Well, that's Xine. I still say the best movie player for Windows is Knoppix. I can tinker with Windows and it's codecs for hours, and never can get it to the point where it can play back everything with no problems. Always a couple of strange videos or formats that won't play, and if I get those playing - somethink else stops working. On the other hand, Xine just works.
Schools bought them by the truckload, they didn't care that they sucked. Though to their credit, an OS on the ROM made them pretty tamper proof - if someone messed them up just cycle the power and all is good. I saw some still in service as of 2000.
The original Windows 98? You must of been pretty disappointed. From what I found it was pretty much a bloated, slow, and crash happy Windows 95OSR2. 98SE was a huge improvement.
I do agree the original Windows 95 wasn't very good, though I did have an old 486 laptop with a ~70MB drive that had both original Windows 95 and Office 95 on it. While it wasn't quite as compact as what this guy has done, a lot of fat did get trimmed. And there was enough room left over for Master of Orion, Sim City 2000 (for dos), and of course, Solitare.
I've run Windows 95 without a swap file before. For best results you probably need atleast 64MB. I think you can only do it in one version, I forgot if it's the original or OSR2. Probably the original because you can do 3.1 without a swap.
I agree with you on Windows 2k. Not only does it need a swap file, if it's less than about 700MB Windows will complain about it.
Version 2 you must mean the 6x86L? The 6x86L was a dual voltage chip like the Pentium MMX, and finding motherboards was a bit tough. They were solid, though I did see some OEMs put the thing on 3.5V that the 6x86 was rated for, that probably caused some problems.
I had a PR200+ version of it. It ran nice and cool. It wouldn't overclock (I think it was more the motherboard's fault, because the only way to overclock the sucker would be to run the bus speed at 75Mhz instead of 66Mhz, and I had cheap ram). However for a while I ran the core at 2.5V instead of 2.8V and ditched the fan. Nice and quiet.
I do agree the FPU unit sucked hard. Playing a mp3 file would take 50-65% CPU utilization and made the computer pretty much useless for doing anything else while it played.
#4 there is a big one. I've seen power supply voltages spike up after being shutdown. I never really paid attention to it until I was using a cheapo power supply on the bench to test some old 12V fans just to see if they'd spin. I noticed when I shut off the power supply, the fans would spin faster for about 1 second then start to slow down. Voltages were cearhing 14-15V on the 12V line at that time.
I don't know why not either. In older computers, the power supply fan was the exhaust fan - and in many cases the only fan in the computer. Without that fan the computer would overheat from the CPU/disk drives/etc running.
With today's computers, most people have atleast 1 intake and 1 exhaust fan in addition to the power supply's exhaust fan(s). So I don't see why you couldn't take the power supply out, and the other fans could keep the disk drives cool. Worst case I think is you may have to throw in another exhaust fan into the case.
In older engines you can reduce pinging and knocking with higher octane fuel. While it doesn't fix the problem, and after a while it will start pinging and/or knocking at the higher octane fuel - it is a good, cheap, and easy (temporary) solution for an old car you don't really feel like working on.
While a single computer harddrive cannot saturate 133 MB/s, you can get that with RAID & fast hard drives. And I would trust RAID 0 before some RAM drive, even with backup batteries.
For students, there is the problem that PDAs generally are not allowed on tests. But then again, some professors and teachers aren't going to allow a 49G+ either. Also, I don't want to constantly feed my calculator batteries. My 48G and TI-85 go months, even years between changes. Depending on your PDA, you may only get hours of use.
Eh? The TI-85 and TI-86 are almost identical. The TI-86 got some upgrades to the graphing, a major overhaul of the statistics package, a nicer vector/list/matrix editor, added table function - and that's about it. Oh yeah, the TI-86 also has ~3x more memory available, and it's noticeably slower due to bank switching with the RAM.
Programming TI-Basic on the TI-86 is just like the TI-85. As a matter of fact you can even transfer TI-85 programs to the TI-86 and run them as is.
I think you may have the TI-85 confused with the 82/83 - which are limited to one character variable names and are even more crippled in their programming language.
When I need to use something other than pen & paper for classes like that, I run on over to Maple on the computer. Much more powerful, much easier to use, worlds faster. The calculator to me is just something to crunch numbers on. I have a HP48G and a HP49G and I hardly ever touch the 49G because the 48G is so much better for crunching numbers - the keys are better laid out*, the keyboard is better, the screen is better, and it's a tad faster.
*I know you can customize the keyboards on both machines, but the 49G needs extensive modifications while the 48G is pretty darn good as-is. And it's much nicer when all the keylabels match the functions.
If I understand the recording industry's tactics well enough, doesn't Micheal Jackson's label own the copyright to "Billy Jean", and Micheal has very little actual say with what they can and can't do with it?
It's interesting to watch how the government cracks down on various drugs. The US Government has deemed smoking as pretty bad, yet smoking does not cause drunk driving, nor does it cause men to go home and beat their wives. An addiction to tobacco does not ruin someone's life the way an addiction to alcohol can. I hear lots of complaining about the costs smokers create in terms of health care, but I never hear about the costs associated with heavy drinkers, not to mention rehab programs.
What's really interesting is how they make marijuana illegal, when in many ways it is not as bad as smoking or drinking. In terms of health, people say marijuana does less damage than all that tar and chemicals they put in cigarettes. Some people say it's even less addictive than tobacco, though I would not know. Marijuana also does not make you overconfident the way alcohol will - making you think you are the best driver in the world when in reality you should not be anywhere near the controls of a vehicle. The government likes to say that marijuana use just leads to usage of dangerous drugs like cocaine, but that is not true - just like alcoholics generally don't move onto cocaine either.
I'll probably get modded down for this, but I feel the world would be a better place without alcohol. But that simply will not happen. People will not give it up, just look at when they tried prohibition in the US.
I'm surprised I have not seen people speak of the downsides of cars like this. When cars are all basically the same, some things are a whole lot easier.
Such as safety. When cars are the same, government can crash test a couple of them, and then everyone knows more or less how all of them will behave in accidents. If cars could be so radically different, how could the government crash test them? They would have to crash just about every major combination. Also, how about recalls? Certain combinations could be potential deathtraps, but no one will notice because so few of those combinations are on the road.
Not to mention constructing the cars to be safe in the first place. The cars sitting on lots right now are the results of numerous internal crash tests and simulations done by the manufacturers to get everything just right. I wouldn't want to go out and drive some combination of engines/body type/chassis that has not been tested extensively like that.
Also, it will be a hassle to repair such a car. With cars all alike, dealers can stock the parts to fix. Also, it's a lot easier, quicker, and cheaper for the mechanics to repair cars that are basically identical, once they learn the in's and out's of the vehicle. Also, they also know exactly what needs to be done and what parts are needed when I tell them I need a new alternator in my '97 Maxima. With these custom cars, something may go wrong and they would have no idea where to start, or what they will need to fix it. Expect more labor, and more expensive parts to fix these cars. I would also count on being without a car for days and weeks while they wait for the custom parts to arrive to fix your car.
I would also bet these cars have a lot more problems. Cars now, especially the Japanese cars, are very refined. With cars alike, trends are easy to spot and problems can be addressed. While the Toyota Camry may be a boring car, it's an extremely reliable one because the design has been refined for a long time, and all the major bugs worked out. A custom car would probably run as well as a first model year car at best (Ford Focus anyone?), and chances are much worse. Expect lots of little bugs and nuisances, and a few major problems thrown in.
Also, on the idea of parts and repairs, parts could get pretty obscure in a few years, especially if the company goes under. With any reasonably popular model of car, atleast there are thousands just like it to salvage parts from. It sure is nice to go to the junkyard and find several cars just like mine that I can part out. That simply won't be happening with these custom cars.
So while the idea picking and choosing custom colors, radios, seats, and options as we know them now from the major automakers is great - I think the idea of being about to pick and choose things like the chassis, body styles, drive trains, alternators, brake systems etc. are a bad idea.
SUVs are surprisenly cramped for tall people. The best cars seem to be 2 door coupes that are really meant for 2 people only, or some large vans like the Econoline. Also the big American sedans like the Cadillacs and Lincolns are fairly roomy.
Perhaps they should consider setting up some shoutcast/icecast style stations to stream music over the college LAN? Assuming it can be done cheaply and legally, this would be pretty neat. If people like the radio stations enough, they will spend less time messing with MP3's.
It would sure beat a DRM'ed library of music that I have to pay for, that would lack the convience,variety, and quality of what is already on my harddrive.
I just tried it myself, and guess what? I get 22ms too. However I don't have 8mbps DSL.
We used to get DSL through the local phone company. 100-110ms was not that uncommon during the day. (I kid you not!)
Interestingly, it takes 3ms to get to the modem. Actually that's not that bad considering about 50ft of cable between this computer and the router/modem in the basement.
Just look for a blue glow coming from the cockpit's screens?
Seriously though, in this day and age wars are even less "civil" than they were 90 years ago. I couldn't see today's pilots waiting for their opponent to unjam their weaponry. If it breaks and has to reboot, you'll be toast.
And they also said Windows 95 would run on a 386 with 4MB of ram. Anyone ever try that? They also said Windows 98 will run on a 486-66 with 8MB of ram. I've seen that and it's not pretty.
It is possible, and it is useable, it certainly is not too responsive.
What's so hard about installing Linux? Actually what you need to do is stay late some night, and after everyone leaves put a Knoppix disk in their workstations, and reboot. The looks on everyone's face the next day should be priceless.
There are plenty of smaller ISPs that offer broadband too. Besides, it's the act of sharing that is illegal, not how fast your connection is. I've shared over 10000 files on my 56k before.
However, I wouldn't be surprised to hear of some computer with a lot of storage and a really fast connection being the equilvent of 327 computers or something like that.
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Well, that's Xine. I still say the best movie player for Windows is Knoppix. I can tinker with Windows and it's codecs for hours, and never can get it to the point where it can play back everything with no problems. Always a couple of strange videos or formats that won't play, and if I get those playing - somethink else stops working. On the other hand, Xine just works.
Works in Windows 2000 too. However, while it will list the Fax Services as a component to uninstall, it won't let me remove it. Oh well.
Schools bought them by the truckload, they didn't care that they sucked. Though to their credit, an OS on the ROM made them pretty tamper proof - if someone messed them up just cycle the power and all is good. I saw some still in service as of 2000.
The original Windows 98? You must of been pretty disappointed. From what I found it was pretty much a bloated, slow, and crash happy Windows 95OSR2. 98SE was a huge improvement.
I do agree the original Windows 95 wasn't very good, though I did have an old 486 laptop with a ~70MB drive that had both original Windows 95 and Office 95 on it. While it wasn't quite as compact as what this guy has done, a lot of fat did get trimmed. And there was enough room left over for Master of Orion, Sim City 2000 (for dos), and of course, Solitare.
I've run Windows 95 without a swap file before. For best results you probably need atleast 64MB. I think you can only do it in one version, I forgot if it's the original or OSR2. Probably the original because you can do 3.1 without a swap.
I agree with you on Windows 2k. Not only does it need a swap file, if it's less than about 700MB Windows will complain about it.
Version 2 you must mean the 6x86L? The 6x86L was a dual voltage chip like the Pentium MMX, and finding motherboards was a bit tough. They were solid, though I did see some OEMs put the thing on 3.5V that the 6x86 was rated for, that probably caused some problems.
I had a PR200+ version of it. It ran nice and cool. It wouldn't overclock (I think it was more the motherboard's fault, because the only way to overclock the sucker would be to run the bus speed at 75Mhz instead of 66Mhz, and I had cheap ram). However for a while I ran the core at 2.5V instead of 2.8V and ditched the fan. Nice and quiet.
I do agree the FPU unit sucked hard. Playing a mp3 file would take 50-65% CPU utilization and made the computer pretty much useless for doing anything else while it played.
Neato. Can I hook it up to my C64 then?
#4 there is a big one. I've seen power supply voltages spike up after being shutdown. I never really paid attention to it until I was using a cheapo power supply on the bench to test some old 12V fans just to see if they'd spin. I noticed when I shut off the power supply, the fans would spin faster for about 1 second then start to slow down. Voltages were cearhing 14-15V on the 12V line at that time.
I don't know why not either. In older computers, the power supply fan was the exhaust fan - and in many cases the only fan in the computer. Without that fan the computer would overheat from the CPU/disk drives/etc running.
With today's computers, most people have atleast 1 intake and 1 exhaust fan in addition to the power supply's exhaust fan(s). So I don't see why you couldn't take the power supply out, and the other fans could keep the disk drives cool. Worst case I think is you may have to throw in another exhaust fan into the case.
In older engines you can reduce pinging and knocking with higher octane fuel. While it doesn't fix the problem, and after a while it will start pinging and/or knocking at the higher octane fuel - it is a good, cheap, and easy (temporary) solution for an old car you don't really feel like working on.
While a single computer harddrive cannot saturate 133 MB/s, you can get that with RAID & fast hard drives. And I would trust RAID 0 before some RAM drive, even with backup batteries.
For students, there is the problem that PDAs generally are not allowed on tests. But then again, some professors and teachers aren't going to allow a 49G+ either. Also, I don't want to constantly feed my calculator batteries. My 48G and TI-85 go months, even years between changes. Depending on your PDA, you may only get hours of use.
Eh? The TI-85 and TI-86 are almost identical. The TI-86 got some upgrades to the graphing, a major overhaul of the statistics package, a nicer vector/list/matrix editor, added table function - and that's about it. Oh yeah, the TI-86 also has ~3x more memory available, and it's noticeably slower due to bank switching with the RAM.
Programming TI-Basic on the TI-86 is just like the TI-85. As a matter of fact you can even transfer TI-85 programs to the TI-86 and run them as is.
I think you may have the TI-85 confused with the 82/83 - which are limited to one character variable names and are even more crippled in their programming language.
When I need to use something other than pen & paper for classes like that, I run on over to Maple on the computer. Much more powerful, much easier to use, worlds faster. The calculator to me is just something to crunch numbers on. I have a HP48G and a HP49G and I hardly ever touch the 49G because the 48G is so much better for crunching numbers - the keys are better laid out*, the keyboard is better, the screen is better, and it's a tad faster.
*I know you can customize the keyboards on both machines, but the 49G needs extensive modifications while the 48G is pretty darn good as-is. And it's much nicer when all the keylabels match the functions.
...and I'm sure there were a lot of computers in Florida running the Chinese version of Windows 3.1 too.
I guess they included them just in case...
If I understand the recording industry's tactics well enough, doesn't Micheal Jackson's label own the copyright to "Billy Jean", and Micheal has very little actual say with what they can and can't do with it?
It's interesting to watch how the government cracks down on various drugs. The US Government has deemed smoking as pretty bad, yet smoking does not cause drunk driving, nor does it cause men to go home and beat their wives. An addiction to tobacco does not ruin someone's life the way an addiction to alcohol can. I hear lots of complaining about the costs smokers create in terms of health care, but I never hear about the costs associated with heavy drinkers, not to mention rehab programs.
What's really interesting is how they make marijuana illegal, when in many ways it is not as bad as smoking or drinking. In terms of health, people say marijuana does less damage than all that tar and chemicals they put in cigarettes. Some people say it's even less addictive than tobacco, though I would not know. Marijuana also does not make you overconfident the way alcohol will - making you think you are the best driver in the world when in reality you should not be anywhere near the controls of a vehicle. The government likes to say that marijuana use just leads to usage of dangerous drugs like cocaine, but that is not true - just like alcoholics generally don't move onto cocaine either.
I'll probably get modded down for this, but I feel the world would be a better place without alcohol. But that simply will not happen. People will not give it up, just look at when they tried prohibition in the US.
I'm surprised I have not seen people speak of the downsides of cars like this. When cars are all basically the same, some things are a whole lot easier.
Such as safety. When cars are the same, government can crash test a couple of them, and then everyone knows more or less how all of them will behave in accidents. If cars could be so radically different, how could the government crash test them? They would have to crash just about every major combination. Also, how about recalls? Certain combinations could be potential deathtraps, but no one will notice because so few of those combinations are on the road.
Not to mention constructing the cars to be safe in the first place. The cars sitting on lots right now are the results of numerous internal crash tests and simulations done by the manufacturers to get everything just right. I wouldn't want to go out and drive some combination of engines/body type/chassis that has not been tested extensively like that.
Also, it will be a hassle to repair such a car. With cars all alike, dealers can stock the parts to fix. Also, it's a lot easier, quicker, and cheaper for the mechanics to repair cars that are basically identical, once they learn the in's and out's of the vehicle. Also, they also know exactly what needs to be done and what parts are needed when I tell them I need a new alternator in my '97 Maxima. With these custom cars, something may go wrong and they would have no idea where to start, or what they will need to fix it. Expect more labor, and more expensive parts to fix these cars. I would also count on being without a car for days and weeks while they wait for the custom parts to arrive to fix your car.
I would also bet these cars have a lot more problems. Cars now, especially the Japanese cars, are very refined. With cars alike, trends are easy to spot and problems can be addressed. While the Toyota Camry may be a boring car, it's an extremely reliable one because the design has been refined for a long time, and all the major bugs worked out. A custom car would probably run as well as a first model year car at best (Ford Focus anyone?), and chances are much worse. Expect lots of little bugs and nuisances, and a few major problems thrown in.
Also, on the idea of parts and repairs, parts could get pretty obscure in a few years, especially if the company goes under. With any reasonably popular model of car, atleast there are thousands just like it to salvage parts from. It sure is nice to go to the junkyard and find several cars just like mine that I can part out. That simply won't be happening with these custom cars.
So while the idea picking and choosing custom colors, radios, seats, and options as we know them now from the major automakers is great - I think the idea of being about to pick and choose things like the chassis, body styles, drive trains, alternators, brake systems etc. are a bad idea.
SUVs are surprisenly cramped for tall people. The best cars seem to be 2 door coupes that are really meant for 2 people only, or some large vans like the Econoline. Also the big American sedans like the Cadillacs and Lincolns are fairly roomy.
Perhaps they should consider setting up some shoutcast/icecast style stations to stream music over the college LAN? Assuming it can be done cheaply and legally, this would be pretty neat. If people like the radio stations enough, they will spend less time messing with MP3's.
It would sure beat a DRM'ed library of music that I have to pay for, that would lack the convience,variety, and quality of what is already on my harddrive.
I just tried it myself, and guess what? I get 22ms too. However I don't have 8mbps DSL.
We used to get DSL through the local phone company. 100-110ms was not that uncommon during the day. (I kid you not!)
Interestingly, it takes 3ms to get to the modem. Actually that's not that bad considering about 50ft of cable between this computer and the router/modem in the basement.
Just look for a blue glow coming from the cockpit's screens?
Seriously though, in this day and age wars are even less "civil" than they were 90 years ago. I couldn't see today's pilots waiting for their opponent to unjam their weaponry. If it breaks and has to reboot, you'll be toast.
And they also said Windows 95 would run on a 386 with 4MB of ram. Anyone ever try that? They also said Windows 98 will run on a 486-66 with 8MB of ram. I've seen that and it's not pretty.
It is possible, and it is useable, it certainly is not too responsive.
What's so hard about installing Linux? Actually what you need to do is stay late some night, and after everyone leaves put a Knoppix disk in their workstations, and reboot. The looks on everyone's face the next day should be priceless.
There are plenty of smaller ISPs that offer broadband too. Besides, it's the act of sharing that is illegal, not how fast your connection is. I've shared over 10000 files on my 56k before.
However, I wouldn't be surprised to hear of some computer with a lot of storage and a really fast connection being the equilvent of 327 computers or something like that.