I'd expect to just have to enter the times by hand in that case, not to have a completely useless device.
The Archos TVPlus DVRs were like this. While they defaulted to a (now defunct) subscription TV listings service, you were always just one keypress from a standard "set it yourself" date/channel/time-on/time-off/quality menu. I never actually used the subscription service because of this.
Also, these boxes recorded standard MP4 AVI files with PCM audio that you could easily offload through the USB port (possibly over Ethernet/wifi too). Pity they never made a set-top HD version.*
(then again, the above may explain why they didn't...hmm)
---PCJ
*(their "Internet Tablet" series PMPs could behave like a PVR and record 720P (if I recall correctly) when docked in an extra-cost "DVR station", but no set-top version existed)
I've even ridden these NYC-Montreal through the notorious Adirondack Northway, but haven't felt any need to use the seat belts. The cupholder, power outlets and WiFi, however...
In contrast, I went to my local Micro Center (Yonkers, NY) looking for some video editing software. The one I decided on before I left home showed one copy remaining at that location on the website. Upon arriving at the store I got lucky and walked right up to the item in question (first time using the software section of that particular location) and was out of there in record time.
Arriving home a couple of hours after I left (subway/bus connections worked extremely well that night), I noticed I still had the screen up and refreshed it just out of curiousity. It now reported the item as out of stock.
I should probably add that MC's site allows you to limit what you see to whatever your local store has in-stock by picking it from a drop-down list of locations at the top of the page. Before I got used to doing that I would find items "in stock" that weren't actually available at my local outlet (which wouldn't have been a factor if I was just ordering online, but my "local" MC is close enough to go out there on a whim).
This past month I was in Myrtle Beach, SC for a family function. Back in the '80's, my summer vacations would invariably come down here for a several-day stay. I didn't particularly care for the beach, but the amusement parks with their large arcades (particularly the Myrtle Beach Gran Prix (just learned it's defunct as of 2006)) were the highlight of my stays there.
We didn't go anywhere near those places this year--assuming any of them still existed (we were actually only staying in a rented condo just outside of the main strip during preparations for a wedding a couple of counties further east). I did however note the irony that the main reason I would have for going to these places was now sitting in the MAME folder on my laptop.
Once, arcade games were so commonplace that as a grade-schooler I compiled maps of neighborhood shops with coin-ops tucked inside, down to the layout of the store with the actual physical locations of the games therein. It figures that once I actually had an ample supply of quarters that all this would have long fallen by the wayside.
...since they're the heaviest users of cellphones. And (at least in the US) they are, for all intents and purposes, the only ones who wear rubber boots nowadays.
I found one item that fits the "DVR that works like a VCR" description--I needed a solution to the problem of DVD recorders that die after a year or two of service. The biggest problem is it's a discontinued item and it doesn't do high-def (I'm not on the HD bandwagon yet, and all of the old VCR recordings I want to convert are SD, so yeah). It's the Archos TV+, and although it did at one time offer a subscription-based tv guide function (now defunct, if I recall corectly), it will happily function like a typical VCR without it, down to in-person recording or VCR-style programming. Oh, it also does MP3 and photos.
On top of that, it can be hooked to your home network, and has USB ports for connecting mass-storage devices to view, transfer or backup recordings. Although I haven't tried it, it's also supposed to let you perform rudimentary edits (like removing commercials) on your recordings, either overwriting the original, or generating a new file.
Although it isn't advertised as such, it will play Flash Video files, although like the Archos 5-series PMP's it's based on, I think it's limited to those with Sorensen/H.263 compression. I haven't tried it with H.264 FLVs, despite the format list on its Wikipedia entry saying so (which I feel is suspect).
Too bad Archos didn't hype the device's ability to function without a subscription, there may have been enough interest in it to warrant a HD version.
If you encode your uploads as Flash video with the previous codec used by YouTube, H.263 compression with less than 350kb/s audio+video bitrate, then they'll pass onto YouTube's servers unmolested. I do this, and my uploads are viewable within a minute or so of uploading, rather than spending several minutes "Processing, please wait".
Why do this? Less CPU-intensive for older systems (videos of long model trains--which comprise most of my submissions--tend to highlight framerate issues), and it's compatible with my Archos 5-series media device (as well as their TV+ DVR), so I need not produce two versions of the same video.
---PCJ
*(yes they do make it tedious to find the d/l link. It's at the bottom of ths page if you're looking for it)
I was under the impression that YouTube was using H.264 for everything since early 2009. I found out about the changeover after I noticed my videos were showing really choppy framerates that weren't present on my pre-2009 videos. The effect was quite noticable since most of my uploads are of model trains (my YT username is the same as here if you want to examine them), and long continuously-moving objects tend to highlight shaky framerates..
Dinking around on Wikipedia revealed the changeover to H.264, and further searches revealed the consensus that H.264 is considered to be very CPU intensive (I'm using a 2Ghz Celeron laptop running XP). Employing as a basis some early tricks to get stereo sound before YouTube officially supported it), I began encoding my uploads to mimic the previous YouTube format (Flash video with H.263 compression/MP3 audio, and a combined audio/video bitrate under 350KB/s). The results?
(1) The videos were viewable within a minute or so of upload completion, instead of spending several minutes as "Processing--Please wait".
(2) The framerate issues are not evident on the uploads using the pre-2009 parameters.
Although I haven't downloaded those videos to confirm it, this suggests to me that the H.264 conversion was skipped. I don't know how long this tactic will work, but for now, I continue to format new uploads this way.
It also has something to do with the competence of the freight railroads. Last March, I rode Amtrak's Crescent from NYC to Atlanta, a 17-hour trip conducted mostly over Norfolk Southern trackage once leaving the Northeast Corridor. We arrived in Atlanta on time, much to my surprise (we did have to wait for at least one freight traveling in the opposite direction in the dead of night). On the return trip the Crescent, already 12 hours into it's trip from New Orleans, not only arrived in Atlanta on time, but arrived and left Washington DC on time, and arrived in NYC ahead of schedule. The NS portion of this route is identified as a future high-speed line. I quite frankly can't see how they'd do it--watching the line from the last car on the return trip through Virginia, you would not believe how much the line twists, turns, rises and dips over a fairly large chunk of the route.
I've taken a number of trips NYC-Pittsburgh via Amtrak's Pennsylvanian (a 9-hour trip), also using NS tracks after leaving Amtrak-owned lines. Most of these were on-time. In one trip, the conductor specifically credited NS dispatchers with getting us out of Harrisburg, PA ahead of two waiting freight trains, and another year, we arrived on-time in Pittsburgh after tailgating a high-priority UPS freight for several miles. We were switched onto the adjacent track against traffic, and arrived in Pittsburgh literally racing alongside the freight we were behind only minutes before. This line (Harrisburg-Pittsburgh) is also identified as a future high-speed route. Frankly, the mountainous regions are something to behold when you remember that for the most part, the tracks go up and over them rather than through. Approaching Horseshoe Curve, you'll notice a road high up the mountainside on the opposite side of the valley. Then you notice that it's not a road, but it's the railroad you're traveling on. Then you remember that mile-long freight trains run on this line too. It's enough to give one pause.
The biggest delay I've had on these trips was about 45 minutes on one Pittsburgh-NYC trip, when our locomotive died pulling out of Philadelphia, PA on the way to NYC. No spare locomotives were available there, and we were transferred to the next arriving Corridor train from DC.
If you want people to learn to use a keyboard better, get them on IRC for a few years. It will learn them real good. Can't say it will help grammar any
(emphasis mine)
That's what happened in my case. Attempting to get my two cents in before the chat topic veered off in another direction caused me to spontaneously touch-type, although it didn't take years--more like a couple of months of doing it every night as part of my online routine. One night I hammered out a few lines of text significantly faster than I usually did, and realized after the fact that I didn't look at the keyboard to do it.
No, the problem is decoding too. Software decode is fine on the desktop, but a non-starter for phones. Good phone video requires and uses ASIC or GPU acceleration. Theora, as a much older and simpler codec will probably decode faster in software than a maxed-out H.264 bitstream, but even if it could get to full-screen on a handset, it'd require a lot more bandwidth, and would run the battery down very quickly.
Without going full-screen, recent videos have been looking worse on my "primary" computer, a fairly old 2ghz Celeron laptop. Up to about 2/09,(which according to Wikipedia is when YouTube switched to h.264 for pretty much everything), the videos I uploaded ran nice and smooth (I usually didn't run them full-screen, and rarely in HQ). The ones I uploaded after the changeover look like they were shot with a cheap cellphone, with awful amounts of frameskipping, which is painfully obvious in the model-train videos that make up most of my uploads. Downloading these FLV's and attempting to play them also stymies all of the player/converters on my system (although that may be that my install of the K-Lite codec pack is outdated)
Seeing as it takes more horsepower to decode H.264 than the older H.263/Sorenensen/Spark/whatever they were using before, I assume it's my aging PC that's at fault. But buying a new PC just to get 30FPS on YouTube is a non-starter, given that the existing one still does everthing else I need it to do at acceptable speed.
I'm wondering if I transcode my uploads to be identical to YouTube's flavor of.FLV, but with H.263, will it allow them to slide through unmodified, seeing as the older uploads haven't been molested. Otherwise, I'll have lost most of my desire to put stuff up there anymore.
One of the things the Opie & Anthony Show revealed about "regular radio" in one of their rants about the industry is that most radio stations do not honor requests, even though they solicit them by broadcasting their "request lines". What they do instead is record the caller's request, and if it happens to match up with something already on the official playlist at some point in the future, they play that call as the lead-in to the song, making it appear that they fulfilled a request, but in reality it was something that was already scheduled to appear in the rotation. Needless to say, if your request isn't on the "approved" list, lotsa luck getting the DJ to gamble with their jobs playing an unsanctioned record.
It's not my primary system. I just left whatever OS was there when it was superceded by a newer laptop running XP. It actually only gets fired up when I want to print to it's printer over the network, either from the XP machine, or an even more ancient '98 laptop (PII-266) that sits in a corner and runs Thunderbird to collect email. Oddly enough on that laptop, leaving IE running next to TB seems to keep it stable enough to run a a few weeks at a time without locking up:)
It sounds like an awkward arrangement, but I've had issues with the XP machines seeing each other or the NAS on the network. The two '98 machines mostly behave themselves (for the amount of time they're actually in use printing or diddling with the NAS box), so I haven't been motivated to retire them.
I am aware of DOSBox, though. I'm eyeing it for use on my Vista...er, future Win7 machine that's waiting to take over as primary.
True. But for those who still have machines running '98, there is a little known generic mass storage driver for '98 that allows use of newer drives that do not come with '98 support.
I have a tower still running 98SE that I installed this driver onto. It'll take any flash drive I shove into it, that whore:D.
---PCJ
Re:eSATA on one side USB on the other?
on
Flash Drive Roundup
·
· Score: 3, Informative
One of the drives in the article (OCZ Throttle) functions in this way. The review notes that it still needs a USB port to power it while plugged into SATA.
I wonder if it has anything to do with Albion's alleged incompatibility with laptop displays. I remember seeing the retail package years ago, and was going to buy it right then and there when I spotted the warning in the system requirements. At the time, the only computers I had were laptops (lack of space for a conventional desktop/workstation)
Amtrak has never had a guaranteed source of funding. Throughout its history it has had to literally ask Congress for funding every year like a child asking for its allowance. While it has historically had enough congressional support to get it enough money to survive another year, there was never any guarantee it would get funded in any particular fiscal year till Bush Jr's last year in office. That the company still exists today can be largely credited to the 1970's Arab oil embargo, since when Amtrak was first created, it wasn't expected to survive into the next decade*. And thus funded accordingly.
Can you imagine trying to do long-term planning such as buying passenger cars** and locomotives (both of which have been in short supply for years) when there was literally no guarantee that your company would even be around in 12 months?
*-Amtrak's first new diesel locomotives (the EMD SDP40F) were designed to be easily convertible to freight use owing to the real possibility that the company would collapse.
**--the average passenger car in the Amtrak system today is around 30 years old
Amtrak offers incentive payments to the freight railroads to get its trains through on-time. There are penalties involved in delaying passenger trains, but sometimes these are viewed as the cost of doing business, (or it would seem that way)
My last round-trips on Amtrak were as follows:
NYC-Pittsburgh: On time. Conductor announced that Norfolk Southern let us out onto their tracks ahead of two of their freight trains, as we left Harrisburg (Amtrak owns the line between Philadelphia and Harrisburg, PA. The rest of the line is NS). Pittsburgh-NYC: On time
NYC-Pittsburgh: On time. We tailgated a high-priority freight train on the last leg of the trip, but we were able to get onto the eastbound track, caught up to the freight, and actually arrived in Pittsburgh alongside it. Pittsburgh-NYC: About 45 minutes late. Our electric locomotive-put on in Philadelphia, died pulling us out of the station. Restarted and died less than 100ft later. Restarted and managed to push the train back far enough to get the last car to the platform before dying again. No spare locomotives were available in Philadelpia, so we were put on another Corridor train arriving from DC. We had cars to ourselves at the end of that train, just a litle less legroom.
NYC-Atlanta: 17-hour trip. On time. I think we had to wait out one passing freight train. Atlanta-NYC: Ahead of time. Maybe the schedule was padded--we left Washington DC exactly on time, and arrived in NYC. Then again, my train also arrived in Atlanta on time--12 hours after its trip began in New Orleans.
From Atlanta to DC the line is rather smooth, but unbelievably curvy. Watching the line from the last car, it was hard to believe a passenger train could make time. And this is supposedly one of the designated HSR corridors.
Conclusion: The particular freight railroad you're dealing with affects the timeliness of the journey. Norfolk Southern is recognized as being good at getting passenger trains through its system. Some others aren't.
On my first trip into Canada, via bus at the Blackpool Border Crossing (New York/Quebec) my phone showed one bar of Verizon Wireless signal while waiting on line in the Customs building. After passing through the facility and exiting at the other end of the building to re-board the bus, my phone had switched over to roaming, in a distance of less than a hundred feet (If you look at the Google Map image linked to from the above Wikipedia link, it's the small narrow building above and to the right of the toll plaza just beyond the physical border).
Slashdot Mirror
I'd expect to just have to enter the times by hand in that case, not to have a completely useless device.
The Archos TVPlus DVRs were like this. While they defaulted to a (now defunct) subscription TV listings service, you were always just one keypress from a standard "set it yourself" date/channel/time-on/time-off/quality menu. I never actually used the subscription service because of this.
Also, these boxes recorded standard MP4 AVI files with PCM audio that you could easily offload through the USB port (possibly over Ethernet/wifi too). Pity they never made a set-top HD version.*
(then again, the above may explain why they didn't...hmm)
---PCJ
*(their "Internet Tablet" series PMPs could behave like a PVR and record 720P (if I recall correctly) when docked in an extra-cost "DVR station", but no set-top version existed)
Unfortunately it seems the real "Big Bus" was scrapped. Maybe some goofy automotive-reality show could attempt to re-create the thing.
---PCJ
I've even ridden these NYC-Montreal through the notorious Adirondack Northway, but haven't felt any need to use the seat belts. The cupholder, power outlets and WiFi, however...
--PCJ
In contrast, I went to my local Micro Center (Yonkers, NY) looking for some video editing software. The one I decided on before I left home showed one copy remaining at that location on the website. Upon arriving at the store I got lucky and walked right up to the item in question (first time using the software section of that particular location) and was out of there in record time. Arriving home a couple of hours after I left (subway/bus connections worked extremely well that night), I noticed I still had the screen up and refreshed it just out of curiousity. It now reported the item as out of stock.
I should probably add that MC's site allows you to limit what you see to whatever your local store has in-stock by picking it from a drop-down list of locations at the top of the page. Before I got used to doing that I would find items "in stock" that weren't actually available at my local outlet (which wouldn't have been a factor if I was just ordering online, but my "local" MC is close enough to go out there on a whim).
---PCJ
Those are cartoons. Cartoons are for children. Hence those are acceptable for children to watch. And learn from.
Just like this one. And this one
:) )
(I'd been saving those two. Like one would save a S.B.D.
---PCJ
Correction: 25 sleepers. There is an option to expand the total order.
(Funny, I thought the 'submit' button was only available after you previewed your post.)
---PCJ
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viewliner#Viewliner_II
An order for at least 50 of these was placed less than a couple of months ago, among other cars built on this platform.
---PCJ
This past month I was in Myrtle Beach, SC for a family function. Back in the '80's, my summer vacations would invariably come down here for a several-day stay. I didn't particularly care for the beach, but the amusement parks with their large arcades (particularly the Myrtle Beach Gran Prix (just learned it's defunct as of 2006)) were the highlight of my stays there.
We didn't go anywhere near those places this year--assuming any of them still existed (we were actually only staying in a rented condo just outside of the main strip during preparations for a wedding a couple of counties further east). I did however note the irony that the main reason I would have for going to these places was now sitting in the MAME folder on my laptop.
Once, arcade games were so commonplace that as a grade-schooler I compiled maps of neighborhood shops with coin-ops tucked inside, down to the layout of the store with the actual physical locations of the games therein. It figures that once I actually had an ample supply of quarters that all this would have long fallen by the wayside.
---PCJ
...since they're the heaviest users of cellphones. And (at least in the US) they are, for all intents and purposes, the only ones who wear rubber boots nowadays.
---PCJ
I found one item that fits the "DVR that works like a VCR" description--I needed a solution to the problem of DVD recorders that die after a year or two of service. The biggest problem is it's a discontinued item and it doesn't do high-def (I'm not on the HD bandwagon yet, and all of the old VCR recordings I want to convert are SD, so yeah). It's the Archos TV+, and although it did at one time offer a subscription-based tv guide function (now defunct, if I recall corectly), it will happily function like a typical VCR without it, down to in-person recording or VCR-style programming. Oh, it also does MP3 and photos.
On top of that, it can be hooked to your home network, and has USB ports for connecting mass-storage devices to view, transfer or backup recordings. Although I haven't tried it, it's also supposed to let you perform rudimentary edits (like removing commercials) on your recordings, either overwriting the original, or generating a new file.
Although it isn't advertised as such, it will play Flash Video files, although like the Archos 5-series PMP's it's based on, I think it's limited to those with Sorensen/H.263 compression. I haven't tried it with H.264 FLVs, despite the format list on its Wikipedia entry saying so (which I feel is suspect).
Too bad Archos didn't hype the device's ability to function without a subscription, there may have been enough interest in it to warrant a HD version.
---PCJ
I'm seriously looking at starting a PAC to get high speed light rail between Dallas and San Antonio (with a stop in Austin of course).
Already done :) Texas High Speed Rail & Transportation Corporation. And lookie here, Dallas, Austin and San Antonio are already part of the proposed route.
---PCJ
Minor trivia:
If you encode your uploads as Flash video with the previous codec used by YouTube, H.263 compression with less than 350kb/s audio+video bitrate, then they'll pass onto YouTube's servers unmolested. I do this, and my uploads are viewable within a minute or so of uploading, rather than spending several minutes "Processing, please wait".
When I re-downloaded one of my recent videos to examine it (using Super©*), it was still in H.263 format.
Why do this? Less CPU-intensive for older systems (videos of long model trains--which comprise most of my submissions--tend to highlight framerate issues), and it's compatible with my Archos 5-series media device (as well as their TV+ DVR), so I need not produce two versions of the same video.
---PCJ
*(yes they do make it tedious to find the d/l link. It's at the bottom of ths page if you're looking for it)
I was under the impression that YouTube was using H.264 for everything since early 2009. I found out about the changeover after I noticed my videos were showing really choppy framerates that weren't present on my pre-2009 videos. The effect was quite noticable since most of my uploads are of model trains (my YT username is the same as here if you want to examine them), and long continuously-moving objects tend to highlight shaky framerates..
Dinking around on Wikipedia revealed the changeover to H.264, and further searches revealed the consensus that H.264 is considered to be very CPU intensive (I'm using a 2Ghz Celeron laptop running XP). Employing as a basis some early tricks to get stereo sound before YouTube officially supported it), I began encoding my uploads to mimic the previous YouTube format (Flash video with H.263 compression/MP3 audio, and a combined audio/video bitrate under 350KB/s). The results?
(1) The videos were viewable within a minute or so of upload completion, instead of spending several minutes as "Processing--Please wait".
(2) The framerate issues are not evident on the uploads using the pre-2009 parameters.
Although I haven't downloaded those videos to confirm it, this suggests to me that the H.264 conversion was skipped. I don't know how long this tactic will work, but for now, I continue to format new uploads this way.
---PCJ
It also has something to do with the competence of the freight railroads. Last March, I rode Amtrak's Crescent from NYC to Atlanta, a 17-hour trip conducted mostly over Norfolk Southern trackage once leaving the Northeast Corridor. We arrived in Atlanta on time, much to my surprise (we did have to wait for at least one freight traveling in the opposite direction in the dead of night). On the return trip the Crescent, already 12 hours into it's trip from New Orleans, not only arrived in Atlanta on time, but arrived and left Washington DC on time, and arrived in NYC ahead of schedule. The NS portion of this route is identified as a future high-speed line. I quite frankly can't see how they'd do it--watching the line from the last car on the return trip through Virginia, you would not believe how much the line twists, turns, rises and dips over a fairly large chunk of the route.
I've taken a number of trips NYC-Pittsburgh via Amtrak's Pennsylvanian (a 9-hour trip), also using NS tracks after leaving Amtrak-owned lines. Most of these were on-time. In one trip, the conductor specifically credited NS dispatchers with getting us out of Harrisburg, PA ahead of two waiting freight trains, and another year, we arrived on-time in Pittsburgh after tailgating a high-priority UPS freight for several miles. We were switched onto the adjacent track against traffic, and arrived in Pittsburgh literally racing alongside the freight we were behind only minutes before. This line (Harrisburg-Pittsburgh) is also identified as a future high-speed route. Frankly, the mountainous regions are something to behold when you remember that for the most part, the tracks go up and over them rather than through. Approaching Horseshoe Curve, you'll notice a road high up the mountainside on the opposite side of the valley. Then you notice that it's not a road, but it's the railroad you're traveling on. Then you remember that mile-long freight trains run on this line too. It's enough to give one pause.
The biggest delay I've had on these trips was about 45 minutes on one Pittsburgh-NYC trip, when our locomotive died pulling out of Philadelphia, PA on the way to NYC. No spare locomotives were available there, and we were transferred to the next arriving Corridor train from DC.
---PCJ
---PCJ
If you want people to learn to use a keyboard better, get them on IRC for a few years. It will learn them real good. Can't say it will help grammar any
(emphasis mine)
That's what happened in my case. Attempting to get my two cents in before the chat topic veered off in another direction caused me to spontaneously touch-type, although it didn't take years--more like a couple of months of doing it every night as part of my online routine. One night I hammered out a few lines of text significantly faster than I usually did, and realized after the fact that I didn't look at the keyboard to do it.
---PCJ
No, the problem is decoding too. Software decode is fine on the desktop, but a non-starter for phones. Good phone video requires and uses ASIC or GPU acceleration. Theora, as a much older and simpler codec will probably decode faster in software than a maxed-out H.264 bitstream, but even if it could get to full-screen on a handset, it'd require a lot more bandwidth, and would run the battery down very quickly.
Without going full-screen, recent videos have been looking worse on my "primary" computer, a fairly old 2ghz Celeron laptop. Up to about 2/09,(which according to Wikipedia is when YouTube switched to h.264 for pretty much everything), the videos I uploaded ran nice and smooth (I usually didn't run them full-screen, and rarely in HQ). The ones I uploaded after the changeover look like they were shot with a cheap cellphone, with awful amounts of frameskipping, which is painfully obvious in the model-train videos that make up most of my uploads. Downloading these FLV's and attempting to play them also stymies all of the player/converters on my system (although that may be that my install of the K-Lite codec pack is outdated)
Seeing as it takes more horsepower to decode H.264 than the older H.263/Sorenensen/Spark/whatever they were using before, I assume it's my aging PC that's at fault. But buying a new PC just to get 30FPS on YouTube is a non-starter, given that the existing one still does everthing else I need it to do at acceptable speed.
I'm wondering if I transcode my uploads to be identical to YouTube's flavor of .FLV, but with H.263, will it allow them to slide through unmodified, seeing as the older uploads haven't been molested. Otherwise, I'll have lost most of my desire to put stuff up there anymore.
---PCJ
One of the things the Opie & Anthony Show revealed about "regular radio" in one of their rants about the industry is that most radio stations do not honor requests, even though they solicit them by broadcasting their "request lines". What they do instead is record the caller's request, and if it happens to match up with something already on the official playlist at some point in the future, they play that call as the lead-in to the song, making it appear that they fulfilled a request, but in reality it was something that was already scheduled to appear in the rotation. Needless to say, if your request isn't on the "approved" list, lotsa luck getting the DJ to gamble with their jobs playing an unsanctioned record.
---PCJ
It's not my primary system. I just left whatever OS was there when it was superceded by a newer laptop running XP. It actually only gets fired up when I want to print to it's printer over the network, either from the XP machine, or an even more ancient '98 laptop (PII-266) that sits in a corner and runs Thunderbird to collect email. Oddly enough on that laptop, leaving IE running next to TB seems to keep it stable enough to run a a few weeks at a time without locking up :)
It sounds like an awkward arrangement, but I've had issues with the XP machines seeing each other or the NAS on the network. The two '98 machines mostly behave themselves (for the amount of time they're actually in use printing or diddling with the NAS box), so I haven't been motivated to retire them.
I am aware of DOSBox, though. I'm eyeing it for use on my Vista...er, future Win7 machine that's waiting to take over as primary.
---PCJ
True. But for those who still have machines running '98, there is a little known generic mass storage driver for '98 that allows use of newer drives that do not come with '98 support.
I have a tower still running 98SE that I installed this driver onto. It'll take any flash drive I shove into it, that whore :D.
---PCJ
---PCJ
---PCJ
Can you imagine trying to do long-term planning such as buying passenger cars** and locomotives (both of which have been in short supply for years) when there was literally no guarantee that your company would even be around in 12 months?
*-Amtrak's first new diesel locomotives (the EMD SDP40F) were designed to be easily convertible to freight use owing to the real possibility that the company would collapse.
**--the average passenger car in the Amtrak system today is around 30 years old
---PCJ
My last round-trips on Amtrak were as follows:
NYC-Pittsburgh: On time. Conductor announced that Norfolk Southern let us out onto their tracks ahead of two of their freight trains, as we left Harrisburg (Amtrak owns the line between Philadelphia and Harrisburg, PA. The rest of the line is NS).
Pittsburgh-NYC: On time
NYC-Pittsburgh: On time. We tailgated a high-priority freight train on the last leg of the trip, but we were able to get onto the eastbound track, caught up to the freight, and actually arrived in Pittsburgh alongside it.
Pittsburgh-NYC: About 45 minutes late. Our electric locomotive-put on in Philadelphia, died pulling us out of the station. Restarted and died less than 100ft later. Restarted and managed to push the train back far enough to get the last car to the platform before dying again. No spare locomotives were available in Philadelpia, so we were put on another Corridor train arriving from DC. We had cars to ourselves at the end of that train, just a litle less legroom.
NYC-Atlanta: 17-hour trip. On time. I think we had to wait out one passing freight train.
Atlanta-NYC: Ahead of time. Maybe the schedule was padded--we left Washington DC exactly on time, and arrived in NYC. Then again, my train also arrived in Atlanta on time--12 hours after its trip began in New Orleans.
From Atlanta to DC the line is rather smooth, but unbelievably curvy. Watching the line from the last car, it was hard to believe a passenger train could make time. And this is supposedly one of the designated HSR corridors.
Conclusion: The particular freight railroad you're dealing with affects the timeliness of the journey. Norfolk Southern is recognized as being good at getting passenger trains through its system. Some others aren't.
---PCJ
On my first trip into Canada, via bus at the Blackpool Border Crossing (New York/Quebec) my phone showed one bar of Verizon Wireless signal while waiting on line in the Customs building. After passing through the facility and exiting at the other end of the building to re-board the bus, my phone had switched over to roaming, in a distance of less than a hundred feet (If you look at the Google Map image linked to from the above Wikipedia link, it's the small narrow building above and to the right of the toll plaza just beyond the physical border).
---PCJ