Back then, Dell used to produce relatively standard systems, and hell, IBM invented the AT-style motherboard. In 1987 IBM forcibly made their hardware incompatible (with the PS/2 line) and has never looked back. Today, Dell has no incentive to use an ATX form factor, but all third party boards are ATX format.
I think there are forces at work which will oppose any further standardization beyond the third-party ghetto that we both apparently live in. Yeah, rail mounted motherboards would be nice, and are very feasible, but we're going to have to wait a bit to get them. Even then, the big hardware makers aren't going to participate unless it is somehow in their interest.
I'm kind of happy at the state of the market at this juncture, though. I have an ASUS Nforce motherboard at the moment and I can't think of an x86 board that was more stable and of such quality manufacture since the old Compaq boards of the early 90's in Proliants. I certainly couldn't get something so solid out of Dell or HP.
If you knew my name you could find evidence of me online in 1989. I was 20 then. I know how things worked because I worked for several mail order retailers. You know the one with the blonde on the cover of the catalog that just got bought last year by CDW? That was from 87-91.
One good way of verifying a retailer, if you didn't have a BBS community to rely on, was to watch the ads for a retailer over time. I kept all my CS issues and could go back two years to see if X retailer existed then. Then, you placed a small order and saw if it went well. Then, you could deal with them more extensively.
You can get ripped off just as easily today. Back then, you used word of mouth to find out who was good and who was not. I had great success dealing with reputable companies that advertised in CS.
The reason why the guy yelled at you was because the Computer Shopper pricing models were cutthroat. The price checks were often done by competing retailers so they could undercut someone else - even by a buck - in print. There was a 3 month lag back then between ad submission and print. You see the issue.
I think the web killed them though, along with consolidation in the clone market. Microsoft can be fairly blamed here as they made sure that with the onset of Windows, that writing drivers to their specifications was required to sell a system. Obvious advantages in mass-production were the result and the extinction of niche clone makers quickly followed.
No more going to the Chinese guy in the industrial park to buy systems. I remember my first trip there back in the 80s when I had a 286 board that wasn't working with my SIPPs, this guy threw my board on a pile of DOA boards and ripped out a new one, mounted 1MB of RAM on it and sent me on my way. Woohoo! That was CS at work.
CS was the heart of the hobbyist market of the 80s and early 90s. Drilling holes in toner cartridges and punching holes in floppy disks is long gone, as is building your own system as a common endeavor. CS' time has passed.
I never liked the Hard Edge much anyway - they devoted too many pages to that. I would have preferred general interest stuff rather, more hole drillings and hardware mods!
Imus (when he used to take drugs) did skits, a repeating one was "Reverend Billy Soul Hargis" who would sell blasphemous religious items like train tickets to Heaven, one per day. He would kid around with people and basically did a Morning Zoo type broadcast interspersed with music.
When he got off the drugs he became what he is now - dull and boring.
The theme song for Rev. Hargis had a few lines like the following, sung by a choirlike set of voices:...as long as i've got my plastic Jesus riding on the dashboard of my car I can go a hundred miles an hour as long as i've got that almighty power...
Imus would start with "Say Hallelujah!" and then go into his sales pitch for whatever religious tchotke he was pretending to sell that day.
The fact that I remember all this from riding to school in the morning in 1982 is depressing.
The only reason North Korea wasn't wiped off the map was the following:
1. China intervened as MacArthur was about to reach the Yalu - ie, the western border of North Korea, and drove him back to the 38th parallel in mid-winter.
2. Truman chose not to invade China in response. This was governed primarily by the nuclear threat and the proximity to the Soviet Union which might be likely to intervene at that time.
Make no mistake about it: North Korea was obliterated and took many years to recover from the utter defeat it had suffered, if it has in fact ever recovered.
I found the baby monitor to be a severe problem for sleep, at first. After a while, you hardly pay attention. Babies are great for alerting you that they need help.
My oldest daughter is 10 now. If she knew all the nights I spent in the damn rocking chair putting her back to sleep - my second wasn't an insomniac luckily.
As for spying on the babysitter - that would entail spying on the ex-wife's mother, which is something i'd rather not do, thank you. And that was only once a year or so.
reminds me of a joke my grandfather told me once
on
E-bike E-xperiences?
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· Score: 1
A guy in the 1930's lost an eye in an industrial accident and after healing up a bit, went to see a specialist in prosthetics about a replacement. He was shown glass eyes that looked almost like the real thing, but were way out of his price league, this being the Depression.
The salesman heard about the man's financial woes and said "Well, we do have some painted wooden eyes here. They were used back in the Civil War as a replacement. Here, i'll get one.". The man tried it on and was fitted with one. It wasn't perfect, but it was better than walking around looking like a pirate with an eye patch. Moreover, he could afford it. He left relatively happy.
That night, he went to a dance. He got there a bit late and found all the ladies were dancing except for one. She was a little heavyset but otherwise attractive. So, with newfound confidence, he walked over and asked if she would like to dance. Dumbfounded, she answered, "Would I? Would I!". His face turned sour and he taunted her, "Fat ass! Fat ass!".
I don't get the impression from reading Terrasoft's site that this is the last release of Yellow Dog, but reading that article text certainly gave off the impression. Might want to edit that a bit. "Final master for YDL 4.0" perhaps?
That's funny. I've _never_ been contacted for any of my employees, or had any of my 'to contact' people contacted. Ever, during many investigations for Secret clearances.
I got a lot of shit about my divorce and the debts from it. We're talking $7k of debt at the time - not that much really (i'd made a lot of progress before I applied for the clearance). Basically, I needed to pay everything, or set up a workable payment arrangement before they'd ok the clearance. Then again, that's the same thing a mortgage company will ask of you before they'll ok a mortgage, so it's not that outlandish.
I was kind of upset about all the information I had to give initially, but whatever - listen, it's not like any of this information wasn't available to the govt if they wanted it.
2. Your SF-86 was most likely transcribed into the EPSQ "Subject Edition" by your security manager if you didn't fill it out yourself electronically. I know that by me we have to do it ourselves because it's a lot of typing. Also, the EPSQ has a 'password' feature that lets you hide parts of your information from your security manager but not from the investigators - this is for privacy reasons.
In any event, it needs to be in electronic form nowadays for submission.
3. They ask a lot of questions on the form, but I have actually sat in front of a DSS (Defense Security Service) investigator multiple times and have been present at a hearing. They are looking for financials and court records in an investigation. I have had to provide the same shit (meaning, list of employers, prior residences, drug use details) with the exception of the selective service question for a bank background check, which I suppose was because I was a bank officer on the books. I also had the same shit when I was working for the Fed. It's nothing special. I even had to take the same piss test.
The DSS guys come into the room with a copy of your credit report in their hand, and a sheaf of court documents (if any) relating to you that they searched electronically. They do not spend their time beating feet around your home or calling all your relatives/friends/associates for a Secret investigation. If they had any reason to do so, you'd be denied the clearance purely based upon the discrepancies identified in the public records.
A bank employee gets scrutinized to the same degree. I've gone through background checks for banks repeatedly in the past. It's financials and court records exclusively for a Secret clearance. TS is past contacts, exhaustive checks, as well as investigators going out to check with your neighbors about you.
Beside which, you don't fill out an SF-86 anymore, it's done via the EPSQ software and electronically transmitted to your security manager, then electronically transmitted up the chain. I've heard they are going to replace the EPSQ soon also with something more modern - the EPSQ is for Win 3.1.
A Secret background investigation involves financials and court records. They don't go through your past contacts and they only ask about drug use after the age of 18.
You can explain away a _lot_ of things on a Secret investigation. A TS or above is much, much harder. I'm aware of a person with a felony conviction who got through a Secret investigation with a bunch of testimonials from govt employees to his upstanding character. Admittedly, he was rejected once before.
There is a Judge Advocate who makes decisions on such things.
I haven't detected it hurting their bottom line just yet. When it does we can revisit this, but I stand by my assertion that Microsoft is relatively immune to market forces in the core OS market.
No, it won't. Operating system software is an enabler, not a product in and of itself. Moreover, Microsoft's license deals with hardware vendors ensure that the vendors ship the latest version of any operating system Microsoft offers.
The monopoly will be able to foist whatever it likes on the end users in the near term future.
1. Sue tons of people. 2. People bitch to politicians. 3. Politicians pass another copyright adjustment law that 'protects' consumers while improving the recording industry's profit margin. 4. Profit!
It's that simple. They have no fear of boycott or consumer retribution. Consumers of music are sheep. Even if some of the sheep wise up and stop buying, there are more people growing up to take their place, which is probably as good an explanation as any for why the music industry targets youth.
The problem isn't the people, it's the law. Trying to sell recorded copies of music in an era where music copying is simple and easy requires the construction of a police state. It's a ludicrous response to the issue. Making it a felony to share files will result in many congressmen and women losing their jobs. Not that that is a bad thing.
As if this law will stop anything - the US is becoming a nation of file leeches, since you only get busted for sharing, not downloading. I wonder when the 'Great Firewall of America' will be forthcoming?
The musician has to find a different means of marketing, basically. If there are fewer musicians in the future, well, I suspect the ones that go will be the ones that suck the worst in general, so that's no great loss. And before some musician or record company shill starts whining to me, I don't see a lot of people crying when my industry gets devastated by foreign outsourcing. Where's the 'Anti-Outsourcing Act of 2004'? Nowhere. So why are we protecting the content distribution industry? Beats me.
Threatening to throw people in jail for sharing files is akin to say, huge sentences for selling marijuana. We see how that problem got solved, right? Failing to learn from history dooms you to repeat it.
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Refusing cert just means that they couldn't get five justices to be interested in taking the case.
There might have been three for all we know - or none.
Back then, Dell used to produce relatively standard systems, and hell, IBM invented the AT-style motherboard. In 1987 IBM forcibly made their hardware incompatible (with the PS/2 line) and has never looked back. Today, Dell has no incentive to use an ATX form factor, but all third party boards are ATX format.
I think there are forces at work which will oppose any further standardization beyond the third-party ghetto that we both apparently live in. Yeah, rail mounted motherboards would be nice, and are very feasible, but we're going to have to wait a bit to get them. Even then, the big hardware makers aren't going to participate unless it is somehow in their interest.
I'm kind of happy at the state of the market at this juncture, though. I have an ASUS Nforce motherboard at the moment and I can't think of an x86 board that was more stable and of such quality manufacture since the old Compaq boards of the early 90's in Proliants. I certainly couldn't get something so solid out of Dell or HP.
Added to my bookmark arsenal. Thanks dude.
If you knew my name you could find evidence of me online in 1989. I was 20 then. I know how things worked because I worked for several mail order retailers. You know the one with the blonde on the cover of the catalog that just got bought last year by CDW? That was from 87-91.
One good way of verifying a retailer, if you didn't have a BBS community to rely on, was to watch the ads for a retailer over time. I kept all my CS issues and could go back two years to see if X retailer existed then. Then, you placed a small order and saw if it went well. Then, you could deal with them more extensively.
You can get ripped off just as easily today. Back then, you used word of mouth to find out who was good and who was not. I had great success dealing with reputable companies that advertised in CS.
The reason why the guy yelled at you was because the Computer Shopper pricing models were cutthroat. The price checks were often done by competing retailers so they could undercut someone else - even by a buck - in print. There was a 3 month lag back then between ad submission and print. You see the issue.
I think the web killed them though, along with consolidation in the clone market. Microsoft can be fairly blamed here as they made sure that with the onset of Windows, that writing drivers to their specifications was required to sell a system. Obvious advantages in mass-production were the result and the extinction of niche clone makers quickly followed.
No more going to the Chinese guy in the industrial park to buy systems. I remember my first trip there back in the 80s when I had a 286 board that wasn't working with my SIPPs, this guy threw my board on a pile of DOA boards and ripped out a new one, mounted 1MB of RAM on it and sent me on my way. Woohoo! That was CS at work.
CS was the heart of the hobbyist market of the 80s and early 90s. Drilling holes in toner cartridges and punching holes in floppy disks is long gone, as is building your own system as a common endeavor. CS' time has passed.
I never liked the Hard Edge much anyway - they devoted too many pages to that. I would have preferred general interest stuff rather, more hole drillings and hardware mods!
Imus (when he used to take drugs) did skits, a repeating one was "Reverend Billy Soul Hargis" who would sell blasphemous religious items like train tickets to Heaven, one per day. He would kid around with people and basically did a Morning Zoo type broadcast interspersed with music.
...as long as i've got my plastic Jesus
When he got off the drugs he became what he is now - dull and boring.
The theme song for Rev. Hargis had a few lines like the following, sung by a choirlike set of voices:
riding on the dashboard of my car
I can go a hundred miles an hour
as long as i've got that almighty power...
Imus would start with "Say Hallelujah!" and then go into his sales pitch for whatever religious tchotke he was pretending to sell that day.
The fact that I remember all this from riding to school in the morning in 1982 is depressing.
Well, in comparison to Don Imus back in the 80s. On second thought, I see your point.
The only reason North Korea wasn't wiped off the map was the following:
1. China intervened as MacArthur was about to reach the Yalu - ie, the western border of North Korea, and drove him back to the 38th parallel in mid-winter.
2. Truman chose not to invade China in response. This was governed primarily by the nuclear threat and the proximity to the Soviet Union which might be likely to intervene at that time.
Make no mistake about it: North Korea was obliterated and took many years to recover from the utter defeat it had suffered, if it has in fact ever recovered.
Being aboard a mighty achievement of human science, and having your own shit piling up next to you for lack of a means to dispose it.
It would be very demoralizing to me.
That's what we call those trucks. Honeydippers.
Mmmm-mmm what a yummy smell.
I found the baby monitor to be a severe problem for sleep, at first. After a while, you hardly pay attention. Babies are great for alerting you that they need help.
My oldest daughter is 10 now. If she knew all the nights I spent in the damn rocking chair putting her back to sleep - my second wasn't an insomniac luckily.
As for spying on the babysitter - that would entail spying on the ex-wife's mother, which is something i'd rather not do, thank you. And that was only once a year or so.
A guy in the 1930's lost an eye in an industrial accident and after healing up a bit, went to see a specialist in prosthetics about a replacement. He was shown glass eyes that looked almost like the real thing, but were way out of his price league, this being the Depression.
The salesman heard about the man's financial woes and said "Well, we do have some painted wooden eyes here. They were used back in the Civil War as a replacement. Here, i'll get one.". The man tried it on and was fitted with one. It wasn't perfect, but it was better than walking around looking like a pirate with an eye patch. Moreover, he could afford it. He left relatively happy.
That night, he went to a dance. He got there a bit late and found all the ladies were dancing except for one. She was a little heavyset but otherwise attractive. So, with newfound confidence, he walked over and asked if she would like to dance. Dumbfounded, she answered, "Would I? Would I!". His face turned sour and he taunted her, "Fat ass! Fat ass!".
Hey it was a 1930's joke, gimme a break.
I don't get the impression from reading Terrasoft's site that this is the last release of Yellow Dog, but reading that article text certainly gave off the impression. Might want to edit that a bit. "Final master for YDL 4.0" perhaps?
That's funny. I've _never_ been contacted for any of my employees, or had any of my 'to contact' people contacted. Ever, during many investigations for Secret clearances.
I got a lot of shit about my divorce and the debts from it. We're talking $7k of debt at the time - not that much really (i'd made a lot of progress before I applied for the clearance). Basically, I needed to pay everything, or set up a workable payment arrangement before they'd ok the clearance. Then again, that's the same thing a mortgage company will ask of you before they'll ok a mortgage, so it's not that outlandish.
I was kind of upset about all the information I had to give initially, but whatever - listen, it's not like any of this information wasn't available to the govt if they wanted it.
1. I work for a DoD component.
2. Your SF-86 was most likely transcribed into the EPSQ "Subject Edition" by your security manager if you didn't fill it out yourself electronically. I know that by me we have to do it ourselves because it's a lot of typing. Also, the EPSQ has a 'password' feature that lets you hide parts of your information from your security manager but not from the investigators - this is for privacy reasons.
In any event, it needs to be in electronic form nowadays for submission.
3. They ask a lot of questions on the form, but I have actually sat in front of a DSS (Defense Security Service) investigator multiple times and have been present at a hearing. They are looking for financials and court records in an investigation. I have had to provide the same shit (meaning, list of employers, prior residences, drug use details) with the exception of the selective service question for a bank background check, which I suppose was because I was a bank officer on the books. I also had the same shit when I was working for the Fed. It's nothing special. I even had to take the same piss test.
The DSS guys come into the room with a copy of your credit report in their hand, and a sheaf of court documents (if any) relating to you that they searched electronically. They do not spend their time beating feet around your home or calling all your relatives/friends/associates for a Secret investigation. If they had any reason to do so, you'd be denied the clearance purely based upon the discrepancies identified in the public records.
A bank employee gets scrutinized to the same degree. I've gone through background checks for banks repeatedly in the past. It's financials and court records exclusively for a Secret clearance. TS is past contacts, exhaustive checks, as well as investigators going out to check with your neighbors about you.
Beside which, you don't fill out an SF-86 anymore, it's done via the EPSQ software and electronically transmitted to your security manager, then electronically transmitted up the chain. I've heard they are going to replace the EPSQ soon also with something more modern - the EPSQ is for Win 3.1.
So I call BS on you, AC.
A Secret background investigation involves financials and court records. They don't go through your past contacts and they only ask about drug use after the age of 18.
You can explain away a _lot_ of things on a Secret investigation. A TS or above is much, much harder. I'm aware of a person with a felony conviction who got through a Secret investigation with a bunch of testimonials from govt employees to his upstanding character. Admittedly, he was rejected once before.
There is a Judge Advocate who makes decisions on such things.
I haven't detected it hurting their bottom line just yet. When it does we can revisit this, but I stand by my assertion that Microsoft is relatively immune to market forces in the core OS market.
No, it won't. Operating system software is an enabler, not a product in and of itself. Moreover, Microsoft's license deals with hardware vendors ensure that the vendors ship the latest version of any operating system Microsoft offers.
The monopoly will be able to foist whatever it likes on the end users in the near term future.
I'm still running Win2k on the MS system I have to keep around. This is solely due to product activation.
My 2100 users were still using Win2k primarily until we got an activation-free corporate copy.
Trusted computing is unwelcome in my environment and commercial off the shelf software that depends on it will not be purchased.
1. Sue tons of people.
2. People bitch to politicians.
3. Politicians pass another copyright adjustment law that 'protects' consumers while improving the recording industry's profit margin.
4. Profit!
It's that simple. They have no fear of boycott or consumer retribution. Consumers of music are sheep. Even if some of the sheep wise up and stop buying, there are more people growing up to take their place, which is probably as good an explanation as any for why the music industry targets youth.
What do you expect them to throw at the problem? James Bond doesn't work for the US government.
As a humorous aside, I lied, there are several "James Bond"s working for the US government and they don't like the 'licensed to kill' jokes at all.
You do realize, of course, that audio recordings were not copyrighted in the US before mid-1972, correct?
The problem isn't the people, it's the law. Trying to sell recorded copies of music in an era where music copying is simple and easy requires the construction of a police state. It's a ludicrous response to the issue. Making it a felony to share files will result in many congressmen and women losing their jobs. Not that that is a bad thing.
As if this law will stop anything - the US is becoming a nation of file leeches, since you only get busted for sharing, not downloading. I wonder when the 'Great Firewall of America' will be forthcoming?
The musician has to find a different means of marketing, basically. If there are fewer musicians in the future, well, I suspect the ones that go will be the ones that suck the worst in general, so that's no great loss. And before some musician or record company shill starts whining to me, I don't see a lot of people crying when my industry gets devastated by foreign outsourcing. Where's the 'Anti-Outsourcing Act of 2004'? Nowhere. So why are we protecting the content distribution industry? Beats me.
Threatening to throw people in jail for sharing files is akin to say, huge sentences for selling marijuana. We see how that problem got solved, right? Failing to learn from history dooms you to repeat it.
This box, distcc and a cross compiler sound like a Gentoo wet dream.
Interestingly, why aren't they using Linux as an OS? I didn't see anything about exactly what they are planning on using.