I mean geez it's 2003 and I've been waiting for 20 years now. Come on. How come that guy's computer in War Games could do that but not my expensive ass Pentium III? Huh? What a letdown...
Last I heard, the CoCo port was kind of on hiatus due to the original porter not having enough time or something to work on it. Maybe you can find out more on bit.listserv.coco. Someone else is bound to pick it up. There's a lot of talented CoCo people around.
128 MB RAM for XP? Oh, give me a break. 128 is barely enough for XP to run by itself much less play a game on top of that. It really ought to be 256 minimum. This is just like Microsoft's minimum requirements for different versions of Windows being unrealistically low. It's a disservice to consumers.
The board in it is a VIA GA-6EVM. It has the VIA PLE133T chipset. Someone posted some crap about the CPU being soldered on or something. That's a bunch of phooey. It's a Socket 370 so the C3 can be replaced with a P3 or Celery. It actually has quite a few modern features. I'd say the worst thing about the unit as a whole is the integrated video. It's a Trident Blade3D Pro Media. Ack. It can really drag down KDE 3.x sometimes. Yeah, I bought one of these a couple months ago and am now running Redhat 7.3 on it and using it as a firewall, dev machhine, backup server, ogg and mpg over network dispenser. For $200 + shipping, I think it was a good deal.
mainframes are reliable as hell but when there's a big load
on the system during, for example, month-end processing at
a bank, these things can really start to crawl on every
friggin' LPAR in the sysplex. And that can really make it
hard to Get Stuff Done. And the "traditional IT" types of
companies like banks, insurance companies, etc. are usually
pretty resistant to adding more CPUs, memory, DASD, tape
drives, etc. until it's taking like 5 minutes for screens
to update on the 3rd Saturday afternoon of the month. Damn
those penny pinching suits up in Corporate...
Unfortunately, I know all of this from personal experience.
Ack! I'm just a *nix programmer wannabe stuck in a mainframe
programmer job. Arrrghhh... where's my copy of K&R2???
I use Redhat 7.3 95% of the time and use Win2k ONLY when absolutely necessary (i.e. logging onto work LAN via Windows-only VPN software, playing a select few Windows-only games, when I need to use video with Yahoo Messenger thingy, DV editing (only because DV editors aren't really there yet on Linux)). Any development I do is done in Linux nowadays. I will NEVER "upgrade" from my OEM Win2k to XP. I've done tech support for a couple of relatives with XP and it gave me one giant headache working on it. And people lately are complaining about the KDE (K) menu being messy! That Luna theme alone makes me woozy and nauseous. It's bad enough having to reinstall 2k every 3 to 6 months to clean the system up and get it back to normal running speed but to have to do that with XP? Yeah, right. Sorry Bill, no thanks, dude. The Longhorn Beta looks like XP + more useless eye candy and more "feautures" I'd never use. Even if it was on store shelves, I'd still pass on it.
I did just that. Put Redhat 7.3 on the cheapest one ($199), added
a rear exhaust fan, and now it works great as a firewall/router and serves up mpeg1 copies of my VHS movies to all the computers on my home network. Wal-Mart may be a big corporate ogre but MS is still the biggest corporate ogre. Besides XBox technology will be obselete in 6 months... oh wait, 3 months... oh wait...
Thanks to everyone making such a big deal about eye contact, I *REALLY* suck at interviews what with my
curses of congenital nystagmus + lazy eye. Too bad people can't get hired for their technical skills and non-eye contact related communications skills rather than how much eye contact they have with an interviewer. Now if the interviewer was a computer or robot or something that might be a different story. Anyway, people (mainly job interviewers) need to realize that not everyone can look people straight in the eye for extended periods of time and that just because they don't/can't it doesn't mean they're dishonest/uninterested/whatever.
Slashdot Mirror
WOULD
YOU
LIKE
TO
PLAY
A
GAME?
yet?
I mean geez it's 2003 and I've been waiting for 20 years now. Come on. How come that guy's computer in War Games could do that but not my expensive ass Pentium III? Huh? What a letdown...
Last I heard, the CoCo port was kind of on hiatus due to the original porter not having enough time or something to work on it. Maybe you can find out more on bit.listserv.coco. Someone else is bound to pick it up. There's a lot of talented CoCo people around.
128 MB RAM (win2k/XP), 96MB (Win9x)
128 MB RAM for XP? Oh, give me a break. 128 is barely enough for XP to run by itself much less play a game on top of that. It really ought to be 256 minimum. This is just like Microsoft's minimum requirements for different versions of Windows being unrealistically low. It's a disservice to consumers.
Pkzip? Winzip? Why would anyone want to use either of these when there's ICEOWS? Once I discovered it, I forgot Pkzip and Winzip even existed.
...CoCo 4?!? And where's my Timex Sinclair 8000?
The board in it is a VIA GA-6EVM. It has the VIA PLE133T
chipset. Someone posted some crap about the CPU being
soldered on or something. That's a bunch of phooey. It's
a Socket 370 so the C3 can be replaced with a P3 or Celery.
It actually has quite a few modern features. I'd say the
worst thing about the unit as a whole is the integrated
video. It's a Trident Blade3D Pro Media. Ack. It can really
drag down KDE 3.x sometimes. Yeah, I bought one of these
a couple months ago and am now running Redhat 7.3 on it
and using it as a firewall, dev machhine, backup server,
ogg and mpg over network dispenser. For $200 + shipping,
I think it was a good deal.
mainframes are reliable as hell but when there's a big load on the system during, for example, month-end processing at a bank, these things can really start to crawl on every friggin' LPAR in the sysplex. And that can really make it hard to Get Stuff Done. And the "traditional IT" types of companies like banks, insurance companies, etc. are usually pretty resistant to adding more CPUs, memory, DASD, tape drives, etc. until it's taking like 5 minutes for screens to update on the 3rd Saturday afternoon of the month. Damn those penny pinching suits up in Corporate... Unfortunately, I know all of this from personal experience. Ack! I'm just a *nix programmer wannabe stuck in a mainframe programmer job. Arrrghhh... where's my copy of K&R2???
I use Redhat 7.3 95% of the time and use Win2k ONLY when absolutely necessary (i.e. logging onto work LAN via Windows-only VPN software, playing a select few Windows-only games, when I need to use video with Yahoo Messenger thingy, DV editing (only because DV editors aren't really there yet on Linux)). Any development I do is done in Linux nowadays. I will NEVER "upgrade" from my OEM Win2k to XP. I've done tech support for a couple of relatives with XP and it gave me one giant headache working on it. And people lately are complaining about the KDE (K) menu being messy! That Luna theme alone makes me woozy and nauseous. It's bad enough having to reinstall 2k every 3 to 6 months to clean the system up and get it back to normal running speed but to have to do that with XP? Yeah, right. Sorry Bill, no thanks, dude. The Longhorn Beta looks like XP + more useless eye candy and more "feautures" I'd never use. Even if it was on store shelves, I'd still pass on it.
I did just that. Put Redhat 7.3 on the cheapest one ($199), added a rear exhaust fan, and now it works great as a firewall/router and serves up mpeg1 copies of my VHS movies to all the computers on my home network. Wal-Mart may be a big corporate ogre but MS is still the biggest corporate ogre. Besides XBox technology will be obselete in 6 months... oh wait, 3 months... oh wait...
Thanks to everyone making such a big deal about eye contact, I *REALLY* suck at interviews what with my curses of congenital nystagmus + lazy eye. Too bad people can't get hired for their technical skills and non-eye contact related communications skills rather than how much eye contact they have with an interviewer. Now if the interviewer was a computer or robot or something that might be a different story. Anyway, people (mainly job interviewers) need to realize that not everyone can look people straight in the eye for extended periods of time and that just because they don't/can't it doesn't mean they're dishonest/uninterested/whatever.