I hate to rain on your parade pal, but the VIA MVP3 chipset is a piece of crap, I ought to know, I got lumbered with one!
It's implementation of both the PCI/AGP and IDE bus is woeful...just try using any PCI sound card with one setup for UDMA...Snap, Crackle and Pop!!!
Odd...I have such a setup here and have never run into the problems you describe. What board are you using? Mine's an FIC VA-503+ with an ATI Xpert 98 AGP and an Ensoniq AudioPCI. I've had two UDMA-compatible hard drives (a Western Digital AC35100 and a Quantum Fireball EX 10.2GB (don't remember the model #)) and both have worked flawlessly with the rest of the system. Maybe if you're running some PC Chips motherboard (or something equally crummy), you might run into problems...hell, PC Chips is almost a guarantee of problems of some sort. Given a decent brand of motherboard, though, you shouldn't have problems.
What does the hex sequence 2C 30 C0 assemble to, and what does that instruction do on an Apple II?
BIT $C030, which pings the speaker.
One neat trick was to turn the speaker on and off at a fast enough rate that the speaker cone couldn't move in/out all the way. This allowed you to change the volume. You could also use it to play digital-audio files with a fair amount of fidelity. (I wrote some code to do this...on a IIe, it played 8-bit mono audio sampled at 11.025 kHz, using just the upper 3 or 4 bits of each sample. I think it only took 73 bytes. Try writing anything useful in just 73 bytes on a more "modern" system.:-) )
Remember the magazines with the programs you'd type in? That was good typing practice. For not having any concept of the "home row" and other stuff you'd learn in a typing class (which I eventually took in high school, though I had already been pounding away at the keys for four or five years before that), I had gotten up a pretty good speed by keying in programs from magazines such as Nibble, Rainbow, and Hot CoCo. (Yes, I know the magazines are for different computers...Nibble was for the Apple IIe that my parents bought in '85, while the other two were for my grandfather's Color Computer that I used before then.)
(The typing class used IBM Selectrics, though, instead of computers...kinda hard to cheat when you're using one of those.:-) )
Slot A is nowhere the same as Slot 1. Probably will be sized differently, and keyed differently, and differen number of pins and everything.
Electrically, no--the signals used by Slot A and Slot 1 are completely different. Physically, yes--they use the same edge-connector slot. It's no different a concept than the 6502, 6800, and 8080 all using the same socket (40-pin DIP) with different pin-outs.
They used a Apple II screen that hadn't been invented for eight years.
I was wondering if anybody else was going to notice that all their Apple IIs, going back to the very first ones shown off at the '77 West Coast Computer Faire (?), were equipped with Monitor IIs. The IIe my parents bought in '85 came with a Monitor II (I still have it, too), but they wouldn't have had any of 'em. (Besides, the hot thing about the Apple II was that it was the first relatively affordable PC to offer color graphics, so wouldn't they have been showing it off with a color monitor or TV and playing Breakout or something else that'd use color?)
Still, as a long-time Apple II user (just hopped my IIGS up to 12.5 MHz a couple of days ago, and have a bigger hard drive and a CD-ROM drive on order for it), it was kinda nice seeing Apple IIs all over the place.:-)
anyone who considers that horendous pile of bits on a windows machine to be a "telnet Client" should have their head examined...
its terrible, it barely functions at all and its huge (ever taken a look at the size of the executable)
Hmm...I'll admit that it's kinda bare-bones, but check the following (the first is from the retail Win98 upgrade, the second is from Slackware 3.6):
C:\WINDOWS>dir telnet.exe
Volume in drive C is BOOT Volume Serial Number is 1D75-07E2 Directory of C:\WINDOWS
TELNET EXE77,824 05-11-98 8:01p TELNET.EXE 1 file(s) 77,824 bytes 0 dir(s) 1,890.10 MB free -------------------------------------------------- ---------- chakotay:~> ls -l/bin/telnet -rwxr-xr-x 1 root bin 73456 Jan 27 20:19/bin/telnet
There's not that much of a difference between them in size or functionality. (For a better telnet client for Win9x, you can download HyperTerminal Private Edition for free...I use it to log into the Linux box with an 80x50 window so I can read news with trn, sanity-check my web site with lynx, etc.)
(BTW,/. really ought to support the plaintext tag. It'd make the inclusion of stuff such as text-screen captures turn out properly. tt (a synonym for code) just doesn't cut it.)
I had the Apple ][+ (I never saw a plain ][) with a stock 2MHz crystal driving a Rockwell 6502 processor.
With the exception of the IIGS and IIc Plus, all Apple IIs are clocked at ~1 MHz. (The IIGS runs at ~2.8 MHz and the IIc Plus runs at ~4 MHz.) Memory accesses are split 50/50 between the processor and the video hardware. The memory runs at 2 MHz; the processor would get to access it on one cycle and the video hardware would get to access it on the next cycle. (The need to continually refresh the video display led to this function also refreshing the DRAM as a "byproduct" of its operation. In addition to not needing dedicated DRAM refresh hardware, it also keeps the video hardware and processor from interfering with each other--no screen flicker, no slowdown.)
(Note the use of present tense...I have a IIGS on my desk between a couple of x86 boxes. Until I started playing with the ZipGS accelerator card in it to get it to go even faster than it had been running, it was running flawlessly. I really need to tear it open and get it running right again.:-) I also have a IIe and a (dead) II+ kicking around here. The Apple II wasn't the first computer I ever used (that was a TRS-80 Model 1) and it wasn't the first computer I had at home (that was a TI-99/4A), but it was the first computer with which I was able to do serious work. It's also the most hackable computer I've ever run across, and it's probably the most sophisticated computer of which one person can hope to have a pretty good grasp of how the whole thing works from both a hardware and a software standpoint. Imagine Linus trying to get Linux to the point where it is today, all by himself. He's a pretty smart guy, but that simply wouldn't have happened. There's no way it could happen that way anymore.)
Digital Video Express, LP is a partnership between Circuit City Stores, Inc. and a prominent Los Angeles entertainment law firm.
Which law firm would that be?
Dewey, Cheatham, and Howe.:-)
Re:Could someone tell me why it was bad?
on
DIVX is dead
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· Score: 1
I've seen scads of "Down with DIVX" drek on the web, but I've never actually understood why everyone resented it so much...
Oh, wait, I know -- it must be the privacy issue. Since you have to dial up and activate the disc when you rent it, "they" know when you're watching.
Do me a favor -- open your wallet. Take out your BlockBuster card. Look at the back. See that barcode? Uh-huh.
How about a movie you want to add to your collection on a permanent basis? With DIVX, even after you "convert" your movie to unlimited-play, your player still calls into DIVX HQ every time you watch it. You also can't let your friends borrow it (well, you can, but they'll have to fork over $$$ to watch your movie on their player). By comparison, you can pay cash for a DVD at Best Buy or whatever (maybe even Blockbuster if they're selling DVDs now and not just renting them), take it home, and watch it whenever you like--and nobody will have any record of what you're watching or when you're watching it.
Plus, there's no ticking time bomb with DVD, unlike the way DIVX is now. As long as you have a functioning DVD player (and I know that changing media formats can create a different set of problems--anyone here have equipment to read 8" floppies?:-) ), your DVD collection is still usable. Two years from now, DIVX movies will be about as useful as AOL CDs.
Re:But check Circuit City's web page!
on
DIVX is dead
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· Score: 1
It is now. (They're also playing "Video Killed The Radio Star" in the background to go with the news.:-) ) I heard about the good news from news.com first and then went to check the Fight DIVX page; they had already made a quick hack to their page to note DIVX's demise.
But security in Linux is a one-box-show. If you admin 8 boxes you need to configure your accounts separatly on the 8 boxes (!as far as I know! : I asked about this a couple times and no-one has been able to tell me how to centralize this Novell-NDS style)
You can share user accounts across multiple UN*X boxen. The engineering workstations at UNLV, for instance (where I'm slowly finishing my CS degree), send all their authentication to a single system. User disk space is also maintained on just one or two systems. The workstations (a mix of Sun, NeXT, DEC, and SGI equipment, both old and new, plus some x86 boxes that dual-boot NT and one of the BSDs) basically run as "compute boxes," with most programs and data residing on the servers. You use the same username and password to log into any of the systems, you have the same home directory on all the systems, and changes to your environment on one machine will also appear on the other machines (at least if they're the same type). Even after all this time, I'm not sure how they do it...Kerberos is a part of it, but there's probably some other stuff (maybe including some homebrew bits and pieces).
Re:All in one PCs revisited?
on
Cool PC Cases
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· Score: 1
[Monorail] took a huge hit on these as well. Their sales were sluggish, which could be due to the half-ass componentry that was used but regardless of the reason it nearly brought down the company.
They apparently haven't gotten any better, either. I work (as a PC technician) for one of the largest consumer-electronics retailers in the country. One of the managers at my store bought one of the Monorails that we were selling. I think he eventually went through two or three of 'em before he got tired of the hassle and traded it in for a Compaq. Damn thing kept glitching in strange and unpredictable ways.
(Personally, I wouldn't buy any computer that you see on any store's shelves...there's too much WinHardware in 'em. You might think it's strange that I'd work for someone who pushes these boxes, but at least I can steer the upgraders away from Winmodems and similar drek.:-) )
...because I have a sinking feeling that AOL is going to monkey with it privacy-wise. I just don't like AOL, and I don't trust them.
That's exactly why I took Winamp off my machine as soon as I read they had been bought out by AO-Hell. Now I'm stuck finding a comparable replacement...the playlist support in RealPlayer Plus G2 and Windows Media Player is minimal (RP+ has shuffle play, but doesn't preload ID3 information from files in the playlist; Media Player doesn't grok ID3 at all and doesn't do shuffle play).
Almost everyone has to limit the top speed in order to stop it flaking out, dropping the connection at random moments and generally being a piece of analogue technology pushed far too far.
Whether with my modem (USR Sportster Voice 56K) or the various types of modems I deal with at work (all the way down to piece-of-shit PCtel HSP Winmodems), I've never had to do any special tinkering with 56K modems to get them to run right. Some of 'em definitely work better than others (the USRs I use at home and at work consistently get connect speeds in the mid- to high-40s with nearly any ISP), but I haven't seen one yet that completely fails to work as described.
Hell, getting speeds short of the maximum isn't even new with V.90/x2/K56flex; don't these clowns who filed this lawsuit remember V.34? You didn't always get 28.8; with a SupraFAXmodem 288, I usually got 26.4 or 28.8, but a noisy line could drop that as low as 21.6 or even 19.2. Where were these people then?
Why are there question marks instead of apostrophes? I've seen that before. The editors must not see that on their screens, why not? If you look at the HTML, there's no funny markup there, just " ? " instead of " ' ". So strange.
It's ISO8859-1 character code 146, which is the "filled-in-9-looking" apostrophe commonly used in printing. Whoever edited the text for the article must've had something akin to the Mac's "smart quoting" option turned on.
If your browser is properly configured, it should've displayed the article properly. Maybe yours is only displaying 7-bit ASCII characters and throwing everything else out. There should be some option in your browser to select ISO8859-1 as the default. (Even better would've been for the page's author to include the appropriate META tag to specify the encoding to use, if he was going to stray from ASCII.)
BTW, the source doesn't have all the crud in it that FrontPage likes to add to its output, so I think it's kinda hard to blame Microsoft for this one. Blame AOL/Netscape for not knowing how to deal with 8-bit character sets.
I think they *might* teach [FORTRAN] somewhere on campus...
Try checking your math department. When I took computational linear algebra a few years ago, I had to pick up enough FORTRAN to get by since all of the in-class examples and many of the homework and test questions used it. C was allowed for some of the homework assignments, but the rest of the class was in FORTRAN.
(OTOH, if you took regular linear algebra instead of the computer-assisted variety, you could more than likely get through college without ever having to write a line of FORTRAN code.)
Good ol' trn, last updated in 1993, still kicks the pants off of the scroll and drool web interface for usability in reading large numbers of messages.
Wow...and I thought I was the only one using trn. It's definitely the only way to cut through all the chaff that's on Usenet nowadays. I've tried nn, gnus, and a bunch of Win9x-based newsreaders, but I keep going back to trn.
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Odd...I have such a setup here and have never run into the problems you describe. What board are you using? Mine's an FIC VA-503+ with an ATI Xpert 98 AGP and an Ensoniq AudioPCI. I've had two UDMA-compatible hard drives (a Western Digital AC35100 and a Quantum Fireball EX 10.2GB (don't remember the model #)) and both have worked flawlessly with the rest of the system. Maybe if you're running some PC Chips motherboard (or something equally crummy), you might run into problems...hell, PC Chips is almost a guarantee of problems of some sort. Given a decent brand of motherboard, though, you shouldn't have problems.
BIT $C030, which pings the speaker.
One neat trick was to turn the speaker on and off at a fast enough rate that the speaker cone couldn't move in/out all the way. This allowed you to change the volume. You could also use it to play digital-audio files with a fair amount of fidelity. (I wrote some code to do this...on a IIe, it played 8-bit mono audio sampled at 11.025 kHz, using just the upper 3 or 4 bits of each sample. I think it only took 73 bytes. Try writing anything useful in just 73 bytes on a more "modern" system. :-) )
(The typing class used IBM Selectrics, though, instead of computers...kinda hard to cheat when you're using one of those. :-) )
Electrically, no--the signals used by Slot A and Slot 1 are completely different. Physically, yes--they use the same edge-connector slot. It's no different a concept than the 6502, 6800, and 8080 all using the same socket (40-pin DIP) with different pin-outs.
I was wondering if anybody else was going to notice that all their Apple IIs, going back to the very first ones shown off at the '77 West Coast Computer Faire (?), were equipped with Monitor IIs. The IIe my parents bought in '85 came with a Monitor II (I still have it, too), but they wouldn't have had any of 'em. (Besides, the hot thing about the Apple II was that it was the first relatively affordable PC to offer color graphics, so wouldn't they have been showing it off with a color monitor or TV and playing Breakout or something else that'd use color?)
Still, as a long-time Apple II user (just hopped my IIGS up to 12.5 MHz a couple of days ago, and have a bigger hard drive and a CD-ROM drive on order for it), it was kinda nice seeing Apple IIs all over the place. :-)
Hmm...I'll admit that it's kinda bare-bones, but check the following (the first is from the retail Win98 upgrade, the second is from Slackware 3.6):
C:\WINDOWS>dir telnet.exe
- ---------- /bin/telnet /bin/telnet
Volume in drive C is BOOT
Volume Serial Number is 1D75-07E2
Directory of C:\WINDOWS
TELNET EXE 77,824 05-11-98 8:01p TELNET.EXE
1 file(s) 77,824 bytes
0 dir(s) 1,890.10 MB free
-------------------------------------------------
chakotay:~> ls -l
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root bin 73456 Jan 27 20:19
There's not that much of a difference between them in size or functionality. (For a better telnet client for Win9x, you can download HyperTerminal Private Edition for free...I use it to log into the Linux box with an 80x50 window so I can read news with trn, sanity-check my web site with lynx, etc.)
(BTW, /. really ought to support the plaintext tag. It'd make the inclusion of stuff such as text-screen captures turn out properly. tt (a synonym for code) just doesn't cut it.)
With the exception of the IIGS and IIc Plus, all Apple IIs are clocked at ~1 MHz. (The IIGS runs at ~2.8 MHz and the IIc Plus runs at ~4 MHz.) Memory accesses are split 50/50 between the processor and the video hardware. The memory runs at 2 MHz; the processor would get to access it on one cycle and the video hardware would get to access it on the next cycle. (The need to continually refresh the video display led to this function also refreshing the DRAM as a "byproduct" of its operation. In addition to not needing dedicated DRAM refresh hardware, it also keeps the video hardware and processor from interfering with each other--no screen flicker, no slowdown.)
(Note the use of present tense...I have a IIGS on my desk between a couple of x86 boxes. Until I started playing with the ZipGS accelerator card in it to get it to go even faster than it had been running, it was running flawlessly. I really need to tear it open and get it running right again. :-) I also have a IIe and a (dead) II+ kicking around here. The Apple II wasn't the first computer I ever used (that was a TRS-80 Model 1) and it wasn't the first computer I had at home (that was a TI-99/4A), but it was the first computer with which I was able to do serious work. It's also the most hackable computer I've ever run across, and it's probably the most sophisticated computer of which one person can hope to have a pretty good grasp of how the whole thing works from both a hardware and a software standpoint. Imagine Linus trying to get Linux to the point where it is today, all by himself. He's a pretty smart guy, but that simply wouldn't have happened. There's no way it could happen that way anymore.)
Dewey, Cheatham, and Howe. :-)
How about a movie you want to add to your collection on a permanent basis? With DIVX, even after you "convert" your movie to unlimited-play, your player still calls into DIVX HQ every time you watch it. You also can't let your friends borrow it (well, you can, but they'll have to fork over $$$ to watch your movie on their player). By comparison, you can pay cash for a DVD at Best Buy or whatever (maybe even Blockbuster if they're selling DVDs now and not just renting them), take it home, and watch it whenever you like--and nobody will have any record of what you're watching or when you're watching it.
Plus, there's no ticking time bomb with DVD, unlike the way DIVX is now. As long as you have a functioning DVD player (and I know that changing media formats can create a different set of problems--anyone here have equipment to read 8" floppies? :-) ), your DVD collection is still usable. Two years from now, DIVX movies will be about as useful as AOL CDs.
It is now. (They're also playing "Video Killed The Radio Star" in the background to go with the news. :-) ) I heard about the good news from news.com first and then went to check the Fight DIVX page; they had already made a quick hack to their page to note DIVX's demise.
You can share user accounts across multiple UN*X boxen. The engineering workstations at UNLV, for instance (where I'm slowly finishing my CS degree), send all their authentication to a single system. User disk space is also maintained on just one or two systems. The workstations (a mix of Sun, NeXT, DEC, and SGI equipment, both old and new, plus some x86 boxes that dual-boot NT and one of the BSDs) basically run as "compute boxes," with most programs and data residing on the servers. You use the same username and password to log into any of the systems, you have the same home directory on all the systems, and changes to your environment on one machine will also appear on the other machines (at least if they're the same type). Even after all this time, I'm not sure how they do it...Kerberos is a part of it, but there's probably some other stuff (maybe including some homebrew bits and pieces).
They apparently haven't gotten any better, either. I work (as a PC technician) for one of the largest consumer-electronics retailers in the country. One of the managers at my store bought one of the Monorails that we were selling. I think he eventually went through two or three of 'em before he got tired of the hassle and traded it in for a Compaq. Damn thing kept glitching in strange and unpredictable ways.
(Personally, I wouldn't buy any computer that you see on any store's shelves...there's too much WinHardware in 'em. You might think it's strange that I'd work for someone who pushes these boxes, but at least I can steer the upgraders away from Winmodems and similar drek. :-) )
That's exactly why I took Winamp off my machine as soon as I read they had been bought out by AO-Hell. Now I'm stuck finding a comparable replacement...the playlist support in RealPlayer Plus G2 and Windows Media Player is minimal (RP+ has shuffle play, but doesn't preload ID3 information from files in the playlist; Media Player doesn't grok ID3 at all and doesn't do shuffle play).
Whether with my modem (USR Sportster Voice 56K) or the various types of modems I deal with at work (all the way down to piece-of-shit PCtel HSP Winmodems), I've never had to do any special tinkering with 56K modems to get them to run right. Some of 'em definitely work better than others (the USRs I use at home and at work consistently get connect speeds in the mid- to high-40s with nearly any ISP), but I haven't seen one yet that completely fails to work as described.
Hell, getting speeds short of the maximum isn't even new with V.90/x2/K56flex; don't these clowns who filed this lawsuit remember V.34? You didn't always get 28.8; with a SupraFAXmodem 288, I usually got 26.4 or 28.8, but a noisy line could drop that as low as 21.6 or even 19.2. Where were these people then?
It's ISO8859-1 character code 146, which is the "filled-in-9-looking" apostrophe commonly used in printing. Whoever edited the text for the article must've had something akin to the Mac's "smart quoting" option turned on.
If your browser is properly configured, it should've displayed the article properly. Maybe yours is only displaying 7-bit ASCII characters and throwing everything else out. There should be some option in your browser to select ISO8859-1 as the default. (Even better would've been for the page's author to include the appropriate META tag to specify the encoding to use, if he was going to stray from ASCII.)
BTW, the source doesn't have all the crud in it that FrontPage likes to add to its output, so I think it's kinda hard to blame Microsoft for this one. Blame AOL/Netscape for not knowing how to deal with 8-bit character sets.
Try checking your math department. When I took computational linear algebra a few years ago, I had to pick up enough FORTRAN to get by since all of the in-class examples and many of the homework and test questions used it. C was allowed for some of the homework assignments, but the rest of the class was in FORTRAN.
(OTOH, if you took regular linear algebra instead of the computer-assisted variety, you could more than likely get through college without ever having to write a line of FORTRAN code.)
Wow...and I thought I was the only one using trn. It's definitely the only way to cut through all the chaff that's on Usenet nowadays. I've tried nn, gnus, and a bunch of Win9x-based newsreaders, but I keep going back to trn.