Re:Standard response to the "why bother" crowd.
on
Ultimate Cooling System
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· Score: 4, Interesting
This has me thinking. Sometimes I do that =)
But seriously. Anyone seen sites with info on overclocking ancient CPUs? I remember once seeing a 486 overclocked well over 100MHz, perhaps into the 200MHz range, through refrigerated cooling. To me, that's as interesting as getting 5GHz from a brand new CPU.
Any 50MHz 68000s? A 300MHz Pentium I? 250MHz from a PPC601?
I just had a little spinetingling experience, which was serendipitously timed.
Watching an old "Computer Chronicles" video of Macworld 1989, a news short at the end of the main story states:
"...Microsoft nudged closer to the UNIX world last week, buying a 20% interest in the Santa Cruz Operation, a major UNIX software house. A recent market research study predicts a 29% annual growth rate for UNIX systems compared to a 12% growth rate for all other systems"
Likely completely irrelevant, but just one of those things that came up with lovely timing!
Imagine Autozone converted to away from SCO UNIX and over to MacOSX or BeOS or OS/2 or Windows instead of Linux
It would be exactly the same case - an SCO ex client moving from UNIX to must have used SCO shared libraries as part of the solution because it went so smoothly.
So really this case has nothing to do with Linux at all, looked at in that manner.
To go back to an often used analogy, if Microsoft were a car company and their vehicles happened to exhibit a problem with the engines catching on fire (as happens, sometimes, with real car manufacturers) other makers would recall and fix the problem.
Not microsoft!
They're innovative. They'd send a helpful sheet out to owners:
----------------- Things you can do to protect yourself from an engine fire:
The most effective step you can take to protect yourself from an engine fire caused by the known defect, is pushing your car manually. By pushing your car manually, you can avoid creating the temperatures required to initiate combustion. This will keep your car safe. Also, you can save fuel and contribute to a cleaner environment. -----------------:P
The best hack I'd seen was on a colour classic, where an LCD was found to just fit its display, a slot loading DVDrom was mounted an inch below the display, with a slot cut out freshly, and shaped to perfectly match the floppy drive slot on a quadra of the day, and a 6500 motherboard with 500MHz G3 installed were all fit inside the case. It was -very- well done.
I think I'll add to my comment by saying I hope whoever did the car had a hell of a lot of fun doing it. That's some dedication there:)
The stuff around the steering wheel scares me though.
Re:I just don't get it.
on
The Star Wars Car
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I honestly don't know. It's bizarre. It's the same mentality as a fellow I know here who puts every reflector, sticker, and gadget outside and inside his car. antennae, bumpers, air fresheners, popup tissue holders... you name it, the car has it. Maybe some people NEED to be surrounded by clutter.
In any case, I've mirrored the pics in a smaller size:
That's almost as big a transformation of the web as happened when suddenly animated gifs became popular. After they came to the masses, our eyeballs were transformed forever...
I do, on a black background like that. Horrible Horrible image that one.
Probably why slashdot's games pages have so many of us going "gah my eyes!". It's a colour that pumps out intense red and blue from a display, and for some of us our eyes are jumping between focusing on one or the other.
Think it might be possible that some of us see the effect more because of the physical structure of our eyes?. The idea that blue wavelengths will be refracted more than red makes sense - do we all have really huge eyeballs or something? Who else is a bug eyes monster?:)
It wasn't far from the huge Macquarie Centre shopping complex, along the same main road I can't remember the name of. This was back in 1997:). Lane Cove Road perhaps? It was on one of the small side roads that led off it northwards.
When I lived in Sydney, one of the nearby dumps had an area where old computing equipment could be left. It -claimed- to recycle these properly, but I can't vouch for the truth behind that.
There seem to be many places that will take ancient working machinery too, and use it as donation equipment - for some people, a simple 386 is heaven. In 2001 I helped shuffle some of this stuff around, and for students who had absolutely no access to a computer for doing university work at home, a 386 that could edit text was a godsend. No, it's no use for software development or comp sci courses, but for those students who do only need to type up essays and the like, a simple machine with floppy is well appreciated and more than enough. Not every college course is comp.sci or IT.
Personally, I just get a new one and push the old ones to the side. They seem to become part of the furniture and I don't notice they're there any more:)
There's a difference when wearing glasses, but it seems to make things a little better if anything. With mine on (and they're thin, lightweight & strong, to correct shortsightedness) the red and green are close together in focus, with the blue quite a way off.
Without glasses, they're pretty much equal in the focus difference. I'll have to go hunt down my last 3 pairs of glasses now, to see if there's much difference. My first ones were thick and HEAVY things.
That is exactly what I see too, and it's much worse at smaller text sizes. Looking at the same colours on a white background seems to completely remove any focus problems, so I settle for a black/colour on white/pastel terminal:).
My eyes suck especially badly at blue. a pure-blue image is something my eyes completely refuse to focus on. I can see the image is there, see that it's blurry, but whatever makes my eyes focus just doesn't work on blue. Light a room with pure blue light and I'm almost blind. gah!.
Add some other colours and I'm fine. Curiously, given a red line of text, a green line of text and an off blue line of text, I have to focus differently for all three. (Fully blue is, of course, a complete waste of time:)
Re:The "Home Computer Museum"...
on
First Computers
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· Score: 1
My first one wasn't truly a computer, but was a Mattel device with a small LCD, non backlit black & white (black and muddy swampy brown, really), and a little character named 'cursor' who ran around doing Stuff. It took small cartidges with extra apps, including a graphic one that started off a lifelong obsession with pixels:).
I did get bored of it after a few months, and pulled it apart. Unfortunately I can't for the life of me remember its name. It was before the C64 I used in the mid 80s, which was my first real computer.
It's not a bad small out of the way server for the old learning experience. The whole idea of starting admins-in-training on the most minimal hardware instead of having them throw 3GHz PIVs at serving a home site that gets 5 visitors a day just begs for inefficiency down the line.
I started my site on a 33MHz Quadra. It'd still be using that if I didn't rely on quite a bit of PHP in places. There was no reason to jump up too far, so a PPC601 was the next machine up.
What the whole experience has taught me is how to keep things running efficiently by knowing the system well, and remembering never to do stupid things, like post the URL on slashdot.:)
A better email client is a good thing, whether being pushed by small developers with a few unique ideas, or by a group as large as IBM with decades of research behind them. However, apart from the occasional efforts from businesses like Yahoo, the whole email distribution path doesn't seem to be getting as much attention as it could.
Even if it's just theory, research and study, are there publicly accessible projects by larger groups (such as IBM) looking at how to completely overhaul email transmission, especially for the elimination of spam and the ability to drag an address with you that's not dependant (for most people) on an ISP? I'd be all for a completely new system running side by side with conventional SMTP type email for several years, even.
I bought a IIcx on ebay - advertised as "as is" and unknown if it worked. Hey, I liked the case and didn't have one yet, and it was $10 =)
Turned out it'd been half submerged in a flood then populated by mice. Between the silt, leaves, mouse pee, water and mouse crap it was in a sad state.
EVERYTHING got a thorough soaking cleaning under detergent and hot running water, then warming and drying. Thankfully the peeing rodents hadn't been there long enough to corrode too much. A spray over with silicon based furniture polish stopped anything on the motherboard corroding anymore in the last 2 years. Still works fine, HD and all
I have a couple of samples from a dev preview. The newer full 10.3 release is better and doesn't have the odd speech impediment in some places, but I have no idea how to actually record panther speech straight to a file (and haven't been bothered looking how to, to be honest!)
http://www.danamania.com/temp/victoria.mp3 is the old http://www.danamania.com/temp/vicki.mp3 is the new
Slashdot Mirror
Quick screen capture of the entire (tiny) article here
The GDM link points to here (japanese)
The Xeon roadmap link points to another vr-zone article here (probably also slashdotted)
Kinda contentless, apart from the pic.
Lately I could do with a little of that myself.
:)
"Does my butt look big in this?"
This has me thinking. Sometimes I do that =)
:)
But seriously. Anyone seen sites with info on overclocking ancient CPUs? I remember once seeing a 486 overclocked well over 100MHz, perhaps into the 200MHz range, through refrigerated cooling. To me, that's as interesting as getting 5GHz from a brand new CPU.
Any 50MHz 68000s? A 300MHz Pentium I? 250MHz from a PPC601?
A 50MHz Commodore 64, even?
That's all that was said about MS and old SCO in the news report. However there was an address to get the transcript from the show, at the end of it.
Unfortunately, being 1989, it's a snailmail one and cost $4 =)
--dana
I just had a little spinetingling experience, which was serendipitously timed.
Watching an old "Computer Chronicles" video of Macworld 1989, a news short at the end of the main story states:
"...Microsoft nudged closer to the UNIX world last week, buying a 20% interest in the Santa Cruz Operation, a major UNIX software house. A recent market research study predicts a 29% annual growth rate for UNIX systems compared to a 12% growth rate for all other systems"
Likely completely irrelevant, but just one of those things that came up with lovely timing!
--dana
Imagine Autozone converted to away from SCO UNIX and over to MacOSX or BeOS or OS/2 or Windows instead of Linux
It would be exactly the same case - an SCO ex client moving from UNIX to must have used SCO shared libraries as part of the solution because it went so smoothly.
So really this case has nothing to do with Linux at all, looked at in that manner.
To go back to an often used analogy, if Microsoft were a car company and their vehicles happened to exhibit a problem with the engines catching on fire (as happens, sometimes, with real car manufacturers) other makers would recall and fix the problem.
:P
Not microsoft!
They're innovative. They'd send a helpful sheet out to owners:
-----------------
Things you can do to protect yourself from an engine fire:
The most effective step you can take to protect yourself from an engine fire caused by the known defect, is pushing your car manually. By pushing your car manually, you can avoid creating the temperatures required to initiate combustion. This will keep your car safe. Also, you can save fuel and contribute to a cleaner environment.
-----------------
The best hack I'd seen was on a colour classic, where an LCD was found to just fit its display, a slot loading DVDrom was mounted an inch below the display, with a slot cut out freshly, and shaped to perfectly match the floppy drive slot on a quadra of the day, and a 6500 motherboard with 500MHz G3 installed were all fit inside the case. It was -very- well done.
:)
applefritter has the thread about it but unfortunately all the pics are now down.
A japanese fellow has done a nice tidy conversion too.
Personally, I have no problem just pixelling up the completely fake ones
My Canon A70 picks up the hotplate on a stove, which appears red to my eye, as a bluish purple
I think I'll add to my comment by saying I hope whoever did the car had a hell of a lot of fun doing it. That's some dedication there :)
The stuff around the steering wheel scares me though.
I honestly don't know. It's bizarre. It's the same mentality as a fellow I know here who puts every reflector, sticker, and gadget outside and inside his car. antennae, bumpers, air fresheners, popup tissue holders... you name it, the car has it. Maybe some people NEED to be surrounded by clutter.
In any case, I've mirrored the pics in a smaller size:
http://www.danamania.com/starwarscar/
That's almost as big a transformation of the web as happened when suddenly animated gifs became popular. After they came to the masses, our eyeballs were transformed forever...
And a higher again one here
Easy enough to make if you download the polar shot here and apply photoshop's Polar coordinates filter.
I do, on a black background like that. Horrible Horrible image that one.
:)
Probably why slashdot's games pages have so many of us going "gah my eyes!". It's a colour that pumps out intense red and blue from a display, and for some of us our eyes are jumping between focusing on one or the other.
Think it might be possible that some of us see the effect more because of the physical structure of our eyes?. The idea that blue wavelengths will be refracted more than red makes sense - do we all have really huge eyeballs or something? Who else is a bug eyes monster?
> Which one?
:). Lane Cove Road perhaps? It was on one of the small side roads that led off it northwards.
It wasn't far from the huge Macquarie Centre shopping complex, along the same main road I can't remember the name of. This was back in 1997
When I lived in Sydney, one of the nearby dumps had an area where old computing equipment could be left. It -claimed- to recycle these properly, but I can't vouch for the truth behind that.
:)
There seem to be many places that will take ancient working machinery too, and use it as donation equipment - for some people, a simple 386 is heaven. In 2001 I helped shuffle some of this stuff around, and for students who had absolutely no access to a computer for doing university work at home, a 386 that could edit text was a godsend. No, it's no use for software development or comp sci courses, but for those students who do only need to type up essays and the like, a simple machine with floppy is well appreciated and more than enough. Not every college course is comp.sci or IT.
Personally, I just get a new one and push the old ones to the side. They seem to become part of the furniture and I don't notice they're there any more
There's a difference when wearing glasses, but it seems to make things a little better if anything. With mine on (and they're thin, lightweight & strong, to correct shortsightedness) the red and green are close together in focus, with the blue quite a way off.
:).
Without glasses, they're pretty much equal in the focus difference. I'll have to go hunt down my last 3 pairs of glasses now, to see if there's much difference. My first ones were thick and HEAVY things.
I'll put it down to my eyes just being screwy
That is exactly what I see too, and it's much worse at smaller text sizes. Looking at the same colours on a white background seems to completely remove any focus problems, so I settle for a black/colour on white/pastel terminal :).
This is an example of what's horrible for my eyes
My eyes suck especially badly at blue. a pure-blue image is something my eyes completely refuse to focus on. I can see the image is there, see that it's blurry, but whatever makes my eyes focus just doesn't work on blue. Light a room with pure blue light and I'm almost blind. gah!.
:)
Add some other colours and I'm fine. Curiously, given a red line of text, a green line of text and an off blue line of text, I have to focus differently for all three. (Fully blue is, of course, a complete waste of time
My first one wasn't truly a computer, but was a Mattel device with a small LCD, non backlit black & white (black and muddy swampy brown, really), and a little character named 'cursor' who ran around doing Stuff. It took small cartidges with extra apps, including a graphic one that started off a lifelong obsession with pixels :).
I did get bored of it after a few months, and pulled it apart. Unfortunately I can't for the life of me remember its name. It was before the C64 I used in the mid 80s, which was my first real computer.
Thanks!
;)
I shall remember to mention in each message not to click on the above link. That could have done some real damage!
(PS. Don't click on the link)
It's not a bad small out of the way server for the old learning experience. The whole idea of starting admins-in-training on the most minimal hardware instead of having them throw 3GHz PIVs at serving a home site that gets 5 visitors a day just begs for inefficiency down the line.
:)
I started my site on a 33MHz Quadra. It'd still be using that if I didn't rely on quite a bit of PHP in places. There was no reason to jump up too far, so a PPC601 was the next machine up.
What the whole experience has taught me is how to keep things running efficiently by knowing the system well, and remembering never to do stupid things, like post the URL on slashdot.
A better email client is a good thing, whether being pushed by small developers with a few unique ideas, or by a group as large as IBM with decades of research behind them. However, apart from the occasional efforts from businesses like Yahoo, the whole email distribution path doesn't seem to be getting as much attention as it could.
Even if it's just theory, research and study, are there publicly accessible projects by larger groups (such as IBM) looking at how to completely overhaul email transmission, especially for the elimination of spam and the ability to drag an address with you that's not dependant (for most people) on an ISP? I'd be all for a completely new system running side by side with conventional SMTP type email for several years, even.
I bought a IIcx on ebay - advertised as "as is" and unknown if it worked. Hey, I liked the case and didn't have one yet, and it was $10 =)
Turned out it'd been half submerged in a flood then populated by mice. Between the silt, leaves, mouse pee, water and mouse crap it was in a sad state.
EVERYTHING got a thorough soaking cleaning under detergent and hot running water, then warming and drying. Thankfully the peeing rodents hadn't been there long enough to corrode too much. A spray over with silicon based furniture polish stopped anything on the motherboard corroding anymore in the last 2 years. Still works fine, HD and all
I have a couple of samples from a dev preview. The newer full 10.3 release is better and doesn't have the odd speech impediment in some places, but I have no idea how to actually record panther speech straight to a file (and haven't been bothered looking how to, to be honest!)
http://www.danamania.com/temp/victoria.mp3 is the old
http://www.danamania.com/temp/vicki.mp3 is the new