, some construction paper and electrician's tape, and part of a toothbrush handle (for the film advance). I loaded it up with Ektachrome 400, shot some pictures around the school, and developed and mounted the film. Several frames actually turned out fairly well (properly lit and in usable focus), for having come from such crude technology. Try doing that with a sensor from a digital camera.
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Netscrape 4.x definitely has some issues with its CSS implementation. Mainly I've seen problems with its interpretation of layout attributes, though it wouldn't surprise me if some text-color attributes might be screwed up as well.
Recent Mozilla builds seem to work much better, as does Internet Explorer.
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I just paid a little under $130 for an FIC AZ11. That's not much more than I've paid for reasonably modern (at the time) Socket 7/Super 7/Slot 1 motherboards from reputable manufacturers ("reputable manufacturer" != "PC Chips").
You're not going to find a good-quality motherboard for any current processor at that price. You might find older boards for that price or less (the last two boards I bought for personal use were about $20-$25 each, but those were a Supermicro i430TX-based AT m/b and an Asus SiS 5598-based ATX m/b, both of which are way behind the power curve), or maybe some PC Chips^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hpiece-of-sh*t "BXPro+Ultra©®" motherboard, but that's about it.
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"QueueFeline" (sorry..."Queue:Feline"), perhaps?
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Must go to Radio Shack and pick one of these things up so I can start "breaking the law" and "infringing DC's IP..."
#include "Judas Priest--Breaking The Law.mp3"
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IANAL, but isn't the first-sale doctrine (brought up recently here WRT books) something that would come into play here? (It says that once you purchase something, it is yours to do with as you please and the seller has no control over what you do with it.) If it is applicable, then the proper response to Digital Convergence would be to tell them what they can go do with themselves.
The only snag I can think of here, though, is that nothing is sold to you here...they're giving these scanners away. Would that make any difference?
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Haven't there been some preliminary reports that Willamette will likely not run substantially faster than existing products, despite being clocked considerably faster than current products. Intel's trying to make this into a dick-size contest...the funny thing is that, this time, size really won't matter a damn.
On a slightly related note, if Willamette is to be known informally as P4, what are we going to call the successor to Willamette? P5's already taken (codename for the original Pentium from back in the day), so I propose "Roadkill."
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They did that long ago...it's called a catalytic converter. Some of 'em (most of 'em, nowadays?) aren't too bad, but I remember the exhaust from Fords up to at least the late 80s or early 90s smelling like rotten eggs. It must've been something in the catalyst Ford used, as none of my cars (various GM makes and models) have smelled like that.
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Sounds interesting, but if you plan on getting full power out of it, you'll more than likely need more than "two small V-8s" (forget about V-6s). A stock late-60s Olds 350, for instance, was good for a little over 300 hp. Two of those would be 620...build them up for high performance and you can get more from 'em, but it seems you'd still have some losses to deal with.
Also, how big a vehicle would you need as a foundation for such a beast? You'd probably need to start with a mid-70s land yacht to get something big enough and strong enough to hold all of it.
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A recent experiment I tried with Illustrator 7 (yeah, it's old, but Adobe sent it to me free when it came out and I'm not a hardcore graphics-design geek) on a Duron system I built for somebody indicated that ATA-66 didn't make much difference one way or another. The load time for the default Illustrator 7 install on this box (650-MHz Duron, FIC AZ11, 128MB PC133 SDRAM, WD 20GB 7200rpm HD, ATI Xpert 2000) was about seven seconds, regardless of whether ATA-66 was enabled. I remember it taking more than a minute to load the same install on a 300-MHz K6-2 with 64 megs of RAM and a 5GB hard drive, and a test yesterday on a 400-MHz PII with 192 megs of RAM and a 13GB 5400-rpm HD came up with a load time of about 15 seconds.
I doubt that ATA-66 is making the difference in your system. Having lots of memory helps, as well as speeding up the rate at which you can pull data off the platters in the hard drives. Faster spindle speeds (7200+) help here. RAID ought to help as well, as you can spread accesses across several drives. ATA-66, at this point, seems to be mostly a waste.
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(IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail)
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Um...what gave you this idea? The first burner I used was an $800 HP 2x4 SCSI CD-R, and that was cheaper than the $2000-$3000 that the very first CD-Rs cost. The drive I'm using now is a no-name 2x2x6 IDE CD-RW that cost $200 a year and a half ago.
What special support do you need? More than a few SCSI burners are supported directly, and a larger number of IDE burners are supported through IDE-SCSI emulation. (I suppose that's no good if you managed to snag the one no-name drive that isn't yet working, though...)
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(IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail)
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As long as your 486 m/b has PCI slots (the Biostar 8433UUD in my firewall is such a board), all you should need is a USB card and an OS that supports USB.
If you're stuck with only VLB and/or ISA slots, forget it.
Last time I looked, USB cards were somewhere around $40 at places like Best Buy. You can probably find lower prices than that if you look around a bit.
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(IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail)
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"If our product never breaks, will we have any customers when everybody is using it?"
Planned obsolescence is the game that most industries are playing. The computer industry is probably the worst for this, but as you observe below, it's not the only one.
My first car was an '80 Chevette. Odds are good I'd still be driving it now if an Olde Pharte in a Town Car hadn't cut me off. :-( (OTOH, if I was still driving it today, I wouldn't have the '77 Cutlass Supreme Brougham that I'm driving now, so maybe the accident wasn't entirely a bad thing in the long run. Chevettes are good cars in their own way, but a Rocket 350 is more fun than a 1.6L four-banger. :-) )
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(IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail)
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Some of 'em are still in the private sector, too. My former employer was still using IBM terminals up to sometime within the past 12 months. I think they've converted from terminals to NT workstations, but they still have a 3270 emulator on them for legacy-system access.
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(IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail)
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Emulation has its place, but real hardware is more fun, and is ultimately the most accurate representation of what computing "back in the day" was like. I'm slowly accumulating old hardware...my "collection" currently includes three Apple IIs (a II+, a IIe, and a "stealth IIGS" in a IIe case), a VIC-20, a CoCo 2, and a PC/XT. (I wish I hadn't left my TI-99/4A behind in Germany 12 years ago, but I didn't have much say in the matter.)
The only problem is finding space for them all...the only one that's close to set up is the GS (which has been on my desktop for the past 15 years, having started life as a IIe), and right now its monitor is hanging off of one of the x86 boxen (the NEC MultiSync 3D is a versatile beast...one of the few VGA monitors that will sync down to the GS's NTSC-compatible refresh rate). The rest are disconnected and stacked in a couple of "piles." (The XT was last fired up to get an Ethernet adapter and a network client so that it can talk to the Samba servers. Need to test the RamWorks II that came in for the IIe next...)
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(IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail)
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There's a fairly comprehensive history of the Apple II up at http://www.hypermall.com/History. There's tons of info in there if you have any interest in the II (and who here doesn't? :-) ).
(No, I didn't write it...but I have a minor contribution in the section on foreign magazines for the II. The whole series was put together over the course of several months on GEnie (anyone else remember them?) and eventually found its way onto the 'net.)
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(IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail)
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Isn't Office their main cash cow anyway? Why should they care if you're running Office on Win9x, MacOS, or whatever? If you're running Office of any flavor, they're making their money. Office is to Windows as blades are to a razor.
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(IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail)
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(IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail)
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"Relatively steep price?" The one I snagged last weekend (a Philips HDR112) was $300, but a $100 rebate knocks that down to $200. That's about what you'd pay for a decent HiFi VHS VCR (decent == reputable brands such as JVC, Sharp, Sony, Panasonic, etc., not el-cheapo brands such as Symphonic or Craig). The $10/month for service is about what you'd pay for dial-up Internet access (or you can fork over a $200 lump sum and be done with it).
It only took it a couple of days to figure out what type of stuff I watch. At first, it was a bit frustrating to not be able to put in "season passes" for two different programs that each have a showing on at the same time in some time slot you never knew even existed, but it's done a good job so far of catching stuff to watch all by itself. Sehr gut.
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(IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail)
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If 2% of wholesale is all they're taking, where's the rest of the money going? I'm not being argumentative...this just sounds fishy.
This is true. The difference in price between the two types is strictly artificial and has no technical merit.
This is encouraging news for those who bought audio CD-R decks, but when you can find data CD-R spindles at local retailers for about $0.25 each (seen recently at PC Club in Las Vegas), you're still paying too much for audio CD-Rs. (Hell, you can get CD-RWs for less than the $1.13 you mentioned...while passing through Tempe a while back, I saw a 5-pack of CD-RWs at Fry's for $5.)
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(IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail)
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Only of the CD-Rs sold for use in audio CD burners (of the type that plug into your stereo, not the type that plug into your computer). Those burners are rigged to only burn to the special CD-Rs that cost considerably more than the normal variety. They get nothing from those 25-cent-per-disk spindles you pick up in computer stores. If you're interested in not lining the pockets of the RIAA, do all your CD burning from your computer. (The equipment is cheaper anyway, and if you're only working with digital sources, there's no difference in sound quality.)
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(IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail)
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