The problem was, the keyboards would inevitably wear out when the machines were given to managers. Apparently the action of them folding out was even more mesmerizing than those kinetic managerial trip toys. Productivity plummeted due to all the managers just opening and closing their laptops all day long. IBM could have solved the technical problems with the keyboard with time, but there's nothing you can do about the manager-mesmerising potential.
Um...you could fire the PHBs and replace them with people who are actually useful...
Ick...if you're going to do that, why bother buying a multi-megapixel camera?
If he's only using it for viewing on screen, why make hi res (priting quality) images at all?
You might only want to view it on-screen now...but what if you want a print at some point in the future? You might as well grab the best quality you can, because you won't be able to get better pictures 5 or 10 years from now. To go with a music analogy, let's say you wanted to rip all of your CDs and then fence them at the used-record store to free up some (physical) space. Would you store the ripped audio as FLAC/SHN/APE, or would you keep only 64-kbps MP3s?
Even simpler, look at the setup for the camera. Probably you can set it to make "web" images (low res) by default, rather than print (hi res) ones. That also allows it to save many more images in its chip.
Ick...if you're going to do that, why bother buying a multi-megapixel camera? You might as well save your money and buy some piece-of-junk $50 camera that shoots at 640x480...that'd be like using a 110 Instamatic instead of a decent 35mm SLR. You can always reduce a high-resolution image to a lower resolution that will look decent on-screen, but a low-resolution image will look like crap if you blow it up or print it.
I shoot a Nikon Coolpix 995 at its next-to-highest quality setting, which produces JPEGs up around 600K or so IIRC. (The camera's highest-quality mode saves lossless TIFFs instead of JPEGs, but it takes much longer to write those images to memory.) A 128MB CF card is good for somewhere around 80 pictures, which is more than enough for a day's shooting.
(Dad's camera is an Olympus of similar spec, so the same rough estimates for memory usage should hold for it as well. Memory is cheap...the first thing both cameras got early on was more memory, as they came with only 16MB each.)
And god forbid you ever give her a digital camera. Prepare yourself for a barrage of emails with 10 meg bitmap attachments. I tried to teach my grandma how to at least save as jpeg (not even approaching the "resize" road), but we ended up with a zip compromise.
Tell her to dump all her pix in one directory.
Give her an icon to double-click that launches a shell script (install Cygwin, NetPBM, and the IJG JPEG tools) that resizes & optimizes everything in the previous directory and dump the results into a subdirectory...call the subdirectory "small."
Tell her to only send pictures from the "small" directory.
I set up Dad's computer this way...the large files from the digital camera get cut down to somewhere around 16-32K each, which is better for sending them out over a dial-up connection.
IDE: Only the PIIX4 IDE controllers have been found to work. Attached devices must be UDMA/33 compatible or better.
Ethernet: Intel 8255x 10/100 ethernet controllers are supported.
Video: You must have a VESA 2.0 compliant video card. Almost all modern graphics cards are VESA 2.0 compliant. However, emulators such as vmware do not have VESA 2.0 compliant emulated video cards.
Successfully tested hardware: All 440BX motherboards tested have worked with their internal IDE controllers. IBM ThinkPad A21m (with onboard Intel ethernet)
Known to not be supported: All AMD and VIA based systems.
That rules out nearly every system I have at home and work, except for maybe the dual P!!! that runs alfter.us...and the 3Com NICs and SCSI hard drives in it would need to be swapped out. Most of my systems run on AMD processors...everything from dual Athlon MPs down to K6-2s.
(I do have a beige G3 (266 MHz) that I'm using to punch in this message...it's a bit on the slow side even with 256 megs of RAM, but at $40, it was a cheap way to get something on which to try out Mac OS X. Mozilla looks much nicer on it than it does on the x86 boxen under Win2K/WinXP, though...must be Apple's mad antialiasing skillz at work, or something like that.)
My Mac Classic has a SuperDrive. It's a 3.5" floppy drive that handles 750kB and 1.5MB (I think those are the numbers, anyway) disks.
720K (MFM), 800K (GCR), and 1.4MB (MFM).
SuperDrive isn't the only name from the past that Apple has reused, either...how about AppleWorks? I have several 5.25" floppies with school papers and such that were done with AppleWorks 3.0 (and earlier versions) on a IIe.
Of course I can't RTFA or LATFP (look at the feckin' pictures) cause the site is down. But what about combining a water-cooling system with a tropical aquarium?
That way little bottom-feeders (and no, I don't mean CowboyNeal) can clean the algae for you. Salt-water might also help the cooling process... have to check my physics textbook on that one.
It'd be cool as hell...but last time I checked, copper (the material used for most waterblocks/radiators/heater cores) isn't so good for fishes. You'd end up replacing them frequently, which I don't think would be a Good Idea.
Their site was working enough that the page loaded from the Google cache would, after a (long) delay, pull in the images. I saved all three pages with Mozilla and zipped them up. Enjoy.
My cat sure thinks so, laying on top of the monitor is his favorite spot. He likes to use by wireless router/firewall as a pillow to rest his head on. It's hysterical.
Just hope he doesn't get the idea to piss on your monitor, or you'll come home to fried kitty one day...zzzap!
Track down an Apex AD600A...there's nothing that's unskippable on one of those.
Unfortunately, the picture quality on this model is awful. It was among the earliest models that used standard off-the-shelf PC DVD drives along with an on-board decoder (as opposed to a custom-made design in most big-name DVD players). There is a noticeable difference in picture quality when playing almost any DVD on this player vs. another player - this is the reason I sold mine.
I've not had any complaints about the video quality on mine...was there something specific that you thought was wrong with it? (The only other point of reference I'd have at this point would be PowerDVD running on a computer, though I used a Dxr2 in an old K6-200 that I no longer have before I bought the Apex.)
One more oddity about the AD600A, though, which is back on-topic - its hidden menu let you strip CSS.
Actually, all it let you do was disable CSS decryption...not useful at all for most home use. The intended use of the feature, IIRC, was in kiosk applications where you didn't want somebody to just pop in a random DVD and play (instead, you'd put in your own video on a CSS-free DVD). Even that seems far-fetched, though, as a kiosk would most likely have the player locked away in a box.
But try telling them they're not allowed to skip the commercial/FBI warning...
I get turned off every time I come to an unskippable part of a DVD. If DVD quality wasn't so much better than VHS, I wouldn't bother with it. The lack of control the customer has over their own purchase is ridiculous.
Track down an Apex AD600A...there's nothing that's unskippable on one of those. Most of the time, pressing PBC OFF twice and then pressing DVD DIGEST will take you straight to the root menu, past any ads/FBI warnings/etc. On the rare occasions that they're part of the movie VTS and not a separate VTS, you can turn playback control off entirely by pressing PBC OFF, then skip around to wherever you want to go. Mine has the latest firmware and an upgraded loader (read: 16x IDE DVD-ROM drive) so it'll play DVD-Rs and -RWs...it'll play damn near anything I can throw at it.
You won't find them in stores anymore, but I'd guess that they turn up on eBay from time to time.
I wonder what it'd be like if DVD CCA's CSS were re-implemented as yet another general-purpose stream cipher for a popular platform's crypto interface.
It might be an interesting academic exercise, but the weak encryption provided by CSS would be useless from a standpoint of securing your data. The only practical use for CSS as a general-purpose encryption/decryption unit would be the decoding of DVDs...and that's where the Media Mafia gets the inclination to bust your kneecaps instead of leaving you alone. For protecting your data, you'd rather use something like Blowfish or RSA.
Also it might make sense to provide a BitTorrent version that installs through ActiveX.
Didn't somebody do a Java BitTorrent client already? That would be better than an ActiveX version, especially if you're delivering something that's platform-neutral.
I'd say the difference in the number of HyperTransport links is more than cosmetic...the multiple connections are what enable MP usage. (Theoretically, somebody could design a chip to enable a multiprocessor Athlon 64 configuration...but it'd more than likely be more trouble than it's worth. By connecting multiple Opterons through the extra HyperTransport links, one processor is able to get at another processor's memory (since each processor has its own memory controller and memory) with not too big a speed hit.)
I really wanted to see the video but, the site requires Windows or MAc with Internet Explorer, cookies enabled and Windows Media Player.
I must've been imagining things when I went there with Mozilla and copied the URL for the video into FlashGet for downloading. (I wasn't prompted about any cookie, either...first-party cookies prompt for saving, while third-party cookies are rejected.) I also must've been imagining things when I played it in Media Player Classic (not Windows Media Player)...had to download and install ffdshow first, but everything worked fine without IE or WMP. If you're going to troll, it's a good idea to have at least a small part of your troll based in fact.
And we all know that the XP and the MP are so very much different. I mean you couldn't use an XP in an MP board just by painting some traces. RIGHT?
That's not guaranteed to work. Athlon MPs aren't that much more expensive than Athlon XPs to make it worth the risk. (Then again, I'm not a case-modding/overclocking riceboy either.)
... someone did it with a C64, so someone else had to do with an Atari 800.
Some things never change;-)
...and CowboyNeal considered doing the same to an Apple IIc. Fortunately, he decided against doing that...maybe because there's still useful stuff you can do with an Apple II.:-) (Speaking of things that never change...)
the only thing that might make the PC platform attractive are the rumors that HP will be releasing an Opteron soon.
Uh.. can't you get an Opteron now?
Yes...and the current rumor WRT HP is that it'll have an Athlon 64 system in the not-too-distant future, not an Opteron. (Athlon 64 is the single-processor desktop chip, intended to take the place of the Athlon XP. Opteron is the multi-processor-capable workstation/server chip, intended to take the place of the Athlon MP.)
Everybody pays a premium for the newest processors. Try buying a Gateway with the latest and greatest from Intel. It'll probably be $3000.
You can build your own for much less than that, and it'll most likely have better parts put into it...a few months back, we built a system around a 2.8-GHz P4 (their fastest chip at the time) with plenty of RAM, a 15krpm SCSI hard drive, and other goodies in a nice, heavy full-tower case. Even with an OEM copy of Win2K Pro, the total came to somewhere around $1500. More recently, approximately the same amount of money (maybe a little less) bought a dual Athlon MP 2600 (backed it down to an IDE hard drive (at least it's larger than the SCSI drive in the P4), but the video card offers dual-monitor and TV-out support). If an outfit like Gateway or Dell charges $3k for anything short of a dual-Xeon workstation or server, you're getting ripped off.
(We usually buy parts from Newegg or Googlegear. They're not the absolute cheapest, but we've never had problems with them. If we're in a hurry, we'll buy from the local Fry's...a few weeks ago, I pieced together an Athlon XP 1700 system for about $300 to replace an old Pentium-MMX 233 that was our router and was acting up. The case isn't the best in the world, but it gets the job done and everything else in there is decent enough.)
Las Vegas, to name one example. We have both here in the office, and while there have been occasional issues with our cable-modem connection, our DSL usually only goes for a day or two before the modem needs to be reset.
Most of the DSL problems stem from the service provider not owning the lines...they're stuck with getting problems resolved on Sprint's schedule, whatever that happens to be. Given the weirdness I've also seen with voice service, I'm not convinced that Sprint is up to keeping any type of service (voice, DSL, whatever) going reliably. Cox doesn't have to deal with another company to get line issues, etc. resolved, and when a problem does pop up (which happens much less frequently than with the DSL), it usually gets taken care of fairly quickly. 24/7 tech support for cable-modem service is also a Good Thing.
(I should probably point out that both services are business-oriented, not the garden-variety residential service. I also have the same cable-modem service (at a lower speed level) at home. It costs no more than same-speed residential cable-modem service, but you can order static IPs for it, run whatever services you want, etc. As for speed vs. DSL, the cable modem almost always beats DSL for upstream and downstream transfers around here.)
What a c*** article! The author seems to have shoe-horned every alarmist notion in the tabloids' dictionary - cloning dead pets, outraged pet dealers (can you even imagine an outraged pet dealer?), the word 'fruit' in an article about fish, a totally unrelated issue (tropical fish that can live in cold water), and false selling (i.e. a kitten that doesn't look like it's clone-parent).
When I was a kid in Guernsey (Channel Islands, home of the Guernsey cow) we used to get raw (unpasteurised) milk delivered into the jug of our choice on our doorstep.
Can't say that I've gone that far, but the milk that was delivered to us for the couple of years we were in England in the mid-80s wasn't homogenized. On a cold-enough morning, if the milk wasn't brought inside soon enough after it was delivered, the cream that was floating on top would start to freeze and push the foil cap off the bottle. Ice cream, anyone?:-)
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Um...you could fire the PHBs and replace them with people who are actually useful...
<a href="http://newsvac.newsforge.com/newsvac/03/06/2 4/1542207.shtml"> NewsForge article </a>
gets rendered as
NewsForge article
You might only want to view it on-screen now...but what if you want a print at some point in the future? You might as well grab the best quality you can, because you won't be able to get better pictures 5 or 10 years from now. To go with a music analogy, let's say you wanted to rip all of your CDs and then fence them at the used-record store to free up some (physical) space. Would you store the ripped audio as FLAC/SHN/APE, or would you keep only 64-kbps MP3s?
Ick...if you're going to do that, why bother buying a multi-megapixel camera? You might as well save your money and buy some piece-of-junk $50 camera that shoots at 640x480...that'd be like using a 110 Instamatic instead of a decent 35mm SLR. You can always reduce a high-resolution image to a lower resolution that will look decent on-screen, but a low-resolution image will look like crap if you blow it up or print it.
I shoot a Nikon Coolpix 995 at its next-to-highest quality setting, which produces JPEGs up around 600K or so IIRC. (The camera's highest-quality mode saves lossless TIFFs instead of JPEGs, but it takes much longer to write those images to memory.) A 128MB CF card is good for somewhere around 80 pictures, which is more than enough for a day's shooting.
(Dad's camera is an Olympus of similar spec, so the same rough estimates for memory usage should hold for it as well. Memory is cheap...the first thing both cameras got early on was more memory, as they came with only 16MB each.)
I set up Dad's computer this way...the large files from the digital camera get cut down to somewhere around 16-32K each, which is better for sending them out over a dial-up connection.
Do they? I thought they just appeared from nowhere, like mold on a loaf of old bread or toadstools in your lawn...
Last time I checked, Darwin-x86 runs on an extremely limited subset of x86 hardware:
(http://www.opensource.apple.com/projects/darwin/6 .0/install.x86.txt)
That rules out nearly every system I have at home and work, except for maybe the dual P!!! that runs alfter.us...and the 3Com NICs and SCSI hard drives in it would need to be swapped out. Most of my systems run on AMD processors...everything from dual Athlon MPs down to K6-2s.
(I do have a beige G3 (266 MHz) that I'm using to punch in this message...it's a bit on the slow side even with 256 megs of RAM, but at $40, it was a cheap way to get something on which to try out Mac OS X. Mozilla looks much nicer on it than it does on the x86 boxen under Win2K/WinXP, though...must be Apple's mad antialiasing skillz at work, or something like that.)
720K (MFM), 800K (GCR), and 1.4MB (MFM).
SuperDrive isn't the only name from the past that Apple has reused, either...how about AppleWorks? I have several 5.25" floppies with school papers and such that were done with AppleWorks 3.0 (and earlier versions) on a IIe.
It'd be cool as hell...but last time I checked, copper (the material used for most waterblocks/radiators/heater cores) isn't so good for fishes. You'd end up replacing them frequently, which I don't think would be a Good Idea.
Make that all six pages now (phases 2 and 3)...same URL as before.
Their site was working enough that the page loaded from the Google cache would, after a (long) delay, pull in the images. I saved all three pages with Mozilla and zipped them up. Enjoy.
Just hope he doesn't get the idea to piss on your monitor, or you'll come home to fried kitty one day...zzzap!
I've not had any complaints about the video quality on mine...was there something specific that you thought was wrong with it? (The only other point of reference I'd have at this point would be PowerDVD running on a computer, though I used a Dxr2 in an old K6-200 that I no longer have before I bought the Apex.)
Actually, all it let you do was disable CSS decryption...not useful at all for most home use. The intended use of the feature, IIRC, was in kiosk applications where you didn't want somebody to just pop in a random DVD and play (instead, you'd put in your own video on a CSS-free DVD). Even that seems far-fetched, though, as a kiosk would most likely have the player locked away in a box.
Track down an Apex AD600A...there's nothing that's unskippable on one of those. Most of the time, pressing PBC OFF twice and then pressing DVD DIGEST will take you straight to the root menu, past any ads/FBI warnings/etc. On the rare occasions that they're part of the movie VTS and not a separate VTS, you can turn playback control off entirely by pressing PBC OFF, then skip around to wherever you want to go. Mine has the latest firmware and an upgraded loader (read: 16x IDE DVD-ROM drive) so it'll play DVD-Rs and -RWs...it'll play damn near anything I can throw at it.
You won't find them in stores anymore, but I'd guess that they turn up on eBay from time to time.
It might be an interesting academic exercise, but the weak encryption provided by CSS would be useless from a standpoint of securing your data. The only practical use for CSS as a general-purpose encryption/decryption unit would be the decoding of DVDs...and that's where the Media Mafia gets the inclination to bust your kneecaps instead of leaving you alone. For protecting your data, you'd rather use something like Blowfish or RSA.
Didn't somebody do a Java BitTorrent client already? That would be better than an ActiveX version, especially if you're delivering something that's platform-neutral.
I'd say the difference in the number of HyperTransport links is more than cosmetic...the multiple connections are what enable MP usage. (Theoretically, somebody could design a chip to enable a multiprocessor Athlon 64 configuration...but it'd more than likely be more trouble than it's worth. By connecting multiple Opterons through the extra HyperTransport links, one processor is able to get at another processor's memory (since each processor has its own memory controller and memory) with not too big a speed hit.)
I must've been imagining things when I went there with Mozilla and copied the URL for the video into FlashGet for downloading. (I wasn't prompted about any cookie, either...first-party cookies prompt for saving, while third-party cookies are rejected.) I also must've been imagining things when I played it in Media Player Classic (not Windows Media Player)...had to download and install ffdshow first, but everything worked fine without IE or WMP. If you're going to troll, it's a good idea to have at least a small part of your troll based in fact.
That's not guaranteed to work. Athlon MPs aren't that much more expensive than Athlon XPs to make it worth the risk. (Then again, I'm not a case-modding/overclocking riceboy either.)
Yes...and the current rumor WRT HP is that it'll have an Athlon 64 system in the not-too-distant future, not an Opteron. (Athlon 64 is the single-processor desktop chip, intended to take the place of the Athlon XP. Opteron is the multi-processor-capable workstation/server chip, intended to take the place of the Athlon MP.)
You can build your own for much less than that, and it'll most likely have better parts put into it...a few months back, we built a system around a 2.8-GHz P4 (their fastest chip at the time) with plenty of RAM, a 15krpm SCSI hard drive, and other goodies in a nice, heavy full-tower case. Even with an OEM copy of Win2K Pro, the total came to somewhere around $1500. More recently, approximately the same amount of money (maybe a little less) bought a dual Athlon MP 2600 (backed it down to an IDE hard drive (at least it's larger than the SCSI drive in the P4), but the video card offers dual-monitor and TV-out support). If an outfit like Gateway or Dell charges $3k for anything short of a dual-Xeon workstation or server, you're getting ripped off.
(We usually buy parts from Newegg or Googlegear. They're not the absolute cheapest, but we've never had problems with them. If we're in a hurry, we'll buy from the local Fry's...a few weeks ago, I pieced together an Athlon XP 1700 system for about $300 to replace an old Pentium-MMX 233 that was our router and was acting up. The case isn't the best in the world, but it gets the job done and everything else in there is decent enough.)
Las Vegas, to name one example. We have both here in the office, and while there have been occasional issues with our cable-modem connection, our DSL usually only goes for a day or two before the modem needs to be reset.
Most of the DSL problems stem from the service provider not owning the lines...they're stuck with getting problems resolved on Sprint's schedule, whatever that happens to be. Given the weirdness I've also seen with voice service, I'm not convinced that Sprint is up to keeping any type of service (voice, DSL, whatever) going reliably. Cox doesn't have to deal with another company to get line issues, etc. resolved, and when a problem does pop up (which happens much less frequently than with the DSL), it usually gets taken care of fairly quickly. 24/7 tech support for cable-modem service is also a Good Thing.
(I should probably point out that both services are business-oriented, not the garden-variety residential service. I also have the same cable-modem service (at a lower speed level) at home. It costs no more than same-speed residential cable-modem service, but you can order static IPs for it, run whatever services you want, etc. As for speed vs. DSL, the cable modem almost always beats DSL for upstream and downstream transfers around here.)
It was from the Guardian...what did you expect?
Can't say that I've gone that far, but the milk that was delivered to us for the couple of years we were in England in the mid-80s wasn't homogenized. On a cold-enough morning, if the milk wasn't brought inside soon enough after it was delivered, the cream that was floating on top would start to freeze and push the foil cap off the bottle. Ice cream, anyone? :-)