I've used "real" RDBMSes (MySQL and PostgreSQL -- yes, I know, MySQL doens't really count compared to Postgres, Oracle or DB2, but I've used it...), MS-Jet (ugh), and SQLite, and my favorite by far is SQLite. PostgreSQL is lovely, and can do maybe 90% of what Oracle can for 0% of the price, but massive overkill for small apps (not to mention not very friendly to non-DBA system admins).
As for things that can get away with just a simple key-value mapping and don't need to be written to disk, I love std::map. The STL makes C++ that much nicer to live with (and it beats Microsoft's MFC utility classes any day).
Actually, the driver issues have been sorted and the HVR-1600 now works fine with both ATSC and NTSC. I've been using mine with MythTV for a few months now, and it works quite well.
FWIW, I'm using Debian testing, kernel 2.6.24 and the MythTV packages from debian-multimedia.org.
I remember those days...I thought it would be so cool to get a T1 into my house and sell people dialup accounts back then (keep in mind I was only 18 in 1995). I've also heard of a few people that ran their domains off semi-dedicated dialup using Linux or FreeBSD (I did something similar for a few years before I got DSL and a homeip.net address in 2000).
Also, you could do 128k on ISDN if your ISP did bonded D channels...back when my employer got on the net in 1996, they had an Ascend Pipeline ISDN modem/router and bonded-D dialup to a local ISP in Falls Church.
Someone on another forum was complaining about this same thing, so I ran good ol' traceroute on the IPs.
Result: unroutable past the first or second hop.
These are obviously forgeries generated by a portscanning program using info from ARIN; the addresses don't even have to be connected to anything, they just have to belong to a scary-looking government organisation (and if they were real, they'd route over the Internet at least as far as that agency's firewall).
I've heard at least one person I know comment that they got a TiVo instead of setting up MythTV because "they don't want to sysadmin their TV." I can sympathize, somewhat; MythTV is somewhat complicated to set up for the first time if you're not considering running it client-server; it does indeed require MySQL, something of a tall order for a single-user DVR (an SQLite option would be nice); and I've had issues over the past few days with it crashing while recording something (after months of solid operation; I get the feeling my new microATX board doesn't like my cheap BT878-based capture card).
My family had a Sears all-in-one stereo with a Philips CD player in early 1987. This was the one with the drop-down tray loader and the bright red LED inside. We also had a few CDs to work with (I specifically remember the Big Chill soundtrack and Born in the USA). Even then it was a big deal because it was so new (to us, anyway).
Also, we had a Betamax in 1977 and a VHS machine in 1979, a while before most people had even heard of a VCR.
I actually bought a PowerBook G3 (Bronze Keyboard/Lombard) off eBay about a year ago and fixed it up with more memory and a G4 upgrade because I wanted a PowerPC notebook for cheap. It's been surprisingly useful for such an old machine, though I do have some issues with it (no 3D acceleration and the upgrade card drivers crash the machine on resume sometimes). That said, it runs 10.4.9 quite well. Oh, and it's black.:D
How old of a monitor are we talking? If it was made before about 1998 (I forget exactly where the line is), it may not have VESA DDC support -- I've found that newer versions of X (including X.org) don't like that, and will give you a black screen unless you tell them to ignore the EDID. I had an old Amptron monitor a while back that had broken/non-existent DDC, and it would go black when X loaded until I put Options "IgnoreEDID" "1" in my X config file (I was using an old TNT2 M64 with the Nvidia drivers back then). Also, what ATI card is this? My old Athlon XP machine at the house has a Radeon 9600 in, and it works fine with the latest X.org in Debian unstable (though 3D could be faster).
I have the 2001 "Director's Edition" of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and they cleaned up quite a few of the not-quite-realised (but storyboarded and planned for production if they hadn't run out of time) special effects in that, with the proviso that it *all* had to look like it could have been done in 1979. They actually did a pretty good job of it, and didn't change the feel of the movie much; it's not like the special editions of Star Wars, where the movie looks completely different.
I actually got to see this happen once, live, when I was dinking around with an old Seagate Hawk 4GB. I accidentally dropped it so that the power circuitry hit part of the case, and it made some funny noises, tried to stay running, then *POP*. Left a 1 or 2 mm wide "bullet hole" in the main motor driver chip, but oddly didn't do anything to the power FETs surrounding it. I also did something similar to a really old CDC 40MB (yes, MB) drive, such that it lost one of its phases and the servo couldn't lock on -- the power drive section on those was an entire module on the back of the drive!
That chip you're looking at is a STMicro "SMOOTH" combo driver, most likely slightly customised for the application. This particular chip has two power regulators and a serial interface to the microcontroller (most likely I2Cish) in addition to the motor drive stuff.
Also, brushless DC motor drivers that have the drive transistors and the PID controller in the same package have been around for years (Hitachi and SGS were making them back in the late 1980s/early 1990s); the trick was getting them on the same chip as the coil driver, which is more like a BTL audio amp than a motor driver (Seagate actually did use a car audio amp, the TDA1210 I think, in the early ST4000 series drives back around 1984).
Sort of. ATI itself dates back to the mid-1980s (they got their start making high-feature EGA and VGA cards), and they did the 3D Rage, Rage 128 and the first two major revs (R100 and R200) of the Radeon themselves. The Radeon since the 9500 (the R300 series and beyond) is mainly ArtX's doing, however -- and ArtX was founded by the SGIers that did the chipset for the Nintendo 64, and bought by ATI back in 2000.
I had glasses with a really strong prescription made back in 1999 or 2000 (don't remember which), and looking through them was like looking through a fisheye lens -- the curvature of field was incredible, and things looked shorter than they actually were. (FWIW, these were also made with high-refractive polycarbonate instead of glass.) I finally got contacts (again) this year, and noticed I had astigmatism and needed toric lenses; I'm betting it was the curvature in my old glasses that did it.
The new contacts work extremely well, too, though they're pricey at $25 a box...
It's pretty much tailor-made for NT-based Windows; it relies on quirks of the Windows IFS system to hide the files, as well as installing upper and lower filter drivers on the IDE and CD-ROM device chains (Mark's article says exactly what is affected). So no, it wouldn't affect Linux or OS X without a total rewrite (and unless they used a privilege-escalation exploit, it'd need you to be root to install it, so they can't just slip it in).
It's because almost all Windows installs give the main user administrative privileges by default, mainly because they have to -- so many programs insist on wide-open privileges that for most people, locking down the Administrators group and running with reduced privileges isn't worth the hassle.
DSL is a rarity because of the penetration of Fiber lines.
Maybe in the newer communities like South Riding, but where I live (Manassas, not far from Old Town) fiber isn't even an option yet. That said, both cable and DSL can do 6.0/768 here, so it's not a big problem at the moment. (I have 6.0/768 through Speakeasy, and it works great.)
Not only did LANceGS cost too much ($150 plus drop shipment from Germany), but it also seems the developer refused to release any specifications for a long time -- even the photos on the website had the markings on the Ethernet chip ground off. (It's since been revealed that it uses an SMSC LAN91C96, and the latest release of Contiki supports it just fine.)
Company and organization names are usually treated as plural in English outside North America. If you read, say, the BBC's online news service, you'll see it used all the time.
Actually, the PC was about as non-proprietary as IBM ever got in those days. The machine itself was an almost direct clone of the Apple II, cobbled together in what was then record time for IBM using a few off-the-shelf Intel chips and quite a bit of common 74-series TTL gates. The only thing proprietary about it was the BIOS, and even then, it wasn't like it was secret (IBM published a listing of it in their tech manuals, just like Apple did then) -- they just refused to license it to anyone.
For video cards, it's not quite as simple. You have hardware that's several orders of magnitude more complex than the old PC, stuff that may or may not be covered by patents and (more importantly) trade secrets, bits of code that were licensed under NDAs, and all sorts of other pitfalls and gotchas. Nvidia in particular is pretty paranoid when it comes to this, for reasons I'm not quite sure of, and it'll take some doing on their part to convince them otherwise.
Nope; amazingly enough, they're still separate companies with totally different histories. MasterCard was originally "master charge - the Interbank card" and was founded by a group of banks in the Southern Tier back in the late 1950s, and Visa was originally part of Bank of America (who spun them off in 1976).
I bought a IBM 75GXP 20GB back in late 2000, before the news about their QC broke. I was pretty impressed with it at the time; it was quieter and cooler-running than the 9GB Seagate Medalist Pro 7200 it replaced, and it was super-fast for the time.
Eventually though, it developed bad sectors, and by then (2002) I figured it was time to send it back. I moved my work onto a 36GB IBM SCSI drive until I could get something better. I eventually replaced the 36GB with a 120GB Seagate 7200.7 Pro (8MB cache), which I'm quite happy with (fast and much quieter than either the 75GXP or (especially) the 36GB!) When I finally sent the 75GXP back, I noticed that the replacement drive had several things about it I didn't like...partially stripped screw heads, for one, and a noise on startup that suggested the bearings were damaged. Since it worked otherwise, I decided to save it for something non-critical.
Judging from those two factors (initial failure of the drive, sloppy workmanship on the replacement), something was definitely amiss in the state of IBM/HGST. I did read the Maximum PC article (we have a copy of the Feb/2004 issue here at the office), and that made me feel that much better about having gotten a Seagate drive again.
Every article on Wikipedia has a "Page history" link on it, whch shows the entire edit history of that page with visual diff capability. The site owners can also restrict access to certain pages that are easy edit-war or defacement targets, like the front page, but this is used very sparingly.
Slashdot Mirror
I've used "real" RDBMSes (MySQL and PostgreSQL -- yes, I know, MySQL doens't really count compared to Postgres, Oracle or DB2, but I've used it...), MS-Jet (ugh), and SQLite, and my favorite by far is SQLite. PostgreSQL is lovely, and can do maybe 90% of what Oracle can for 0% of the price, but massive overkill for small apps (not to mention not very friendly to non-DBA system admins).
As for things that can get away with just a simple key-value mapping and don't need to be written to disk, I love std::map. The STL makes C++ that much nicer to live with (and it beats Microsoft's MFC utility classes any day).
-lee
Actually, the driver issues have been sorted and the HVR-1600 now works fine with both ATSC and NTSC. I've been using mine with MythTV for a few months now, and it works quite well.
FWIW, I'm using Debian testing, kernel 2.6.24 and the MythTV packages from debian-multimedia.org.
-lee
I remember those days...I thought it would be so cool to get a T1 into my house and sell people dialup accounts back then (keep in mind I was only 18 in 1995). I've also heard of a few people that ran their domains off semi-dedicated dialup using Linux or FreeBSD (I did something similar for a few years before I got DSL and a homeip.net address in 2000).
Also, you could do 128k on ISDN if your ISP did bonded D channels...back when my employer got on the net in 1996, they had an Ascend Pipeline ISDN modem/router and bonded-D dialup to a local ISP in Falls Church.
Someone on another forum was complaining about this same thing, so I ran good ol' traceroute on the IPs.
Result: unroutable past the first or second hop.
These are obviously forgeries generated by a portscanning program using info from ARIN; the addresses don't even have to be connected to anything, they just have to belong to a scary-looking government organisation (and if they were real, they'd route over the Internet at least as far as that agency's firewall).
-lee
I've heard at least one person I know comment that they got a TiVo instead of setting up MythTV because "they don't want to sysadmin their TV." I can sympathize, somewhat; MythTV is somewhat complicated to set up for the first time if you're not considering running it client-server; it does indeed require MySQL, something of a tall order for a single-user DVR (an SQLite option would be nice); and I've had issues over the past few days with it crashing while recording something (after months of solid operation; I get the feeling my new microATX board doesn't like my cheap BT878-based capture card).
All the self-checkouts I've used so far (IBM, NCR, Fujitsu) read off what you buy as well, though thankfully they just say the price.
My family had a Sears all-in-one stereo with a Philips CD player in early 1987. This was the one with the drop-down tray loader and the bright red LED inside. We also had a few CDs to work with (I specifically remember the Big Chill soundtrack and Born in the USA). Even then it was a big deal because it was so new (to us, anyway).
Also, we had a Betamax in 1977 and a VHS machine in 1979, a while before most people had even heard of a VCR.
I actually bought a PowerBook G3 (Bronze Keyboard/Lombard) off eBay about a year ago and fixed it up with more memory and a G4 upgrade because I wanted a PowerPC notebook for cheap. It's been surprisingly useful for such an old machine, though I do have some issues with it (no 3D acceleration and the upgrade card drivers crash the machine on resume sometimes). That said, it runs 10.4.9 quite well. Oh, and it's black. :D
How old of a monitor are we talking? If it was made before about 1998 (I forget exactly where the line is), it may not have VESA DDC support -- I've found that newer versions of X (including X.org) don't like that, and will give you a black screen unless you tell them to ignore the EDID. I had an old Amptron monitor a while back that had broken/non-existent DDC, and it would go black when X loaded until I put Options "IgnoreEDID" "1" in my X config file (I was using an old TNT2 M64 with the Nvidia drivers back then). Also, what ATI card is this? My old Athlon XP machine at the house has a Radeon 9600 in, and it works fine with the latest X.org in Debian unstable (though 3D could be faster).
-lee
I have the 2001 "Director's Edition" of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and they cleaned up quite a few of the not-quite-realised (but storyboarded and planned for production if they hadn't run out of time) special effects in that, with the proviso that it *all* had to look like it could have been done in 1979. They actually did a pretty good job of it, and didn't change the feel of the movie much; it's not like the special editions of Star Wars, where the movie looks completely different.
-lee
I actually got to see this happen once, live, when I was dinking around with an old Seagate Hawk 4GB. I accidentally dropped it so that the power circuitry hit part of the case, and it made some funny noises, tried to stay running, then *POP*. Left a 1 or 2 mm wide "bullet hole" in the main motor driver chip, but oddly didn't do anything to the power FETs surrounding it. I also did something similar to a really old CDC 40MB (yes, MB) drive, such that it lost one of its phases and the servo couldn't lock on -- the power drive section on those was an entire module on the back of the drive!
-lee
That chip you're looking at is a STMicro "SMOOTH" combo driver, most likely slightly customised for the application. This particular chip has two power regulators and a serial interface to the microcontroller (most likely I2Cish) in addition to the motor drive stuff.
Also, brushless DC motor drivers that have the drive transistors and the PID controller in the same package have been around for years (Hitachi and SGS were making them back in the late 1980s/early 1990s); the trick was getting them on the same chip as the coil driver, which is more like a BTL audio amp than a motor driver (Seagate actually did use a car audio amp, the TDA1210 I think, in the early ST4000 series drives back around 1984).
-lee
Sort of. ATI itself dates back to the mid-1980s (they got their start making high-feature EGA and VGA cards), and they did the 3D Rage, Rage 128 and the first two major revs (R100 and R200) of the Radeon themselves. The Radeon since the 9500 (the R300 series and beyond) is mainly ArtX's doing, however -- and ArtX was founded by the SGIers that did the chipset for the Nintendo 64, and bought by ATI back in 2000.
-lee
I had glasses with a really strong prescription made back in 1999 or 2000 (don't remember which), and looking through them was like looking through a fisheye lens -- the curvature of field was incredible, and things looked shorter than they actually were. (FWIW, these were also made with high-refractive polycarbonate instead of glass.) I finally got contacts (again) this year, and noticed I had astigmatism and needed toric lenses; I'm betting it was the curvature in my old glasses that did it.
The new contacts work extremely well, too, though they're pricey at $25 a box...
-lee
It's pretty much tailor-made for NT-based Windows; it relies on quirks of the Windows IFS system to hide the files, as well as installing upper and lower filter drivers on the IDE and CD-ROM device chains (Mark's article says exactly what is affected). So no, it wouldn't affect Linux or OS X without a total rewrite (and unless they used a privilege-escalation exploit, it'd need you to be root to install it, so they can't just slip it in).
-lee
It's because almost all Windows installs give the main user administrative privileges by default, mainly because they have to -- so many programs insist on wide-open privileges that for most people, locking down the Administrators group and running with reduced privileges isn't worth the hassle.
-lee
"Windows 95 Sucks" is actually "Bought It Up" by Bob Rivers.
-lee
DSL is a rarity because of the penetration of Fiber lines.
Maybe in the newer communities like South Riding, but where I live (Manassas, not far from Old Town) fiber isn't even an option yet. That said, both cable and DSL can do 6.0/768 here, so it's not a big problem at the moment. (I have 6.0/768 through Speakeasy, and it works great.)
-lee
Not only did LANceGS cost too much ($150 plus drop shipment from Germany), but it also seems the developer refused to release any specifications for a long time -- even the photos on the website had the markings on the Ethernet chip ground off. (It's since been revealed that it uses an SMSC LAN91C96, and the latest release of Contiki supports it just fine.)
-lee
Company and organization names are usually treated as plural in English outside North America. If you read, say, the BBC's online news service, you'll see it used all the time.
-lee
The test and measurement stuff got spun out to Agilent with the semiconductor division, IIRC.
-lee
Actually, the PC was about as non-proprietary as IBM ever got in those days. The machine itself was an almost direct clone of the Apple II, cobbled together in what was then record time for IBM using a few off-the-shelf Intel chips and quite a bit of common 74-series TTL gates. The only thing proprietary about it was the BIOS, and even then, it wasn't like it was secret (IBM published a listing of it in their tech manuals, just like Apple did then) -- they just refused to license it to anyone.
For video cards, it's not quite as simple. You have hardware that's several orders of magnitude more complex than the old PC, stuff that may or may not be covered by patents and (more importantly) trade secrets, bits of code that were licensed under NDAs, and all sorts of other pitfalls and gotchas. Nvidia in particular is pretty paranoid when it comes to this, for reasons I'm not quite sure of, and it'll take some doing on their part to convince them otherwise.
-lee
Nope; amazingly enough, they're still separate companies with totally different histories. MasterCard was originally "master charge - the Interbank card" and was founded by a group of banks in the Southern Tier back in the late 1950s, and Visa was originally part of Bank of America (who spun them off in 1976).
-lee
I bought a IBM 75GXP 20GB back in late 2000, before the news about their QC broke. I was pretty impressed with it at the time; it was quieter and cooler-running than the 9GB Seagate Medalist Pro 7200 it replaced, and it was super-fast for the time.
Eventually though, it developed bad sectors, and by then (2002) I figured it was time to send it back. I moved my work onto a 36GB IBM SCSI drive until I could get something better. I eventually replaced the 36GB with a 120GB Seagate 7200.7 Pro (8MB cache), which I'm quite happy with (fast and much quieter than either the 75GXP or
(especially) the 36GB!) When I finally sent the 75GXP back, I noticed that the replacement drive had several things about it I didn't like...partially stripped screw heads, for one, and a noise on startup that suggested the bearings were damaged. Since it worked otherwise, I decided to save it for something non-critical.
Judging from those two factors (initial failure of the drive, sloppy workmanship on the replacement), something was definitely amiss in the state of IBM/HGST. I did read the Maximum PC article (we have a copy of the Feb/2004 issue here at the office), and that made me feel that much better about having gotten a Seagate drive again.
-lee
Every article on Wikipedia has a "Page history" link on it, whch shows the entire edit history of that page with visual diff capability. The site owners can also restrict access to certain pages that are easy edit-war or defacement targets, like the front page, but this is used very sparingly.
-lee