Honestly, I think that VIA is the bane of AMD's existance. If you want an AMD CPU, you're pretty much forced into a VIA chipset, which IMHO give AMD a bad name. Incompatibility issues, stability problems.
That's funny...I've never ran into problems with any of the VIA-based motherboards I've run across (except for the PCChips motherboards with relabeled VIA chipsets, but we all know what absolute pieces of sh*t PCChips products are). I have two FIC motherboards here (a PA-2007 (VP2) with K6-200 and a VA-503+ (MVP3) with K6-III-450) and have never run into hardware incompatibility problems. FWIW, all the motherboards that have given me trouble (other than the aforementioned PCChips boards, which I've had the good sense to not own myself) have been Intel-based boards. (In all fairness, their chipsets usually haven't been at fault...though I've seen some weirdness with configuring two IDE devices as primary-master and secondary-master on some i430?X-based boards. To get the system to work, you'd end up putting the hard drive and CD-ROM drive on the primary interface and leave the secondary interface empty, which is lame.)
_/_ / v \ (IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail) \_^_/
I'm speaking out of my nethers when I say that it's my belief that when they changed to the socket cpu design they introduced the abiltiy to control this from the mb and bios... no gold fingers.. just extra pins that do the same functions. This is just the first mb that has taken advantage of those options.
They probably did this to enable jumperless configuration, but the ease with which overclocking can be done is a nice bonus for people who are so inclined. On Socket A processors, there are four pins that tell the motherboard what settings (multiplier, FSB, and voltage, IIRC) to use. The motherboard then generates signals that go to the processor on another pin to set it to a particular multiplier. Theoretically, the BIOS will only echo back whatever the processor told it to use. In practice, the BIOS can ignore what the processor says and set up the processor to run at whatever multiplier it wants. This is just the first motherboard to take advantage of that capability.
I love AMD... I've used them since their K-6 series first came out and have used them ever since.
Likewise...I'm running a K6-III-450, a K6-2-300, and a K6-200 here, and have never run into problems with any of them while running Win9x, NT4, Linux, or whatever (only thing I haven't tried on them yet is NetWare, and I have no reason to believe it wouldn't work). I see a K7 of some kind in my future...(most likely a Spitf^H^H^H^H^HDuron due to the lower price...)
_/_ / v \ (IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail) \_^_/
Ok, the motherboard I can understand, but why would you swap out your case? Damn near everyone uses ATX now.
I guess I'm not "everyone"...my fastest box is in a full-tower AT case. (It's a 450-MHz K6-III with 256 megs of PC133 SDRAM on an FIC VA-503+. (No, the motherboard I have now doesn't take full advantage of the memory speed...I only bought the memory a few months ago with the intent to move it to some kind of K7 box.)) ATX cases used to cost substantially more than AT cases, which is why I've stuck with AT cases for so long. Now that you can get ATX cases for about what AT cases used to cost, it's not as big a hassle. (Also, I don't think anybody is making any AT cases anymore, and I've not heard of any Slot/Socket A AT motherboards.)
With all that said, the specs on Abit's new board look pretty sweet. Six PCI slots, an ISA slot, and no AMR header to waste space that'd be better occupied by a PCI or ISA slot. (Epox also has an AMR-free K7 board (the EP-8KTA) that comes close, but includes on-board audio (isn't the on-board audio on VIA-chipset motherboards kinda difficult to get running under Linux? I'll stick with my Ensoniq AudioPCI...).) The KT7 hasn't found its way to the Price Watch vendors, though...yet.
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Hardly. It's not too different from the dot commands I was sticking in Apple Writer documents 15 years ago to twiddle margins, set tabs, etc., and it serves approximately the same purpose.
(Even funnier would be someone who calls himself an "HTML programmer," but would be lost without his FrontPage.)
_/_ / v \ (IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail) \_^_/
Actually, it doesn't appear that Home Deopt "locks you in" with the standard whack-a-mole javascript crap. It appears to have several redirects, but I can hold my back button down (Netscape) and get back to familiar territory -/.
Top9 mentioned UPN as an offender. I tried it...while casual clicking of the back button will more than likely keep you on UPN's site, if you hold down Backspace (IE), you'll break loose. You'll probably end up going back through dozens of previously-viewed pages when you do this, though. (It'd be like putting your car up on blocks in your garage, firewalling the throttle with the tranny in Reverse, and kicking the blocks out from under the car, at which time you'd crash through the garage door and probably slam into the garage across the street.:-) )
_/_ / v \ (IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail) \_^_/
PuTTY is a very usable, free Win32 ssh/telnet client.
It has the added benefit of being small. I have it up on my webserver so that if I'm on some random Win9x/NT box with a net connection, I can punch in a URL and have PuTTY come up so I can log into my computers at home. Even over a 56K dial-up connection, it only takes a minute or so to download.
_/_ / v \ (IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail) \_^_/
Gotta correct you here... ISDN is laughably expensive (coming from someone who has 128kbps to BigPong Direct)... but the line charges are capped: AU$275/month for 64kbps and AU$435/month for 128kbps - for a "permanent connection" (i.e. your line is dialled up to the one number, and when it disconnects it redials that)...
Ow...even after converting to US $, that's still a fortune. Do they include Vaseline in that price? They should.:-)
(I probably shouldn't mention that I'm getting the same upstream speed and 4x the downstream speed through my cable-modem hookup for $40/month. Even here, ISDN is a ripoff by comparison...not as bad as you have it, but it costs at least as much (probably more) as cable-modem service, and it only delivers 128 kbps. Two POTS lines and a MLPPP connection would be almost as good as ISDN, and cheaper too.)
_/_ / v \ (IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail) \_^_/
But to test this theory, I tried connecting to another machine of mine 40 miles across town, running the same modem (at the time, a Zoom 56kFlex) and made it consistantly at 44k.
How did you do this - the modem to modem connect?
56k modem connecting to a 56k modem will only connect at 33.6k *maximum*.
He could've had something like a USR Courier I-modem, which is an ISDN adapter that can act as the "server side" of a V.90 connection, at the remote site. A connection between two ordinary modems certainly wouldn't get anything beyond 33.6 kbps, as you noted.
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Dozens of people have complained to me over the last year or two, about their inability to connect to their 56k account at anything higher than 19200bps. That's 19200bps! I haven't seen connections like that since late in 1994!
You think 19.2 kbps is bad? The company for which I work had (until recently) a store in Milpitas, CA. My understanding is that Milpitas is somewhere in the Bay Area/Silicon Valley general neighborhood (having never lived in the People's Republic of California, I'm not too familiar with what's where there). Anyway, each store had a point-of-sale system that we could dial into and take over with pcAnywhere. We use US Robotics controller-based modems (usually externals, never Winmodems) at each store and at the home office. Connections to most other stores would run from the mid-20s to the low 30s, but we'd always connect to the Milpitas store at the whopping fast speed of 9600 bps!
(When we called PacBell (the local phone company up there) about the problem, they passed some BS off on us about how that was as much speed as they'd guarantee for a POTS line. Yeah, whatever...)
At least I get a consistent 512 kbps out of the cable modem at home...I've not even had the bog-downs that other people have complained about.
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If you look at all the proprietary operating systems, their community is very different from the BSD/Linux community.
Even the BeOS-community which seem to be rather enthusiastic is still mostly closed source.
As another example, consider the Apple II community...due to the age of the hardware involved (last new design hit the market in '88, last Apple II rolled off the assembly line in '93...or was it '92?), you're dealing with an even smaller niche than with anything that runs on modern hardware. You can almost always count on a flamewar in progress in comp.sys.apple2 regarding 15- or 20-year-old software up on FTP sites...not even just for software from the few companies from that period that are still around in some form or other (someone like Broderbund or Activision), but also from long-dead companies that just disappeared (someone like Epyx or Muse). The few people who are still coding today for the II also seem to be inordinately occupied with how much money they might be able to squeeze out of a project, even though they know it's been pretty much impossible for years now to code for the II as your day job.
FWIW, the last two releases I've done for the Apple II have been GPL'd. One was a digital-audio player for the 8-bit IIs that I open-sourced in 1992. The more recent one was a DHR character generator (no link at this time) that provided an easy way to mix graphics and text under BASIC. A more significant open-source release was GNO, a mulitasking command-line shell for GS/OS. Beyond my two programs and GNO, I can't think of any other open-source releases for the Apple II in recent years (public-domain software excluded because of the way derivative works can be made closed).
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I actually used to [redirect ad sites to localhost in/etc/hosts], but a number of sites stopped working completely for me - instead of loading a broken image or whatever for the banner, I got a full page error message, and no web page.
I've been using squid for a few months to filter out ads and keep cookies from being set; it's worked really well. It hasn't broken any sites that I can recall, and it's cut out most of the clutter and third-party cookies. You still need to check periodically for third-party cookies as new ad servers are put online, but I've gotten most of the current sites loaded into it. It even strips out the annoying host-navigation frames put up with sites hosted by the likes of Xoom and AOHell.
Here's some info on configuring squid as an ad-blocker. My list of blocked sites is here. (I've tweaked the redirector script to support a NULLHTML tag that causes a file containing "<html></html>" to be returned...it's a simple hack, and I don't know squat about Perl.)
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In my humble opinion, the worst form of PC deception has always been the monitor advertisemnts. All the monitors you see in the magazines and stuff have the pictures just pasted into the frame, they're not really rendered on the monitor.
It's no different than the ads you see for TVs...they're done the same way, and for the same reason. Have you ever tried to take a picture of your monitor or TV? You can't get an integral number of frames with most cameras (there's a shutter speed of 1/30 s on my Pentax K1000 which comes close to the 29.97 fps of NTSC video, but ends up going slightly over), so you end up with gaps in the picture, or light/dark bars. Even if you manage to get a full frame, it'll appear washed out because the dynamic range of film is much greater than any video display. End result: pictures that look like crap, which wouldn't do a good job of selling product. That's why you usually see a "simulated image" footnote near TV and monitor ads (or at least near TV ads...I don't recall if monitor ads use that disclaimer or not).
(Back in the day, I could take screenshots of still images off of my Apple Monitor II that turned out OK, but I suspect that the long-persistence phosphor used in most green-screen monitors is what made that possible.)
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Also two-way paging is down to the $30/$20/month rate... are we also going to clutter our paging airwaves with rather unencrypted email, spam, etc?
My Nextel phone already receives more spam than my normal email systems...received a message yesterday on my phone (with HTML tags and other garbage that doesn't belong in email) from some moron selling satellite receiving systems, or something (didn't read it...saw the subject and "<HTML>" and hit Erase).
The really strange part is that I've never given anybody the email address for my phone. Where are the spammers getting it? Are they just hitting every phone in Nextel's exchanges? (The email address for a phone is (10-digitphone#)@page.nextel.com, so I'd imagine that a cross between a bulk mailer and a wardialer would allow you to spam phones.)
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i know my 89 honda runs like crap, looks like crap, but everytime i take it to get the emmisions done i'm told it's the cleanest car they've seen, and it get's a whopping 28mpg. in the city.
...and is it your implication that older cars, especially of the "Yank tank" variety, are smoke-belching monsters? I have a '77 Cutlass Supreme Brougham (with the Rocket 350 V-8) that's as clean-burning as any other car I've had. It still looks like new on the outside, too. (It could use some new upholstery, but what's in there is serviceable.)
I'll concede that it does suck down a bit more fuel, but I knew that when I bought it. With a big engine set up very conservatively, it'll keep on chugging away nearly forever if it's well-maintained. (190 hp from a 5.7L V-8 is much easier to squeeze out than 190 hp from some rinky-dink four-banger or small V-6.) Besides, if I wanted, an engine rebuild could put it at 300+ hp, and with a buttload of torque to go with it, and it'd still be a rock-solid engine.
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Any idea if Intel is EVER going to change the name? I doubt it. "Pentium" is such a household name, and whenever it is mentioned, the average person recognizes it, and associates it with a fast computer.
Pricewatch still sells 64MB of SDRAM for $49. Pretty damn good prices. Usually you see the prices drop before you read an article like this. I don't remember what the prices were like back in February (too much up and down). I don't think comparing today's $8.50 to February's $4.50 is a good example, considering that February was close to an all time low.
I bought 256 megs of PC133 SDRAM toward the end of March; the price back then was about $210 (from a reputable vendor, not a Pricewatch lowballer). I just checked the same vendor's price for the same memory; they're now up to $270. Prices are up, but not by an obscene margin (not like the way gas prices here skyrocketed a month or so ago...on a completely off-topic tangent, why isn't it news when the screws are put to Las Vegas motorists, but it's on the front page when the exact same thing happens in the Midwest?).
In any case, it's still cheaper on a per-megabyte basis than the $80 I paid to add 512K to my Apple IIe back in '90 or '91...:-)
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So, because KPH stands for Kilometers Per Hour, there is no such thing as a Kilometer?
"KPH" sounds like it might be a radio station's callsign (now that I think about it some more, it is the callsign of a maritime communications station on the West Coast), but it's definitely not an abbreviation for "kilometers per hour." That abbreviation, even here in the metric-impaired USA, is "km/h".
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If you were inhumanly patient and had a decent ear, you could write programs in FP Basic that would make an Apple II+ play tones out of the speaker. I remember a popular tune at our ComputerLand franchise was Bach's "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring."
BASIC on the II was too slow to get more than just a buzz out of the speaker. You needed assembly language to get a wider tonal range; a few bytes stuffed into page 3 would get you a tone player. Here's source for the simplest type of player, which doesn't auto-compensate the duration for variations in pitch (for a given duration, a note of higher pitch will play for less time than a note of lower pitch):
LDX#$80;duration LOOP1LDY#$80;pitch LOOP2BIT$C030;toggle the speaker DEY BNELOOP2 DEX BNELOOP1 RTS
Finding the right values of pitch and duration to get real musical notes would be a bit of a pain, but it's doable.
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The honestly expect programmers to pronounce this C sharp , when we all say pound for "#".
Speak for yourself. "lb." is "pound." "£" is "pound." "#" is "number sign." (Keyboard trivia: shift-3 on a British keyboard gets you "£" instead of "#"...makes you wonder where "#" went. That still doesn't make "#" "pound," though.)
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I just mention that model because they used to be really cheap at Circuit City (old slashdot story on this) and they have lots of really cool features (old/. story on this, too).
The ones they're currently selling are locked to region 1 and don't let you kill Macrovision. They still play MP3s, though (it only groks ISO-9660, not Rock Ridge or Joliet, so names look weird unless you keep them to ISO-9660's 8.3 limits).
I snagged one of the "good ones" back when the/. articles you mentioned were first put up. Can't say that I've gotten any urge to become a "DVD p1r4t3" (arrr) as a result, though.:-)
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...and have it play CDs and streaming audio/video too. (OK, maybe you'd need a little more horsepower for streaming video, but something in the neighborhood of 150-200 MHz works fine for that.)
Also, what kind of networking is it, and is it something that would normally be found near your stereo? If it's HPNA, it'd need a phone jack nearby...how many of you have phone jacks near your stereo stack? If you're gonna have to run cable anyway, you might as well forget about HPNA and go straight to Fast Ethernet.
(I suppose the "geek factor" might still draw some people in. I had a K6-200 parked under my TV, configured to play DVDs, MP3 CDs, MP3s off of the file server, etc. That still didn't stop me from snagging an Apex AD-600A (one of the region-free, Macrovision-free models) back when they were available.)
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In the nicer parts of America, that's how CDs are sold. It's only in high-loss neighborhoods that you'll find those horrid cd protectors that do a great job of making the useful display space disappear.
Sometimes they only do this with the CDs that are most often subject to the "five-finger discount." Back in my days working for The Man, certain categories of music (such as rap, though I don't know if that qualifies as music:-) ) got placed in the anti-theft packaging thingies, while the other CDs were simply sensor-tagged. (The kids in the "crack alley" across the street from the store were more likely to want to snatch Snoop Doggy Dogg than Yanni.:-) )
_/_ / v \ (IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail) \_^_/
Slashdot Mirror
That's funny...I've never ran into problems with any of the VIA-based motherboards I've run across (except for the PCChips motherboards with relabeled VIA chipsets, but we all know what absolute pieces of sh*t PCChips products are). I have two FIC motherboards here (a PA-2007 (VP2) with K6-200 and a VA-503+ (MVP3) with K6-III-450) and have never run into hardware incompatibility problems. FWIW, all the motherboards that have given me trouble (other than the aforementioned PCChips boards, which I've had the good sense to not own myself) have been Intel-based boards. (In all fairness, their chipsets usually haven't been at fault...though I've seen some weirdness with configuring two IDE devices as primary-master and secondary-master on some i430?X-based boards. To get the system to work, you'd end up putting the hard drive and CD-ROM drive on the primary interface and leave the secondary interface empty, which is lame.)
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They probably did this to enable jumperless configuration, but the ease with which overclocking can be done is a nice bonus for people who are so inclined. On Socket A processors, there are four pins that tell the motherboard what settings (multiplier, FSB, and voltage, IIRC) to use. The motherboard then generates signals that go to the processor on another pin to set it to a particular multiplier. Theoretically, the BIOS will only echo back whatever the processor told it to use. In practice, the BIOS can ignore what the processor says and set up the processor to run at whatever multiplier it wants. This is just the first motherboard to take advantage of that capability.
(More details here, at Tom's Hardware.)
Likewise...I'm running a K6-III-450, a K6-2-300, and a K6-200 here, and have never run into problems with any of them while running Win9x, NT4, Linux, or whatever (only thing I haven't tried on them yet is NetWare, and I have no reason to believe it wouldn't work). I see a K7 of some kind in my future...(most likely a Spitf^H^H^H^H^HDuron due to the lower price...)
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I guess I'm not "everyone"...my fastest box is in a full-tower AT case. (It's a 450-MHz K6-III with 256 megs of PC133 SDRAM on an FIC VA-503+. (No, the motherboard I have now doesn't take full advantage of the memory speed...I only bought the memory a few months ago with the intent to move it to some kind of K7 box.)) ATX cases used to cost substantially more than AT cases, which is why I've stuck with AT cases for so long. Now that you can get ATX cases for about what AT cases used to cost, it's not as big a hassle. (Also, I don't think anybody is making any AT cases anymore, and I've not heard of any Slot/Socket A AT motherboards.)
With all that said, the specs on Abit's new board look pretty sweet. Six PCI slots, an ISA slot, and no AMR header to waste space that'd be better occupied by a PCI or ISA slot. (Epox also has an AMR-free K7 board (the EP-8KTA) that comes close, but includes on-board audio (isn't the on-board audio on VIA-chipset motherboards kinda difficult to get running under Linux? I'll stick with my Ensoniq AudioPCI...).) The KT7 hasn't found its way to the Price Watch vendors, though...yet.
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Hardly. It's not too different from the dot commands I was sticking in Apple Writer documents 15 years ago to twiddle margins, set tabs, etc., and it serves approximately the same purpose.
(Even funnier would be someone who calls himself an "HTML programmer," but would be lost without his FrontPage.)
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Top9 mentioned UPN as an offender. I tried it...while casual clicking of the back button will more than likely keep you on UPN's site, if you hold down Backspace (IE), you'll break loose. You'll probably end up going back through dozens of previously-viewed pages when you do this, though. (It'd be like putting your car up on blocks in your garage, firewalling the throttle with the tranny in Reverse, and kicking the blocks out from under the car, at which time you'd crash through the garage door and probably slam into the garage across the street. :-) )
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I thought most people had reached that conclusion about AOHell several years ago.
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22 million, to be a little more precise. :-)
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It has the added benefit of being small. I have it up on my webserver so that if I'm on some random Win9x/NT box with a net connection, I can punch in a URL and have PuTTY come up so I can log into my computers at home. Even over a 56K dial-up connection, it only takes a minute or so to download.
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Ow...even after converting to US $, that's still a fortune. Do they include Vaseline in that price? They should. :-)
(I probably shouldn't mention that I'm getting the same upstream speed and 4x the downstream speed through my cable-modem hookup for $40/month. Even here, ISDN is a ripoff by comparison...not as bad as you have it, but it costs at least as much (probably more) as cable-modem service, and it only delivers 128 kbps. Two POTS lines and a MLPPP connection would be almost as good as ISDN, and cheaper too.)
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He could've had something like a USR Courier I-modem, which is an ISDN adapter that can act as the "server side" of a V.90 connection, at the remote site. A connection between two ordinary modems certainly wouldn't get anything beyond 33.6 kbps, as you noted.
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You think 19.2 kbps is bad? The company for which I work had (until recently) a store in Milpitas, CA. My understanding is that Milpitas is somewhere in the Bay Area/Silicon Valley general neighborhood (having never lived in the People's Republic of California, I'm not too familiar with what's where there). Anyway, each store had a point-of-sale system that we could dial into and take over with pcAnywhere. We use US Robotics controller-based modems (usually externals, never Winmodems) at each store and at the home office. Connections to most other stores would run from the mid-20s to the low 30s, but we'd always connect to the Milpitas store at the whopping fast speed of 9600 bps!
(When we called PacBell (the local phone company up there) about the problem, they passed some BS off on us about how that was as much speed as they'd guarantee for a POTS line. Yeah, whatever...)
At least I get a consistent 512 kbps out of the cable modem at home...I've not even had the bog-downs that other people have complained about.
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As another example, consider the Apple II community...due to the age of the hardware involved (last new design hit the market in '88, last Apple II rolled off the assembly line in '93...or was it '92?), you're dealing with an even smaller niche than with anything that runs on modern hardware. You can almost always count on a flamewar in progress in comp.sys.apple2 regarding 15- or 20-year-old software up on FTP sites...not even just for software from the few companies from that period that are still around in some form or other (someone like Broderbund or Activision), but also from long-dead companies that just disappeared (someone like Epyx or Muse). The few people who are still coding today for the II also seem to be inordinately occupied with how much money they might be able to squeeze out of a project, even though they know it's been pretty much impossible for years now to code for the II as your day job.
FWIW, the last two releases I've done for the Apple II have been GPL'd. One was a digital-audio player for the 8-bit IIs that I open-sourced in 1992. The more recent one was a DHR character generator (no link at this time) that provided an easy way to mix graphics and text under BASIC. A more significant open-source release was GNO, a mulitasking command-line shell for GS/OS. Beyond my two programs and GNO, I can't think of any other open-source releases for the Apple II in recent years (public-domain software excluded because of the way derivative works can be made closed).
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What "spasms?" Here's a quick check:
Looks like the normal file delete to me...
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I've been using squid for a few months to filter out ads and keep cookies from being set; it's worked really well. It hasn't broken any sites that I can recall, and it's cut out most of the clutter and third-party cookies. You still need to check periodically for third-party cookies as new ad servers are put online, but I've gotten most of the current sites loaded into it. It even strips out the annoying host-navigation frames put up with sites hosted by the likes of Xoom and AOHell.
Here's some info on configuring squid as an ad-blocker. My list of blocked sites is here. (I've tweaked the redirector script to support a NULLHTML tag that causes a file containing "<html></html>" to be returned...it's a simple hack, and I don't know squat about Perl.)
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It's no different than the ads you see for TVs...they're done the same way, and for the same reason. Have you ever tried to take a picture of your monitor or TV? You can't get an integral number of frames with most cameras (there's a shutter speed of 1/30 s on my Pentax K1000 which comes close to the 29.97 fps of NTSC video, but ends up going slightly over), so you end up with gaps in the picture, or light/dark bars. Even if you manage to get a full frame, it'll appear washed out because the dynamic range of film is much greater than any video display. End result: pictures that look like crap, which wouldn't do a good job of selling product. That's why you usually see a "simulated image" footnote near TV and monitor ads (or at least near TV ads...I don't recall if monitor ads use that disclaimer or not).
(Back in the day, I could take screenshots of still images off of my Apple Monitor II that turned out OK, but I suspect that the long-persistence phosphor used in most green-screen monitors is what made that possible.)
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My Nextel phone already receives more spam than my normal email systems...received a message yesterday on my phone (with HTML tags and other garbage that doesn't belong in email) from some moron selling satellite receiving systems, or something (didn't read it...saw the subject and "<HTML>" and hit Erase).
The really strange part is that I've never given anybody the email address for my phone. Where are the spammers getting it? Are they just hitting every phone in Nextel's exchanges? (The email address for a phone is (10-digitphone#)@page.nextel.com, so I'd imagine that a cross between a bulk mailer and a wardialer would allow you to spam phones.)
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I'll concede that it does suck down a bit more fuel, but I knew that when I bought it. With a big engine set up very conservatively, it'll keep on chugging away nearly forever if it's well-maintained. (190 hp from a 5.7L V-8 is much easier to squeeze out than 190 hp from some rinky-dink four-banger or small V-6.) Besides, if I wanted, an engine rebuild could put it at 300+ hp, and with a buttload of torque to go with it, and it'd still be a rock-solid engine.
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Joe Luser might associate "Pentium" with "fast computer," but in my mind, there's a slightly different association. :-)
I suppose the trick now is to get that across to Joe Luser. The "P!!!" ads were a start, but they don't go far enough.
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I bought 256 megs of PC133 SDRAM toward the end of March; the price back then was about $210 (from a reputable vendor, not a Pricewatch lowballer). I just checked the same vendor's price for the same memory; they're now up to $270. Prices are up, but not by an obscene margin (not like the way gas prices here skyrocketed a month or so ago...on a completely off-topic tangent, why isn't it news when the screws are put to Las Vegas motorists, but it's on the front page when the exact same thing happens in the Midwest?).
In any case, it's still cheaper on a per-megabyte basis than the $80 I paid to add 512K to my Apple IIe back in '90 or '91...:-)
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"KPH" sounds like it might be a radio station's callsign (now that I think about it some more, it is the callsign of a maritime communications station on the West Coast), but it's definitely not an abbreviation for "kilometers per hour." That abbreviation, even here in the metric-impaired USA, is "km/h".
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BASIC on the II was too slow to get more than just a buzz out of the speaker. You needed assembly language to get a wider tonal range; a few bytes stuffed into page 3 would get you a tone player. Here's source for the simplest type of player, which doesn't auto-compensate the duration for variations in pitch (for a given duration, a note of higher pitch will play for less time than a note of lower pitch):
LDX#$80 ;duration
LOOP1LDY#$80;pitch
LOOP2BIT$C030;toggle the speaker
DEY
BNELOOP2
DEX
BNELOOP1
RTS
Finding the right values of pitch and duration to get real musical notes would be a bit of a pain, but it's doable.
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Speak for yourself. "lb." is "pound." "£" is "pound." "#" is "number sign." (Keyboard trivia: shift-3 on a British keyboard gets you "£" instead of "#"...makes you wonder where "#" went. That still doesn't make "#" "pound," though.)
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The ones they're currently selling are locked to region 1 and don't let you kill Macrovision. They still play MP3s, though (it only groks ISO-9660, not Rock Ridge or Joliet, so names look weird unless you keep them to ISO-9660's 8.3 limits).
I snagged one of the "good ones" back when the /. articles you mentioned were first put up. Can't say that I've gotten any urge to become a "DVD p1r4t3" (arrr) as a result, though. :-)
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Also, what kind of networking is it, and is it something that would normally be found near your stereo? If it's HPNA, it'd need a phone jack nearby...how many of you have phone jacks near your stereo stack? If you're gonna have to run cable anyway, you might as well forget about HPNA and go straight to Fast Ethernet.
(I suppose the "geek factor" might still draw some people in. I had a K6-200 parked under my TV, configured to play DVDs, MP3 CDs, MP3s off of the file server, etc. That still didn't stop me from snagging an Apex AD-600A (one of the region-free, Macrovision-free models) back when they were available.)
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Sometimes they only do this with the CDs that are most often subject to the "five-finger discount." Back in my days working for The Man, certain categories of music (such as rap, though I don't know if that qualifies as music :-) ) got placed in the anti-theft packaging thingies, while the other CDs were simply sensor-tagged. (The kids in the "crack alley" across the street from the store were more likely to want to snatch Snoop Doggy Dogg than Yanni. :-) )
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