As a programming language [PostScript] is quite primitive and incomprehensible
Really? It's fairly easy to test a printer by banging out a line or two...
echo '/Times-Roman findfont 72 scalefont setfont 1 72 mul 9 72 mul moveto (This is a test) show showpage' >/dev/lp0
I wouldn't call that incomprehensible. It loads 72-point Times Roman, moves to a point 1" to the right and 9" from the bottom, renders "This is a test", and tells the rendering device to print (or otherwise finalize) the page.
PostScript as a general-purpose language isn't even all that new a concept...Don Lancaster has been doing that for years, starting with an Apple IIe connected to a LaserWriter and moving up from there.
As long as I can still pull the shows off to my pc and burn them to DVD, I'll use it. BUT, if they keep taking out these features, then they are removing the exact thing which makes them different (superior?) to Tivo.
That's funny...I'd swear I've been ripping TiVo video for the past couple of years. It took a hack to do that, but ReplayTV's ability to send video to another TV isn't that much different than TiVo's Home Media Option. You can rip video because someone made some software that makes a computer look like a ReplayTV (which sounds like a possible approach to take to enable ripping from a Series 2 TiVo, since they still haven't been cracked yet).
Another way, which wouldn't require so much equipment, would be to use a small microcontroller like a PIC or AVR. I'm not sure what the power consumption of an Apple IIe is, but it's surely much higher than a modern microcontroller.
I might try that at some point, especially if I add another fridge and need another controller...it'd be an interesting project. The power consumption of an Apple II is next to nothing, though...probably comparable to a nightlight when the floppy drive isn't running. (The power supply is rated for a maximum of only 30 or 35 watts.) Besides, the graph of temperature for the past four hours is kinda neat.:-) (I think there's an FPGA or something for which a VGA-compatible video generator can be programmed in...)
When recursion is the only way to get a lot of things done, people learn it and it never becomes the "black magic" that many beginners (or even some "experts") think it is.
I don't know that I would consider recursion "black magic." There are some problems where a recursive solution seems the obvious way to go, but it can bite you in the ass if you're not up to speed on (for instance) program complexity or other matters. As an example, in some 200-level class I wrote a program that used a recursive function to find Fibonacci numbers. It seemed elegant to do something like this:
int fibonacci (int n)
{
if (n<3)
return n;
else
return fibonacci(n-1)+fibonacci(n-2);
}
Not having gotten to big-O notation and analysis of program complexity yet, though, the exponential runtime of such a function wasn't immediately obvious...which is why I was somewhat puzzled why it didn't run substantially faster on a Convex (?) supercomputer than it did on a SPARCstation 1. A saying about a hammer and everything looking like nails comes to mind.
(Before the assignment was due, the instructor suggested switching to an iterative approach, which was of linear complexity instead of exponential complexity.)
If you ever watch a piano tuner work, he will usually tune A440 (or as close as possible depending upon the condition of the instrument) and then tune the rest of the piano by ear. This makes the piano very pleasing to the ear, however it is actually a little out of tune over the entire range of the instrument. A "strobo-tuner" will show this to be true.
A tuner could at least tune the other As against A-above-middle-C...press both and tune to eliminate the beat note. That'd at least get the tuning back on track once every octave. (Whether any of them actually do things that way, I don't know...it's been 20 years since my last piano lesson, and I never got very far with it (didn't really want to put all that time into practice). I adjusted the speed of a tape deck back to where it should be by a similar method once, though.)
Re:How can you be that trusting?
on
Gator Examined
·
· Score: 1
Gator's password saving and form filling features are not perfect, but at least acceptable.
How can you trust your passwords to an app the likes of gator? It is clear to me that they have to ethical backbone.
Besides, how many different passwords do you need to keep on hand? I use one password for systems I own, another for systems I control, a third for websites that deal with stuff I'd not like others to get at (online banking, DNS maintenance), and a fourth for stuff that's just not that critical in the big picture (like/.). It's secure enough for most purposes (certainly more secure than trusting your passwords to the scum who run Gator), and most people's meatware storage can handle something similar.
Am I this way? Of course. I love blending the old and the new, the modern with the retro. Hell, my ideal computer case design would be something that would look like it belongs in a victorian parlor. Geeks love the anachronism, because if something from the past Just Works, why not use it?
I designed a temperature controller for the refrigerator I use for brewing beer. It uses a temperature sensor and clock chip of fairly recent design from Maxim (stuff they got when they bought Dallas Semiconductor). The circuit board's about the size of a matchbox.
It's plugged into an Apple IIe, which uses a mix of BASIC and 6502 assembly language to check the temperature, plot it on screen, and switch the compressor on and off.
(It's also capable of carrying out gradual temperature changes...1F/hr up or down until it reaches the temperature you want. I don't think there's a temperature controller on the market that does that.)
I could've made the temperature controller into a USB or RS-232 dongle that'd plug into a newer computer...but why waste an Athlon (or even an old Pentium or 486) on being a glorified thermostat when a really old machine (like an Apple II) gets the job done just as well?
Really, though, chill out. Go out and pick up a six pack of Bud and some Dove. Nobody's first batch of home brew ever turns out good anyway.
Speak for yourself. I got pretty good remarks from other people about my first batch...and not all of them were homebrewers. If you use good ingredients and a good recipe, there's no reason you can't get decent beer on your first attempt. If you use a canned kit that tells you to add a few pounds of sugar, warm it a bit, and then sprinkle on a yeast packet, you'll get crappy results. You can get good results from even a simple recipe that uses malt extract for all the fermentables, hops that you add yourself during the boil (instead of hop extract or prehopped malt extract), and pitchable liquid yeast (though my first batch was done with dry yeast that was rehydrated before pitching).
Re:I preferred these
on
Ant Farm PC
·
· Score: 4, Informative
There's no mention of a water filter on the page, and with a tank under 2 gallons, ammonia is going to build up from fish waste very quickly.
In this picture, you can see that there's a small fishbowl-type filter in the tank. I'm not sure how effective they really are (I use an undergravel filter in a 10-gallon tank at work and a hang-on-the-back type of filter on a 55-gallon tank at home), but it appears there was at least some thought put into keeping it livable.
That said, $720 to put what can't be more than a 2-gallon aquarium inside a computer is a bit ridiculous. You can set up a 10-gallon tank (much more room for the fishes) for somewhere around $50, and you'll get better visibility and no chance that a leak will toast your computer. (Besides, my dual-Athlon machines run too hot anyway...fish stew, anyone?:-) )
Why would hardware be more secure than software, when (if my facts are straight) some hardware solutions are merely software hard-coded on the chip?
Consider the difference between a "winmodem" (some of which are little more than a codec on a card) and a modem that has its own DSP and microcontroller. You could write a driver for a winmodem that would do whatever you want (including getting a true 56 kbps out of it, which the FCC wouldn't like), but you're not going to do that with the controller-based modem unless you manage to rewrite its firmware (not impossible, but nowhere near as likely as rolling your own winmodem driver).
Doesn't every nerd have a huge poster of Sarah Michelle Gellar next to their Matrix poster?:)
I don't think so...
I bet you're still living in your parents' cellar
Downloading pictures of Sarah Michelle Gellar
Posting "me too" like some brain-dead AOLer
I should do the world a favor and cap you like Old Yeller
You're about as useless as JPEGs to Helen Keller
From 1986 or '87 until about '94 or '95, all my word-processing/database/spreadsheet stuff got done on an Apple II (first a IIe, then a IIGS) running several versions of AppleWorks, up to v3.0. Even with some 3rd-party addons (mainly SuperFonts and UltraMacros), AppleWorks never crashed.
I'm willing to concede that the codebase was considerably smaller. It had to be, in order to produce an executable that would fit in 800K (the size of a 3.5" double-density floppy) and would run reasonably well on a 1-MHz 8-bit processor with as little as 128K of RAM...but I don't find myself doing sufficiently more advanced stuff in Word or Excel than I used to do in AppleWorks (actually, AppleWorks was probably doing more sophisticated stuff with UltraMacros added to it). I would be willing to wager that 95% of Office users use no more than 5-10% of its features. All that extra code that keeps getting added in with every new release means there's that much less time spent making sure the core functionality (and all of the chrome added in previous releases) is bug-free.
(I'll admit that I haven't had much trouble with Office...but then you've noticed that I don't push it particularly hard either.)
As long as this falls into the "interesting hack" category, Apple won't care.
They did say that performance wasn't all that hot...on their 600-MHz G3, clicking a button in Mac OS X took a second or two just to begin to get a response from the computer. My 266-MHz beige G3 runs faster than that (it's not snappy, but it's not dog-slow either).
I somehow doubt that people will be buying these to run Mac OS X...at least not as the primary OS. Apple doesn't have much to worry about here. For a few hundred more, you'll get a faster processor and hardware that'll run X natively.
(Even if all you want to do is just tinker around with non-x86 hardware, a used Mac will most likely be cheaper and better-supported. My G3 only set me back $40.)
What about the VIA 82C686B Southbridge? (Any AmigaOne owners?)
I've had no issues with it on a Biostar M7MIA (where it's paired with an AMD 761 northbridge). I did a clean WinXP install on it the other day (swapped it back into my computer when an MSI K7D Master started acting up), and everything worked right off the bat.
RFC 3533 over RFC 1149! (perfect for those multi-year John Cage tunes)
Screw that...it needs RFC3514 support so that Britney/NSuck/etc. OGGs can be marked appropriately. With RFC3514 support in routers and such, maybe you'd see much less of that crap clogging the Internet.
I think the worst thing about that system (and indeed the American system) is that *coins are named*. WHY give coins a name??
The pre-1968 (?) currency I ran across while in England was marked "1 shilling," "2 shillings," etc. and got mentally translated as "5p," "10p," etc. (It helped that (for instance) the 5p and 1/ (?) coins are the same size. I don't think I ever heard anybody using those old names; about the only place I've seen them pop up is while watching Monty Python.
As for our coins, the quarter is marked "quarter dollar." "Dime" follows from being a tenth of a dollar. "Penny" might be a holdover from British coinage that got applied to the cent. As for "nickel," the alloy used to make them is 25% nickel.
In the end, "quarter" is easier to say than "twenty-five-cent coin." Naming coins only becomes cumbersome if you have a bunch of coins to name. Here, we have only four that are in common use. (You run across half-dollar and dollar coins about as often as you run across $2 bills.)
So Intuit dropped its product activation scheme...whoopy-fscking-do. Many (most?) of the people who've used their products in the past switched to something else and will need a strongly compelling reason to switch back. After having used TurboTax for the past few years, I used TaxAct for my '02 return. It got the job done just as well as TurboTax would've...and as an added bonus, it's free (as in beer, anyway). Why would I go back to forking over $30+ every year for TurboTax?
"More often than not"? Really? That hasn't been my experience. In fact, I haven't experienced a single problem due to a Windows update.
Win2K SP3 broke my FireWire webcam...when a filter graph that used it closed, the computer bluescreened. (I eventually found that you could copy ohci1394.sys from a SP2 system into %systemroot%\system32\drivers and use the camera under SP3 that way...but SP3 shouldn't have broken it to begin with.)
Re:Gotta love british humor
on
Spam, Milord
·
· Score: 1
Rhubarb ? Nah....
Hold a chicken in the air was my favorite:-)
...And tho' you hate this song
You'll be humming it for weeks...
...and now everyone here who remembers that will be doing the same. Spitting Image 0wnz j00.
Closer to home, Fox News trounced CNN and MSNBC in the ratings. People are going to get their news from sources they trust, and people's faith in CNN to provide (dare I say it) fair and balanced coverage of the news is fading.
In fact Rupert Murdock is a friend of GWB and will not let his news network report negatively on the Bush admin.
I'd swear I've heard Bill O'Reilly (to name just one commentator) take the Bush administration to the woodshed on more than one occasion. Alan Colmes (to name another) has even less use for Bush. Rupert Murdoch also made a fairly hefty donation to Algore's 2000 campaign and to the DNC (including, IIRC, a hell of a deal on the Democrats' use of Staples Center for their convention that year).
Slashdot Mirror
Really? It's fairly easy to test a printer by banging out a line or two...
echo '/Times-Roman findfont 72 scalefont setfont 1 72 mul 9 72 mul moveto (This is a test) show showpage' >/dev/lp0
I wouldn't call that incomprehensible. It loads 72-point Times Roman, moves to a point 1" to the right and 9" from the bottom, renders "This is a test", and tells the rendering device to print (or otherwise finalize) the page.
PostScript as a general-purpose language isn't even all that new a concept...Don Lancaster has been doing that for years, starting with an Apple IIe connected to a LaserWriter and moving up from there.
It's not dead...it's just pining for the fjords.
Will it go to plaid after that stage?
I think you also skipped past "Ridiculous DMCA."
That's funny...I'd swear I've been ripping TiVo video for the past couple of years. It took a hack to do that, but ReplayTV's ability to send video to another TV isn't that much different than TiVo's Home Media Option. You can rip video because someone made some software that makes a computer look like a ReplayTV (which sounds like a possible approach to take to enable ripping from a Series 2 TiVo, since they still haven't been cracked yet).
I might try that at some point, especially if I add another fridge and need another controller...it'd be an interesting project. The power consumption of an Apple II is next to nothing, though...probably comparable to a nightlight when the floppy drive isn't running. (The power supply is rated for a maximum of only 30 or 35 watts.) Besides, the graph of temperature for the past four hours is kinda neat. :-) (I think there's an FPGA or something for which a VGA-compatible video generator can be programmed in...)
I don't know that I would consider recursion "black magic." There are some problems where a recursive solution seems the obvious way to go, but it can bite you in the ass if you're not up to speed on (for instance) program complexity or other matters. As an example, in some 200-level class I wrote a program that used a recursive function to find Fibonacci numbers. It seemed elegant to do something like this:
int fibonacci (int n)
}{
Not having gotten to big-O notation and analysis of program complexity yet, though, the exponential runtime of such a function wasn't immediately obvious...which is why I was somewhat puzzled why it didn't run substantially faster on a Convex (?) supercomputer than it did on a SPARCstation 1. A saying about a hammer and everything looking like nails comes to mind.
(Before the assignment was due, the instructor suggested switching to an iterative approach, which was of linear complexity instead of exponential complexity.)
A tuner could at least tune the other As against A-above-middle-C...press both and tune to eliminate the beat note. That'd at least get the tuning back on track once every octave. (Whether any of them actually do things that way, I don't know...it's been 20 years since my last piano lesson, and I never got very far with it (didn't really want to put all that time into practice). I adjusted the speed of a tape deck back to where it should be by a similar method once, though.)
Besides, how many different passwords do you need to keep on hand? I use one password for systems I own, another for systems I control, a third for websites that deal with stuff I'd not like others to get at (online banking, DNS maintenance), and a fourth for stuff that's just not that critical in the big picture (like /.). It's secure enough for most purposes (certainly more secure than trusting your passwords to the scum who run Gator), and most people's meatware storage can handle something similar.
I designed a temperature controller for the refrigerator I use for brewing beer. It uses a temperature sensor and clock chip of fairly recent design from Maxim (stuff they got when they bought Dallas Semiconductor). The circuit board's about the size of a matchbox.
It's plugged into an Apple IIe, which uses a mix of BASIC and 6502 assembly language to check the temperature, plot it on screen, and switch the compressor on and off.
(It's also capable of carrying out gradual temperature changes...1F/hr up or down until it reaches the temperature you want. I don't think there's a temperature controller on the market that does that.)
I could've made the temperature controller into a USB or RS-232 dongle that'd plug into a newer computer...but why waste an Athlon (or even an old Pentium or 486) on being a glorified thermostat when a really old machine (like an Apple II) gets the job done just as well?
Speak for yourself. I got pretty good remarks from other people about my first batch...and not all of them were homebrewers. If you use good ingredients and a good recipe, there's no reason you can't get decent beer on your first attempt. If you use a canned kit that tells you to add a few pounds of sugar, warm it a bit, and then sprinkle on a yeast packet, you'll get crappy results. You can get good results from even a simple recipe that uses malt extract for all the fermentables, hops that you add yourself during the boil (instead of hop extract or prehopped malt extract), and pitchable liquid yeast (though my first batch was done with dry yeast that was rehydrated before pitching).
In this picture, you can see that there's a small fishbowl-type filter in the tank. I'm not sure how effective they really are (I use an undergravel filter in a 10-gallon tank at work and a hang-on-the-back type of filter on a 55-gallon tank at home), but it appears there was at least some thought put into keeping it livable.
That said, $720 to put what can't be more than a 2-gallon aquarium inside a computer is a bit ridiculous. You can set up a 10-gallon tank (much more room for the fishes) for somewhere around $50, and you'll get better visibility and no chance that a leak will toast your computer. (Besides, my dual-Athlon machines run too hot anyway...fish stew, anyone? :-) )
Consider the difference between a "winmodem" (some of which are little more than a codec on a card) and a modem that has its own DSP and microcontroller. You could write a driver for a winmodem that would do whatever you want (including getting a true 56 kbps out of it, which the FCC wouldn't like), but you're not going to do that with the controller-based modem unless you manage to rewrite its firmware (not impossible, but nowhere near as likely as rolling your own winmodem driver).
I don't think so...
I bet you're still living in your parents' cellar
Downloading pictures of Sarah Michelle Gellar
Posting "me too" like some brain-dead AOLer
I should do the world a favor and cap you like Old Yeller
You're about as useless as JPEGs to Helen Keller
I'm willing to concede that the codebase was considerably smaller. It had to be, in order to produce an executable that would fit in 800K (the size of a 3.5" double-density floppy) and would run reasonably well on a 1-MHz 8-bit processor with as little as 128K of RAM...but I don't find myself doing sufficiently more advanced stuff in Word or Excel than I used to do in AppleWorks (actually, AppleWorks was probably doing more sophisticated stuff with UltraMacros added to it). I would be willing to wager that 95% of Office users use no more than 5-10% of its features. All that extra code that keeps getting added in with every new release means there's that much less time spent making sure the core functionality (and all of the chrome added in previous releases) is bug-free.
(I'll admit that I haven't had much trouble with Office...but then you've noticed that I don't push it particularly hard either.)
They did say that performance wasn't all that hot...on their 600-MHz G3, clicking a button in Mac OS X took a second or two just to begin to get a response from the computer. My 266-MHz beige G3 runs faster than that (it's not snappy, but it's not dog-slow either).
I somehow doubt that people will be buying these to run Mac OS X...at least not as the primary OS. Apple doesn't have much to worry about here. For a few hundred more, you'll get a faster processor and hardware that'll run X natively.
(Even if all you want to do is just tinker around with non-x86 hardware, a used Mac will most likely be cheaper and better-supported. My G3 only set me back $40.)
I've had no issues with it on a Biostar M7MIA (where it's paired with an AMD 761 northbridge). I did a clean WinXP install on it the other day (swapped it back into my computer when an MSI K7D Master started acting up), and everything worked right off the bat.
You forgot 555-1212...directory assistance in each area code.
Screw that...it needs RFC3514 support so that Britney/NSuck/etc. OGGs can be marked appropriately. With RFC3514 support in routers and such, maybe you'd see much less of that crap clogging the Internet.
I won't say that the air here is as clean as a whistle...but if you're in that bad a shape, you have other problems to worry about than pollution. :-)
The pre-1968 (?) currency I ran across while in England was marked "1 shilling," "2 shillings," etc. and got mentally translated as "5p," "10p," etc. (It helped that (for instance) the 5p and 1/ (?) coins are the same size. I don't think I ever heard anybody using those old names; about the only place I've seen them pop up is while watching Monty Python.
As for our coins, the quarter is marked "quarter dollar." "Dime" follows from being a tenth of a dollar. "Penny" might be a holdover from British coinage that got applied to the cent. As for "nickel," the alloy used to make them is 25% nickel.
In the end, "quarter" is easier to say than "twenty-five-cent coin." Naming coins only becomes cumbersome if you have a bunch of coins to name. Here, we have only four that are in common use. (You run across half-dollar and dollar coins about as often as you run across $2 bills.)
So Intuit dropped its product activation scheme...whoopy-fscking-do. Many (most?) of the people who've used their products in the past switched to something else and will need a strongly compelling reason to switch back. After having used TurboTax for the past few years, I used TaxAct for my '02 return. It got the job done just as well as TurboTax would've...and as an added bonus, it's free (as in beer, anyway). Why would I go back to forking over $30+ every year for TurboTax?
Win2K SP3 broke my FireWire webcam...when a filter graph that used it closed, the computer bluescreened. (I eventually found that you could copy ohci1394.sys from a SP2 system into %systemroot%\system32\drivers and use the camera under SP3 that way...but SP3 shouldn't have broken it to begin with.)
You'll be humming it for weeks...
Meanwhile, HMS Ark Royal shut off the Beeb as a result of the pro-Iraq bias in its coverage.
Closer to home, Fox News trounced CNN and MSNBC in the ratings. People are going to get their news from sources they trust, and people's faith in CNN to provide (dare I say it) fair and balanced coverage of the news is fading.
I'd swear I've heard Bill O'Reilly (to name just one commentator) take the Bush administration to the woodshed on more than one occasion. Alan Colmes (to name another) has even less use for Bush. Rupert Murdoch also made a fairly hefty donation to Algore's 2000 campaign and to the DNC (including, IIRC, a hell of a deal on the Democrats' use of Staples Center for their convention that year).