Agreed, I was never into music so I forgot that one. My brother had an Amiga and it was great for games, although I had Dungeon Master on the Atari ST and that was enough for me;-) One of the few games I've literally spent weeks and weeks on. Others were Elite, Lords of Midnight and shadowfire on the ZX Spectrum.
When I was 9 or 10 I climbed onto the neighbour's roof to get a model plane back. There was a staircase leading up to a flat area, a two foot wall and then the roof itself. I climbed that wall onto the tiles and put my hand out to grab the railing (a kind of stranded black wire).
Then I realised it was an overhead power line. There were four of them, crossing the house at shoulder level.
I don't know what made me stop my hand, inches from grabbing hold of that high voltage wire, but I've made the most of my life ever since. (And I never got that damned plane back, either.)
Regarding the exclusivity of this product... Back in 1991 I was selling the first colour laptops in Australia for AUD$13,999 each. (25mhz 386SX for the curious) They were the exclusive domain of rich execs. And now?
Right now this jukebox thing is $17,000 or whatever. Give it a year or two and they could be as common as DVD players, and around the same price.
A couple of years back I paid out a fair bit of money for 2 x 120gb drives (when they were the biggest available) so that I could store all my games and application CDs on my file server at home. I use Virtual CD to pick any one at any time, no more hunt-the-disk amongst 7 96-capacity CD wallets or hunt-the-nocd-with-trojan on the net.
Convenience and user-friendliness, who'd have thought people would want that?
I have a bookcase alongside me with roughly 250 DVDs in it. I've considered using the now-empty CD wallets, but that will scratch them. Basically I've stopped buying DVDs because I've run out of storage room. I like to collect so that I can watch something on the spur of the moment, so rental is right out. Broadband in OZ is a joke, so there's no chance of content over the net. A big storage tank with all those films on... that's an attractive idea.
Me too, although my apps are written in VB6 so the likelihood of me porting them is slim.
Instead, I've made a load of internal changes to make them wine-friendly. For example, ditching all my database code which used to run on the MDAC and JET runtimes - now I use flat ascii for small stuff and records/random access databases for the larger ones.
When I started programming I had 640kb of RAM to play with, which means I automatically select disk-based access when storage needs exceed about 10kb. Nowadays who cares if you load a 100kb data file into memory when the program starts, and write it out from time to time?
Product placement! Every song could become a lengthy commercial for selected high-quality items of interest to the consumer. They could even delve into their back catalogues and digitally enhance older tracks by substituting words like 'smoke', 'like' and 'scavenger' for well-known brands.
Then they could do this with movies, cunningly inserting sponsored products at the most inopportune moments, and-- Oh...
I use Mysql (and PHP) because the first article I read on dynamic web pages involved LAMP. Finding more LAMP articles was a snap, and a week later my site was working and I didn't care what else was out there.
Man, I remember an Atari ST enthusiast back in 1987. He owned the only ST shop in town, and he imported about AUD$14,000 worth of gear for demo purposes (big HD, controller cards, etc - this was before Atari Megadrives. My Megadrive cost me around AUD$1750, so that kind of dough wasn't excessive.) He hooked up a DX7 keyboard with midi cables, both monitors (via switchbox), laser printer... the whole works.
Then he plugged it in and fired it up.
Pity the external hard drive transformer was 110v, and Aussie power is 240.
A year or so later he could laugh about the way the drive heads were fused to the platters when he opened it up for a look. At the time he was somewhat distraught.
Another less expensive tale - the tech at a computer shop I used to work for ordered in an 80mb hard drive for a customer in the days when 20mb was the standard. (yes - MB. It was a long time ago...) This thing cost around AUD$800 (about US$600 at current prices), and unfortunately the molex socket on the drive was quite flexible and his glasses weren't quite strong enough. So he put the Molex power plug in upside down.
End result: I found him wreathed in magic blue smoke, explaining to the distributor that a sudden fault had arisen with the new and very expensive hard drive.
I read a couple of posts about 350w PSUs blowing capacitors and taking out motherboards, CPUs, etc and that was enough for me. Like I said, I took this PSU test and ended up feeling that my unit was a stick of dynamite with a hissing fuse.
With only 1/2 the USB devices I've got plugged in the requirement is over 400 watts, and I was using a 350w PSU (granted, that was before I stuck in the 6800GT which uses a heap)
Well, I bought the PSU because of problems with a Radeon 9600XT. My old 4200Ti staggered a bit with the Doom 3 demo, and the Athlon 64 3400+ deserved a better card to stretch its legs. The 9600 seemed like a reasonable card, despite my having used NVidia since the Geforce 2 GTS days.
From day one the 9600XT was as unstable as anything, giving me one VPU error after another. I persisted for 5 or 6 weeks, trying everything - and I mean everything. It was still useless after I installed the new 550W PSU so I took the Radeon back and paid the extra (a lot extra) for an Nvidia 6800GT card. Completely wild and over the top, but you're only 37 once.
I've been grinning ever since, especially when using Half Life 2;-)
Costs a fair bit, weighs more than a house brick and could probably power the rest of the street, but I reckon I need it. When video cards need 1 or 2 molex connectors you know they're sucking up a healthy whack of juice, and I'm running 3 hard drives, 2 DVD burners and about 4 external USB hubs with all kinds of junk plugged in (including 2 external 2.5" drives and 3 external 3.5, although the latter have their own power)
I did that online test where you put in the hardware and it calculates your PSU requirements. Mine said 'portable nuclear power station', but the 550W Antec was all I could find.
Anyone know if card manufacturers are planning slower, low-power modes? I like the way the Athlon 64 winds itself back when not under load, but the fan in my 6800GT runs full tilt despite the fact I use 3d features maybe once a fortnight. (Sure, I wish I could use it more, but work before pleasure and all that.)
I've been following the discussion on the neverending PA thread, and congrats on a fantastic sting. I was really moved by the post about a lass who had only two copies of her novel at a book fair because that was all she could afford to buy from her 'publisher' for the event.
There's nothing wrong with POD or self-pub if you know what you're getting into - I self-published three SF novels over the past 4 years and they were picked up by a reputable publisher just last week - but dressing things up to fool hopeful writers is sickening.
Andrew Burt, the owner of the site which I linked to, wrote one of the chapters in the book we're all talking about. He runs critters, an SF/F critique group, which is also hosted on the site where the PDF is stored.
I'm an author myself, so I'm hardly going to link to illegal copies of books floating around the web.
As the link no longer works, perhaps he and the other authors involved just realised they have a potential best-seller on their hands and asked aburt to remove the PDF so they can cash in. If so, more power to them. On the other hand, perhaps he took the PDF down because their server is melting under a slashdot-induced feeding frenzy. It's almost 600kb, and a few hundred thousand simultaneous downloads would be painful.
Unless you have a business account (which I need solely for the fixed IP address) Then you pay $105 p/m for 512/128 and a 2gb/month cap. I've watched the iiNet home plans soaring over the past 2 years, but have the business plans improved? Not really... The plan I'm on has been replaced with a $149/m 40gb/m 512/128 one. For me to upgrade to a faster speed, I'm looking at $199 per month. Nuts to that.
An equivalent home plan without fixed IP looks like it's about fifty bucks a month. I'm not complaining - companies are entitled to charge what they can get away with, but a little bit of evening up on the business accounts wouldn't hurt.
Disclosure: I have shares in iiNet, and if they're charging other business customers like they they charge me, I'm keeping them...
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed, I was never into music so I forgot that one. My brother had an Amiga and it was great for games, although I had Dungeon Master on the Atari ST and that was enough for me ;-) One of the few games I've literally spent weeks and weeks on. Others were Elite, Lords of Midnight and shadowfire on the ZX Spectrum.
"The instant revival abilities mean a future mission, if it found anything on Mars, could conceivably culture it and bring it back alive."
Great, haven't these idiots seen Alien?
Not for business use. The Atari ST was best for DTP/WP.
When I was 9 or 10 I climbed onto the neighbour's roof to get a model plane back. There was a staircase leading up to a flat area, a two foot wall and then the roof itself. I climbed that wall onto the tiles and put my hand out to grab the railing (a kind of stranded black wire).
Then I realised it was an overhead power line. There were four of them, crossing the house at shoulder level.
I don't know what made me stop my hand, inches from grabbing hold of that high voltage wire, but I've made the most of my life ever since. (And I never got that damned plane back, either.)
Nah, Earth to moon is $7,900,000 but the trip back is free - They just push you out the airlock and let gravity take its course...
Regarding the exclusivity of this product... Back in 1991 I was selling the first colour laptops in Australia for AUD$13,999 each. (25mhz 386SX for the curious) They were the exclusive domain of rich execs. And now?
Right now this jukebox thing is $17,000 or whatever. Give it a year or two and they could be as common as DVD players, and around the same price.
A couple of years back I paid out a fair bit of money for 2 x 120gb drives (when they were the biggest available) so that I could store all my games and application CDs on my file server at home. I use Virtual CD to pick any one at any time, no more hunt-the-disk amongst 7 96-capacity CD wallets or hunt-the-nocd-with-trojan on the net.
Convenience and user-friendliness, who'd have thought people would want that?
I have a bookcase alongside me with roughly 250 DVDs in it. I've considered using the now-empty CD wallets, but that will scratch them. Basically I've stopped buying DVDs because I've run out of storage room. I like to collect so that I can watch something on the spur of the moment, so rental is right out. Broadband in OZ is a joke, so there's no chance of content over the net. A big storage tank with all those films on... that's an attractive idea.
Me too, although my apps are written in VB6 so the likelihood of me porting them is slim.
Instead, I've made a load of internal changes to make them wine-friendly. For example, ditching all my database code which used to run on the MDAC and JET runtimes - now I use flat ascii for small stuff and records/random access databases for the larger ones.
When I started programming I had 640kb of RAM to play with, which means I automatically select disk-based access when storage needs exceed about 10kb. Nowadays who cares if you load a 100kb data file into memory when the program starts, and write it out from time to time?
Product placement! Every song could become a lengthy commercial for selected high-quality items of interest to the consumer. They could even delve into their back catalogues and digitally enhance older tracks by substituting words like 'smoke', 'like' and 'scavenger' for well-known brands.
Then they could do this with movies, cunningly inserting sponsored products at the most inopportune moments, and-- Oh...
There's only 50 people watching, it's just that they're all hitting reload over and over to watch the counter climb. Amazingly, it does...
The slow response is due to another 50 slashdotters trying to leach the entire site so they can post 'It's slashdotted already, but here's a cache'.
I agree - the parts hook together so well and it's a neat acronym to boot.
I use Mysql (and PHP) because the first article I read on dynamic web pages involved LAMP. Finding more LAMP articles was a snap, and a week later my site was working and I didn't care what else was out there.
Man, I remember an Atari ST enthusiast back in 1987. He owned the only ST shop in town, and he imported about AUD$14,000 worth of gear for demo purposes (big HD, controller cards, etc - this was before Atari Megadrives. My Megadrive cost me around AUD$1750, so that kind of dough wasn't excessive.) He hooked up a DX7 keyboard with midi cables, both monitors (via switchbox), laser printer ... the whole works.
Then he plugged it in and fired it up.
Pity the external hard drive transformer was 110v, and Aussie power is 240.
A year or so later he could laugh about the way the drive heads were fused to the platters when he opened it up for a look. At the time he was somewhat distraught.
Another less expensive tale - the tech at a computer shop I used to work for ordered in an 80mb hard drive for a customer in the days when 20mb was the standard. (yes - MB. It was a long time ago...) This thing cost around AUD$800 (about US$600 at current prices), and unfortunately the molex socket on the drive was quite flexible and his glasses weren't quite strong enough. So he put the Molex power plug in upside down.
End result: I found him wreathed in magic blue smoke, explaining to the distributor that a sudden fault had arisen with the new and very expensive hard drive.
I read a couple of posts about 350w PSUs blowing capacitors and taking out motherboards, CPUs, etc and that was enough for me. Like I said, I took this PSU test and ended up feeling that my unit was a stick of dynamite with a hissing fuse.
Here's the link to the site I used: PSU Wattage Calculator
With only 1/2 the USB devices I've got plugged in the requirement is over 400 watts, and I was using a 350w PSU (granted, that was before I stuck in the 6800GT which uses a heap)
Well, I bought the PSU because of problems with a Radeon 9600XT. My old 4200Ti staggered a bit with the Doom 3 demo, and the Athlon 64 3400+ deserved a better card to stretch its legs. The 9600 seemed like a reasonable card, despite my having used NVidia since the Geforce 2 GTS days.
;-)
From day one the 9600XT was as unstable as anything, giving me one VPU error after another. I persisted for 5 or 6 weeks, trying everything - and I mean everything. It was still useless after I installed the new 550W PSU so I took the Radeon back and paid the extra (a lot extra) for an Nvidia 6800GT card. Completely wild and over the top, but you're only 37 once.
I've been grinning ever since, especially when using Half Life 2
Costs a fair bit, weighs more than a house brick and could probably power the rest of the street, but I reckon I need it. When video cards need 1 or 2 molex connectors you know they're sucking up a healthy whack of juice, and I'm running 3 hard drives, 2 DVD burners and about 4 external USB hubs with all kinds of junk plugged in (including 2 external 2.5" drives and 3 external 3.5, although the latter have their own power)
I did that online test where you put in the hardware and it calculates your PSU requirements. Mine said 'portable nuclear power station', but the 550W Antec was all I could find.
Anyone know if card manufacturers are planning slower, low-power modes? I like the way the Athlon 64 winds itself back when not under load, but the fan in my 6800GT runs full tilt despite the fact I use 3d features maybe once a fortnight. (Sure, I wish I could use it more, but work before pleasure and all that.)
Atlanta Nights by Travis Tea:
;-))
Lulu Sales Rank: 26
It was 55 last night. What happens when it hits #1, do they list it on the main page with a HIGHLY RECOMMENDED or #1 BESTSELLER tag?
I've been following the discussion on the neverending PA thread, and congrats on a fantastic sting. I was really moved by the post about a lass who had only two copies of her novel at a book fair because that was all she could afford to buy from her 'publisher' for the event.
There's nothing wrong with POD or self-pub if you know what you're getting into - I self-published three SF novels over the past 4 years and they were picked up by a reputable publisher just last week - but dressing things up to fool hopeful writers is sickening.
Andrew Burt, the owner of the site which I linked to, wrote one of the chapters in the book we're all talking about. He runs critters, an SF/F critique group, which is also hosted on the site where the PDF is stored.
I'm an author myself, so I'm hardly going to link to illegal copies of books floating around the web.
As the link no longer works, perhaps he and the other authors involved just realised they have a potential best-seller on their hands and asked aburt to remove the PDF so they can cash in. If so, more power to them. On the other hand, perhaps he took the PDF down because their server is melting under a slashdot-induced feeding frenzy. It's almost 600kb, and a few hundred thousand simultaneous downloads would be painful.
The manuscript PDF link worked on the 1st of February, because that's when I got my copy.
Or do you mean the other links?
And once again with markup:
http://critters.critique.org/sting/
They did:
http://critters.critique.org/sting/
I've got a subdomain. I'm shifting stuff off it, but it's linked from a few places and it'd be a problem to drop it.
Unless you have a business account (which I need solely for the fixed IP address) Then you pay $105 p/m for 512/128 and a 2gb/month cap. I've watched the iiNet home plans soaring over the past 2 years, but have the business plans improved? Not really... The plan I'm on has been replaced with a $149/m 40gb/m 512/128 one. For me to upgrade to a faster speed, I'm looking at $199 per month. Nuts to that.
An equivalent home plan without fixed IP looks like it's about fifty bucks a month. I'm not complaining - companies are entitled to charge what they can get away with, but a little bit of evening up on the business accounts wouldn't hurt.
Disclosure: I have shares in iiNet, and if they're charging other business customers like they they charge me, I'm keeping them...
Wait until you try 3.4_beta1 with split ebuilds... Unless you already have, of course.