arguing that there is not enough court time to try Mr Serial Rapist because we are too busy trying Miss Downloaded Britney isn't going to cut it.
Isn't it a bit unfortunate for those people to have such names? Particularly if (like most people) they were given them by their parents?
Won't this prejudice any case against them?
Also, in your example above you failed to explain what crimes these people actually committed. What if Mr. Serial Rapist had been downloading Britney Spears tracks, and Ms. Downloaded Britney was actually a serial rapist?
You didn't really give us much here continue with... It's "feign indignation at the high quality of life of the previous poster" + "state your childhood desires to have such luxury" + "state how much worse you had it" so that the next poster can follow up. Get with the program!
The Lynx hardware itself was quite innovative, but its "huge" size and hunger for batteries made it a poor portable.
Apparently, Atari made the first version of the Lynx's case *larger*- and half empty!- because the focus groups said that this was perceived to be better value or something. They launched a more compact (and better looking) version later on- my brother had one of those- but it was still very battery hungry.
In some ways, the Game Boy and the Lynx were different anyway- the GB was a pocket system, the Lynx was a portable one.
The Game Gear was similarly troubled but Sega somehow managed to attract buyers though.
I never got the impression that the Game Gear was *that* big a hit personally, but I might be wrong.
Hang on.. 256 colours? That can't be 256 at once, surely.
Are you confusing the technically-unrelated ST line with the 400/800/XL/XE 8-bit computers?
The 8-bits certainly *could* have that many colours on-screen at once, with some limitations.
The reason was that the custom graphics chip let you change the palette (and/or graphics mode, sprite positions, etc.) on every new scan line if you wanted to. This wasn't an esoteric trick or hack, it was a standard part of the hardware and used by almost all half-decent games, though they didn't all necessarily use as many as 256 colours.
Ahhh. The days when technology companies were run by engineers for engineers, not marketing whores worshipping their quarterly bonus.
I suspect that some nice people in engineering were responsible for that. But except possibly for their early days (long before the GP's 800XL was even launched), Atari were never the company you dream of.
They considered software writers to be little better than towel designers, which caused many of their most talented people to leave and form Activision- hence starting off the massive market in third-party VCS games. They considered licenses and such more important than good software, resulting in them rushing the likes of the notorious ET game to market, ditto the 2600 version of Pac Man.
All of which probably contributed to the video game crash of 1983.
When Jack Tramiel bought over the computer and home divisions, he sacked half the people working there. Apparently they had a really nice sound chip in the works, but nothing happened with that because all the people who knew about it had been laid off.
Ataris were always rubbish anyway. Long live the Amiga!
You probably mean the ST range, which competed with the Amiga. The 8-bit Atari computers (400/800/XL/XE) were a totally different range designed during a different era and with a different philosophy- i.e. state of the art (for their time) rather than affordability-oriented like the ST was.
The 400/800 are sometimes considered the spiritual predecessors of the Amiga, not least because some of the same people worked on them both. (And remember that the Amiga was designed by an independent company that was bought by C= at the last minute).
The 1200xl was so horrible that people bought up its predecessor to avoid having to succumb to the evil
As far as I'm aware the 1200XL had two problems that caused this; intentionally "closed" design with a lack of expandability (and loss of compatibility with some older peripherals), and also some software incompatibility with older 400/800 software.
This is why (AFAIK) it was replaced with the 600XL and 800XL computers.
A pal of mine had an Atari XEGS. It looked awesome and futuristic, but was a bit of an oddball considering Atari already had the cheaper 2600 and superior 7800 out on the market.
Atari's problem seemed to be that they tried to do too many things at once and lacked focus.
Bill himself has already mentioned the Warner-era 5200, which was a previous attempt at building a console derived from the 400/800 8-bit computer hardware. From what I know, internally the hardware was virtually identical to the 400/800, but for some reason they changed round the location of a few registers in memory and removed some of the OS. They also changed the cartridge interface.
Therefore, despite the hardware and most of the system being identical, the 5200 couldn't directly run 400/800 games (*1) and vice versa, even if you could get it to load them.
AFAIK, they launched the 5200 around the same time that the 400/800 was replaced with the XL line. The XL was backwards-compatible (*2), so it ran (most) 400/800 games and hardware, and it *wasn't* compatible with the 5200.
Why did Atari do this? Was it a cynical attempt at marketing? Or were the divisions within Atari just more concerned at scoring points off each other? It happens.
Anyway, the 5200 flopped, not least (I heard) because the joysticks were horrible.
Re: the XEGS. This was launched later on, circa 1987, during the Tramiel era. I heard that Atari were originally planning on releasing the 7800 in Europe then changed their mind and launched the XEGS instead. Since the XEGS was (unlike the 5200) fully compatible with the 400/800/XL/XE line, it was probably a quick and easy way of exploiting existing hardware that had a lot of pre-existing software.
Thing is though, I later saw the 7800 for sale in Europe (more specifically, through Argos in the UK) and I think they sold the XEGS in the US anyway. So I'm not sure what the story was. I don't think Atari did either.
Then during the early-1990s there was the launch of the ST's successor, the Falcon 030. The ST had been quite successful in Europe, but was later overtaken by the Amiga 500 when the price of that came down. I *knew* that regardless of whether it was a nice machine or not, the Falcon 030 was going to flop because (a) Even then the ST market was seriously declining with no obvious likelihood of things getting better and the PC compatibles were taking over, (b) Atari probably didn't have the budget to do it justice and (c) Atari couldn't market ****.
The Falcon 030 flopped.
It was withdrawn after just a year or so, I seem to remember so that Atari could commit to the Jaguar console, but that was a relative flop as well. If they'd launched it properly, it might have done some business before the far superior PlayStation came out and wiped the floor with it, but they didn't.
Oh yeah, and the technically-brilliant-for-its-time Lynx was a flop as well, even though it should have done well.
But from what I understood, most other free countries tend to be more liberal (significantly) than the U.S. (and a lot of liberals in the U.S. complain about that.)
When you say "more liberal", do you mean "more left-wing"? The word "liberal" tends to have connotations within the U.S. political system which don't really apply elsewhere, and it makes it confusing if you use it within both contexts like that.
Charging a small fee to upload videos is the key to improving YouTube. The reason people upload so many "mundane crap videos" is because there is not a fee. People who are proud of good work would be willing to pay a buck or two to upload their video. The people that upload their friend burping would hesitate to waste money their money.
Careful with that. The people uploading videos are the ones providing YouTube with lots of free content. Yes, much- probably most- of it is crap, but from a financial point of view, that isn't a problem in itself because the cost of *storing* it is likely fairly insignificant on a per-video basis.
And storage isn't the financial problem with sites like YouTube- bandwidth is. So unless those crap videos are getting lots of viewers- and I suspect they aren't- they're a very minor issue, if not a complete irrelevance.
You could, of course, charge people for the bandwidth their video being viewed "cost" YouTube. Which would penalise the producers of popular (and likely good) content, and discourage people from uploading. Not a good idea.
The key to improving YouTube is more likely improving the rating/searching facilities so that the obvious crap falls under and stays under the radar.
No images on Slashdot, so visualise that stock photo of 1950s guy with the caption "Aw geez, not this shit again."
Yes, we've had God knows how many rehashes of the endless "BSD is free, GPL isn't free because it forces conditions" / "GPL makes sure it remains free, BSD can become proprietary" argument / flamewar around here, so I'm *sure* we need another one.
As per usual, it'll include the exact same detailed and polarised arguments that we've already seen in great detail countless times previously, no new light will be shed on the subject, and no-one's opinion will be changed, but the thread will be filled with this offtopic crap to satisfy those involved anyway.
The modern Atari *isn't* the original company by any reasonable measure. The original Atari is effectively dead; it was split in 1984, and both its descendants are now gone. Atari Games (the arcade division) was later purchased by Midway, then renamed, then closed down in the early-2000s. Atari Corp. (the home and computer hardware division) was bought by Jack Tramiel and enjoyed some European success with the ST before going totally downhill in the 1990s and merging with a third-rate hard drive manufacturer which went bankrupt not soon after.
Hasbro Interactive purchased the name and some intellectual property rights, and later sold those on to Infogrames.
The current "Atari" is little more than a trading name of Infogrames.
The CB Simulator was fun. I still remember fondly that people back then typed complete sentences and words, not like the ch475p33k crap that passes for communication these days.
FWIW, the illiterate drivel spewed by fucktards on YouTube comments and the like is the bastard offspring of years of txt mssging cntrctions (or at least strongly gives the impression of having come from there), compounded by not giving a toss.
Though 13375p34k might appear superficially similar to the uninitiated, and probably overlaps it in some areas, it's not really the same thing. Unlike the thriving text-messaging-derived drivel, genuine (non-ironic) use of actual 13375p34k seems to have disappeared from the face of the net fairly suddenly around three years back. Probably because it stopped being obscure fun and became passe when newspapers started publishing guides to those weird messages your children were typing.
(I've heard some people claim that 13375p34k originated as a way of getting around textual filters, and other people rebut this origin claiming they saw early use of such language long ago when that wasn't an issue. I don't know, personally.)
Everyone complained about how expensive Compu$erve was, but we paid the price anyway. And we liked it that way.
I remembered reading about Compuserve and similar services long before the Internet became popular, and I'd have loved to give it a go, but it looked *horrendously* expensive. (Something like 25p to 50p a minute at late-80s UK prices IIRC).
There wasn't even a snowball's chance in hell of me being able to afford it on my pocket money, or even my parents probably.
I know you were half-joking, but in all seriousness, if you could afford Compuserve- even if it hurt a bit- you or your family must have been reasonably well-off. But you'll excuse me if I don't get *too* nostalgic for a proprietary service whose price put it out of the league of the majority of ordinary people when- for all its well-documented flaws- the Internet offers so much more at a fraction of the cost.
You sound like my grand parents defending the fact that they paid enough money repairing their CRT that they could have bought a flat panel.
Depends what kind of CRT they're talking about. I have a 14" Sony Trinitron portable that is over 15 years old and still gives fantastic picture quality when fed RGB component video from my Freeview digibox through the SCART socket.
And most cheap and nasty portable flat screen TVs look horrible in comparison. Some of the larger LCDs are pretty good, but there's something I find cheap, unpleasant and lacking in punch about almost all the smaller ones that I've seen.
You're damn right I'd spend £100 getting my CRT fixed rather than spending the same amount on some crappy low-end LCD toss that probably wouldn't outlive the repair anyway.
After the music CD became the mainstream format, several attempts at creating higher quality formats have been made such Mini Disc and Super Audio CD but only a select set of audiophiles picked up on it.
Mini Disc was never sold as a "high quality" format; even at its launch there was little dispute that its need to compress the sound made its audio quality inferior to that of the already long-established CD.
Mini Disc was basically a replacement for cassettes; it's no coincidence that it was competing against the Digital Compact Cassette (Philips' failed attempt to update the original audio cassette format). It improved on cassettes in terms of convenience and probably sound quality- but certainly not to CD standards.
BTW, FWIW MiniDisc *did* enjoy major success in Japan. And despite not being a hit when launched in Europe in the early-90s, it did (for some reason) enjoy a brief surge in popularity here circa the late-90s/early-2000s, just before portable MP3 players took over. Never a massive success, but probably miles better than either of the high-definition audio CD/DVD formats, or the total flop of the Digital Compact Cassette for that matter.
There's TONS of low-power 386 and 486-based SBCs out there in the world
Yes, but we were talking about "pre-80386 PCs" (i.e. 286s at best!) which are *significantly* older.
It takes a nontrivial amount of energy to make a new computer
And it certainly takes a nontrivial amount of energy to run one.
Don't get me wrong, it might still work out more efficient to run the older machine in some cases, but it's not merely a case of "it'd be going to waste anyway, so there's no harm in running it" that some people might think.
Secondly, I didn't suggest that a brand-new computer (albeit a small energy-efficient one and *not* a big-box) was the way to go. Go back and read what I said about running a 6-7 year old computer instead of a 20-year-old one. (As I mentioned, I was responding to the OP's suggestion of running 20-year-old 286s). The former is probably at the stage of lying unused if not being thrown out anyway, so can likely be acquired for little to no cost- so you probably get significantly more bang-per-buck/watt than the 286.
So even if the old PCs are old, they still might suffice to run a given app.
Let me emphasise this point:- The original poster was proposing (and I was responding to) the use of pre-386 machines; i.e. those around 20 years old.
Yes, *obviously* they can still run plenty of apps- that was what they were meant for. Unfortunately, most of those single-user apps will be around 20 years old, and in the majority of cases newer versions will be far more powerful and usable.
And if you tried using a 286 for even the most undemanding "modern" uses for an obsolete machine (e.g. pressing into service as a router, etc) you'd probably realise just how incredibly underpowered it was compared to even the most insignificant modern embedded processor.
Or are you talking about junking them and replacing them with new PCs? I read on, and apparently you are.
Then you weren't paying attention. That was *one* suggestion- and it was for small, energy-efficient devices, not equally large "big box" PCs.
But to address your point... In the next **** sentence I suggest using a 6-7 year old computer. That's not wasteful; even at that age they're on the edge of being unused if not thrown out, and you can get them for free or very little. So given a choice between two unused and possible junk machines, it makes more sense to use the one that's merely pretty outdated- but still useful in some ways- than one that can't even run the 13-year-old Windows 95.
The only good reason for using a 286 is for legacy apps that are reliant on specific obsolete hardware.
If your connection to the Internet isn't more than 3 Mbps, why would you need more than 10 Mbps between the gigabit switch and the router PC?
That assumes that you only wish to actively route to and from the Internet- and that you wish to use a separate switch. And would the network hardware a 286 comes with even be able to manage that? Would it even support modern Ethernet connections (I honestly don't know).
Unlike old PCs, a lot of "small, inobtrusive modern device[s]" use cryptography to lock out the use of any free software. Game consoles and digital video recorders are key examples of this.
I don't know why you jumped to the conclusion that that's what I had in mind, because it certainly wasn't! (I sure as hell wouldn't waste time trying to turn my USB-less DVR into a PC). Small, energy-efficient Atom-based PCs are available. And general-purpose plug-based devices running Linux are also coming onto the market.
Even if the Linux plug things are pathetically underpowered compared to a modern PC, they'll still knock the living daylights out of a 286 or 386, and probably much more "recent" PCs than that.
Slashdot Mirror
arguing that there is not enough court time to try Mr Serial Rapist because we are too busy trying Miss Downloaded Britney isn't going to cut it.
Isn't it a bit unfortunate for those people to have such names? Particularly if (like most people) they were given them by their parents?
Won't this prejudice any case against them?
Also, in your example above you failed to explain what crimes these people actually committed. What if Mr. Serial Rapist had been downloading Britney Spears tracks, and Ms. Downloaded Britney was actually a serial rapist?
I AM THOGULUS WARRIOR OF THE UNDEAD. I EAT YOUR LIVER TO REGAIN HEALTH.
I *am* Thogulus Warrior of the Undead, you insensitive clod. Sheesh, people think I go about eating livers all the time. I don't.
I'll save yours for later on, when I'm a bit hungrier.
You didn't really give us much here continue with... It's "feign indignation at the high quality of life of the previous poster" + "state your childhood desires to have such luxury" + "state how much worse you had it" so that the next poster can follow up. Get with the program!
If you're going to explain it, at least explain what it's based on in the first place!
The later 1050 used double density disks (but could read and write single density disks with a lower capacity).
You had to get the doubler ROMs to get true double density 180k, otherwise the drive did some weird 1 1/2 density 160k...
The 1050 supported 130K "enhanced" density". The later XF551 supported true double density and apparently was also true double-sided, but that came out pretty late in the day and it wasn't that cheap by the standards of the time.
The Lynx hardware itself was quite innovative, but its "huge" size and hunger for batteries made it a poor portable.
Apparently, Atari made the first version of the Lynx's case *larger*- and half empty!- because the focus groups said that this was perceived to be better value or something. They launched a more compact (and better looking) version later on- my brother had one of those- but it was still very battery hungry.
In some ways, the Game Boy and the Lynx were different anyway- the GB was a pocket system, the Lynx was a portable one.
The Game Gear was similarly troubled but Sega somehow managed to attract buyers though.
I never got the impression that the Game Gear was *that* big a hit personally, but I might be wrong.
Forgot the footnotes(!)
(*1) Though the changes required to port 5200 games to/from the 400/800 would likely be limited to tweaking a few locations
(*2) Almost; some games didn't run, but the majority did.
Hang on.. 256 colours? That can't be 256 at once, surely.
Are you confusing the technically-unrelated ST line with the 400/800/XL/XE 8-bit computers?
The 8-bits certainly *could* have that many colours on-screen at once, with some limitations.
The reason was that the custom graphics chip let you change the palette (and/or graphics mode, sprite positions, etc.) on every new scan line if you wanted to. This wasn't an esoteric trick or hack, it was a standard part of the hardware and used by almost all half-decent games, though they didn't all necessarily use as many as 256 colours.
Ahhh. The days when technology companies were run by engineers for engineers, not marketing whores worshipping their quarterly bonus.
I suspect that some nice people in engineering were responsible for that. But except possibly for their early days (long before the GP's 800XL was even launched), Atari were never the company you dream of.
They considered software writers to be little better than towel designers, which caused many of their most talented people to leave and form Activision- hence starting off the massive market in third-party VCS games. They considered licenses and such more important than good software, resulting in them rushing the likes of the notorious ET game to market, ditto the 2600 version of Pac Man.
All of which probably contributed to the video game crash of 1983.
When Jack Tramiel bought over the computer and home divisions, he sacked half the people working there. Apparently they had a really nice sound chip in the works, but nothing happened with that because all the people who knew about it had been laid off.
Ataris were always rubbish anyway. Long live the Amiga!
You probably mean the ST range, which competed with the Amiga. The 8-bit Atari computers (400/800/XL/XE) were a totally different range designed during a different era and with a different philosophy- i.e. state of the art (for their time) rather than affordability-oriented like the ST was.
The 400/800 are sometimes considered the spiritual predecessors of the Amiga, not least because some of the same people worked on them both. (And remember that the Amiga was designed by an independent company that was bought by C= at the last minute).
The Atari Keyboard looks cooler. That's enough for me!
The XL line had very nice industrial design- not just the computers, but the matching peripherals as well.
The 1200xl was so horrible that people bought up its predecessor to avoid having to succumb to the evil
As far as I'm aware the 1200XL had two problems that caused this; intentionally "closed" design with a lack of expandability (and loss of compatibility with some older peripherals), and also some software incompatibility with older 400/800 software.
This is why (AFAIK) it was replaced with the 600XL and 800XL computers.
As I recall most kids in the 1980s couldn't care less about BASIC or assembler. They just wanted to play games on their home computers.
Which was only possible if you could do basic!
We had these things called tapes and disks when I was a kid. You could buy them with other people's games on and stuff!
:-)
And no, I don't count 'LOAD ""' or whatever the C64 equivalent was as knowing BASIC.
BTW, BASIC was a ******* horrible language for encouraging bad habits, for myself included.
A pal of mine had an Atari XEGS. It looked awesome and futuristic, but was a bit of an oddball considering Atari already had the cheaper 2600 and superior 7800 out on the market.
Atari's problem seemed to be that they tried to do too many things at once and lacked focus.
Bill himself has already mentioned the Warner-era 5200, which was a previous attempt at building a console derived from the 400/800 8-bit computer hardware. From what I know, internally the hardware was virtually identical to the 400/800, but for some reason they changed round the location of a few registers in memory and removed some of the OS. They also changed the cartridge interface.
Therefore, despite the hardware and most of the system being identical, the 5200 couldn't directly run 400/800 games (*1) and vice versa, even if you could get it to load them.
AFAIK, they launched the 5200 around the same time that the 400/800 was replaced with the XL line. The XL was backwards-compatible (*2), so it ran (most) 400/800 games and hardware, and it *wasn't* compatible with the 5200.
Why did Atari do this? Was it a cynical attempt at marketing? Or were the divisions within Atari just more concerned at scoring points off each other? It happens.
Anyway, the 5200 flopped, not least (I heard) because the joysticks were horrible.
Re: the XEGS. This was launched later on, circa 1987, during the Tramiel era. I heard that Atari were originally planning on releasing the 7800 in Europe then changed their mind and launched the XEGS instead. Since the XEGS was (unlike the 5200) fully compatible with the 400/800/XL/XE line, it was probably a quick and easy way of exploiting existing hardware that had a lot of pre-existing software.
Thing is though, I later saw the 7800 for sale in Europe (more specifically, through Argos in the UK) and I think they sold the XEGS in the US anyway. So I'm not sure what the story was. I don't think Atari did either.
Then during the early-1990s there was the launch of the ST's successor, the Falcon 030. The ST had been quite successful in Europe, but was later overtaken by the Amiga 500 when the price of that came down. I *knew* that regardless of whether it was a nice machine or not, the Falcon 030 was going to flop because (a) Even then the ST market was seriously declining with no obvious likelihood of things getting better and the PC compatibles were taking over, (b) Atari probably didn't have the budget to do it justice and (c) Atari couldn't market ****.
The Falcon 030 flopped.
It was withdrawn after just a year or so, I seem to remember so that Atari could commit to the Jaguar console, but that was a relative flop as well. If they'd launched it properly, it might have done some business before the far superior PlayStation came out and wiped the floor with it, but they didn't.
Oh yeah, and the technically-brilliant-for-its-time Lynx was a flop as well, even though it should have done well.
Atari sucked.
But from what I understood, most other free countries tend to be more liberal (significantly) than the U.S. (and a lot of liberals in the U.S. complain about that.)
When you say "more liberal", do you mean "more left-wing"? The word "liberal" tends to have connotations within the U.S. political system which don't really apply elsewhere, and it makes it confusing if you use it within both contexts like that.
Charging a small fee to upload videos is the key to improving YouTube. The reason people upload so many "mundane crap videos" is because there is not a fee. People who are proud of good work would be willing to pay a buck or two to upload their video. The people that upload their friend burping would hesitate to waste money their money.
Careful with that. The people uploading videos are the ones providing YouTube with lots of free content. Yes, much- probably most- of it is crap, but from a financial point of view, that isn't a problem in itself because the cost of *storing* it is likely fairly insignificant on a per-video basis.
And storage isn't the financial problem with sites like YouTube- bandwidth is. So unless those crap videos are getting lots of viewers- and I suspect they aren't- they're a very minor issue, if not a complete irrelevance.
You could, of course, charge people for the bandwidth their video being viewed "cost" YouTube. Which would penalise the producers of popular (and likely good) content, and discourage people from uploading. Not a good idea.
The key to improving YouTube is more likely improving the rating/searching facilities so that the obvious crap falls under and stays under the radar.
No images on Slashdot, so visualise that stock photo of 1950s guy with the caption "Aw geez, not this shit again."
Yes, we've had God knows how many rehashes of the endless "BSD is free, GPL isn't free because it forces conditions" / "GPL makes sure it remains free, BSD can become proprietary" argument / flamewar around here, so I'm *sure* we need another one.
As per usual, it'll include the exact same detailed and polarised arguments that we've already seen in great detail countless times previously, no new light will be shed on the subject, and no-one's opinion will be changed, but the thread will be filled with this offtopic crap to satisfy those involved anyway.
Yay.
Atari, who btw are still in business.
The modern Atari *isn't* the original company by any reasonable measure. The original Atari is effectively dead; it was split in 1984, and both its descendants are now gone. Atari Games (the arcade division) was later purchased by Midway, then renamed, then closed down in the early-2000s. Atari Corp. (the home and computer hardware division) was bought by Jack Tramiel and enjoyed some European success with the ST before going totally downhill in the 1990s and merging with a third-rate hard drive manufacturer which went bankrupt not soon after.
Hasbro Interactive purchased the name and some intellectual property rights, and later sold those on to Infogrames.
The current "Atari" is little more than a trading name of Infogrames.
If, despite your name, you weren't remotely grandmother-aged, why would they still assume that you were female?!
The CB Simulator was fun. I still remember fondly that people back then typed complete sentences and words, not like the ch475p33k crap that passes for communication these days.
FWIW, the illiterate drivel spewed by fucktards on YouTube comments and the like is the bastard offspring of years of txt mssging cntrctions (or at least strongly gives the impression of having come from there), compounded by not giving a toss.
Though 13375p34k might appear superficially similar to the uninitiated, and probably overlaps it in some areas, it's not really the same thing. Unlike the thriving text-messaging-derived drivel, genuine (non-ironic) use of actual 13375p34k seems to have disappeared from the face of the net fairly suddenly around three years back. Probably because it stopped being obscure fun and became passe when newspapers started publishing guides to those weird messages your children were typing.
(I've heard some people claim that 13375p34k originated as a way of getting around textual filters, and other people rebut this origin claiming they saw early use of such language long ago when that wasn't an issue. I don't know, personally.)
Everyone complained about how expensive Compu$erve was, but we paid the price anyway. And we liked it that way.
I remembered reading about Compuserve and similar services long before the Internet became popular, and I'd have loved to give it a go, but it looked *horrendously* expensive. (Something like 25p to 50p a minute at late-80s UK prices IIRC).
There wasn't even a snowball's chance in hell of me being able to afford it on my pocket money, or even my parents probably.
I know you were half-joking, but in all seriousness, if you could afford Compuserve- even if it hurt a bit- you or your family must have been reasonably well-off. But you'll excuse me if I don't get *too* nostalgic for a proprietary service whose price put it out of the league of the majority of ordinary people when- for all its well-documented flaws- the Internet offers so much more at a fraction of the cost.
I have noticed a huge difference in how my mom's computer handles virii
Viri.
As far as I am aware, the plural of virus is viruses. Nothing more.
This article also disagrees with you, though I'm not claiming WP as gospel.
You sound like my grand parents defending the fact that they paid enough money repairing their CRT that they could have bought a flat panel.
Depends what kind of CRT they're talking about. I have a 14" Sony Trinitron portable that is over 15 years old and still gives fantastic picture quality when fed RGB component video from my Freeview digibox through the SCART socket.
And most cheap and nasty portable flat screen TVs look horrible in comparison. Some of the larger LCDs are pretty good, but there's something I find cheap, unpleasant and lacking in punch about almost all the smaller ones that I've seen.
You're damn right I'd spend £100 getting my CRT fixed rather than spending the same amount on some crappy low-end LCD toss that probably wouldn't outlive the repair anyway.
After the music CD became the mainstream format, several attempts at creating higher quality formats have been made such Mini Disc and Super Audio CD but only a select set of audiophiles picked up on it.
Mini Disc was never sold as a "high quality" format; even at its launch there was little dispute that its need to compress the sound made its audio quality inferior to that of the already long-established CD.
Mini Disc was basically a replacement for cassettes; it's no coincidence that it was competing against the Digital Compact Cassette (Philips' failed attempt to update the original audio cassette format). It improved on cassettes in terms of convenience and probably sound quality- but certainly not to CD standards.
BTW, FWIW MiniDisc *did* enjoy major success in Japan. And despite not being a hit when launched in Europe in the early-90s, it did (for some reason) enjoy a brief surge in popularity here circa the late-90s/early-2000s, just before portable MP3 players took over. Never a massive success, but probably miles better than either of the high-definition audio CD/DVD formats, or the total flop of the Digital Compact Cassette for that matter.
I believe he meant "regretted" as in simply "wished they hadn't done that"- i.e. "you'll regret doing that".
There's TONS of low-power 386 and 486-based SBCs out there in the world
Yes, but we were talking about "pre-80386 PCs" (i.e. 286s at best!) which are *significantly* older.
It takes a nontrivial amount of energy to make a new computer
And it certainly takes a nontrivial amount of energy to run one.
Don't get me wrong, it might still work out more efficient to run the older machine in some cases, but it's not merely a case of "it'd be going to waste anyway, so there's no harm in running it" that some people might think.
Secondly, I didn't suggest that a brand-new computer (albeit a small energy-efficient one and *not* a big-box) was the way to go. Go back and read what I said about running a 6-7 year old computer instead of a 20-year-old one. (As I mentioned, I was responding to the OP's suggestion of running 20-year-old 286s). The former is probably at the stage of lying unused if not being thrown out anyway, so can likely be acquired for little to no cost- so you probably get significantly more bang-per-buck/watt than the 286.
So even if the old PCs are old, they still might suffice to run a given app.
Let me emphasise this point:- The original poster was proposing (and I was responding to) the use of pre-386 machines; i.e. those around 20 years old.
Yes, *obviously* they can still run plenty of apps- that was what they were meant for. Unfortunately, most of those single-user apps will be around 20 years old, and in the majority of cases newer versions will be far more powerful and usable.
And if you tried using a 286 for even the most undemanding "modern" uses for an obsolete machine (e.g. pressing into service as a router, etc) you'd probably realise just how incredibly underpowered it was compared to even the most insignificant modern embedded processor.
Or are you talking about junking them and replacing them with new PCs? I read on, and apparently you are.
Then you weren't paying attention. That was *one* suggestion- and it was for small, energy-efficient devices, not equally large "big box" PCs.
But to address your point... In the next **** sentence I suggest using a 6-7 year old computer. That's not wasteful; even at that age they're on the edge of being unused if not thrown out, and you can get them for free or very little. So given a choice between two unused and possible junk machines, it makes more sense to use the one that's merely pretty outdated- but still useful in some ways- than one that can't even run the 13-year-old Windows 95.
The only good reason for using a 286 is for legacy apps that are reliant on specific obsolete hardware.
If your connection to the Internet isn't more than 3 Mbps, why would you need more than 10 Mbps between the gigabit switch and the router PC?
That assumes that you only wish to actively route to and from the Internet- and that you wish to use a separate switch. And would the network hardware a 286 comes with even be able to manage that? Would it even support modern Ethernet connections (I honestly don't know).
Unlike old PCs, a lot of "small, inobtrusive modern device[s]" use cryptography to lock out the use of any free software. Game consoles and digital video recorders are key examples of this.
I don't know why you jumped to the conclusion that that's what I had in mind, because it certainly wasn't! (I sure as hell wouldn't waste time trying to turn my USB-less DVR into a PC). Small, energy-efficient Atom-based PCs are available. And general-purpose plug-based devices running Linux are also coming onto the market.
Even if the Linux plug things are pathetically underpowered compared to a modern PC, they'll still knock the living daylights out of a 286 or 386, and probably much more "recent" PCs than that.