1.2 Million hours? Sure, I know some drives do last a long time but 137 years? And I certainly wouldn't put my money on a fast, hot, 10,000RPM drive lasting that long either.
I would like too see any relatively complex machine last 137 years without repair, even under ideal conditions. Especially something as sensitive as a hard disk.
Perhaps a different spin on donating computers to school...
A while ago I asked an electronics teachers if they wanted an old computer for their class. They took it and had a bunch of fun tearing it apart and playing around with it. While the digital stuff was a bit out of reach, they were able to hack apart the analog parts of the video and get the monitor to turn on different pixels and stuff (so I hear, I would think some of that kind of stuff could be quite dangerous). They also had great fun with the disk drives (powerful motors and magnets in those old hard drives). They also learned a lot from the 120V AC to 12V DC power supply. Not sure what happened to it after they were done though. Probably put it back together to see if it booted...
Well do you want to do it? How long do you think it would take to set it up and configure? What happens once you give it to someone, then something craps out? Do you really want to be stuck supporting all these various old computers, each one different than the others?
Personally, I would not want to spend my day trying to get Linux running on a bunch of 486/Pentium class systems. Supporting the old hardware, obscure drivers for sound, video, and CD. All the flakey hardware too, enough to make me pull my hair out.
Also, I find that many of the faster computers that get thrown out not because they are too slow it's because they are simply cheap peices of shit. Hell, recently I recycled a 333Mhz machine (eMachine), a 200Mhz machine (Packard Bell), 380Mhz (no-name pile of crap). These computers were plenty fast, but they simply crashed if you looked at them the wrong way. I kept and still use two HPs, a 75Mhz and a 100Mhz which are both rock solid.
Probably what you would end up doing is taking the best computers in the lot, and trashing the rest because it's too old/too flakey/not supported/not worth the time/simply busted/etc. And you are back to your old problem, what to do with the 9/10 or whatever computers that you don't want?
I find XP left in it's default state to be fairly sluggish. XP itself isn't sluggish, but with all those fancy eye candy options it feels like it. Sure, having the menu you clicked on fade in and out looks cool for about 30 seconds, but after that it's just annoying. Same goes with basically all the eye candy Microsoft has thrown into their desktop since Windows 95. I'm guessing he has all that stuff turned off like I do?
After all is said and done... I actually prefer Moo to it's sequels. I think the original AI was the smartest. Sure, it's less complex but at the same time it doesn't have to handle as much. The Moo2 AI was pretty stupid, especially when it came to ship designs.
The other thing about Moo was it had less micromanagement than Moo2. After a while Moo2 just became too tedious. I hated having a large number of planets, and after a while I would simply stop expanding because it took too long and was a huge pain in the ass to build all the stuff the planet needed to become reasonably productive. Meanwhile in Moo all I had to do was sliue some bars around every once and a while.
The other thing interesting about Moo was the bugs in the AI that would sometimes give it some insane number of ships, something like 32000 ships in one stack. The AI would then take his uber fleet and blow up half my planets while I was running around panicing trying to get the blackhole generator on some ship. Then suddenly mid-rampage the AI would decide that design was out of date and scrap the whole lot. So damn funny... those were the days....
The only problem with Trillian is that they reversed engineered the protocols for the IM services, and thus it sometimes acts a little strange, though it's getting better.
Also it's full of security holes. http://www.der-keiler.de/Mailing-Lists/Sec uriteam/ 2002-09/0095.html
How is AOL going to charge for IM, when others offer it for free? If someone starts charging everyone will flock to the free services. If the other free services start charging new ones will spring up. It's kind of the same problem that the free email providers have - except worse, as people tend to be a little more reluctant to change email than IM screennames.
As for this business IM, how do they expect to charge for that? Games and matchmaking are not going to cut it. And how many people really use those features anyway? I certainly don't use 98% of the features of ICQ2002. And what's to keep the businesses from installing the free version anyway?
And finally they really need to address the spam issue too. I used to get ICQ spam constantly before I turned it so only people on my contact list can message me. And ICQ seems to have no place to report the spam either. AIM seems to be better set up with the warning level system atleast.
And they tried to steal my CD player. The theif obviously had no idea what he was doing because he attacked the CD player with a screw driver. They managed to pry the whole front of the CD player off, which set off the alarm in it (it is an old Pioneer with their DFS alarm built in, for those who know what that means). The dumbshit fled, leaving the CD player and everything else in the car like my CDs, sub, change in the change tray, etc. When I came back to my car I found the door open in the CD player in a couple of peices. I carefully put everything back together, and by god it still works! And if I ever find that dumbshit I'm going to rearrange his face.
So in summary: Dumbass car theif: 0. 5 year old low end Pioneer CD player: 1.
I have a friend who works in some company where they need 50Hz power for something. Their solution was a large 60Hz motor connected to 50Hz generator. Sure, it was kind of silly but it worked.
Digital readouts instead of gauges have been done, and overall people hate them. You can find them in some GM cars from the 80's. I've driven them, and they don't really annoy me that much, but I would take analog over the digital anytime. And cars with digital odometers that can't be read with the engine off annoy me to no end. Atleast the GM engineers in the 80's had enough sense to stick with an analog odometer.
Also, most cars still use incandescent bulbs in the dash. Even if some of the illumination is done with other things, you still find incandescent bulbs in things like switches, the radio etc. About the only thing to do is to use the dimmer switch (they will atleast last a lot longer).
I agree. Most programs I either use the default skin, like in Winamp 2. Or if the program's default skin is hideous (like Windows Media player) I go and find a good, clean, simple skin to use like WiMP. (http://www.whichsoever.com/wimp/)
And who said the default Windows XP is good? I find that thing awful, the first thing I do is turn back to the "classic" theme, and turn off all the stupid crap I can. And since 95% of the new stuff in Windows XP is simply interface changes to Windows 2000, I say you might as well run Windows 2000 to begin with.
Overall, the problem with skins is that people go all out generally to make them look cool - which many of them do, but the user inferace suffers (crappy designed buttons that are poorly labeled or hidden). Another problem is that they are well designed and look cool, but end up taking WAY too much real estate on the screen. I want my Winamp to take up a very small corner of the screen, not half the damn monitor!
Heh, I would of removed/hidden all the mp3's that I did not rip myself off of the disks I own. Throw in some of the legally downloaded free songs off of mp3.com, etc. When they popped up I would of said those are my music and the files are all perfectly legal due to fair use. When they ask to see the CDs I'll tell them that they are in storage 100 miles away.
Just to see what they would do (they would probably nuke the files anyway) Besides they would have to *prove* that I do not own those CDs.
It's the truth too. I didn't want to bother with my CD's at school because they take up space, and they would have a tendency to walk off. So I bought a huge HDD and ripped everything to mp3. So now I can enjoy my music, and *I* don't have to worry about anyone stealing it, though on the other hand the RIAA seems to worry plenty enough about that.
No kidding about privacy. They can't just walk in and scan a student's personal computer. If they tried that on me I would tell them to go to hell. Even with a warrant I would still tell them to go to hell (who do they think they are, the police?) If it meant me getting kicked off the school net so be it, even though getting back on after being banned is easy (changing your MAC address usually does the trick)
Now if they hooked themselves up to the school network and browsed people's shares that would be different. I also suppose it would be okay to scan the university-owned machines for caches of files on them, but scanning students email (even when it resides on the university mail servers), is going over the line.
Atleast my school doesn't do that. And I have enough sense now to not share files to just anyone over the network. Zonealarm is great for this, as I can specify the IPs of people that I allow to see my shares, and to everyone else my computer is effectively invisible.
Don't you remember MSAV.EXE? Microsoft did bundle Anti-virus software a long time ago, I think the last version that had it was Dos 6.22 I seem to even recall that Windows 3.1 had a front-end to it too.
I believe they lost some lawsuit and had to remove it from the OS. Either that or they removed it because they didn't feel like updating it and it was getting terribly out of date (afaik you could not update the database of virii, and the database was c.1993). I did use it to catch some infected floppies back in the day.
Comments like these is the reason that the so called third parties haven't been able to do much of anything. The whole throwing your vote away if you don't vote democrat/republican thing is a crock of crap, but as long as people believe it then it's serving it's purpose.
Or any other cold environment where they use salt on the roads? There are two concerns I have, salt and the cold.
Will this new plastic paint be more resistant to the salt? If so then that would be good. But what about when the steel underneath starts to rust? With standard paint you get the bubbling - will this push off the plastic coating exposing the metal underneath for even more rust?
The other problem is the extreme cold. In warm weather plastic panels are nice, they are dent resistant and bounce back. In the really cold parts of the year they crack and shatter however. I could see this new paint cracking off in after a minor accident in the cold.
You mean you still listen to the radio?
Seriously, I would like see some numbers on commercial radio's audiences the past few years. They have to of lost a lot of listeners out there, people like me that have completely stopped listening to radio. Of the people that are left, most of them probably don't listen as much as they used to. It would probably make the decreasing CD sales the RIAA claims look tiny in comparison.
Judging from what I have seen the younger generation has abandoned radio for mp3's and CD's. If someone told me that the number of 15-25 year olds listening to the radio now is 50% of the number in 1996, I would believe it. And the fact that almost all the radio stations here in the Twin Cities, MN, now are classic rock/contemporary rock/soft rock (aka stuff the typical baby boomer likes to listen to) seems to back me up.
I find it most interesting at places where lots of computers are hooked up to a network, like at a college dorm. It's amazing the clueless dolts that share their entire harddrive over the network. You can learn a lot by browsing someone's internet cache. Also, since Windows seems to share My Documents by default, you can read people's homework (usually boring as hell though). About the most interesting was the person sharing all of their instant messaging chat logs. Lets just say that person got around a lot...
The only thing is that you have to be careful, these people who are that clueless usually have a ton of virii, so don't click on goatse.ch.vbs!
I don't listen to commercial radio anymore. It wasn't really a decision I made either, just one day I suddenly realized I hadn't turned on a radio in several months.
While I argue that MP3's aren't really hurting CD sales that much, I buy more CDs now than ever, from all the music I have discovered. But MP3's have killed radio for me. Why put up with all the stupid ads, same music played over and over, and annoying DJs when I can so easily load up a playlist of what I want to hear?
Combine MP3's on the computer with all the other gadgets like portable players, car players, etc. and radio has to be hurting. Big time. It's obvious where I live, where we now have like 1 pop station, 1 rap station, and about 8 classic rock/70's/80's/oldies stations. FM Radio has lost the younger generation with their MP3's and CD collections, and it won't be long before no one is tuning in.
I don't own a XM reciever, but have heard other's and it's pretty nice. But it is owned by Clear Channel, so that's one reason I haven't bit (another reason is all those MP3's...But maybe I haven't heard enough of it yet. Just like the classic rock stations here can be tolerated for a little while, until you realize they play the same ~50 songs over and over, despite having DECADES of music to choose from. I swear the radio stations here are run off of some computer with a mp3 player and a 2GB harddrive. Actually, that's probably not far from the truth either.
This may be good for Mp3 storage, or the like. MP3's need very little read speed, though more than 25k/s is needed (25k/s means no better than 192kbps quality). On the other hand, it's very easy to acquire many gigabytes of them and they take up a significant portion of my disk space.
I think it's silly to be storing MP3's on ATA100 7200 RPM harddrives that generate considerable heat, noise, and aren't that reliable anyway. Maybe this new medium will be perfect for our music collections?
I have the Dvorak Model M... I wouldn't give it up for anything... except one that's backlit and programmable.
For now, I'll just do with the soft green illumination from the row of LEDs I stole out of an old B&W scanner.
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Really, I don't care too much about any speed difference, or lack thereof. I HATE RIBBON CABLES. *That* is a good enough reason to switch right there.
1.2 Million hours? Sure, I know some drives do last a long time but 137 years? And I certainly wouldn't put my money on a fast, hot, 10,000RPM drive lasting that long either.
I would like too see any relatively complex machine last 137 years without repair, even under ideal conditions. Especially something as sensitive as a hard disk.
Perhaps a different spin on donating computers to school...
A while ago I asked an electronics teachers if they wanted an old computer for their class. They took it and had a bunch of fun tearing it apart and playing around with it. While the digital stuff was a bit out of reach, they were able to hack apart the analog parts of the video and get the monitor to turn on different pixels and stuff (so I hear, I would think some of that kind of stuff could be quite dangerous). They also had great fun with the disk drives (powerful motors and magnets in those old hard drives). They also learned a lot from the 120V AC to 12V DC power supply. Not sure what happened to it after they were done though. Probably put it back together to see if it booted...
Well do you want to do it? How long do you think it would take to set it up and configure? What happens once you give it to someone, then something craps out? Do you really want to be stuck supporting all these various old computers, each one different than the others?
Personally, I would not want to spend my day trying to get Linux running on a bunch of 486/Pentium class systems. Supporting the old hardware, obscure drivers for sound, video, and CD. All the flakey hardware too, enough to make me pull my hair out.
Also, I find that many of the faster computers that get thrown out not because they are too slow it's because they are simply cheap peices of shit. Hell, recently I recycled a 333Mhz machine (eMachine), a 200Mhz machine (Packard Bell), 380Mhz (no-name pile of crap). These computers were plenty fast, but they simply crashed if you looked at them the wrong way. I kept and still use two HPs, a 75Mhz and a 100Mhz which are both rock solid.
Probably what you would end up doing is taking the best computers in the lot, and trashing the rest because it's too old/too flakey/not supported/not worth the time/simply busted/etc. And you are back to your old problem, what to do with the 9/10 or whatever computers that you don't want?
I find XP left in it's default state to be fairly sluggish. XP itself isn't sluggish, but with all those fancy eye candy options it feels like it. Sure, having the menu you clicked on fade in and out looks cool for about 30 seconds, but after that it's just annoying. Same goes with basically all the eye candy Microsoft has thrown into their desktop since Windows 95. I'm guessing he has all that stuff turned off like I do?
After all is said and done... I actually prefer Moo to it's sequels. I think the original AI was the smartest. Sure, it's less complex but at the same time it doesn't have to handle as much. The Moo2 AI was pretty stupid, especially when it came to ship designs.
The other thing about Moo was it had less micromanagement than Moo2. After a while Moo2 just became too tedious. I hated having a large number of planets, and after a while I would simply stop expanding because it took too long and was a huge pain in the ass to build all the stuff the planet needed to become reasonably productive. Meanwhile in Moo all I had to do was sliue some bars around every once and a while.
The other thing interesting about Moo was the bugs in the AI that would sometimes give it some insane number of ships, something like 32000 ships in one stack. The AI would then take his uber fleet and blow up half my planets while I was running around panicing trying to get the blackhole generator on some ship. Then suddenly mid-rampage the AI would decide that design was out of date and scrap the whole lot. So damn funny... those were the days....
It's too late, they already did that in Windows XP. (yet another reason to stick with 2000Pro)
The only problem with Trillian is that they reversed engineered the protocols for the IM services, and thus it sometimes acts a little strange, though it's getting better.
c uriteam/ 2002-09/0095.html
Also it's full of security holes.
http://www.der-keiler.de/Mailing-Lists/Se
How is AOL going to charge for IM, when others offer it for free? If someone starts charging everyone will flock to the free services. If the other free services start charging new ones will spring up. It's kind of the same problem that the free email providers have - except worse, as people tend to be a little more reluctant to change email than IM screennames.
As for this business IM, how do they expect to charge for that? Games and matchmaking are not going to cut it. And how many people really use those features anyway? I certainly don't use 98% of the features of ICQ2002. And what's to keep the businesses from installing the free version anyway?
And finally they really need to address the spam issue too. I used to get ICQ spam constantly before I turned it so only people on my contact list can message me. And ICQ seems to have no place to report the spam either. AIM seems to be better set up with the warning level system atleast.
And they tried to steal my CD player. The theif obviously had no idea what he was doing because he attacked the CD player with a screw driver. They managed to pry the whole front of the CD player off, which set off the alarm in it (it is an old Pioneer with their DFS alarm built in, for those who know what that means). The dumbshit fled, leaving the CD player and everything else in the car like my CDs, sub, change in the change tray, etc. When I came back to my car I found the door open in the CD player in a couple of peices. I carefully put everything back together, and by god it still works! And if I ever find that dumbshit I'm going to rearrange his face.
So in summary: Dumbass car theif: 0. 5 year old low end Pioneer CD player: 1.
I have a friend who works in some company where they need 50Hz power for something. Their solution was a large 60Hz motor connected to 50Hz generator. Sure, it was kind of silly but it worked.
Yeah, but if I wanted to hear something like Eminem or some other crap, I would just turn on the radio. Who needs Kazaa for that?
Digital readouts instead of gauges have been done, and overall people hate them. You can find them in some GM cars from the 80's. I've driven them, and they don't really annoy me that much, but I would take analog over the digital anytime. And cars with digital odometers that can't be read with the engine off annoy me to no end. Atleast the GM engineers in the 80's had enough sense to stick with an analog odometer.
Also, most cars still use incandescent bulbs in the dash. Even if some of the illumination is done with other things, you still find incandescent bulbs in things like switches, the radio etc. About the only thing to do is to use the dimmer switch (they will atleast last a lot longer).
I suppose that you have never had to fix your car either?
Pioneer has been on it's own for the last 30 years.
I agree. Most programs I either use the default skin, like in Winamp 2. Or if the program's default skin is hideous (like Windows Media player) I go and find a good, clean, simple skin to use like WiMP. (http://www.whichsoever.com/wimp/)
And who said the default Windows XP is good? I find that thing awful, the first thing I do is turn back to the "classic" theme, and turn off all the stupid crap I can. And since 95% of the new stuff in Windows XP is simply interface changes to Windows 2000, I say you might as well run Windows 2000 to begin with.
Overall, the problem with skins is that people go all out generally to make them look cool - which many of them do, but the user inferace suffers (crappy designed buttons that are poorly labeled or hidden). Another problem is that they are well designed and look cool, but end up taking WAY too much real estate on the screen. I want my Winamp to take up a very small corner of the screen, not half the damn monitor!
Heh, I would of removed/hidden all the mp3's that I did not rip myself off of the disks I own. Throw in some of the legally downloaded free songs off of mp3.com, etc. When they popped up I would of said those are my music and the files are all perfectly legal due to fair use. When they ask to see the CDs I'll tell them that they are in storage 100 miles away.
Just to see what they would do (they would probably nuke the files anyway) Besides they would have to *prove* that I do not own those CDs.
It's the truth too. I didn't want to bother with my CD's at school because they take up space, and they would have a tendency to walk off. So I bought a huge HDD and ripped everything to mp3. So now I can enjoy my music, and *I* don't have to worry about anyone stealing it, though on the other hand the RIAA seems to worry plenty enough about that.
No kidding about privacy. They can't just walk in and scan a student's personal computer. If they tried that on me I would tell them to go to hell. Even with a warrant I would still tell them to go to hell (who do they think they are, the police?) If it meant me getting kicked off the school net so be it, even though getting back on after being banned is easy (changing your MAC address usually does the trick)
Now if they hooked themselves up to the school network and browsed people's shares that would be different. I also suppose it would be okay to scan the university-owned machines for caches of files on them, but scanning students email (even when it resides on the university mail servers), is going over the line.
Atleast my school doesn't do that. And I have enough sense now to not share files to just anyone over the network. Zonealarm is great for this, as I can specify the IPs of people that I allow to see my shares, and to everyone else my computer is effectively invisible.
Don't you remember MSAV.EXE? Microsoft did bundle Anti-virus software a long time ago, I think the last version that had it was Dos 6.22 I seem to even recall that Windows 3.1 had a front-end to it too.
I believe they lost some lawsuit and had to remove it from the OS. Either that or they removed it because they didn't feel like updating it and it was getting terribly out of date (afaik you could not update the database of virii, and the database was c.1993). I did use it to catch some infected floppies back in the day.
Comments like these is the reason that the so called third parties haven't been able to do much of anything. The whole throwing your vote away if you don't vote democrat/republican thing is a crock of crap, but as long as people believe it then it's serving it's purpose.
Or any other cold environment where they use salt on the roads? There are two concerns I have, salt and the cold. Will this new plastic paint be more resistant to the salt? If so then that would be good. But what about when the steel underneath starts to rust? With standard paint you get the bubbling - will this push off the plastic coating exposing the metal underneath for even more rust? The other problem is the extreme cold. In warm weather plastic panels are nice, they are dent resistant and bounce back. In the really cold parts of the year they crack and shatter however. I could see this new paint cracking off in after a minor accident in the cold.
You mean you still listen to the radio? Seriously, I would like see some numbers on commercial radio's audiences the past few years. They have to of lost a lot of listeners out there, people like me that have completely stopped listening to radio. Of the people that are left, most of them probably don't listen as much as they used to. It would probably make the decreasing CD sales the RIAA claims look tiny in comparison. Judging from what I have seen the younger generation has abandoned radio for mp3's and CD's. If someone told me that the number of 15-25 year olds listening to the radio now is 50% of the number in 1996, I would believe it. And the fact that almost all the radio stations here in the Twin Cities, MN, now are classic rock/contemporary rock/soft rock (aka stuff the typical baby boomer likes to listen to) seems to back me up.
I find it most interesting at places where lots of computers are hooked up to a network, like at a college dorm. It's amazing the clueless dolts that share their entire harddrive over the network. You can learn a lot by browsing someone's internet cache. Also, since Windows seems to share My Documents by default, you can read people's homework (usually boring as hell though). About the most interesting was the person sharing all of their instant messaging chat logs. Lets just say that person got around a lot... The only thing is that you have to be careful, these people who are that clueless usually have a ton of virii, so don't click on goatse.ch.vbs!
I don't listen to commercial radio anymore. It wasn't really a decision I made either, just one day I suddenly realized I hadn't turned on a radio in several months.
While I argue that MP3's aren't really hurting CD sales that much, I buy more CDs now than ever, from all the music I have discovered. But MP3's have killed radio for me. Why put up with all the stupid ads, same music played over and over, and annoying DJs when I can so easily load up a playlist of what I want to hear?
Combine MP3's on the computer with all the other gadgets like portable players, car players, etc. and radio has to be hurting. Big time. It's obvious where I live, where we now have like 1 pop station, 1 rap station, and about 8 classic rock/70's/80's/oldies stations. FM Radio has lost the younger generation with their MP3's and CD collections, and it won't be long before no one is tuning in.
I don't own a XM reciever, but have heard other's and it's pretty nice. But it is owned by Clear Channel, so that's one reason I haven't bit (another reason is all those MP3's...But maybe I haven't heard enough of it yet. Just like the classic rock stations here can be tolerated for a little while, until you realize they play the same ~50 songs over and over, despite having DECADES of music to choose from. I swear the radio stations here are run off of some computer with a mp3 player and a 2GB harddrive. Actually, that's probably not far from the truth either.
This may be good for Mp3 storage, or the like. MP3's need very little read speed, though more than 25k/s is needed (25k/s means no better than 192kbps quality). On the other hand, it's very easy to acquire many gigabytes of them and they take up a significant portion of my disk space. I think it's silly to be storing MP3's on ATA100 7200 RPM harddrives that generate considerable heat, noise, and aren't that reliable anyway. Maybe this new medium will be perfect for our music collections?
I have the Dvorak Model M... I wouldn't give it up for anything... except one that's backlit and programmable. For now, I'll just do with the soft green illumination from the row of LEDs I stole out of an old B&W scanner.