I built one, without voice input capability, for less than $250 US. Sunnylab GXLite MediaGX POS board($40), ES1371 soundcard ($20, OEM), GL5446 videocard ($14), 8G Maxtor HD($79, on sale), 100W micro supply ($10 used) and a small inverter ($59). With a wee bit of modification, (a pair of L-shaped PCI adapters to lay the cards flat and a roll-your-own DC-DC supply) you could fit it into a case slightly smaller than the Kenwood changer it replaced. You can roll your own supply for $20 in parts, (a $50 savings) and toss the video card for a voice interface. Just add a uni mike to the FD ES1371 and your software. Buy in bulk and I'm willing to bet you could get the constituent parts for under $170, add a case for $20, and still make a decent profit at $279.99 final retail..
I belive that it was asked for. Dell did something similar on their PII 'business' machines; Add a interrogatable checksum to the mobo that could be used to validate a given hardware configuration. If the machine shipped with a Rage/128M/8G/PII-350, the checksum was set accordingly. You can reset the checksum with a password, and interrogate it in any number of ways. (BIOS, software over a network, dos debug) Unfortunatly, I've only ever seen it used to figure out which machines shipped with 128M and which ones Dell decided to short us on.
VB is okay. Best thing ever for throwing together a working proof-of-concept in a couple of hours or for throwing a pretty wrapper around that cryptic little bastard you've had hanging around. It's generally NOT the best thing, but you can do just about anything in VB.
Now that I've said that, I'm back to finish this plain 'ol C++ program in joe, skim 'Perl Cookbook' for some inspiration, and then I'm going to contemplate a gcc port to AS/400..
I see a lot of bytching about the site's presentation, and especially about the fact it was done in Frontpage. Don't like it? Do something about it! We're all closet web designers, and while many of us should stay in said closet, someone could whip out a 200% improvement in a couple of hours. So toss in a little elbow grease and send em a concept page. If one of you is half as hot as most of the complaintants act, they'll be floored..
Custom FS, and reduced volume may be tolerable. What about storing the parity information outside of the normal disk area? Say we're working with 1440k floppies. You can actually fit 1600k on the disk. Use the first 1440k for a MSDOS/MINIX/etc filesystem, and the remaining 160k for parity.
You'd need at least nine disks in the set, and you'd have to carry (n>9)+1 disks (the extra disk being the rebuild utility) but they would seem to any unknowing PC to be ordinary install media. No custom filesystem, and probably easy to implement.
As several people have pointed out, RAID-(X) is trivial to do with CD-R/RW, and is easily usable on floppies. I use it all the time. Several other people have linked to my shoddy HOWTO on CD-RAID, and that will get you going if you really want a RAID. Keep in mind that it is totally unusable unless you have a system with (n) CD/floppy drives or enough spare HD space to hold (n-1) cd images.
I wouldn't do it with floppies. Disk images on a bootable CD-R/RW work quite well. If a disk craps out, boot to the CD and make a new disk image. Writing a bootable CD with a small Linux or *BSD install and all of the images is easy. Of course, that means you have to carry (n + 1) + backup CD, but that shouldn't be terrible.
According to several people, all of those ISA cards and sub-gig drives reside somewhere in the scattered mess I call a bedroom.
The prob with online is that everything is so cheap; Sure, Steve in Seattle has the perfect IDE controller for $5, but shipping is nearly $15 and I have to wait a week.
I've had reasonably good results with Mom and Pop computer shops. They'll usually have someone's old junker on hand from a 'trade-in' special or it was declared DOA. When you're in a pinch for a DX2-66 or a couple of 30-pin SIMMS, you'll be able to get it same afternoon with a couple of calls.
My next best bet has been trade shows. For me, there's one within sane driving distance every week or so. I've gotten some real gems from vendors that held on to the merchandise long after it became obselete because they hoped it might garner a higher price later. 4 meg VLB video cards, VLB SCSI adapters, single-volt Pentium boards can all be had for just a couple of bucks. The trade show circuit has been the only successful provider of MFM/RLL drives and controllers. And if you find a rarity cheap, buy more than you need now. I've been stuck time and time again when I ran out of ISA video cards or needed just one more 500M HD.
Auctions, well, have sucked. They may have what you need, but I usually pay more. Anywhere else, it's one dealer, one buyer, and the dealer knows this is probably his only chance to sell. Auctions ALWAYS have someone who will want to outbid you. I've seen a UGLY $4 garden gnome go for $15.
Private (companies, schools, etc) sales have been totally variable. Schools/business will often get rid of mass amounts of old 'commercial' equipment; Suns, Alphas, VAXen. They got the equipment for next to nothing (or have depreciated it to nothing), and are not looking for much more than someone who will haul it away without being paid for the pleasure. Then again, I have seen quite a few that reeked of an accountant wanting to funnel bucks back into the departmental coffers. They usually want some insane amount based on exterior MV depreciation, and will stick to it. Expect only 'whole' equipment from them.
PLEASE NOTE: I've been out of the loop for a while; I work for a large leasing company, and all I really need to do these days is offer the appropriate person 7 cents on the dollar towards FMV and they will scrape up whatever my heart desires. It's me or the scrap bin, and the scrap bin charges them. I've been trying to convince them that I could get the stuff out tertiary market AND turn a sizable profit, but they havn't bitten..
First Meept!, then the real Mr. Petrified, then Fattime and Lubie, now you?? We'll only have OOG!! Well, OOG and the "I'M GONNA KICK YOUR ASS" guy.. C'ya, we'll certainly miss you..
WTF? Not only do I have to look at the the RN sponsored adverts by using the fscking player, but now the stream provider can spam me?
Just wait. The little fscker will get into a registry war with IE 5.0 over who is the default browser. I have a hard enough time convincing it to NOT play.mp3 files as is!
All I know is I'd rather have a crushed Yugo, 12x14x24, in my living room as a 'conversation piece' than a running AMC Pacer with that Gawd-awful four in my driveway.
A Pacer? That'd better be the 258 CID model.. Otherwise you'd be better off tossing a crushed Yugo in!! Please note, the Eagle has a PI stripped from a 1975 U.S.G.S. Cherokee.
I'll sweeten the pot with three dogeared copies of Byte from the eighties, a low mileage Chrysler Torqueflite (for said Eagle), the open tin of Altoids on my desk, and a box of fancy company logo pens that strangly enough found their way into my briefcase.
Koosh guns?!? Bah.. I'll see that bid and up you one complete set of System 3000 manuals, a 1980 AMC Eagle wagon with a blown clutch pack and a tick in #6, and the loose change in my watchpocket. (About a buck fifty US)
The early Clappers were more fun.. They picked up RF noise like they were designed for it. Take a lantern battery and a 12v relay and you could make them flick on and off crazily from fifteen feet away..
Okay.. Let's put it this way. I have a mission critical program. We'll call it Midnight Modeller. Now, this program is the only one with the particular feature set I need. Unfortunatly, its been so long unmaintained that all I can get functioning is a binary that is known vunerable.
I have two options; Install the wrappers, or slog through 18,000 lines of code to modernize it.
Or another:
I have a commercial application. Let's call it Microsoft Office 2001 for Linux. Am I to trust that in that huge, behemoth of Microsoftian bloat there isn't some exploitable code?
I have two options; Install the wrappers, or pay the vendor BIG MONEY for a copy of the source and audit it.
I got a couple of old, low clock rate boards for nothing, and I only had MII chips on hand to pair them up to. So I have a pair of MII-300's clocked at 233 and 266. Their uptime has only been dictated by how long I can go without 'tweaking' something..
Two OC'd AMD, a OC'd Intel, three underclocked Cyrix, three IBM 21's, and a pair of 15. Plus the stereo and sometimes a laptop. The thermostat for the baseboard heater died back in 1998. The room stays a steady 65 through the dead of winter without the monitors and the window cracked. With the monitors on, I need to open the window fully or my pair of AMD start crapping out because the room is 100 degrees and they've hit 150.
Once upon a time we had a bunch of good languages and a good OS. But you couldn't write the OS in those languages, though many tried, so C was invented.
Flash forward a quarter century.....
We have a bunch of good languages, and a good OS. But you couldn't write the OS in those languages, though many tried, so we all went back to C.
It's not the voltage that kills you, its the wattage!! A gig Athlon isn't going to put out more than a couple of milliwatts. The magnetron in your microwave is rated for 1500-3000 watts. The microwave is almost a million times more powerful.
St. Joe's.. Cracked skull from a fall onto concrete.. I spent a whole lot of time in bed with an Atari 400 on my lap and a 300 baud rubber cup modem connection to a Unix box. I think I wrote my first few C programs, a primitive calendar program that was freindly to my teletype and a videogame kind of like Zork during that period, but my memory is more than a wee bit foggy. (I wasn't yet four)
This is exactly the issue we cite time and time again whenever we get in a pisser over DVD and the MPAA. Fair use. Slashdot's use of the posts constitutes fair use. They are not representing the content as their own, they are using the posts as fuel for the book. This is also not a Jane's situation. Jane's solicited our comments for the express use of publication, and the comments were the story, per se.
Do we want to be hypocrites? Shall we scream 'fair use' at the MPAA and scream 'but you're stealing my property'/. ??
A wee bit of advance notice would have been nice though.. I don't think we'd be in such an uproar if we had known of the book before publication..
I was stuck thinking that the crater left by the meteorite was part of the Gulf, only far less so than the facts involved in the crater in the Progresso area. However, that actually augments the argument. A theatrical engagement is defined for the purpose of the DoD study as a 'localized skirmish involving three or less parties, with a combined yield of less than 60 MT of standardized trinitrotoluene.'. If they think 1% of humanity would survive at such a low level, I have but pity the species that formerly populated the earth.. While the 60,000 megaton number cited for current total nuclear yield sounds about right, 100 million megatons sounds vastly huge. Are you sure?
Slashdot Mirror
I built one, without voice input capability, for less than $250 US. Sunnylab GXLite MediaGX POS board($40), ES1371 soundcard ($20, OEM), GL5446 videocard ($14), 8G Maxtor HD($79, on sale), 100W micro supply ($10 used) and a small inverter ($59). With a wee bit of modification, (a pair of L-shaped PCI adapters to lay the cards flat and a roll-your-own DC-DC supply) you could fit it into a case slightly smaller than the Kenwood changer it replaced. You can roll your own supply for $20 in parts, (a $50 savings) and toss the video card for a voice interface. Just add a uni mike to the FD ES1371 and your software. Buy in bulk and I'm willing to bet you could get the constituent parts for under $170, add a case for $20, and still make a decent profit at $279.99 final retail..
I belive that it was asked for. Dell did something similar on their PII 'business' machines; Add a interrogatable checksum to the mobo that could be used to validate a given hardware configuration. If the machine shipped with a Rage/128M/8G/PII-350, the checksum was set accordingly. You can reset the checksum with a password, and interrogate it in any number of ways. (BIOS, software over a network, dos debug) Unfortunatly, I've only ever seen it used to figure out which machines shipped with 128M and which ones Dell decided to short us on.
VB is okay. Best thing ever for throwing together a working proof-of-concept in a couple of hours or for throwing a pretty wrapper around that cryptic little bastard you've had hanging around. It's generally NOT the best thing, but you can do just about anything in VB.
Now that I've said that, I'm back to finish this plain 'ol C++ program in joe, skim 'Perl Cookbook' for some inspiration, and then I'm going to contemplate a gcc port to AS/400..
I see a lot of bytching about the site's presentation, and especially about the fact it was done in Frontpage. Don't like it? Do something about it! We're all closet web designers, and while many of us should stay in said closet, someone could whip out a 200% improvement in a couple of hours. So toss in a little elbow grease and send em a concept page. If one of you is half as hot as most of the complaintants act, they'll be floored..
Custom FS, and reduced volume may be tolerable. What about storing the parity information outside of the normal disk area? Say we're working with 1440k floppies. You can actually fit 1600k on the disk. Use the first 1440k for a MSDOS/MINIX/etc filesystem, and the remaining 160k for parity.
You'd need at least nine disks in the set, and you'd have to carry (n>9)+1 disks (the extra disk being the rebuild utility) but they would seem to any unknowing PC to be ordinary install media. No custom filesystem, and probably easy to implement.
As several people have pointed out, RAID-(X) is trivial to do with CD-R/RW, and is easily usable on floppies. I use it all the time. Several other people have linked to my shoddy HOWTO on CD-RAID, and that will get you going if you really want a RAID. Keep in mind that it is totally unusable unless you have a system with (n) CD/floppy drives or enough spare HD space to hold (n-1) cd images.
I wouldn't do it with floppies. Disk images on a bootable CD-R/RW work quite well. If a disk craps out, boot to the CD and make a new disk image. Writing a bootable CD with a small Linux or *BSD install and all of the images is easy. Of course, that means you have to carry (n + 1) + backup CD, but that shouldn't be terrible.
According to several people, all of those ISA cards and sub-gig drives reside somewhere in the scattered mess I call a bedroom.
The prob with online is that everything is so cheap; Sure, Steve in Seattle has the perfect IDE controller for $5, but shipping is nearly $15 and I have to wait a week.
I've had reasonably good results with Mom and Pop computer shops. They'll usually have someone's old junker on hand from a 'trade-in' special or it was declared DOA. When you're in a pinch for a DX2-66 or a couple of 30-pin SIMMS, you'll be able to get it same afternoon with a couple of calls.
My next best bet has been trade shows. For me, there's one within sane driving distance every week or so. I've gotten some real gems from vendors that held on to the merchandise long after it became obselete because they hoped it might garner a higher price later. 4 meg VLB video cards, VLB SCSI adapters, single-volt Pentium boards can all be had for just a couple of bucks. The trade show circuit has been the only successful provider of MFM/RLL drives and controllers. And if you find a rarity cheap, buy more than you need now. I've been stuck time and time again when I ran out of ISA video cards or needed just one more 500M HD.
Auctions, well, have sucked. They may have what you need, but I usually pay more. Anywhere else, it's one dealer, one buyer, and the dealer knows this is probably his only chance to sell. Auctions ALWAYS have someone who will want to outbid you. I've seen a UGLY $4 garden gnome go for $15.
Private (companies, schools, etc) sales have been totally variable. Schools/business will often get rid of mass amounts of old 'commercial' equipment; Suns, Alphas, VAXen. They got the equipment for next to nothing (or have depreciated it to nothing), and are not looking for much more than someone who will haul it away without being paid for the pleasure. Then again, I have seen quite a few that reeked of an accountant wanting to funnel bucks back into the departmental coffers. They usually want some insane amount based on exterior MV depreciation, and will stick to it. Expect only 'whole' equipment from them.
PLEASE NOTE: I've been out of the loop for a while; I work for a large leasing company, and all I really need to do these days is offer the appropriate person 7 cents on the dollar towards FMV and they will scrape up whatever my heart desires. It's me or the scrap bin, and the scrap bin charges them. I've been trying to convince them that I could get the stuff out tertiary market AND turn a sizable profit, but they havn't bitten..
First Meept!, then the real Mr. Petrified, then Fattime and Lubie, now you?? We'll only have OOG!! Well, OOG and the "I'M GONNA KICK YOUR ASS" guy.. C'ya, we'll certainly miss you..
Winamp uses whatever the system says is the default browser. Netscape, IE, etc, it could care less. All it does is invoke [browser] whatever.html
WTF? Not only do I have to look at the the RN sponsored adverts by using the fscking player, but now the stream provider can spam me?
.mp3 files as is!
Just wait. The little fscker will get into a registry war with IE 5.0 over who is the default browser. I have a hard enough time convincing it to NOT play
Not that I know of!
All I know is I'd rather have a crushed Yugo, 12x14x24, in my living room as a 'conversation piece' than a running AMC Pacer with that Gawd-awful four in my driveway.
A Pacer? That'd better be the 258 CID model.. Otherwise you'd be better off tossing a crushed Yugo in!! Please note, the Eagle has a PI stripped from a 1975 U.S.G.S. Cherokee.
I'll sweeten the pot with three dogeared copies of Byte from the eighties, a low mileage Chrysler Torqueflite (for said Eagle), the open tin of Altoids on my desk, and a box of fancy company logo pens that strangly enough found their way into my briefcase.
Koosh guns?!? Bah.. I'll see that bid and up you one complete set of System 3000 manuals, a 1980 AMC Eagle wagon with a blown clutch pack and a tick in #6, and the loose change in my watchpocket. (About a buck fifty US)
It is a library, but no. Libsafe uses the LD_PRELOAD mechanism to subvert the normal calls.. Binaries are fine!
The early Clappers were more fun.. They picked up RF noise like they were designed for it. Take a lantern battery and a 12v relay and you could make them flick on and off crazily from fifteen feet away..
Okay.. Let's put it this way. I have a mission critical program. We'll call it Midnight Modeller. Now, this program is the only one with the particular feature set I need. Unfortunatly, its been so long unmaintained that all I can get functioning is a binary that is known vunerable.
I have two options; Install the wrappers, or slog through 18,000 lines of code to modernize it.
Or another:
I have a commercial application. Let's call it Microsoft Office 2001 for Linux. Am I to trust that in that huge, behemoth of Microsoftian bloat there isn't some exploitable code?
I have two options; Install the wrappers, or pay the vendor BIG MONEY for a copy of the source and audit it.
Two words: 'Utilities included'..
I got a couple of old, low clock rate boards for nothing, and I only had MII chips on hand to pair them up to. So I have a pair of MII-300's clocked at 233 and 266. Their uptime has only been dictated by how long I can go without 'tweaking' something..
Two OC'd AMD, a OC'd Intel, three underclocked Cyrix, three IBM 21's, and a pair of 15. Plus the stereo and sometimes a laptop. The thermostat for the baseboard heater died back in 1998. The room stays a steady 65 through the dead of winter without the monitors and the window cracked. With the monitors on, I need to open the window fully or my pair of AMD start crapping out because the room is 100 degrees and they've hit 150.
Once upon a time we had a bunch of good languages and a good OS. But you couldn't write the OS in those languages, though many tried, so C was invented.
Flash forward a quarter century.....
We have a bunch of good languages, and a good OS. But you couldn't write the OS in those languages, though many tried, so we all went back to C.
It's not the voltage that kills you, its the wattage!! A gig Athlon isn't going to put out more than a couple of milliwatts. The magnetron in your microwave is rated for 1500-3000 watts. The microwave is almost a million times more powerful.
St. Joe's.. Cracked skull from a fall onto concrete.. I spent a whole lot of time in bed with an Atari 400 on my lap and a 300 baud rubber cup modem connection to a Unix box. I think I wrote my first few C programs, a primitive calendar program that was freindly to my teletype and a videogame kind of like Zork during that period, but my memory is more than a wee bit foggy. (I wasn't yet four)
I suppose you're right.. We couldn't have decided..
This is exactly the issue we cite time and time again whenever we get in a pisser over DVD and the MPAA. Fair use. Slashdot's use of the posts constitutes fair use. They are not representing the content as their own, they are using the posts as fuel for the book. This is also not a Jane's situation. Jane's solicited our comments for the express use of publication, and the comments were the story, per se.
/. ??
Do we want to be hypocrites? Shall we scream 'fair use' at the MPAA and scream 'but you're stealing my property'
A wee bit of advance notice would have been nice though.. I don't think we'd be in such an uproar if we had known of the book before publication..
I was stuck thinking that the crater left by the meteorite was part of the Gulf, only far less so than the facts involved in the crater in the Progresso area. However, that actually augments the argument. A theatrical engagement is defined for the purpose of the DoD study as a 'localized skirmish involving three or less parties, with a combined yield of less than 60 MT of standardized trinitrotoluene.'. If they think 1% of humanity would survive at such a low level, I have but pity the species that formerly populated the earth.. While the 60,000 megaton number cited for current total nuclear yield sounds about right, 100 million megatons sounds vastly huge. Are you sure?