Just a thought: what if someone were to write a prelude trilogy to Star Trek? (Or to anything that hasn't a detailed history between real-now and fantasy-then.)
Scuttlebutt has it that something along those lines is exactly what Paramount is considering for the successor to Voyager. (At least that's one of the ideas they're considering.) I first heard of it, IIRC, through the Sci-Fi News slashbox within the past couple of weeks, so you might want to check their site.
Maybe, but "lots of power" and "low smog" are not mutually exclusive goals. I've often read that diesel trucks in Europe are much cleaner than those in the US and they still manage to carry stuff.
They also tend to be nowhere near as powerful. I suspect that most of 'em aren't carrying the kinds of loads you can fit into a 40' (or longer) trailer. IIRC, they also are equipped with governors that limit their speed to somewhere around 100 km/h (that's a little over 60 mph for those of you who don't grok metric).
I read an article about Australia in a magazine several years ago. One of the pictures that accompanied the article was of a "road train," which was three 40' trailers behind a Kenworth. IIRC, Australia doesn't have a rail network to speak of, so the road trains move goods across the outback at speeds of 80-90 mph. The tractors they use are almost all American-made because nobody else makes 'em powerful enough for that kind of usage. (I don't even think they bothered trying to get 'em in right-hand drive, but this all from memory from several years ago...maybe someone from.au will confirm and/or clarify:-) ).
You can bet on it, that if you want to download that one rare dancemix of your favourite band you'll get the parts 1, 3, 4, 5 and 8 out of 10.
If your ISP's news server sucks, you'll run into that problem (been there, done that). The fix for that is (1) change ISPs to get one with a decent newsfeed or (2) subscribe to a separate newsfeed, such as Supernews. The cheapie ISPs (the ones that charge $10/month or less) are, I suspect, the ones that'll have problems (the time I had trouble grabbing binaries was when I was using one of the $10/month ISPs). I can speak from personal experience that MindSpring and IBM have decent newsfeeds (IBM, though, doesn't do unlimited access, which means you could run up access charges if you try to suck down everything in alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.*).
The V-2 choke shutter was a novel idea though, although I don't know if that was Von Braun or not.
I don't recall if that was one of von Braun's projects, but I do know that the V-2 didn't use the choke shutter. You're thinking of the V-1 "buzz bomb," an early (probably the first) cruise missile design that was rail-launched and powered by a variation of the ramjet design...it wasn't a rocket. A ramjet is little more than a pipe with some burners in it; it works well at high speeds, but not so well at the slower speeds attainable with 40s technology. The shutters made sure the flames shot out the back instead of the front. Their rapid opening and closing is how the V-1 became known as the "buzz bomb."
Then I hope you aren't using a search engine, FTP, web browser, or other program. I guess you suit up with safari equipment and go outside and hunt them the old fasioned way?
Ever hear of alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.*? Monitor Usenet for something you might like and download it. You might not find what you want right away, but it'll pop up eventually.
(Usenet might be old-school Internet technology, but it's good old-school Internet technology!:-) )
He is probably aware of that, and just knows very little about html... that would be my guess. Instead, you should tell him that he can type <disclaim.h> to get that.
You can simplify that a little bit as only the < needs to be escaped. To render <disclaim>, you only need to use <disclaim>. (Yeah, we're not dealing with 48K Apple II+s anymore, but it's still nice to save a byte or two once in a while.:-) )
I wonder what the perfomance of a MAME running on Windows 98 VM running inside of Vmware running on Windows NT running inside of Vmware running on Redhat running inside of Connectixes Virtual PC running on a Mac G4/450 would be?
I don't know about VMware inside Virtual PC (the newest Apple hardware I have is a IIGS:-) ), but one of the VMware FAQs answers the question about running VMware inside VMware. The short answer is, "Don't." If you try it, I suppose you'd learn the sound a tree makes when it falls and nobody is around, or something like that.:-)
(If I am in error, let me know, it would be truly 3l33t to surf the net from OS/2 Warp 3.0...)
I had a copy of OS/2 Warp 3 sitting around from back when it first came out (IBM was giving it away at Fall Comdex '94)...used it for about a year or two. I recently put it on an extra computer I had kicking around and, with some finagling, got TCP/IP networking working well enough to FTP into my Linux server and browse the Web through my masq'd cable modem. Some trickery was needed to get Internet Connection for OS/2 to talk through a NIC instead of a dial-up connection (it's normally dial-up only), but I'm at work and my OS/2 box is at home, so if you have any questions as to how I did it, send me email and I'll dig up the info I found on how to get it to work.
Given that the only browsers I've run across so far are Netscrape 2.x (double ick because (1) it's ancient and (2) it's Netscrape) and some ports of Lynx, I suppose it's more a shits-and-grins exercise than a practical setup...especially since it's on a Cx5x86-120 with 16 megs of RAM and it's not talking to either of my servers (one SuSE Linux 6.2, one NetWare 5), except for FTP to/from the Linux server. (My main machine runs Corel Linux 1.0, VMware, and Win98...the latter two are so I can have a decent Web browser (read: Internet Explorer) under Linux. It's kinda slow that way right now, but I should be getting 256 megs of RAM today, and that'll fix that problem...:-) )
I know a guy who is real happy with his Nextell phone (not sure which one it is, haven't really looked at them). One time, we needed to conference someone into a meeting but the room we were in didn't have a phone, so he dialed it on his cell and put it on speaker. The thing was louder than the regular speaker phones! So they might be worth checking out.
You're thinking of either the Motorola i1000 or i1000+. I have one (provided by my employer). The speakerphone on it is pretty sweet...and it is LOUD. It's good for when you're driving and you don't want to have the phone stuck up against your head. The two-way capability is also good for conserving airtime.
(ObDisclaimer: I don't work for Nextel, I don't own their stock, yadda yadda yadda...)
If you want simple, nothing beats good old analog. Gix your dad up with a nice brick phone, I'm sure he'll appreciate it's hefty construction. (and *no* internet access!)
Seriously though, many people overlook analog as an option. Depending on your area, there may be good plans available.
Last time I checked (which was, admittedly, a while ago), analog was more expensive than digital. Yes, you could get an old brick phone (or even a newer analog phone...I have a Motorola pocket phone with alphanumeric memory and vibrating call alert that I used for about a year back around '96 or so, sitting in my closet) dirt-cheap, but analog airtime often costs more than digital because analog chews up more bandwidth.
also, this whole thing about apple keeping their hardware secret is simply not true anyway. i don't know why people continue to think it is. for those that don't know, apple has a full time employee who's job it is to help developers get hardware specs (and has been doing so for a while now).
As another point of reference, consider the Apple IIe Technical Reference Manual, which contains not only a complete schematic for the motherboard, but also source code for all firmware except the BASIC interpreter (I'm guessing Microsoft didn't allow them to publish the source for that). Other Apple hardware documentation usually had schematics and/or source included as well (earlier manuals for the Super Serial Card had a schematic and source code, though later editions of the manual were greatly abbreviated down to a "here's how you install it and here's how you use it" format).
(Granted, this is all for the Apple II and not the Macintosh; I'm not familiar enough with the tech info available for the Mac to speak one way or the other about it.)
PAL and SECAM VHS machines have three tape speeds which offer, on a T-180 (the PAL/SECAM version of the NTSC T-120), 3 hours, 4.5 hours and 6 hours of recording time (correct me if I'm wrong, PAL/SECAM users).
The multi-system VHS VCR my parents used to have recorded NTSC in all three speeds, but only two (SP and LP) were available in PAL, and at the time we had it, most PAL-only VCRs that other people had used SP only. When we brought a PAL tape recorded at LP speed to a friend's house, we were surprised to find it didn't play. (This was in the late 80s...things might have changed since then. If the Brits have more than four TV channels available to them nowadays, anything is possible.:-) )
Also, E-180 tapes (VHS videotapes for use in PAL equipment have their sizes start with E, not T) are closer in length to T-160s than T-120s. The speed at which the tape moves past the heads is slightly lower for PAL than for NTSC. (525*30=15750. 625*25=15625. In each second, PAL writes fewer scanlines than NTSC.) The difference is slight, though...if you put an NTSC signal on an E-180 tape, it'd get only about a minute and a half less recording time than if you put a PAL signal on it. Come to think of it, E-180 tapes would be closest to T-180 in length.
You might've noticed that T-180 tapes have been on the shelves here for just the past few years. E-180s have been available in Europe much longer than that (at least since the mid-80s) because it was more necessary for them, given that they were stuck for the most part with just SP. With the slower speeds available in most NTSC equipment, you were better off using more durable T-120s. (Why a multi-system VCR supported PAL LP recording when most PAL-only VCRs didn't is beyond me. Given that this particular multi-system VCR also boasted Dolby B noise reduction (it was a 4-head Hitachi with programmable digital tuning, infrared remote, and some other goodies...probably one of the better models available in 1984 or '85), maybe it was just some of the higher-end models that did PAL LP recording, or maybe they "borrowed" some of the capabilities put in for NTSC compatibility.
I've seen this term alot on this page+links on here, what is it? I have never seen it before, but all the dvd-hacks seem to include wether or not it can be deactivated.
Macrovision is an analog copy-protection scheme. I don't know how it's implemented with PAL video (or even if it's implemented for PAL), but with NTSC, it's designed to screw with a VCR's AGC circuitry by throwing some noise into the vertical-blanking interval.
You can see if Macrovision is present if you have a TV with a vertical-hold control (mainly older TVs). (You can also use the green-screen or color monitor that you used years ago with your Apple II/Commodore 64/[insert your favorite vintage 8-bit computer here]; they usually had a vertical-hold control. (At least my Apple Monitor II does, anyway.)) Adjust the vertical hold until the picture rolls down the screen enough that you can see the vertical-blanking interval at the top. Macrovision will look like a bunch of boxes fading between white and black over a period of half a minute or so. Many prerecorded tapes use Macrovision, and nearly all DVD players add it to the video-out signal.
Radio-Electronics magazine published a construction article in '87 or '88 for a device that would remove Macrovision from a video signal. Similar devices have also been available through mail-order outfits (and might still be available) for about as long, and they've even found their way onto store shelves occasionally (Best Buy had 'em a couple or three years ago, but probably doesn't now). It can also be disabled in some DVD-playback equipment, such as the Apex AD-600A DVD/MP3 player (that everyone's been talking about lately) and the Creative Labs Dxr2 DVD decoder.
What really scares me about this, is that it's not the government positing that certain types of people shouldn't do X (vote in this case) - I'd expect it from them. How in hell could you possibly oppose something that will ease the process of voting?!?!
Whoever said voting was supposed to be an easy process? If (hypothetically speaking) you can't be bothered to drag yourself away from Jerry Springer long enough to head to your polling place, what are the odds that you've put any thought into your choices? Odds are good that you'll vote for whoever/whatever had the catchiest slogan, the prettiest/most handsome smile, or whatever...things that have absolutely no bearing on how a candidate might do in office or the effect a ballot initiative might have on your life and the lives of your neighbors.
There's also the issue of security. You might trust your credit card to the Internet (I've made a few purchases that way and haven't been screwed yet, except for one company that took two months to ship a hard drive), but would you trust your vote to the Internet? I've been using the 'net for over ten years, but I don't think I would. I have a hard enough time dealing with the electronic voting machines used here (Clark County, Nevada) that generate no audit trail. Just as it'd be all too easy to divert a memory cartridge from one of those voting machines for some "reprogramming," what's to keep unscrupulous individuals (and since it was the Democrats who ran this experiment, unscrupulous individuals are a foregone conclusion) from intercepting/blocking communications, twiddling bits on the server, or whatever? Unless they've tightened security down on this thing like it was Fort Knox, they're just asking to be 0wNed by some script kiddie. Would you trust your vote to a script kiddie with a root kit?
Maybe someone should ask the Arizona GOP why they didn't go for this plan. I bet it'd be interesting reading.
IIRC, there was some slight change in icons or something in the W98 UI that was kind of the same thing, just different enough to make it distinguishable from 95.
They made the menus "slide" open instead of having them just pop up. This "feature" is one of the first things I turn off when I install/reinstall Win98 on a computer, and if I'm using someone else's computer for any length of time, I'll turn it off on that computer. Less CPU time for GUI frills means more CPU time for Prime95.:-)
I saw the Apex DVD player advertised in a Circuit City ad in yesterday's newspaper, highlighting its MP3 capability.
When I was in one of their stores a few weeks ago looking for one, and mentioned to the salesman that I had heard it was capable of playing MP3s, he looked at me like I was from another planet. Here's what their website says about it:
They're back in stock!! This is the DVD player the whole Internet has been talking about! Disguised as a full function DVD player, the APEX AD600A also plays back MP3 files on the CD-R's you've made AND lets you sing along with the built in karaoke function! Hook up your home theatre now because this player has Digital Coax Output, S-Video and Component Output.
(I didn't check to see if they had any on hand. I already have a computer set up as a DVD/MP3 player (and it's networked, so I can throw MP3s onto one of my servers and play it from there). Still, the AD-600A seems like it has some "geek appeal" or something like that.:-) )
However, more and faster can't take the place of smart. What I'd like to see is more media processor chips. You know like Sid and Nancy, and Paula, and so on. Even the 68xxx chip series started out as a process controller.
That would be the smart way to go (it's the way I build my computers, which is how I get away with a K6-200 in a machine that plays DVDs (should try an even older 5x86-120 sometime and see if it'll still work)). It's not the cheap way, though, which is why pretty much the only way to get a computer built that way is to build it yourself.
Winmodems suck. Software DVD sucks. Give me hardware or give me death!:-)
Many people dump on Apple machines (I'm sure lots of you will flame this article) but they really are cool! Apple computers made me want to program and have fun with them. I remember the first PC I tried programming and I gave it up. Apple ]['s and Mac Classics are definitely way more fun than a PC any day.
I had worked with some other computers before it, but the Apple IIe my parents bought in 1985 was (and is) the most fun and most hackable computer I've ever had. Within a year of getting it, for instance, I had cobbled together for a Boy Scout project a math-drill program that talked (which, given that it used the auxiliary memory solely as wave storage, was in hindsight an early example of bloatware, even though it still fit on a single 140k floppy:-) ). I haven't gotten into the Mac much since fooling around with them some in college around '89 or '90, but I've grown my collection of Apple IIs to three...the IIe my parents bought was upgraded to a IIGS, and then a IIe and II+ were added to the lineup. Fun stuff...they're simple enough that if something goes wrong with the hardware, you stand a good chance of fixing it without resorting to the modern "rip out that board and replace it" mentality. (Reseating all the chips and disassembling and cleaning the keyboard brought the II+ back to life, for instance.)
I even get some use out of them occasionally, especially the IIGS. It gets used mainly as a terminal for the Linux box here, though I still do some tinkering in BASIC or assembly language periodically. A little while back, I cobbled together some string-math routines in assembly language and used those to calculate the exact value of 100!. Running at 12.5 MHz, it finished in maybe a second or so. The same could've been done in C under Linux, Win98, or whatever, but it wouldn't have been as fun. (Why calculate 100!? Why not?:-) )
Before reading the rest of the comments in here, I figured it'd be fun to try out the free scan that NAI is running (yes, I knew going in that the comment about Windows boxen not being vulnerable to conscription in a DDoS attack was bogus). I tried calling it up from a Win98 box at work, but their page doesn't let you enter a target IP address. It only picks up the IP address through which it thinks you're accessing their site (which was incorrect even for this machine as I think they were using our DSL provider's proxy server's IP address instead of our IP address), which meant that I couldn't tell it to scan my Linux box (which sits on a cable-modem connection) through this browser session. Fine...let's ssh into salfter.dyndns.org, call up www.mycio.com in Lynx, and run it there. Still no dice...the lamers who put the site together are using Javascript for form posting! Wake up...if you're saying that Linux boxen might be vulnerable to "DDoS conscription," wouldn't it be a good idea if your site was actually usable from a Linux box? Not all of us are running Netscrape (hell, my server isn't even running X), and even those who are would probably run into problems with Netscrape's many Java- and Javascript-related bugs.
(I eventually hacked their page source so that (hopefully) I could plug in the address of my Linux box and post the form from IE on a Win98 box. It's been over half an hour, though, and nothing has shown up in email from them. Losers.)
Power in france is wacky... Their plugs are two-pronged, straight cylendrical deals that are strange looking compared to the standard US "flat" plugs. Think ground on a 3-prong, but then put on a second one, then space them farther apart than a US 2 prong, and you basically have a french plug.:-P
What you just described is the standard European two-pin power plug. If you need a ground, there's some slight variation between countries, but if you don't need ground, the plug is basically the same everywhere on the Continent. Britain, OTOH, uses a wacky three-pin plug with huge rectangular pins (make it a little larger and it'd almost pass for one of our dryer plugs) and a fuse in every plug. Their outlets also have a switch at the outlet. And that's just the newer standard (13-amp plug)...there are three older plug designs that you might find in older buildings (though IIRC adapters are available to go between them...the existence of these multiple plug designs is why the power cord on an electrical device you buy there usually is terminated in two or three bare wires, to which you attach the appropriate type of plug yourself...at least this was how they were doing things '84-'86, when I lived there).
Wow. If I wanted media that wasn't stable when you reread it, I'd go back to useing my 5 1/4" drive. You meant to say "3.5" drive" and not "5.25" drive," right? I have 5.25" floppies that are still readable with no errors after 15 years, but 3.5" floppies regularly go tits-up on me after just a few weeks. (I should probably still put the 15-year-old data on something more permanent, though...a single CD-R would more than likely hold all my Apple II stuff. Just need to get my GS to work with the CD-ROM drive I bought for it...)
I'm by no means an expert, but I believe the differentiation between on die L1 and L2 cache comes from different latency values. I don't know what the exact values are. But L1 is as fast a memory access as that processor is going to see. When L2 is on die, the processor will still be able to access it very quickly, but it might only be one half or one fourth as fast as the L1 cache (pulling numbers out of my ass).
You weren't too far off. I just upgraded to a 450-MHz K6-III over the weekend and got these results from CacheChk (installed on an FIC VA-503+ v1.2 with the latest BIOS and 64 megs of PC66 SDRAM pushed to 100 MHz):
CACHECHK V7 11/23/98 Copyright (c) 1995-98 by Ray Van Tassle. (-h for help) CMOS reports: conv_mem= 640K, ext_mem= 64,448K, Total RAM= 65,088K BIOS reports: ext_mem= 64,448K Total mem: 63 MB "AuthenticAMD" AMD-K6(tm) 3D+ Processor Clocked at 451.1 MHz Reading from memory. (timings snipped for some brevity:-) ) This machine seems to have 3 caches! [reading] (This can't be right.) L1 cache is 32KB--1876.5 MB/s 0.6 ns/byte (1179%) L2 cache is 256KB--1257.8 MB/s 0.8 ns/byte (790%) L3 cache is 1024KB-- 480.1 MB/s 2.2 ns/byte (301%) Main memory speed -- 159.1 MB/s 6.6 ns/byte (100%) [reading] 11.3 clks Effective RAM access time (read ) is 52ns (a RAM bank is 8 bytes wide). Effective RAM access time (write) is 91ns (a RAM bank is 8 bytes wide). "AuthenticAMD" AMD-K6(tm) 3D+ Processor Clocked at 451.1 MHz. Cache ENABLED. Options: -t0 -z
With the K6-III at least, L2 cache runs at about two-thirds of the speed of L1 cache. L3 cache, at 100 MHz, takes a big hit--it's only a little more than a fourth of the speed of L1 cache. L3 cache is still three times faster than main memory, though.
(What's really funny is the comment about how it can't be right that there are three caches in this computer.)
Slashdot Mirror
Scuttlebutt has it that something along those lines is exactly what Paramount is considering for the successor to Voyager. (At least that's one of the ideas they're considering.) I first heard of it, IIRC, through the Sci-Fi News slashbox within the past couple of weeks, so you might want to check their site.
They also tend to be nowhere near as powerful. I suspect that most of 'em aren't carrying the kinds of loads you can fit into a 40' (or longer) trailer. IIRC, they also are equipped with governors that limit their speed to somewhere around 100 km/h (that's a little over 60 mph for those of you who don't grok metric).
I read an article about Australia in a magazine several years ago. One of the pictures that accompanied the article was of a "road train," which was three 40' trailers behind a Kenworth. IIRC, Australia doesn't have a rail network to speak of, so the road trains move goods across the outback at speeds of 80-90 mph. The tractors they use are almost all American-made because nobody else makes 'em powerful enough for that kind of usage. (I don't even think they bothered trying to get 'em in right-hand drive, but this all from memory from several years ago...maybe someone from .au will confirm and/or clarify :-) ).
If your ISP's news server sucks, you'll run into that problem (been there, done that). The fix for that is (1) change ISPs to get one with a decent newsfeed or (2) subscribe to a separate newsfeed, such as Supernews. The cheapie ISPs (the ones that charge $10/month or less) are, I suspect, the ones that'll have problems (the time I had trouble grabbing binaries was when I was using one of the $10/month ISPs). I can speak from personal experience that MindSpring and IBM have decent newsfeeds (IBM, though, doesn't do unlimited access, which means you could run up access charges if you try to suck down everything in alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.*).
I don't recall if that was one of von Braun's projects, but I do know that the V-2 didn't use the choke shutter. You're thinking of the V-1 "buzz bomb," an early (probably the first) cruise missile design that was rail-launched and powered by a variation of the ramjet design...it wasn't a rocket. A ramjet is little more than a pipe with some burners in it; it works well at high speeds, but not so well at the slower speeds attainable with 40s technology. The shutters made sure the flames shot out the back instead of the front. Their rapid opening and closing is how the V-1 became known as the "buzz bomb."
Ever hear of alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.*? Monitor Usenet for something you might like and download it. You might not find what you want right away, but it'll pop up eventually.
(Usenet might be old-school Internet technology, but it's good old-school Internet technology! :-) )
You can simplify that a little bit as only the < needs to be escaped. To render <disclaim>, you only need to use <disclaim>. (Yeah, we're not dealing with 48K Apple II+s anymore, but it's still nice to save a byte or two once in a while. :-) )
I don't know about VMware inside Virtual PC (the newest Apple hardware I have is a IIGS :-) ), but one of the VMware FAQs answers the question about running VMware inside VMware. The short answer is, "Don't." If you try it, I suppose you'd learn the sound a tree makes when it falls and nobody is around, or something like that. :-)
I had a copy of OS/2 Warp 3 sitting around from back when it first came out (IBM was giving it away at Fall Comdex '94)...used it for about a year or two. I recently put it on an extra computer I had kicking around and, with some finagling, got TCP/IP networking working well enough to FTP into my Linux server and browse the Web through my masq'd cable modem. Some trickery was needed to get Internet Connection for OS/2 to talk through a NIC instead of a dial-up connection (it's normally dial-up only), but I'm at work and my OS/2 box is at home, so if you have any questions as to how I did it, send me email and I'll dig up the info I found on how to get it to work.
Given that the only browsers I've run across so far are Netscrape 2.x (double ick because (1) it's ancient and (2) it's Netscrape) and some ports of Lynx, I suppose it's more a shits-and-grins exercise than a practical setup...especially since it's on a Cx5x86-120 with 16 megs of RAM and it's not talking to either of my servers (one SuSE Linux 6.2, one NetWare 5), except for FTP to/from the Linux server. (My main machine runs Corel Linux 1.0, VMware, and Win98...the latter two are so I can have a decent Web browser (read: Internet Explorer) under Linux. It's kinda slow that way right now, but I should be getting 256 megs of RAM today, and that'll fix that problem...:-) )
You're thinking of either the Motorola i1000 or i1000+. I have one (provided by my employer). The speakerphone on it is pretty sweet...and it is LOUD. It's good for when you're driving and you don't want to have the phone stuck up against your head. The two-way capability is also good for conserving airtime.
(ObDisclaimer: I don't work for Nextel, I don't own their stock, yadda yadda yadda...)
Last time I checked (which was, admittedly, a while ago), analog was more expensive than digital. Yes, you could get an old brick phone (or even a newer analog phone...I have a Motorola pocket phone with alphanumeric memory and vibrating call alert that I used for about a year back around '96 or so, sitting in my closet) dirt-cheap, but analog airtime often costs more than digital because analog chews up more bandwidth.
As another point of reference, consider the Apple IIe Technical Reference Manual, which contains not only a complete schematic for the motherboard, but also source code for all firmware except the BASIC interpreter (I'm guessing Microsoft didn't allow them to publish the source for that). Other Apple hardware documentation usually had schematics and/or source included as well (earlier manuals for the Super Serial Card had a schematic and source code, though later editions of the manual were greatly abbreviated down to a "here's how you install it and here's how you use it" format).
(Granted, this is all for the Apple II and not the Macintosh; I'm not familiar enough with the tech info available for the Mac to speak one way or the other about it.)
The multi-system VHS VCR my parents used to have recorded NTSC in all three speeds, but only two (SP and LP) were available in PAL, and at the time we had it, most PAL-only VCRs that other people had used SP only. When we brought a PAL tape recorded at LP speed to a friend's house, we were surprised to find it didn't play. (This was in the late 80s...things might have changed since then. If the Brits have more than four TV channels available to them nowadays, anything is possible. :-) )
Also, E-180 tapes (VHS videotapes for use in PAL equipment have their sizes start with E, not T) are closer in length to T-160s than T-120s. The speed at which the tape moves past the heads is slightly lower for PAL than for NTSC. (525*30=15750. 625*25=15625. In each second, PAL writes fewer scanlines than NTSC.) The difference is slight, though...if you put an NTSC signal on an E-180 tape, it'd get only about a minute and a half less recording time than if you put a PAL signal on it. Come to think of it, E-180 tapes would be closest to T-180 in length.
You might've noticed that T-180 tapes have been on the shelves here for just the past few years. E-180s have been available in Europe much longer than that (at least since the mid-80s) because it was more necessary for them, given that they were stuck for the most part with just SP. With the slower speeds available in most NTSC equipment, you were better off using more durable T-120s. (Why a multi-system VCR supported PAL LP recording when most PAL-only VCRs didn't is beyond me. Given that this particular multi-system VCR also boasted Dolby B noise reduction (it was a 4-head Hitachi with programmable digital tuning, infrared remote, and some other goodies...probably one of the better models available in 1984 or '85), maybe it was just some of the higher-end models that did PAL LP recording, or maybe they "borrowed" some of the capabilities put in for NTSC compatibility.
Macrovision is an analog copy-protection scheme. I don't know how it's implemented with PAL video (or even if it's implemented for PAL), but with NTSC, it's designed to screw with a VCR's AGC circuitry by throwing some noise into the vertical-blanking interval.
You can see if Macrovision is present if you have a TV with a vertical-hold control (mainly older TVs). (You can also use the green-screen or color monitor that you used years ago with your Apple II/Commodore 64/[insert your favorite vintage 8-bit computer here]; they usually had a vertical-hold control. (At least my Apple Monitor II does, anyway.)) Adjust the vertical hold until the picture rolls down the screen enough that you can see the vertical-blanking interval at the top. Macrovision will look like a bunch of boxes fading between white and black over a period of half a minute or so. Many prerecorded tapes use Macrovision, and nearly all DVD players add it to the video-out signal.
Radio-Electronics magazine published a construction article in '87 or '88 for a device that would remove Macrovision from a video signal. Similar devices have also been available through mail-order outfits (and might still be available) for about as long, and they've even found their way onto store shelves occasionally (Best Buy had 'em a couple or three years ago, but probably doesn't now). It can also be disabled in some DVD-playback equipment, such as the Apex AD-600A DVD/MP3 player (that everyone's been talking about lately) and the Creative Labs Dxr2 DVD decoder.
Whoever said voting was supposed to be an easy process? If (hypothetically speaking) you can't be bothered to drag yourself away from Jerry Springer long enough to head to your polling place, what are the odds that you've put any thought into your choices? Odds are good that you'll vote for whoever/whatever had the catchiest slogan, the prettiest/most handsome smile, or whatever...things that have absolutely no bearing on how a candidate might do in office or the effect a ballot initiative might have on your life and the lives of your neighbors.
There's also the issue of security. You might trust your credit card to the Internet (I've made a few purchases that way and haven't been screwed yet, except for one company that took two months to ship a hard drive), but would you trust your vote to the Internet? I've been using the 'net for over ten years, but I don't think I would. I have a hard enough time dealing with the electronic voting machines used here (Clark County, Nevada) that generate no audit trail. Just as it'd be all too easy to divert a memory cartridge from one of those voting machines for some "reprogramming," what's to keep unscrupulous individuals (and since it was the Democrats who ran this experiment, unscrupulous individuals are a foregone conclusion) from intercepting/blocking communications, twiddling bits on the server, or whatever? Unless they've tightened security down on this thing like it was Fort Knox, they're just asking to be 0wNed by some script kiddie. Would you trust your vote to a script kiddie with a root kit?
Maybe someone should ask the Arizona GOP why they didn't go for this plan. I bet it'd be interesting reading.
They made the menus "slide" open instead of having them just pop up. This "feature" is one of the first things I turn off when I install/reinstall Win98 on a computer, and if I'm using someone else's computer for any length of time, I'll turn it off on that computer. Less CPU time for GUI frills means more CPU time for Prime95. :-)
CompUSA (of all places) has carried Raite DVD players, though they didn't carry the MP3-capable model(s), last time I checked.
When I was in one of their stores a few weeks ago looking for one, and mentioned to the salesman that I had heard it was capable of playing MP3s, he looked at me like I was from another planet. Here's what their website says about it:
(I didn't check to see if they had any on hand. I already have a computer set up as a DVD/MP3 player (and it's networked, so I can throw MP3s onto one of my servers and play it from there). Still, the AD-600A seems like it has some "geek appeal" or something like that. :-) )
That would be the smart way to go (it's the way I build my computers, which is how I get away with a K6-200 in a machine that plays DVDs (should try an even older 5x86-120 sometime and see if it'll still work)). It's not the cheap way, though, which is why pretty much the only way to get a computer built that way is to build it yourself.
Winmodems suck. Software DVD sucks. Give me hardware or give me death! :-)
100 equals 100, of course. 100!, on the other hand, was (broken up to get past /.'s "lameness filter," which I didn't know even existed until now):
9332621544394415268169923885626670049071
5968264381621468592963895217599993229915
6089414639761565182862536979208272237582
51185210916864000000000000000000000000
The program's good up to 146!; after that, it runs out of digits (maximum is 256 digits) and produces garbage results.
I had worked with some other computers before it, but the Apple IIe my parents bought in 1985 was (and is) the most fun and most hackable computer I've ever had. Within a year of getting it, for instance, I had cobbled together for a Boy Scout project a math-drill program that talked (which, given that it used the auxiliary memory solely as wave storage, was in hindsight an early example of bloatware, even though it still fit on a single 140k floppy :-) ). I haven't gotten into the Mac much since fooling around with them some in college around '89 or '90, but I've grown my collection of Apple IIs to three...the IIe my parents bought was upgraded to a IIGS, and then a IIe and II+ were added to the lineup. Fun stuff...they're simple enough that if something goes wrong with the hardware, you stand a good chance of fixing it without resorting to the modern "rip out that board and replace it" mentality. (Reseating all the chips and disassembling and cleaning the keyboard brought the II+ back to life, for instance.)
I even get some use out of them occasionally, especially the IIGS. It gets used mainly as a terminal for the Linux box here, though I still do some tinkering in BASIC or assembly language periodically. A little while back, I cobbled together some string-math routines in assembly language and used those to calculate the exact value of 100!. Running at 12.5 MHz, it finished in maybe a second or so. The same could've been done in C under Linux, Win98, or whatever, but it wouldn't have been as fun. (Why calculate 100!? Why not? :-) )
(I eventually hacked their page source so that (hopefully) I could plug in the address of my Linux box and post the form from IE on a Win98 box. It's been over half an hour, though, and nothing has shown up in email from them. Losers.)
What you just described is the standard European two-pin power plug. If you need a ground, there's some slight variation between countries, but if you don't need ground, the plug is basically the same everywhere on the Continent. Britain, OTOH, uses a wacky three-pin plug with huge rectangular pins (make it a little larger and it'd almost pass for one of our dryer plugs) and a fuse in every plug. Their outlets also have a switch at the outlet. And that's just the newer standard (13-amp plug)...there are three older plug designs that you might find in older buildings (though IIRC adapters are available to go between them...the existence of these multiple plug designs is why the power cord on an electrical device you buy there usually is terminated in two or three bare wires, to which you attach the appropriate type of plug yourself...at least this was how they were doing things '84-'86, when I lived there).
Wow. If I wanted media that wasn't stable when you reread it, I'd go back to useing my 5 1/4" drive. You meant to say "3.5" drive" and not "5.25" drive," right? I have 5.25" floppies that are still readable with no errors after 15 years, but 3.5" floppies regularly go tits-up on me after just a few weeks. (I should probably still put the 15-year-old data on something more permanent, though...a single CD-R would more than likely hold all my Apple II stuff. Just need to get my GS to work with the CD-ROM drive I bought for it...)
You weren't too far off. I just upgraded to a 450-MHz K6-III over the weekend and got these results from CacheChk (installed on an FIC VA-503+ v1.2 with the latest BIOS and 64 megs of PC66 SDRAM pushed to 100 MHz):
CACHECHK V7 11/23/98 Copyright (c) 1995-98 by Ray Van Tassle. (-h for help) :-) )
CMOS reports: conv_mem= 640K, ext_mem= 64,448K, Total RAM= 65,088K
BIOS reports: ext_mem= 64,448K Total mem: 63 MB
"AuthenticAMD" AMD-K6(tm) 3D+ Processor Clocked at 451.1 MHz
Reading from memory.
(timings snipped for some brevity
This machine seems to have 3 caches! [reading] (This can't be right.)
L1 cache is 32KB--1876.5 MB/s 0.6 ns/byte (1179%)
L2 cache is 256KB--1257.8 MB/s 0.8 ns/byte (790%)
L3 cache is 1024KB-- 480.1 MB/s 2.2 ns/byte (301%)
Main memory speed -- 159.1 MB/s 6.6 ns/byte (100%) [reading] 11.3 clks
Effective RAM access time (read ) is 52ns (a RAM bank is 8 bytes wide).
Effective RAM access time (write) is 91ns (a RAM bank is 8 bytes wide).
"AuthenticAMD" AMD-K6(tm) 3D+ Processor Clocked at 451.1 MHz. Cache ENABLED.
Options: -t0 -z
With the K6-III at least, L2 cache runs at about two-thirds of the speed of L1 cache. L3 cache, at 100 MHz, takes a big hit--it's only a little more than a fourth of the speed of L1 cache. L3 cache is still three times faster than main memory, though.
(What's really funny is the comment about how it can't be right that there are three caches in this computer.)