I personally find that old video games look fine on large-screen TVs. The distortion introduced by a modern "wide-screen" TV might not look good, though.
Remember, too, the Atari 8-bits had luma/chroma out (as did the VIC-20 and its successors:) ), so you could hook it up to the s-video input on a modern TV.
I used an 800 and an 800XL (with the "Super Video 2" video amplifier fix) with a chroma/luma monitor as my primary computers for a number of years. The display is wonderful. You do lose the artifacting in some games.
there were a few different schemes for bank-switching on the Atari.
The toggle switch was either to disable the extra RAM (to give you back the PIO lines used for bank switching) or to switch between different "compatibility modes". That's the short version of the story...
In the guy's defense, even though I've slammed him elsewhere in the thread for butchering a classic machine, there's a key missing from the keyboard, so getting the keyboard converted wasn't much of an option.
The biggest problem using the keyboard with a PC is that it's just Not The Same as a 101-key PC layout. There are keys on the Atari that aren't on a PC keyboard, and there are plenty of keys on a PC keyboard that would be tricky to represent on the Atari keyboard... Not that it would be impossible to find a workable mapping scheme, but it would be close to impossible to find a USABLE one (i.e. where you didn't have to memorize a bunch of weird key combinations to emulate function keys, which key is ALT?, etc). You could maybe come up with a goony laptop-style Fn-key mapping and carefully re-silkscreen the keys and stuff, and make something that wouldn't drive a reasonably patient person insane, but it would be a LOT of work.
The usability issues make the necessary hardware hacking (i.e. using a microcontroller to generate PS/2 keycodes from the Atari keyboard) look trivial by comparison.
man, I just find emulation painful. Maybe in twenty years when they get all the wrinkles out of Atari emulators, I'll bother with one of the ugly kludges necessary to use a real joystick on a PC... but why bother, when you can boot up a real Atari and play Star Raiders or M.U.L.E. and it Just Works?
And remember, you need a real 800 (or a 400 upgraded to 48K) to play M.U.L.E. with FOUR PLAYERS, as God intended it...
oh yeah, and back in the mid-nineties or so the cool thing to do was to put an 800XL mainboard, a CSS Black Box, a SCSI hard disk, and an PS/2 keyboard interface into a PC case... I never did, but on my bad days I still kind of want to...
I might actually have the MS BASIC cartridge, which didn't come out until the XL/XE era, in storage. I certainly have a few Atari BASIC (rev A I'm pretty sure) carts.
Originally, MS BASIC was sold on floppy disk. It used the most godawful copy-protection scheme I ever saw on the Ataris---it must have used the whole 88K of the floppy to load 12-16k of program in a bizarre overlaying scheme designed to obfuscate the program on the disk. Took FOREVER to boot up, which pretty much made it unusable.
Atari freaks tend to rave about the 1200XL keyboard but I like the travel on the 800 better. The non-standard layout is only annoying to use now that I've been using a model M keyboard and a Dell laptop for years... it was FINE back when.
as someone who has owned every production 8-bit Atari sold in the US (800,400,1200XL,800XL,600XL, 130XE, 65XE, XEGS... other models that are out there that I haven't owned include the 1400XL, 1450XL, 800XE...) this is just WRONG. WRONG, I tell you.
The 800 is one of the very best of the Atari 8-bit line. Funky seventies industrial design, lovely keyboard, great video and audio quality out of the box (Atari boogered the video and audio amplifiers on the XL and XE models)...
They're built like tanks, too. Remember, the MSRP for them in 1979 was something like $2000. In 1979 dollars. 1/4" and 1/8" aluminum shielding in there to pass the old FCC regs from before Apple paid off the FCC to get the Apple II series passed... We used to joke that the 800 could probably survive the EMP from the inevitable nuclear war that was going to happen in the eighties...
About the only "case mod" I could understand on an 800 is gluing the Star Raiders cartridge into the slot, and even then, I'd use a 400 for that...
before you do anything stupid you concoct out of advice from slashdot, friends, coworkers, whatever websites you're reading, and so on, TALK TO A LAWYER NOW.
Lawyers are professional negotiators. Go pay a lawyer, and you can find out if:
a) your employer is breaking any state, local, or federal law. b) they can fire you for saying "no" and working forty hour weeks. i.e. if you'd have a case for a wrongful termination suit if you did. c) there's any other games you can play in your negotiations with your employer.
Bring your lawyer with you to negotiate with your boss if your employer is breaking any law, or has any contractual obligations to you that they're breaking, or if they're doing anything actionable, or if you just want support if you decide to tell them "no, I'm working 40 hour weeks, sorry, that's all you're paying me for".
The other thing you can do is start looking for another job NOW. Your job sucks, and in this economy, it will take a while for you to find a better one. That doesn't mean it's impossible.
Ok, it's actually not that easy to find a job that will relocate you from the middle of nowhere---it took me about two years in the middle of the dotcom boom to get out of Idaho. The truth is, any resume that's not local goes to the bottom of the pile. Now it's because they don't need you, back then it was because they wanted someone who could start yesterday. It's never easy.
There's some good advice for you sprinkled through here: join professional orgs (you ARE an ACM and IEEE Computer member, right?), find a couple of headhunters to talk to, start working NOW doing whatever you possibly can. I was working two jobs, 60-100 hrs a week of manual labor at one and slinging Access and VBA at another, and still conducting my job search, by the time I got an offer from a company in the valley.
I'd also recommend you keep in touch with your CS department as much as you can---go back for any seminars or talks you can make the drive for, go back for next year's job fairs if you have to, etc.
That said, I think I know who you are from your other comment.
Version numbers got changed around a lot in retrospect on Land Warrior; I sort of remember ".6" being called ".9" early on. I heard both the Exponent version with the VIA wearable as well as the prototypes produced by Pacific and GD for the bid called "0.5".
If you are who I think you are, you didn't stick around long enough to see the Pacific Consultants version go to Fort Polk.
And you're probably talking about Solaris on whatever the Army was using for battlefield situational awareness on the other end of the SINCGARS link from Land Warrior.
I worked on Land Warrior.5 and.6, and briefly on 1.0 from 1999-2001.
None of these systems used Solaris; they used Windows 2000 on the computer and Windows CE on the radio. There was lots of talk about using CE on the computer for 1.0 but I don't think anything ever came of it.
I was told that the previous Raytheon versions had run LynxOS.
elsewhere on his site he talks about the 1s1 sampling plug-in for the Tek 547, a 50 Mhz vacuum tube scope from the fifties (this is one of the Great Scopes of History)... that's how you measured VHF and UHF signals back in the bad old days...
sure, and the circuit-tracing and datasheet-reading skills involved in selecting just which chunk of PC board to hacksaw or dremel out aren't something you can just write up in a short article for a general audience.
Personally, I'd be more interested in the author's pending write-ups on vintage Tek gear...
The company wants me to create a dynamic site (for internal use only) to track projects and bug reports, so I've been researching dynamic Web technologies for the past several weeks.
If your time has any value, buy an off-the-shelf product like Joel Spolsky's FogBUGZ. Or install Bugzilla or something.
That said, your management probably
1) wants to keep you busy and doesn't consider your time an expense (at least, not until layoff time comes around) 2) is deluded into thinking they need a full-custom solution. 3) doesn't want to spend money on proprietary software.
oh, and French & Taylor is fine, esp for its treatment of classic experiments in the field, but I found it lacking as a supplemental text when I first took QM (out of Liboff, primarily). Its big advantage was it was cheap, and I suppose at $40 it's still cheaper than most of the competition.
As others have pointed out, the Feynman lectures are probably what you want. But hey, I gotta weigh in with my big physicist ego, and maybe you actually want to solve problems and stuff (which you won't learn from the Feynman lectures [1]), so here goes:
I haven't seen Griffith's QM text, must've been released in the last ten years. I'm not that big a fan of his E&M text. (Purcell is clearer and more elegant.)
Cohen-Tannoudji, which others have recommended, is an encyclopaedic treatment of non-relativistic QM, and was the de facto standard introductory graduate text for a long time. IMO it's very dryly translated from the French and tedious to learn from. If you have to really do this stuff, you'll probably end up with a copy, though. It's all in there.
The raves about Shankar---also newer than my education---on Amazon seriously tempt me.
My favorite introductory QM text for a long time was Liboff. Odd that no one has recommended it yet. Now I really like the underappreciated gem _Quantum Mechanics_ by Amit Goswami (despite the fact he hangs out with Deepak Chopra these days). Maybe Griffith is better, but based on my appreciation of his E&M text, I seriously doubt it.
The Bohm book is a great bargain in the Dover edition, as is Pauling's book (oriented towards physical chemists) but both are very dated.
[1] Read the introduction or the afterword, where Feynman talks about what a disaster his attempt to teach introductory physics at Caltech turned out to be. And remember that the average student at Caltech is very smart and very motivated, and he was only able to "reach" the top ~10%. The Feynman lectures are marvels in many ways, but they're terrible pedagogy.
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I personally find that old video games look fine on large-screen TVs. The distortion introduced by a modern "wide-screen" TV might not look good, though.
:) ), so you could hook it up to the s-video input on a modern TV.
Remember, too, the Atari 8-bits had luma/chroma out (as did the VIC-20 and its successors
I used an 800 and an 800XL (with the "Super Video 2" video amplifier fix) with a chroma/luma monitor as my primary computers for a number of years. The display is wonderful. You do lose the artifacting in some games.
Atari used a couple different keyboard manufacturers IIRC, so some machines are nicer than others within the same model line.
:(
But honestly, if you don't like the 800 keyboard, you probably use a $15 PC keyboard today and would hate a real Model M or Northgate Omnikey...
That said, I've finally become sufficiently used to my laptop's keyboard that a Model M feels weird.
there were a few different schemes for bank-switching on the Atari.
The toggle switch was either to disable the extra RAM (to give you back the PIO lines used for bank switching) or to switch between different "compatibility modes". That's the short version of the story...
Wow.
The Atari-inspired PC case, external DVD drive and LCD box and all, is really classy. Like something from an alternate universe...
You should all check it out. Click "Page Suivante" a few times.
as I've said before, case-modding is to hardware hacking what putting a whale fin on a Civic is to hot-rodding...
In the guy's defense, even though I've slammed him elsewhere in the thread for butchering a classic machine, there's a key missing from the keyboard, so getting the keyboard converted wasn't much of an option.
The biggest problem using the keyboard with a PC is that it's just Not The Same as a 101-key PC layout. There are keys on the Atari that aren't on a PC keyboard, and there are plenty of keys on a PC keyboard that would be tricky to represent on the Atari keyboard... Not that it would be impossible to find a workable mapping scheme, but it would be close to impossible to find a USABLE one (i.e. where you didn't have to memorize a bunch of weird key combinations to emulate function keys, which key is ALT?, etc). You could maybe come up with a goony laptop-style Fn-key mapping and carefully re-silkscreen the keys and stuff, and make something that wouldn't drive a reasonably patient person insane, but it would be a LOT of work.
The usability issues make the necessary hardware hacking (i.e. using a microcontroller to generate PS/2 keycodes from the Atari keyboard) look trivial by comparison.
emulation is for weenies
Just modding hardware is skillfull, but modding software is true art.
The mind boggles...
man, I just find emulation painful. Maybe in twenty years when they get all the wrinkles out of Atari emulators, I'll bother with one of the ugly kludges necessary to use a real joystick on a PC... but why bother, when you can boot up a real Atari and play Star Raiders or M.U.L.E. and it Just Works?
And remember, you need a real 800 (or a 400 upgraded to 48K) to play M.U.L.E. with FOUR PLAYERS, as God intended it...
oh yeah, and back in the mid-nineties or so the cool thing to do was to put an 800XL mainboard, a CSS Black Box, a SCSI hard disk, and an PS/2 keyboard interface into a PC case... I never did, but on my bad days I still kind of want to...
I might actually have the MS BASIC cartridge, which didn't come out until the XL/XE era, in storage. I certainly have a few Atari BASIC (rev A I'm pretty sure) carts.
Originally, MS BASIC was sold on floppy disk. It used the most godawful copy-protection scheme I ever saw on the Ataris---it must have used the whole 88K of the floppy to load 12-16k of program in a bizarre overlaying scheme designed to obfuscate the program on the disk. Took FOREVER to boot up, which pretty much made it unusable.
Atari freaks tend to rave about the 1200XL keyboard but I like the travel on the 800 better. The non-standard layout is only annoying to use now that I've been using a model M keyboard and a Dell laptop for years... it was FINE back when.
as someone who has owned every production 8-bit Atari sold in the US (800,400,1200XL,800XL,600XL, 130XE, 65XE, XEGS... other models that are out there that I haven't owned include the 1400XL, 1450XL, 800XE...) this is just WRONG. WRONG, I tell you.
The 800 is one of the very best of the Atari 8-bit line. Funky seventies industrial design, lovely keyboard, great video and audio quality out of the box (Atari boogered the video and audio amplifiers on the XL and XE models)...
They're built like tanks, too. Remember, the MSRP for them in 1979 was something like $2000. In 1979 dollars. 1/4" and 1/8" aluminum shielding in there to pass the old FCC regs from before Apple paid off the FCC to get the Apple II series passed... We used to joke that the 800 could probably survive the EMP from the inevitable nuclear war that was going to happen in the eighties...
About the only "case mod" I could understand on an 800 is gluing the Star Raiders cartridge into the slot, and even then, I'd use a 400 for that...
before you do anything stupid you concoct out of advice from slashdot, friends, coworkers, whatever websites you're reading, and so on, TALK TO A LAWYER NOW.
Lawyers are professional negotiators. Go pay a lawyer, and you can find out if:
a) your employer is breaking any state, local, or federal law.
b) they can fire you for saying "no" and working forty hour weeks. i.e. if you'd have a case for a wrongful termination suit if you did.
c) there's any other games you can play in your negotiations with your employer.
Bring your lawyer with you to negotiate with your boss if your employer is breaking any law, or has any contractual obligations to you that they're breaking, or if they're doing anything actionable, or if you just want support if you decide to tell them "no, I'm working 40 hour weeks, sorry, that's all you're paying me for".
The other thing you can do is start looking for another job NOW. Your job sucks, and in this economy, it will take a while for you to find a better one. That doesn't mean it's impossible.
Ok, it's actually not that easy to find a job that will relocate you from the middle of nowhere---it took me about two years in the middle of the dotcom boom to get out of Idaho. The truth is, any resume that's not local goes to the bottom of the pile. Now it's because they don't need you, back then it was because they wanted someone who could start yesterday. It's never easy.
There's some good advice for you sprinkled through here: join professional orgs (you ARE an ACM and IEEE Computer member, right?), find a couple of headhunters to talk to, start working NOW doing whatever you possibly can. I was working two jobs, 60-100 hrs a week of manual labor at one and slinging Access and VBA at another, and still conducting my job search, by the time I got an offer from a company in the valley.
I'd also recommend you keep in touch with your CS department as much as you can---go back for any seminars or talks you can make the drive for, go back for next year's job fairs if you have to, etc.
Then again, maybe you're just fucked.
Furthermore, the English department at Yale is considering making it a requirement to read a book before earning the undergraduate degree.
It's amazing the number of literature majors I've come across that read very little for pleasure...
That said, I think I know who you are from your other comment.
Version numbers got changed around a lot in retrospect on Land Warrior; I sort of remember ".6" being called ".9" early on. I heard both the Exponent version with the VIA wearable as well as the prototypes produced by Pacific and GD for the bid called "0.5".
If you are who I think you are, you didn't stick around long enough to see the Pacific Consultants version go to Fort Polk.
And you're probably talking about Solaris on whatever the Army was using for battlefield situational awareness on the other end of the SINCGARS link from Land Warrior.
I worked on Land Warrior .5 and .6, and briefly on 1.0 from 1999-2001.
None of these systems used Solaris; they used Windows 2000 on the computer and Windows CE on the radio. There was lots of talk about using CE on the computer for 1.0 but I don't think anything ever came of it.
I was told that the previous Raytheon versions had run LynxOS.
elsewhere on his site he talks about the 1s1 sampling plug-in for the Tek 547, a 50 Mhz vacuum tube scope from the fifties (this is one of the Great Scopes of History)... that's how you measured VHF and UHF signals back in the bad old days...
Yeah, I like the Atmel AVRs a lot better. You can use gcc or buy a decent commercial C compiler for $200.
sure, and the circuit-tracing and datasheet-reading skills involved in selecting just which chunk of PC board to hacksaw or dremel out aren't something you can just write up in a short article for a general audience.
Personally, I'd be more interested in the author's pending write-ups on vintage Tek gear...
If your time has any value, buy an off-the-shelf product like Joel Spolsky's FogBUGZ. Or install Bugzilla or something.
That said, your management probably
1) wants to keep you busy and doesn't consider your time an expense (at least, not until layoff time comes around)
2) is deluded into thinking they need a full-custom solution.
3) doesn't want to spend money on proprietary software.
Several weeks indeed!
oh, and French & Taylor is fine, esp for its treatment of classic experiments in the field, but I found it lacking as a supplemental text when I first took QM (out of Liboff, primarily). Its big advantage was it was cheap, and I suppose at $40 it's still cheaper than most of the competition.
\I'm wrong about the date of Shankar, 1994 is for the 2nd edition...
As others have pointed out, the Feynman lectures are probably what you want. But hey, I gotta weigh in with my big physicist ego, and maybe you actually want to solve problems and stuff (which you won't learn from the Feynman lectures [1]), so here goes:
I haven't seen Griffith's QM text, must've been released in the last ten years. I'm not that big a fan of his E&M text. (Purcell is clearer and more elegant.)
Cohen-Tannoudji, which others have recommended, is an encyclopaedic treatment of non-relativistic QM, and was the de facto standard introductory graduate text for a long time. IMO it's very dryly translated from the French and tedious to learn from. If you have to really do this stuff, you'll probably end up with a copy, though. It's all in there.
The raves about Shankar---also newer than my education---on Amazon seriously tempt me.
My favorite introductory QM text for a long time was Liboff. Odd that no one has recommended it yet. Now I really like the underappreciated gem _Quantum Mechanics_ by Amit Goswami (despite the fact he hangs out with Deepak Chopra these days).
Maybe Griffith is better, but based on my appreciation of his E&M text, I seriously doubt it.
The Bohm book is a great bargain in the Dover edition, as is Pauling's book (oriented towards physical chemists) but both are very dated.
[1] Read the introduction or the afterword, where Feynman talks about what a disaster his attempt to teach introductory physics at Caltech turned out to be. And remember that the average student at Caltech is very smart and very motivated, and he was only able to "reach" the top ~10%. The Feynman lectures are marvels in many ways, but they're terrible pedagogy.
I'm not American, so I'm not to familiar with SAT tests but do you send in your SAT when applying for a job when you've already got a Masters ?
no. not ever, to the best of my knowledge, though it's possible that a background check might include your high school transcript, SAT scores, etc.