(cue sound of k1dd13z winding mental age estmates up)
...when I worked in a computer store in West Perth called Computer Choice, for a chappie by the name of Ed O'Connor-Smith. After watching him sell a computer, one friend of mine took to calling him Ed O'Conman-Smith which was a tad unfair even though he could indeed sell ice to eskimos or charm a starving baby away from the breast. He once sold a million-dollar mainframe on someone's petty cash.
Ed sold an Osborne 1 to a lady called Pauline Winter (no relation to the actress AFAIK) of Maritana Typing Services, of which I can find no trace on the Web. Pauline had a top-of-the-wozzer Olivetti electric typewriter which would do a steady 75 WPM and had a 16,000 keystroke typeahead buffer. She beat it. Easily.
The Osborne 1 scanned the keyboard in software in its spare time, using its (at the time) grunty 4MHz 8-bit Z80, with pretty much inevitable results. So Pauline brought it back.
Instead of refunding her, Ed upsold her to a KayPro II, which was built like a lab instrument and had a separate microcontroller in the keyboard and guaranteed 3-and-a-half-key rollover. And 400kB 5.25" floppies in place of the shiny new recently-doubled-in-size 192kB floppies in the Osborne, and a full 64kB of RAM in place of the Osborne's 48kB. Your keyboard probably has considerably more storage than everything in the Osborne added together. (-:
Pauline sat in the shop for a few days, using the Kaypro to make sure everything went well. Her typing was like rain on a tin roof, there was no way you could hear individual keystrokes, but the funniest part was watching WordStar.
WordStar is a little priority-driven time-sharing little universe of its own. It had an event loop decades before Bill knackered the one in OS/2. If it has time, it prints stuff. If it doesn't, it at least updates the display decorations. If it has no time for that, it keeps the current text looking good; and if not all of the current text, then the current line, followed by the lines above and below outwards towards the top and bottom of the display. And if not even the current line, it echoes the characters as you type them, and the last-ditch response is to just store the characters and echo nothing.
With Pauline at the keyboard, WordStar was able to echo two characters out of 3 if it was lucky. Printing happened for a few minutes some time after the start of coffee break, and for maybe 25 minutes of a half-hour lunch break, and for many hours after she'd finished for the day. She was typing at least as fast as a top-shelf Ricoh daisywheel could, and that's fast. She started with a blank data floppy every day (two drives, one for programs and one for data), and usually filled about 3/4 of a 400kB floppy by close of trade, so I'd guess that was a sustained 110-120 WPM.
...but I'd still mod it "Funny" if I had any points.
Pray that you get someone like this guy next time you buy at a low-budget superstore. He's one of the few that seem care regardless of the pay and conditions.
He's already pretty much recouped the money from that already via the Ansari prize and Richard "I can make money off that" Branson's interest, so expect Burt Rutan, designer extraordinaire to take the cash flow from that and the follow-up projects (space mini-buses) and make maybe a fibreglass kit build-in-your-garage Shuttle replacement or a LEO commuter plane that flings out a space-bus/space-truck at apogee while amortising the cost with Dallas-to-Europe or New-York-to-Australia passengers on the launch vehicle.
Speaking of Branson, the whole SpaceShipOne experimental program so far has cost less than one single regular passenger jet. I'm expecting Richard to notice that and wonder if Burt can turn his hand to larger aircraft, and sponsor him to do so. It wouldn't shock me to see Burt slash the cost of an airliner and make it intrinsically safer, more economical and more visually interesting all in one hit. I'd expect him to start with a cargo plane and work out, but I think there's room for an immense amount of cross-pollination between his air-breathers and what he's learned from his space work.
..."because Ross and the non-profit MF don't stand to make money..." since that sooner or later seems to drop any group's focus onto making money rather than making good software.
Hmmm... black monolith theme for LXer?
on
Tune in to Titan
·
· Score: 1
D'ya think Dave Whitinger would pick up on it? (-:
To all those who disagree: wait 'till your kids hit the workforce and see how well their drivel-packed minds serve them then. Even before that, you'll see them aping that drivel as they make your life hell because they have the right to.
...stick to ceilings, turn on a dime, carry three and a half tonnes of groceries and hardly ever crash or get stolen. it would also come in an enormous variety of themes (including the "init 3" theme without any body panels), be linkable together in trains of up to 1024 vehicles and include forklift, bucket and blade attachments. The in-dash TV would double as a street directory and would be able to scan nearby vehicles for threats and vulnerabilities.
The van is a "MasterAce Surf", 8 seats, it's diesel and 4WD, has removable skylights and uses very little fuel. Great for shopping, luggin bulk people around or gentle off-roading including parking anywhere.
The Peugeot 505 is just plain fun, albeit with nothing like the jaw-dropping fuel economy of a modern Pug. I've watched "sports" cars run over the roundabout or hit the kerb behind me more often than I can count after mistakenly assuming that where I could go in my old klunker, they could follow. (-:
The Pug is the closest to an electronically controlled (as in, transistor-assisted ignition) car I've owned. A friend in Mount barker got himself a new Mazda a few years ago, then when one of his friends drove the same-model car into a big puddle in a Perth underpass and killed an AUD$12000 car computer, he drove it back up to Perth the next day and traded it in.
Another fun car I once owned was Chrysler Centura 4l 6-cyl hemi with floor-shift. It was butt ugly and handled like a week-old trifle but had an elegant sufficiency of horsepower, thank you. Another was a Ford Transit van, no power or handling but you could stack stuff into it all day long without filling it up (I helped a girl move house with it and we got three wardrobes and a dining suite in one load), and you could bolt the sliding doors back on hot days (-: IOW, climate control locked on "yes":-).
The one without the Remote Driver Protocol daemon installed.
The version of BackOrifice for it will be called BackSeatDriver. Get to practice those dangerous looking stunt-driver actions without any personal risk (to you, anyway). Car thieves will be able to remotely crack their targets and have them drive themselves to the "midnight spares" workshop. Dark-alley hawkers will be offering new serialz for your out-of-warranty car rather than bulky spares or low-profit hubcaps.
Slashdot Mirror
...since about version 2.something. And it does this on-line plus it's a good deal cheaper than MS-Word.
...when I worked in a computer store in West Perth called Computer Choice, for a chappie by the name of Ed O'Connor-Smith. After watching him sell a computer, one friend of mine took to calling him Ed O'Conman-Smith which was a tad unfair even though he could indeed sell ice to eskimos or charm a starving baby away from the breast. He once sold a million-dollar mainframe on someone's petty cash.
Ed sold an Osborne 1 to a lady called Pauline Winter (no relation to the actress AFAIK) of Maritana Typing Services, of which I can find no trace on the Web. Pauline had a top-of-the-wozzer Olivetti electric typewriter which would do a steady 75 WPM and had a 16,000 keystroke typeahead buffer. She beat it. Easily.
The Osborne 1 scanned the keyboard in software in its spare time, using its (at the time) grunty 4MHz 8-bit Z80, with pretty much inevitable results. So Pauline brought it back.
Instead of refunding her, Ed upsold her to a KayPro II, which was built like a lab instrument and had a separate microcontroller in the keyboard and guaranteed 3-and-a-half-key rollover. And 400kB 5.25" floppies in place of the shiny new recently-doubled-in-size 192kB floppies in the Osborne, and a full 64kB of RAM in place of the Osborne's 48kB. Your keyboard probably has considerably more storage than everything in the Osborne added together. (-:
Pauline sat in the shop for a few days, using the Kaypro to make sure everything went well. Her typing was like rain on a tin roof, there was no way you could hear individual keystrokes, but the funniest part was watching WordStar.
WordStar is a little priority-driven time-sharing little universe of its own. It had an event loop decades before Bill knackered the one in OS/2. If it has time, it prints stuff. If it doesn't, it at least updates the display decorations. If it has no time for that, it keeps the current text looking good; and if not all of the current text, then the current line, followed by the lines above and below outwards towards the top and bottom of the display. And if not even the current line, it echoes the characters as you type them, and the last-ditch response is to just store the characters and echo nothing.
With Pauline at the keyboard, WordStar was able to echo two characters out of 3 if it was lucky. Printing happened for a few minutes some time after the start of coffee break, and for maybe 25 minutes of a half-hour lunch break, and for many hours after she'd finished for the day. She was typing at least as fast as a top-shelf Ricoh daisywheel could, and that's fast. She started with a blank data floppy every day (two drives, one for programs and one for data), and usually filled about 3/4 of a 400kB floppy by close of trade, so I'd guess that was a sustained 110-120 WPM.
...but I'd still mod it "Funny" if I had any points.
Pray that you get someone like this guy next time you buy at a low-budget superstore. He's one of the few that seem care regardless of the pay and conditions.
It's Atari or Commodore BASIC.
He's already pretty much recouped the money from that already via the Ansari prize and Richard "I can make money off that" Branson's interest, so expect Burt Rutan, designer extraordinaire to take the cash flow from that and the follow-up projects (space mini-buses) and make maybe a fibreglass kit build-in-your-garage Shuttle replacement or a LEO commuter plane that flings out a space-bus/space-truck at apogee while amortising the cost with Dallas-to-Europe or New-York-to-Australia passengers on the launch vehicle.
Speaking of Branson, the whole SpaceShipOne experimental program so far has cost less than one single regular passenger jet. I'm expecting Richard to notice that and wonder if Burt can turn his hand to larger aircraft, and sponsor him to do so. It wouldn't shock me to see Burt slash the cost of an airliner and make it intrinsically safer, more economical and more visually interesting all in one hit. I'd expect him to start with a cargo plane and work out, but I think there's room for an immense amount of cross-pollination between his air-breathers and what he's learned from his space work.
What about the rest of that huge and scenic country?
..."because Ross and the non-profit MF don't stand to make money..." since that sooner or later seems to drop any group's focus onto making money rather than making good software.
D'ya think Dave Whitinger would pick up on it? (-:
...or two: where is most lawless software used? In places with cheap hardware, or places with pricey hardware?
I thought so.
<whack> Pointy hat on, go to the corner. Bad Steve, no doughnut.
As will The GIMP 3. And other stuff. For AUD$1200 a seat less. Have you used The GIMP 2 recently?
Note that this is running on a primarily one-button OS, but the same menus appear on every window in my (5-button) Linux version.
The GIMP 2 still has less nuanced plugins than PS, but the gap is noticeably smaller and it has some plugins that PS doesn't have.
The GIMP 3 will be even better both absolutely and relatively.
You thought that was funny? Now hear this.
To all those who disagree: wait 'till your kids hit the workforce and see how well their drivel-packed minds serve them then. Even before that, you'll see them aping that drivel as they make your life hell because they have the right to.
...stick to ceilings, turn on a dime, carry three and a half tonnes of groceries and hardly ever crash or get stolen. it would also come in an enormous variety of themes (including the "init 3" theme without any body panels), be linkable together in trains of up to 1024 vehicles and include forklift, bucket and blade attachments. The in-dash TV would double as a street directory and would be able to scan nearby vehicles for threats and vulnerabilities.
And the bonnet emblem wouldn't be a silver lady.
The van is a "MasterAce Surf", 8 seats, it's diesel and 4WD, has removable skylights and uses very little fuel. Great for shopping, luggin bulk people around or gentle off-roading including parking anywhere.
:-).
The Peugeot 505 is just plain fun, albeit with nothing like the jaw-dropping fuel economy of a modern Pug. I've watched "sports" cars run over the roundabout or hit the kerb behind me more often than I can count after mistakenly assuming that where I could go in my old klunker, they could follow. (-:
The Pug is the closest to an electronically controlled (as in, transistor-assisted ignition) car I've owned. A friend in Mount barker got himself a new Mazda a few years ago, then when one of his friends drove the same-model car into a big puddle in a Perth underpass and killed an AUD$12000 car computer, he drove it back up to Perth the next day and traded it in.
Another fun car I once owned was Chrysler Centura 4l 6-cyl hemi with floor-shift. It was butt ugly and handled like a week-old trifle but had an elegant sufficiency of horsepower, thank you. Another was a Ford Transit van, no power or handling but you could stack stuff into it all day long without filling it up (I helped a girl move house with it and we got three wardrobes and a dining suite in one load), and you could bolt the sliding doors back on hot days (-: IOW, climate control locked on "yes"
The one without the Remote Driver Protocol daemon installed.
The version of BackOrifice for it will be called BackSeatDriver. Get to practice those dangerous looking stunt-driver actions without any personal risk (to you, anyway). Car thieves will be able to remotely crack their targets and have them drive themselves to the "midnight spares" workshop. Dark-alley hawkers will be offering new serialz for your out-of-warranty car rather than bulky spares or low-profit hubcaps.
Switch it for a Mandrake Move CD. (-:
...before any missiles arrived. Is that close enough?
You can have both in one car.
the system hides the pedal for your convenience.
...sneezing and suddenly having to clean the lens of my steering mouse while ripping down the Autostrada at 200km/h in my new GUI-enabled Ferrari.
"I'm clicking on the brake icon, but nothing's happening! What, exactly, does Print Screen mean in my current context?"
"[ring, ring... click] Er, Hi honey, can you remember the keyboard shortcut for the Dresden exit? Now, please?"
"Just hit Ctrl-Brake to stop."
etc ad nauseum
Blue Sedan Of Death.
When your electric windows are run by WinCE, nobody can hear you scream.
here.
The more the merrier. Any other takers?