I remember when I first heard about the Sony MD in the early 90's; I was excited because I (foolishly it turns out) anticipated the use of those discs as low-cost portable computer storage. At the time there was no such thing, except I guess Syquest carts which as I recall were kind of expensive and just held 44 or 88 megs. The MD's 170MB capacity was pretty good back then.
Sony, of course, kept the MD music-only (at least in the consumer market) and the niche that they could have OWNED instead went to Iomega and their shitty ZIP ("click-of-death") carts (which were $20 apiece and held 100MB, still a great deal back then).
If you're not afraid of soldering and splicing your monitor's cable, you can replace the ADC connector with DVI, USB and power (of some sort) connectors. For power it should work with 24 to 28 volts. ADC pinouts are out there if you look; I'm pretty sure there's one at cubeowner.com, so with the ADC pinout, your detached connector, and a continuity tester you can figure out what each wire does.
Ideally you could find the opposite-gendered ADC connector to plug your unmolested monitor cable into, but they might be hard to find; you could sacrifice a cheap Mac Rage128 card for the connector though.
You could eBay a G4 Cube power brick (provides two 28 volt rails each rated at 100watts, look for the connector pinout on cubeowner.com) for $50-$60, maybe sacrificing its connector for the type you put on the monitor, but the cheapest way to go would be to look around for a 24volt power adaptor. I don't know how much wattage the LCD models draw; 100watts would certainly cover even the CRT models but I'm sure the LCD's could get by on substantially less.
What I wonder is, can current software and hardware make use of those massive specs and is the memory bandwidth high enough for the GPU to benefit from a gig of video ram. or is it all just a gimmick?
If the CRT's front surface were to break (you'd have to hit it pretty hard with a hammer or something), exposing the "dangerous vacuum", it would implode, not explode; the glass would get sucked inside. The vacuum is probably the least dangerous thing about a CRT.
And then, in college, after a couple of brews my roomie and I decided to strip out the electrolytic caps from a worthless transistor radio, plug them into the end of an extension cord, and lower them out the window to the room blow, plug in the extension cord, and let them go *BANG* outside the window of the room below.
Sounds like a fun prank, When I was a kid I took a large cap out of something and wired it up to my model railroad transformer; I counted the seconds ("one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand..") and at exactly "ten" (I swear) it blew with a loud band and sent a large volume of fuzzy white stuff all over my room. My mom ran in yelling "What the hell???"; that was funny.
You can often fix those bad motherboards; I desoldered the bad cap and soldered in a good replacement on a co-worker's Abit PIII motherboard, and he says it's worked fine since.
Congratulations on finally getting the help you need. As someone with ADHD and who's daughter has it, I agree with your post wholeheartedly.
Ritalin (or other meds) are great for those who need it, but detrimental for those who don't. The key is in determining with accuracy whether the patient needs the meds.
There are good doctors and there are bad ones, and just because a lot of kids had Ritalin prescribed inappropriately by lazy doctors, doesn't mean that Ritalin isn't of immense help to those who actually do need it.
The 64-bit Pentium M's (or whatever you kids are calling them these days) are just around the corner, and Apple's certain to use them; they may be able to boot 64-bit Windows (which does support EFI).
I guess the lack of a VGA BIOS is still a bit of a problem.
Games; they won't run well or at all in a virtual machine environment (VMWare, for example, doesn't support Direct 3D or DirectDraw even in software-only mode), so they have to run natively.
Also, I'd love to have a MacBook that could boot up Windows, not only for games but for testing and development, which chew up a lot more memory than I'd likely have available in a virtual machine environment. I prefer OS X, but do use Windows quite a bit as well and sometimes I need the machine's full resources available to it.
That's a great comment and I wish I had some mod points right now.
Documentation (or lack thereof) oriented toward end users is also an issue. There's often something there, perhaps in a README file, and I usually have no problem following it; however, I can see how confusing it would be for an end user who may not even know to look for a README file rather than looking for a nonexistant or non-working "HELP" button.
Another example of non-user thinking is how a great many project websites (perhaps the majority of them - it seems that way) just have "News" on the home page rather than an overview of what the project actually is. A new user who's heard of a good project (computer news articles often throw project names around as examples without any explanation) and wants to know what it's about isn't going to be so interested in the latest build news, and won't be too impressed if they have to hunt around for a definition of what the project actually is.
No arguments from me, though in my case it's a laptop that I just happen to still like:) I was quite surprised at how well XP runs on it. (Obviously, though, Vista will never happen!)
Win98 ran very fast on the laptop, but it's just too crashy and not very well supported anymore anyway. Win2K ran nice, but XP has ClearType, which I like.
I set Window's theme to "classic" - couple of clicks. Since it was some time ago, I no longer recall what I did, but of course I tried to run KDE and Gnome with the lightest weight themes and features that I could. Didn't seem to help much. Perhaps there was more I could have done, but I had already gone far beyond the simple few clicks needed to change Windows' theme, and it had become too much of a pain in the ass; I've work to do.
You're not actually taking this personally, are you?
I probably should get around to trying out XFCE sometime; does it have a good GUI file manager? That's one of the big things I like about Gnome and KDE.
I'm no stranger to the command line; I use it constantly, even under OSX (lots of shell and perl scripting), but I don't like having to use it just to move files around, as it disrupts my workflow.
Anyway, screwing around with a system is for me a means to an end, not the end itself.
I have a Toshiba Tecra 500CDT laptop, a 120Mhz Pentium with the RAM maxed out to 144MB (fairly cheap) and a leftover 6GB hard drive I had. I installed Windows XP Pro on it; I had to download the boot floppies (no CDROM booting) and use the Windows 2000 video driver (XP no longer supports the Chips and memory video controller, but the Win2K driver works fine).
I use the "Classic" theme, 16-bit color (24-bit is unaccelerated by the driver) with ClearType enabled, and it runs nicely! Office 2003, Firefox, WinAMP, and various 2D games all work perectly fine.
When I tried Fedora Core 2 it thrashed the hell out of the hard drive due to the bloat of Gnome and KDE. Sure, I could have used a lightweight window manager, but I wanted something that approximated the functionality of Windows; turns out that I was better off just using Windows.
Linux certainly works on older hardware, but not with a very good desktop anymore. How hard would it be to use an older version of KDE or Gnome (I remember running them nicely on 64-meg pentiums back in the day!) with a modern distribution?
It may not be the ideal solution, but this would be a great opportunity for Codeweavers to make a bundle selling a port of Crossover Office to OS X/Intel. You could then run the Windows version of Photoshop at full speed.
Does Adobe allow you to migrate your Photoshop license from Windows to Mac?
Maybe I'm just a glass-half-full kind of guy, but I see some great potential here. I believe that Roy Disney is still a big Disney stockholder, and he's been a great advocate for the animators and creative staff over the suits, hence the bad blood between him and Eisner. He may well wish to come back into the fold and work with Jobs and the Pixar team. If things worked out that way, you may see some amazing things come out of the merger.
... at least Windows 2003 does on HPs:
http://docs.hp.com/en/A5201-96043-en/apcs03.html
I don't know about Windows XP 32-bit, but since I already have a licensed, legal copy of Windows 2003 Enterprise, I'm good to go!
USB ports are good for only 500 milliamps of 5V power; this is a problem with a lot of external 2.5" USB harddrives because they need more than that to spin up, so they come with USB cables with two connectors: one for data/power and another for additional power.
Having the two ports so far apart makes it a pain, if not impossible, for both plugs to reach. This is a issue that I actually have to deal with quite frequently at my work. If you're lucky a single port will have enough juice to spin up the drive, but it's hit-or-miss.
I'm picturing the judge holding his pinky finger to the corner of his mouth while reading the verdict. That's like saying "a zillion-kajillion dollars".
They know that they won't really get the money; it'd be more satisfying if the verdict was something more realistic.
You guys are all assuming that the "failure" of Firefly, Futurama and Family Guy were unplanned. (Hmm, too many "f"s in that sentence:)
The execs in charge of greenlighting those shows were ousted from Fox in a power struggle with another set of execs who favored cheap, high-return reality shows.
Causing the failure of your former rivals' projects is an age-old political move. Screwing up the scheduling of those shows was intentional.
I'm also very happy with my 35A headphones; they sounds great and were inexpensive - great bang for the buck. They sound WAY better than any earbuds I've tried, including the ones that came with my iPod.
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Sony, of course, kept the MD music-only (at least in the consumer market) and the niche that they could have OWNED instead went to Iomega and their shitty ZIP ("click-of-death") carts (which were $20 apiece and held 100MB, still a great deal back then).
Ideally you could find the opposite-gendered ADC connector to plug your unmolested monitor cable into, but they might be hard to find; you could sacrifice a cheap Mac Rage128 card for the connector though.
You could eBay a G4 Cube power brick (provides two 28 volt rails each rated at 100watts, look for the connector pinout on cubeowner.com) for $50-$60, maybe sacrificing its connector for the type you put on the monitor, but the cheapest way to go would be to look around for a 24volt power adaptor. I don't know how much wattage the LCD models draw; 100watts would certainly cover even the CRT models but I'm sure the LCD's could get by on substantially less.
Is it worth somone's money to buy such a card?
Thanks, I hadn't heard that one before.
Somehow the idea of egg-laying sheep strikes me as really funny.
If the CRT's front surface were to break (you'd have to hit it pretty hard with a hammer or something), exposing the "dangerous vacuum", it would implode, not explode; the glass would get sucked inside. The vacuum is probably the least dangerous thing about a CRT.
Sounds like a fun prank, When I was a kid I took a large cap out of something and wired it up to my model railroad transformer; I counted the seconds ("one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand..") and at exactly "ten" (I swear) it blew with a loud band and sent a large volume of fuzzy white stuff all over my room. My mom ran in yelling "What the hell???"; that was funny.
You can often fix those bad motherboards; I desoldered the bad cap and soldered in a good replacement on a co-worker's Abit PIII motherboard, and he says it's worked fine since.
Ritalin (or other meds) are great for those who need it, but detrimental for those who don't. The key is in determining with accuracy whether the patient needs the meds.
There are good doctors and there are bad ones, and just because a lot of kids had Ritalin prescribed inappropriately by lazy doctors, doesn't mean that Ritalin isn't of immense help to those who actually do need it.
I guess the lack of a VGA BIOS is still a bit of a problem.
Also, I'd love to have a MacBook that could boot up Windows, not only for games but for testing and development, which chew up a lot more memory than I'd likely have available in a virtual machine environment. I prefer OS X, but do use Windows quite a bit as well and sometimes I need the machine's full resources available to it.
Documentation (or lack thereof) oriented toward end users is also an issue. There's often something there, perhaps in a README file, and I usually have no problem following it; however, I can see how confusing it would be for an end user who may not even know to look for a README file rather than looking for a nonexistant or non-working "HELP" button.
Another example of non-user thinking is how a great many project websites (perhaps the majority of them - it seems that way) just have "News" on the home page rather than an overview of what the project actually is. A new user who's heard of a good project (computer news articles often throw project names around as examples without any explanation) and wants to know what it's about isn't going to be so interested in the latest build news, and won't be too impressed if they have to hunt around for a definition of what the project actually is.
Win98 ran very fast on the laptop, but it's just too crashy and not very well supported anymore anyway. Win2K ran nice, but XP has ClearType, which I like.
Yeah, I tried Rox once myself; I didn't think it lived up to the hype either.
You're not actually taking this personally, are you?
I'm no stranger to the command line; I use it constantly, even under OSX (lots of shell and perl scripting), but I don't like having to use it just to move files around, as it disrupts my workflow.
Anyway, screwing around with a system is for me a means to an end, not the end itself.
I use the "Classic" theme, 16-bit color (24-bit is unaccelerated by the driver) with ClearType enabled, and it runs nicely! Office 2003, Firefox, WinAMP, and various 2D games all work perectly fine.
When I tried Fedora Core 2 it thrashed the hell out of the hard drive due to the bloat of Gnome and KDE. Sure, I could have used a lightweight window manager, but I wanted something that approximated the functionality of Windows; turns out that I was better off just using Windows.
Linux certainly works on older hardware, but not with a very good desktop anymore. How hard would it be to use an older version of KDE or Gnome (I remember running them nicely on 64-meg pentiums back in the day!) with a modern distribution?
Does Adobe allow you to migrate your Photoshop license from Windows to Mac?
It might cause an initial increase in hedonism, but once you get your chest cracked open, you're not eager to have it done again!
Here's hoping.
... at least Windows 2003 does on HPs: http://docs.hp.com/en/A5201-96043-en/apcs03.html I don't know about Windows XP 32-bit, but since I already have a licensed, legal copy of Windows 2003 Enterprise, I'm good to go!
USB ports are good for only 500 milliamps of 5V power; this is a problem with a lot of external 2.5" USB harddrives because they need more than that to spin up, so they come with USB cables with two connectors: one for data/power and another for additional power. Having the two ports so far apart makes it a pain, if not impossible, for both plugs to reach. This is a issue that I actually have to deal with quite frequently at my work. If you're lucky a single port will have enough juice to spin up the drive, but it's hit-or-miss.
They know that they won't really get the money; it'd be more satisfying if the verdict was something more realistic.
The execs in charge of greenlighting those shows were ousted from Fox in a power struggle with another set of execs who favored cheap, high-return reality shows.
Causing the failure of your former rivals' projects is an age-old political move. Screwing up the scheduling of those shows was intentional.
So I've heard.
... definately too girly for a man. Would teenage girls want a USB flashdrive?
I'm also very happy with my 35A headphones; they sounds great and were inexpensive - great bang for the buck. They sound WAY better than any earbuds I've tried, including the ones that came with my iPod.