I am sure it is completely random selection process with my experience but how many of hardworking citizens can be a jury.
I've been called up twice. When your employer won't pay you while you're on jury duty, though, and the meager compensation provided to jurors won't pay the bills, you end up with no choice but to seek an excusal. You end up with juries full of old people and housewives who'd probably be watching Jerry Springer if they weren't in court...just the kind of people you want in court. Not.
But I hear many educated people are dropped during jury selection process. Do I want my life decided by unemployed alcholics? Or somebody hischool drop out working in the corn fields. Sure No.
Lawyers on both sides tend to have dismissed from jury duty all but the most pathetic skulls-full-of-mush. How else do you think the Menendez brothers' verdicts or the O.J. Simpson verdict could have been reached? Those juries were stacked by the defense with a bunch of morons.
At my school, they are using S/F ship names (Enterprise, Voyager, Capricorn, etc.
I've named my home machines after characters on Voyager:
Janeway--K6-2-300 (o/c 333) that dual-boots Win98 and Linux and is my main "workstation"
Chakotay--P5-133 (o/c 166) Linux server providing Internet access
Paris--P5-90 (o/c 100) NetWare 5 server, not doing much that's useful yet
Neelix--K6-200 Win98 "entertainment system" for playing DVDs, MP3s, and CDs (parked under a 20" TV instead of a monitor)
Seven--P5-166 notebook (with a cracked screen, unfortunately) running Win98
I had a name for my Apple IIGS for a while, too, but I haven't had need to bring up Marinetti in a while, so it normally doesn't participate in the home network at this time. (It does have a null-modem link to Chakotay, through which it can be used as a dumb terminal.)
The domain for all of 'em, of course, is ncc74656.org.:-)
Forgive my lack of humour, but what was the point of converting a router of all things to a MP3 player?
Why convert a digital camera into a video-game player? Why get an Apple II to play WAVs (which is something I did a few years back)? Because you can. It may not be the most useful hack in the world, but it's definitely a clever hack.
This sounds like just the thing to get...but one question they left unanswered was what types of media it'll read. Pressed CDs and single-session CD-Rs are almost guaranteed to be readable, but what about multi-session CD-Rs and CD-RWs? Does someone have a link to the manufacturer's page or to some other page that would have this info?
Of course, if these people are willing to settle for second-rate quality, the option of borrowing a VCR and making a tape copy STILL EXISTS! remember: an s-video out port has _no idea_ what happens at the other end. No system will _ever_ be devised where it is more difficult to send the video into a recording device than it is to send the video into a TV to watch it.
Actually a system called macrovision which has existed for quite some years is capable of scrambling a vcr (primarily by messing with it's automatic gain control). This system is mandatory on a DVD player.
Devices are available (or used to be available) that would filter out Macrovision. I have one that I bought a few years back...it only works on composite video (not S-video), but I don't have anything that accepts S-video input anyway. Radio-Electronics magazine even published the design of one of these "Macrovision strippers" sometime in the mid-to-late 80s, so you could build one yourself if you wanted. (It might even be possible to modify the design to work with S-video...would the nasty stuff be hidden in the luminance signal or the chrominance signal? Maybe you could get by with just diverting the appropriate signal through this box and let the other signal go through without modification.)
Another option for computer-based DVD is something like Remote Selector that disables Macrovision on hardware-based DVD decoders. I use this with my Dxr2 instead of the abovementioned Macrovision filter.
How many people just keep their MP3s on disk rather than bother blowing a CD? Hard disk space is getting cheaper all the time...
True, but blank CD-Rs are cheaper still, and they're more portable. I have my MP3s on ten CD-Rs. I can easily take them between home and work, and the CDs are set up so that they'll autoplay like an audio CD when you stick 'em in the drive (well, they'll do that on Win9x anyway).
AMD i'm hoping you are still pushing to put out those mobile k6-3s.
There's a reference to K6-III-Ps at speeds of 350, 366, and 380 MHz in AMD's retail employee website (registration required), and there's this less-detailed information in their public website. I don't know how any of this translates to notebooks that you can actually buy that have this processor...K6-2-Ps are available at speeds up to 475 MHz, and people seem to be fixating on megahertz alone. (Not that the K6-2's bad...I have one myself and it runs like a champ, but the K6-III, from all I've seen, is substantially faster, especially at high clock speeds where the L2 cache speed difference gets totally out-of-control.)
Or what about "synthesizing food to stop world hunger"? The major cause of famines is not lack of FOOD, but lack of MONEY. When you get right down to it, plant organisms are remarkably efficient at building food, far more efficient than robots building food could be. Enough food exists in the world for everyone to be fat and lazy, but the starving people can't afford to buy it.
Lack of $$$ is part of the problem, but not the biggest part. Another, bigger part is the back-asswards political system in many of the poorer parts of the world. Aid shipments have arrived in many countries, only to be captured and either appropriated or destroyed by some tinpot dictator and his cronies. Places where the rule of man outweighs the rule of law tend, more often than not, to have this kind of problem. It's something that nanotech isn't going to solve.
I would like to know what exactly the 18 year limit fixes. I mean, it's not like there's strippers and pornos at Comdex, right?
You're thinking of AdultDex, not Comdex.:-) The pr0n stuff got kicked out of Comdex a few years back. AdultDex is a separate show that runs concurrently with Comdex to handle that kind of stuff. I think it's been at the Sahara in recent years, but I'm not sure as I've never gotten over that way. (I live in Vegas, so the hardest part for me of getting to Comdex is getting the time off from work.:-) )
IBM supported the PS/2's for at least 10 years!!! IBM has Win2k beta support tips for my three year old laptop (not that I could afford enough ram to run it). Of anything you can criticize IBM for, long term support aint it.
How about another example of long-term support? I was given a PC/XT a while back that wasn't registering the proper amount of memory (it had 640K, but was coming up with some completely different number). After digging around a bit with the search engines, I found a page buried in one of IBM's foreign websites that had the jumper (switch, actually) configuration for all of IBM's older machines. I think the only other company that comes close to providing that level of legacy support is Apple, which (I think) still has operating systems for the Apple IIs on its site.
[Hotmail uses] FreeBSD and Apache for the Front End, and Solaris for the Backend User Database.
Hotmail isn't the only Microsoft property that isn't running NT and/or IIS. Netcraft says that WebTV uses Apache on Solaris. (IIRC, MacOS was the predominant desktop OS at WebTV before MS bought them out, too...don't know if that's still the case.)
When will Dell/Compaq/HP begin offering Athlon to the masses?
Compaq already is, AFAIK...most retailers that sell build-to-order Presarios can get 'em with K7s. I don't know if they've put the K7 in other product lines yet. (I'd be kinda leery about buying a Presario because of all the WinHardware in it. Then again, of the five x86 boxen I have, the only factory-built model is an old IBM PC/XT that someone gave to me for my "old computer collection." Everything else is homebrew.)
Hell I started with slackware. Nothign could be worse.
SLS:)
I might still have some 5.25" floppies with SLS on them around here. I downloaded it from the college's machines (ZMODEM at 14.4 kbps...or maybe it was 28.8; can't remember when I made that switch). Haven't used 'em in ages, of course...I think the kernel at the time was 0.99pl14, or somewhere around there. The machine was a 386SX-25 with 4 megs of RAM, 125 megs of disk, and Hercules mono graphics that got upgraded to mono VGA with a 256K Oak VGA card. (Managed to push a fixed-frequency mono VGA monitor to 800x600 when running X...wasn't too bad if you didn't mind the 50-Hz refresh rate.)
They have succeded in that, but their machine is completly useless as an Internet Browser (mail, web, other). This is because of the resolution on a TV it's way to low.
TV resolution is fairly low, but it's not completely useless for web browsing...look at all the WebTV boxen out there.:-) On a more serious note, I have a K6-200 here with a Velocity 128 that I use primarily as a DVD/CD/MP3 player (parked under the TV just like a VCR). I've also fired up Internet Explorer on it, just to see what it looked like. With the display set to 640x480 and large characters, it's usable on most reasonably well-designed sites. On sites that were designed with more screen area in mind, it doesn't work so well. (People who hack their own HTML with vi/emacs/Notepad/[insert the text editor of your choice here] are more likely to generate pages of the former type. People who think FrontPage is the end-all-be-all of webpage editors are more likely to generate pages of the latter type.)
In addition to the design of the site you're viewing, the quality of your video card's TV-out signal has a lot to do with whether you'll get usable results. If your card has some kind of flicker-reduction capability (the Velocity 128 does), you should get a reasonably solid picture. If your card doesn't, the interlace will drive you batty. (I turned off the flicker reduction once to see what it was like...not recommended.)
That is outside of the realm of schools, that should be tought by parents
This much is good...
and if not by parents, then by television.
...but you must be kidding about this last part. I'd hate to run across someone whose morality and worldview were entirely derived from the (mostly) drivel that passes for TV. (Yeah, there are a few shows that score reasonably well for character (the various Star Trek series, for instance, or maybe something like JAG or ER if you're not into sci-fi), but imagine what it'd be like if everybody took their moral cues from The Simpsons or from pro wrestling (didn't our Inhaler-in-Chief say once that he liked to watch wrestling?).)
As I'm Scottish I don't really know how old a 5th or 6th grader is...
Here in the US, it'd usually be ages 10-12, though there's some flexibility at either end to account for people who were either bumped forward a grade or held back a grade. (Personally, I was 9 when I started 5th grade, and there are probably more than a few other people here on/. who did the same.)
The elementary school I was attending at the time (early 80s) didn't have any computers, but I was learning BASIC on my grandfather's TRS-80 Color Computer. A friend a couple blocks away had an Atari 400, and my parents bought a TI-99/4A halfway through 6th grade. Of those machines, the CoCo was the most powerful and flexible (especially after it was upgraded to 64K and Extended BASIC). I even started to do some really simple stuff in 6809 assembly language on it before heading overseas. With the little bit of 6809 assembly that I picked up, learning 6502 assembly on the Apple IIe that I got in 1985 was a little bit easier. Getting somewhat back on topic, I don't think you'd want to introduce newbies to programming by having them learn assembly language...but it was hella fun on the old 8-bit boxen!
I've been on since 1990, anyone want beat that and chat about the good old days?
I can beat that by a year...1989 was the year that the University of Illinois (where I spent my freshman year) started hooking everybody up with free access. They only allowed seven hours a week on the machine (uxa.cso.uiuc.edu) set aside for that purpose, but there were some other machines available for unlimited use...in particular, there was a brand-new '030 NeXTcube that I remember word getting around about for unlimited access.
First modem I had to dial in from the dorm room was an old 300-bps Zoom internal modem that I borrowed from a friend across the street. I managed to snag an Applied Engineering DataLink 2400 that Christmas...said I could use it for classwork (which wasn't a lie, though I suspect I spent too much time on other activities:-) ). Both modems, BTW, were for the Apple IIe I was using at the time. (Still have that computer, though I upgraded it to a IIGS back in '92 or '93.)
No graphical browsers, just lynx gopher, telnet, usenet, and irc back then.
No Lynx (no WWW) and no Gopher. Usenet was a much more useful place before the commercial spammers and AOLers arrived, though. I remember when comp.sys.apple (what comp.sys.apple2 used to be called) had useful info every day, techies from Apple getting involved in discussions, etc. Nowadays it's a shadow of its former self. Some of the changes that have happened there have been mirrored in other newsgroups.
The Internet definitely isn't what it used to be. In some ways, it's better (there's more info out there, and it's easier to get at). In others, it's worse (any moron with a few bucks a month can gain access, make an ass of himself, pollute Usenet, etc.)
Hey, why not, after you get to a certain age, just clone your own body, maybe it could be genetically reengineered to remove certain defects like arthritis and diabetes from the DNA and then grow a new body sans head/brain.
Hmm...it would be possible to look at your medical history and debug your genes to weed out what didn't work so well. We could call it "You, Version 2.0.":-)
How comparable is the hardware in a Dreamcast to a new PC with a good 3D card?
I mean sure, the thing costs very little money compared to a PC, but if you were to buy one of those little sub-400 jobs and add a TNT2...
Most of those "little sub-400 jobs" won't take a TNT2...at least, not one of the AGP variety (is there even such a thing as a PCI TNT2?). These machines often lack an AGP slot because either (1) they've got some kind of integrated AGP graphics (most Emachines boxen use the ATI Rage IIC, for instance) or (2) they use a chipset (such as the SiS 5598 or (in the near future) Intel 810) that includes (low-end) graphics functionality in the chipset itself. Usually the best you can do with these machines in the way of a graphics upgrade is a Voodoo2, or maybe two of 'em in SLI mode if you have enough PCI slots. (There's also stuff like the Obsidian that did dual-Voodoo2 SLI on one card, but who's gonna stick a $500 card in a $400 computer?)
But what makes you think schoolkids would want to play on old old computers? Personally I avoid the old computer lab in my school with Apple IIs, and head straight for the 300 Mhz G3 lab.
Maybe they find that the IIs are more fun or something...whether it's the classic games or their eminent hackability (built-in BASIC and such). Macs and Windows boxen have their place, but I've always found them to be more of an "appliance" system with only limited hackability and superficial customizability. Yeah, I have a couple of Win9x boxes, but the really fun stuff gets done on either (1) my Linux box or (2) my Apple IIGS. (The GS hangs off of one of the Linux box's serial ports; ProTERM 3.0 is a kick-ass communications program for it that beats anything I've ever seen for x86. I'll occasionally drop to BASIC for a quick hack, too.)
For example, QuickTime streaming doesn't work behind a masquerading firewall, so you install a proxy.
This little matter just came up while I was trying to view the Noah Wyle/Steve Jobs thing at Macworld. QuickTime streaming wouldn't work, but RealAudio/RealVideo and Windows Media Player run fine. Where's this proxy you mention?
It is a shame that kids nowadays can't get that kind of a thrill from coding on a machine - heck, it seems like only until recently that they didn't even have anything to code with on their machines (maybe QBASIC). Some kids today seem like they wouldn't have the patience to code anyhow.
That's why they're all a bunch of script kiddies.:-) I used to write all kinds of stuff for a variety of different computers--my grandfather's CoCo, the TI-99/4A that was the first computer I had at home, and the Apple IIe that pretty much replaced it a couple of years later.
One project I wrote for a proficiency-badge project was a math-drill program that spoke everything to you, as well as displayed it. I combined some digital-audio software cribbed from Nibble with lots of samples copied to a RAM disk and some BASIC code to tie it all together. The other kids were impressed at the program that talked. Looking back, though, the use of the full 128K of memory in the computer for something so relatively trivial might have been an early incidence of bloatware.:-) (The samples weren't even that great...some were of my voice and some were from my sister's Speak'n'Spell.)
(Explanatory note: I'm an Air Force brat; we were in England at the time (1984-86). I was in one of their Boy Scout troops while I was there...a different experience. Proficiency badges are roughly equivalent to the merit badges in our system.)
They didn't even say portable. In that case, try Apple ][ in the late '70s
There are earlier examples than that, but I don't know for a fact that music was ever downloaded and played on those.
I was downloading and playing digital audio on my IIe in the early 90s. IIRC, the first file I played through the program I wrote for this purpose was one of the Star Trek themes (can't remember which one).
The date stamp on the source code of the last version I released is dated 11 Aug 92. It was even released under GPL.:-) (Subsequent refinements of my idea were made by others...I don't think they stuck with GPL, but I didn't pursue the matter much beyond that point. I upgraded the IIe to a IIGS about a year later and didn't have a continuing need for the program beyond that point anyway.)
If you're interested, I've put up the (6502 assembly) source code on my website at http://people.delphi.com/salfter/soft dac.html. The code is very compact; it assembled to less than 128 bytes.
"The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak." ==> "The vodka is good but the meat is rotten."
Just to see what it'd do, I took this phrase and passed it through each of the languages Babelfish supports, and then had it translate that back to English. The results:
German: The spirit is ready, but the flesh is weak. (Der Geist ist bereit, aber das Fleisch ist schwach.)
Spanish: The alcohol is ready, but the meat is weak. (El alcohol está dispuesto, pero la carne es débil.)
French: The spirit is laid out, but the flesh is weak. (L'esprit est disposé, mais la chair est faible.)
Portuguese: The spirit is made use, but the meat is weak. (O espírito é disposto, mas a carne é fraca.)
Not as funny as the famed English-Russian-English translation, but still interesting. (Note that it came closest with the translation through German, probably because English is more closely related to German than to the other languages.)
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I've been called up twice. When your employer won't pay you while you're on jury duty, though, and the meager compensation provided to jurors won't pay the bills, you end up with no choice but to seek an excusal. You end up with juries full of old people and housewives who'd probably be watching Jerry Springer if they weren't in court...just the kind of people you want in court. Not.
Lawyers on both sides tend to have dismissed from jury duty all but the most pathetic skulls-full-of-mush. How else do you think the Menendez brothers' verdicts or the O.J. Simpson verdict could have been reached? Those juries were stacked by the defense with a bunch of morons.
I've named my home machines after characters on Voyager:
I had a name for my Apple IIGS for a while, too, but I haven't had need to bring up Marinetti in a while, so it normally doesn't participate in the home network at this time. (It does have a null-modem link to Chakotay, through which it can be used as a dumb terminal.)
The domain for all of 'em, of course, is ncc74656.org. :-)
Why convert a digital camera into a video-game player? Why get an Apple II to play WAVs (which is something I did a few years back)? Because you can. It may not be the most useful hack in the world, but it's definitely a clever hack.
One word: fertilizer.
This sounds like just the thing to get...but one question they left unanswered was what types of media it'll read. Pressed CDs and single-session CD-Rs are almost guaranteed to be readable, but what about multi-session CD-Rs and CD-RWs? Does someone have a link to the manufacturer's page or to some other page that would have this info?
Devices are available (or used to be available) that would filter out Macrovision. I have one that I bought a few years back...it only works on composite video (not S-video), but I don't have anything that accepts S-video input anyway. Radio-Electronics magazine even published the design of one of these "Macrovision strippers" sometime in the mid-to-late 80s, so you could build one yourself if you wanted. (It might even be possible to modify the design to work with S-video...would the nasty stuff be hidden in the luminance signal or the chrominance signal? Maybe you could get by with just diverting the appropriate signal through this box and let the other signal go through without modification.)
Another option for computer-based DVD is something like Remote Selector that disables Macrovision on hardware-based DVD decoders. I use this with my Dxr2 instead of the abovementioned Macrovision filter.
True, but blank CD-Rs are cheaper still, and they're more portable. I have my MP3s on ten CD-Rs. I can easily take them between home and work, and the CDs are set up so that they'll autoplay like an audio CD when you stick 'em in the drive (well, they'll do that on Win9x anyway).
There's a reference to K6-III-Ps at speeds of 350, 366, and 380 MHz in AMD's retail employee website (registration required), and there's this less-detailed information in their public website. I don't know how any of this translates to notebooks that you can actually buy that have this processor...K6-2-Ps are available at speeds up to 475 MHz, and people seem to be fixating on megahertz alone. (Not that the K6-2's bad...I have one myself and it runs like a champ, but the K6-III, from all I've seen, is substantially faster, especially at high clock speeds where the L2 cache speed difference gets totally out-of-control.)
Lack of $$$ is part of the problem, but not the biggest part. Another, bigger part is the back-asswards political system in many of the poorer parts of the world. Aid shipments have arrived in many countries, only to be captured and either appropriated or destroyed by some tinpot dictator and his cronies. Places where the rule of man outweighs the rule of law tend, more often than not, to have this kind of problem. It's something that nanotech isn't going to solve.
You're thinking of AdultDex, not Comdex. :-) The pr0n stuff got kicked out of Comdex a few years back. AdultDex is a separate show that runs concurrently with Comdex to handle that kind of stuff. I think it's been at the Sahara in recent years, but I'm not sure as I've never gotten over that way. (I live in Vegas, so the hardest part for me of getting to Comdex is getting the time off from work. :-) )
How about another example of long-term support? I was given a PC/XT a while back that wasn't registering the proper amount of memory (it had 640K, but was coming up with some completely different number). After digging around a bit with the search engines, I found a page buried in one of IBM's foreign websites that had the jumper (switch, actually) configuration for all of IBM's older machines. I think the only other company that comes close to providing that level of legacy support is Apple, which (I think) still has operating systems for the Apple IIs on its site.
Hotmail isn't the only Microsoft property that isn't running NT and/or IIS. Netcraft says that WebTV uses Apache on Solaris. (IIRC, MacOS was the predominant desktop OS at WebTV before MS bought them out, too...don't know if that's still the case.)
Compaq already is, AFAIK...most retailers that sell build-to-order Presarios can get 'em with K7s. I don't know if they've put the K7 in other product lines yet. (I'd be kinda leery about buying a Presario because of all the WinHardware in it. Then again, of the five x86 boxen I have, the only factory-built model is an old IBM PC/XT that someone gave to me for my "old computer collection." Everything else is homebrew.)
I might still have some 5.25" floppies with SLS on them around here. I downloaded it from the college's machines (ZMODEM at 14.4 kbps...or maybe it was 28.8; can't remember when I made that switch). Haven't used 'em in ages, of course...I think the kernel at the time was 0.99pl14, or somewhere around there. The machine was a 386SX-25 with 4 megs of RAM, 125 megs of disk, and Hercules mono graphics that got upgraded to mono VGA with a 256K Oak VGA card. (Managed to push a fixed-frequency mono VGA monitor to 800x600 when running X...wasn't too bad if you didn't mind the 50-Hz refresh rate.)
TV resolution is fairly low, but it's not completely useless for web browsing...look at all the WebTV boxen out there. :-) On a more serious note, I have a K6-200 here with a Velocity 128 that I use primarily as a DVD/CD/MP3 player (parked under the TV just like a VCR). I've also fired up Internet Explorer on it, just to see what it looked like. With the display set to 640x480 and large characters, it's usable on most reasonably well-designed sites. On sites that were designed with more screen area in mind, it doesn't work so well. (People who hack their own HTML with vi/emacs/Notepad/[insert the text editor of your choice here] are more likely to generate pages of the former type. People who think FrontPage is the end-all-be-all of webpage editors are more likely to generate pages of the latter type.)
In addition to the design of the site you're viewing, the quality of your video card's TV-out signal has a lot to do with whether you'll get usable results. If your card has some kind of flicker-reduction capability (the Velocity 128 does), you should get a reasonably solid picture. If your card doesn't, the interlace will drive you batty. (I turned off the flicker reduction once to see what it was like...not recommended.)
This much is good...
Here in the US, it'd usually be ages 10-12, though there's some flexibility at either end to account for people who were either bumped forward a grade or held back a grade. (Personally, I was 9 when I started 5th grade, and there are probably more than a few other people here on /. who did the same.)
The elementary school I was attending at the time (early 80s) didn't have any computers, but I was learning BASIC on my grandfather's TRS-80 Color Computer. A friend a couple blocks away had an Atari 400, and my parents bought a TI-99/4A halfway through 6th grade. Of those machines, the CoCo was the most powerful and flexible (especially after it was upgraded to 64K and Extended BASIC). I even started to do some really simple stuff in 6809 assembly language on it before heading overseas. With the little bit of 6809 assembly that I picked up, learning 6502 assembly on the Apple IIe that I got in 1985 was a little bit easier. Getting somewhat back on topic, I don't think you'd want to introduce newbies to programming by having them learn assembly language...but it was hella fun on the old 8-bit boxen!
I can beat that by a year...1989 was the year that the University of Illinois (where I spent my freshman year) started hooking everybody up with free access. They only allowed seven hours a week on the machine (uxa.cso.uiuc.edu) set aside for that purpose, but there were some other machines available for unlimited use...in particular, there was a brand-new '030 NeXTcube that I remember word getting around about for unlimited access.
First modem I had to dial in from the dorm room was an old 300-bps Zoom internal modem that I borrowed from a friend across the street. I managed to snag an Applied Engineering DataLink 2400 that Christmas...said I could use it for classwork (which wasn't a lie, though I suspect I spent too much time on other activities :-) ). Both modems, BTW, were for the Apple IIe I was using at the time. (Still have that computer, though I upgraded it to a IIGS back in '92 or '93.)
No Lynx (no WWW) and no Gopher. Usenet was a much more useful place before the commercial spammers and AOLers arrived, though. I remember when comp.sys.apple (what comp.sys.apple2 used to be called) had useful info every day, techies from Apple getting involved in discussions, etc. Nowadays it's a shadow of its former self. Some of the changes that have happened there have been mirrored in other newsgroups.
The Internet definitely isn't what it used to be. In some ways, it's better (there's more info out there, and it's easier to get at). In others, it's worse (any moron with a few bucks a month can gain access, make an ass of himself, pollute Usenet, etc.)
Hmm...it would be possible to look at your medical history and debug your genes to weed out what didn't work so well. We could call it "You, Version 2.0." :-)
Most of those "little sub-400 jobs" won't take a TNT2...at least, not one of the AGP variety (is there even such a thing as a PCI TNT2?). These machines often lack an AGP slot because either (1) they've got some kind of integrated AGP graphics (most Emachines boxen use the ATI Rage IIC, for instance) or (2) they use a chipset (such as the SiS 5598 or (in the near future) Intel 810) that includes (low-end) graphics functionality in the chipset itself. Usually the best you can do with these machines in the way of a graphics upgrade is a Voodoo2, or maybe two of 'em in SLI mode if you have enough PCI slots. (There's also stuff like the Obsidian that did dual-Voodoo2 SLI on one card, but who's gonna stick a $500 card in a $400 computer?)
Maybe they find that the IIs are more fun or something...whether it's the classic games or their eminent hackability (built-in BASIC and such). Macs and Windows boxen have their place, but I've always found them to be more of an "appliance" system with only limited hackability and superficial customizability. Yeah, I have a couple of Win9x boxes, but the really fun stuff gets done on either (1) my Linux box or (2) my Apple IIGS. (The GS hangs off of one of the Linux box's serial ports; ProTERM 3.0 is a kick-ass communications program for it that beats anything I've ever seen for x86. I'll occasionally drop to BASIC for a quick hack, too.)
This little matter just came up while I was trying to view the Noah Wyle/Steve Jobs thing at Macworld. QuickTime streaming wouldn't work, but RealAudio/RealVideo and Windows Media Player run fine. Where's this proxy you mention?
That's why they're all a bunch of script kiddies. :-) I used to write all kinds of stuff for a variety of different computers--my grandfather's CoCo, the TI-99/4A that was the first computer I had at home, and the Apple IIe that pretty much replaced it a couple of years later.
One project I wrote for a proficiency-badge project was a math-drill program that spoke everything to you, as well as displayed it. I combined some digital-audio software cribbed from Nibble with lots of samples copied to a RAM disk and some BASIC code to tie it all together. The other kids were impressed at the program that talked. Looking back, though, the use of the full 128K of memory in the computer for something so relatively trivial might have been an early incidence of bloatware. :-) (The samples weren't even that great...some were of my voice and some were from my sister's Speak'n'Spell.)
(Explanatory note: I'm an Air Force brat; we were in England at the time (1984-86). I was in one of their Boy Scout troops while I was there...a different experience. Proficiency badges are roughly equivalent to the merit badges in our system.)
I was downloading and playing digital audio on my IIe in the early 90s. IIRC, the first file I played through the program I wrote for this purpose was one of the Star Trek themes (can't remember which one).
The date stamp on the source code of the last version I released is dated 11 Aug 92. It was even released under GPL. :-) (Subsequent refinements of my idea were made by others...I don't think they stuck with GPL, but I didn't pursue the matter much beyond that point. I upgraded the IIe to a IIGS about a year later and didn't have a continuing need for the program beyond that point anyway.)
If you're interested, I've put up the (6502 assembly) source code on my website at http://people.delphi.com/salfter/soft dac.html. The code is very compact; it assembled to less than 128 bytes.
Just to see what it'd do, I took this phrase and passed it through each of the languages Babelfish supports, and then had it translate that back to English. The results:
Not as funny as the famed English-Russian-English translation, but still interesting. (Note that it came closest with the translation through German, probably because English is more closely related to German than to the other languages.)