Although luckily I'm half-decent at recognising voices. Still, it's a bit embarrassing to almost walk past a friend without noticing them, and to not be able to recall their name when they do say hello...:-)
There is a hack, and I've never done it on Indigo but I've done it with 2 Indys, to reset the eaddr. But at this point the fix is getting pretty extreme and I see where you're comming from. Too bad it wasn't an Indigo2 instead!
Sadly, the discussion's pretty much academic by now - I haven't seen the machine for the best part of four years or so, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's shuffled off into the great computer skip in the sky. Still, if it is out there somewhere, maybe the above discussion will help someone fix it...:-)
You honestly thing that a bargain basement commodity PC of the Indigo 2 era would or could massively outperform it? Running what? Windows?
I was referring to the time I was using the machine - late 2000, early 2001 or so. As innovative as the Indigo's graphics hardware was when first available in the early 1990s, I don't think it would outperform a Geforce 2...:-)
Indeed the Indigo is much trickier to reset the PROM password. What you have to do then is remove the graphics and CPU board to get to the backplane and you can ground one pin on the EEPROM. As you can imagine it requires alot of care.
And it zeroes the Ethernet MAC address, making the machine completely useless...
Most SGIs have a jumper to reset the PROM password. It's a FAQ that should take 10 seconds to figure out.
Done a quick bit of research - it would appear it was an Indigo, not an Indigo 2 - one of the few machines without the jumper.
And yes, I did download the user manual, ask on the SGI newsgroups, and I even consulted the university's SGI administrator for his advice. The general response? Get IRIX booting in order to run the appropriate password-reset utility, or the machine is unusable.
So, we borrowed a friend's Indy and managed to mount the Indigo's hard disk on that, cleared out/tmp and reset the root password in/etc/passwd, but the machine still wouldn't boot. IRIX was dead, and while it might have been possible to fix it up enough to boot, or to find another working Indigo's hard disk and borrow that, it didn't really seem the effort.
This is one of the reasons I don't listen to most people's opinions unless it's pretty clear they're experts. It makes more sense to figure it our yourself. Too many times I hear people have immense difficulty or distaste for something and the reason is because they don't know what they're doing.
Well, perhaps you ought to redirect your criticisms elsewhere...
They're cool looking computers, but in the end that entire stack of SGIs shown in the fellow's home office probaby has about as much power as the Nvidia/AMD box sitting on my desktop.
A few years ago now, I had access to an old Silicon Graphics machine - a Indigo 2, or something like that. It was quite fun being able to mess around with what had originally been an incredibly expensive machine, and of playing with another UNIX I hadn't used. I even got Blender running on it...
Of course, the machine (well, IRIX) promptly killed itself, and nobody knew the equivalent of the BIOS password to allow reinstallation from the IRIX CDs and bootable SCSI CD-ROM drive we'd spent weeks hunting down. There turned out to be no way of resetting that password, at least not without wiping the MAC address too. Given that the machine was only useful as an X terminal and web browsing machine, it didn't seem worth doing.
Looking inside, at the multi-boarded graphics subsystem covered with huge custom-built chips, it seemed rather sad that even a bargain-basement PC of the time would have massively outperformed it. And now, when I run Half-Life 2 on my current, elderly PC, complete with all sorts of per-pixel shaders and suchlike thanks to its inconceivably powerful (yet obsolete) Geforce 4, I think about how impressed I'd been by a couple of gouraud-shaded polygons...
The only thing I really miss is the screensaver. I forget what it was called, there's an attempted simulation in Xscreensaver called 'stonerview' or similar, but it's nowhere near as good as the original.:-)
Apple has text to synthetic voice capability for dialog boxes for quite a while.
Argh... Just had a sudden vision of it having a telephone-style keypad.
Press power button. Hello, and welcome to iPod Micro. To browse your music tracks, press one. To change track details, press two. To delete a track out of sheer embarrassment, press three....
Press '1'. Beep... Please hold!
(Cue twenty seconds of vile music you didn't know you had. Then, in a completely different voice...)
You have - fifty. Three. Albums and - two. Hundred - and eleven. Tracks. To list albums - one. To - ten, press one. To list...
In my experience, Epson really cares about color-matching. Their printer ink actually has a larger gamut than standardized CMYK, and their drivers come with very well-calibrated color profiles (and are ColorSync-compatible on the Mac.
... Which is why all the printouts on my iBook with my Epson Stylus Photo 1290 at first had a truly horrible mauve haze to them. Disabling ColorSync and manually tweaking the colour balance has helped a lot, but I must have wasted loads of ink and paper getting the colours vaguely match up with the (calibrated!) display.
I had to do something similar in The GIMP on Linux when the printer was connected to my PC - moving my photos to the Mac, I thought I'd be free of such pain. It would appear not.
Seriously, if anyone knows what might be going on, I'd love to know. The purple problem has stumped everyone I've asked so far...:-)
I was reading through the list of things Microsoft were adding, thinking that it's just another place Google are at already, then I realised that while there's Gmail, there's no Gmessenger or similar as far as I'm aware.
How long do you reckon before Google launches such a thing, potentially pushing MSN Messenger out the market?:-)
Something I've liked in the past from compiling development versions of the Gimp are the development splash screens. Frequently containing giant photos of bugs (for squashing, obviously), fake news report screengrabs or some other warped aspects of the programmers' humour, they often show that programmer art isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Although a couple of them were astoundingly crude - but I think that was intentional.:-)
I'm running the game on a system slightly below the average stats and it is easily the best visuals I have seen in a PC game.
My terrible, built-on-the-cheap PC is over three years old now, and I'm utterly amazed how well Half-Life 2 runs on it.
1.1GHz Athlon XP (chip capable of 1.4GHz or something, but it was an emergency replacement after the old one toasted itself - don't ask). 512MB PC133 memory. 20GB main hard disk, mostly used for Linux, and an 8GB pile of rubbish I fished out a skip for Windows games' drive D:. Win98SE. 128MB Nvidia GeForce 4200Ti, or whatever it's called. Somewhat elderly Soundblaster PCI card (probably from 1999 or so).
And, bizarrely, I've been steadily turning the graphics options up (quite a few things are already on 'High'), and it's still completely playable...
There's the stuttering problem (I was playing without Steam having finished downloading the game, so I may not have the latest patches yet) and maps do take ages to load, but it's not nearly as painful an experience as I thought it would be. Actually, it's rather enjoyable.:-)
Likewise, if you no longer have any use for a mounted volume (server or removable media), dragging it to the Trash tells the OS that you are done with it and it should no longer be recognized by the OS. The volume does not get deleted, it's merely discarded and moved out of your way.
That particular old Mac way of ejecting disks is still crap - personally, I tend not to store important things in my rubbish bin, 'cause that's where rubbish goes.:-)
The Mac method particularly rankled me because I had an Atari ST, with the so-similar-Apple-sued-Digital-Research GEM desktop. Where, of course, dragging a disk icon to the trash would delete everything from the disk. It would ask first, mind...
The hardware fix is just as absurd: have you ever seen a memory dump of 1 GIG of memory take only 30 seconds? I sure haven't. Not even for 256MB. BUY A UPS you idiot. They are as cheap as $100, way cheaper than any integrated solution would be. And who wants a computer that weighs 100 pounds?
I do think he has a point - desktop computers have been engineered in such a way that losing power, even momentarily, is data-destroying.
As a wild, thought-up-in-seconds hardware solution that's possibly simpler than his, a small battery and a laptop-style suspend system could be one idea. If power is suddenly lost, the battery saves processor and hardware state and keeps the memory contents alive for long enough for normal power to be restored. My iBook lasts forever while suspended on its battery, while never saving any memory contents to disk - I don't think this method would necessarily need a huge, expensive battery for a desktop machine to survive half an hour or so.
He does appear a bit off when it comes to, say, loss of data when it comes to filling in web forms:
"Store (encrypted) information in cookies even before transfer to the server, so information is preserved from all but the most serious 'melt-downs.'"
Sadly, as far as I know, a cookie has to be explicitly set by the server when it sends a page - the only way the server can set the cookie containing the user's data is if the data has already been sent.
I'm a big fan of saving state client-side for forms - many sites are horrible at trashing user input at any and every opportunity, often mangling the 'Back' button with Javascript or dodgy server-side coding - but unfortunately the server usually has to be involved...
The wings that fold out of the iBook power supply so you can wrap the cable, the button and LEDs on that battery so you can check charge without using the computer, everywhere you look there a nice touches which added together make for a far nicer experience.
I was really surprised to discover that my father's (awful) Dell laptop has that LEDs-on-battery thing - except its design is ever so slightly broken.
The only way you can see the LEDs is to remove the battery...:-)
ie: having their forensics guy take a 320x200-ish video surveillance snapshot and enhancing it to see the bad guy in a reflection from someone's eyeball, etc...
I've heard of some very impressive computer forensics (I think these guys are the acknowledged experts in the UK, even if their poetry is awful), but I've also heard of some seriously cack-handed investigation, filling hard disks with irrelevant files. Something like a semi-automated Knoppix thing could be highly beneficial for some, but anything with any real legal weight would have to be done by a proper specialist...
"Miyamoto, credited as the design genius behind key Nintendo franchises including Zelda and Mario, told the magazine that online gaming will reach the mainstream within three to four years, and that Nintendo will be moving in that direction as a result."
Doesn't this strike people as Nintendo being stunningly... Uninnovative? A case of 'well, everyone else will be doing it, so we will too'?
Japan, probably Nintendo's biggest market, has pretty good broadband uptake - apparently as of September 2003, Japan had "8 per cent penetration per head of population for DSL lines alone". So, it sounds like the telecoms infrastructure's definitely getting there - it's not like the Dreamcast's limited dialup capabilities.
Instead of Nintendo's usual supposed innovation, where they'd 'define' the future, it sounds more like a meek 'meh'...
Except it's not very good spyware - it asks if you wish to participate in the purely voluntary hardware survey, and I think (although I could be wrong) it even shows you precisely what it'll send to Valve if you do agree.
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I can't remember names or faces.
:-)
Although luckily I'm half-decent at recognising voices. Still, it's a bit embarrassing to almost walk past a friend without noticing them, and to not be able to recall their name when they do say hello...
There is a hack, and I've never done it on Indigo but I've done it with 2 Indys, to reset the eaddr. But at this point the fix is getting pretty extreme and I see where you're comming from. Too bad it wasn't an Indigo2 instead!
:-)
Sadly, the discussion's pretty much academic by now - I haven't seen the machine for the best part of four years or so, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's shuffled off into the great computer skip in the sky. Still, if it is out there somewhere, maybe the above discussion will help someone fix it...
You honestly thing that a bargain basement commodity PC of the Indigo 2 era would or could massively outperform it? Running what? Windows?
:-)
I was referring to the time I was using the machine - late 2000, early 2001 or so. As innovative as the Indigo's graphics hardware was when first available in the early 1990s, I don't think it would outperform a Geforce 2...
Indeed the Indigo is much trickier to reset the PROM password. What you have to do then is remove the graphics and CPU board to get to the backplane and you can ground one pin on the EEPROM. As you can imagine it requires alot of care.
And it zeroes the Ethernet MAC address, making the machine completely useless...
Most SGIs have a jumper to reset the PROM password. It's a FAQ that should take 10 seconds to figure out.
/tmp and reset the root password in /etc/passwd, but the machine still wouldn't boot. IRIX was dead, and while it might have been possible to fix it up enough to boot, or to find another working Indigo's hard disk and borrow that, it didn't really seem the effort.
Done a quick bit of research - it would appear it was an Indigo, not an Indigo 2 - one of the few machines without the jumper.
And yes, I did download the user manual, ask on the SGI newsgroups, and I even consulted the university's SGI administrator for his advice. The general response? Get IRIX booting in order to run the appropriate password-reset utility, or the machine is unusable.
So, we borrowed a friend's Indy and managed to mount the Indigo's hard disk on that, cleared out
This is one of the reasons I don't listen to most people's opinions unless it's pretty clear they're experts. It makes more sense to figure it our yourself. Too many times I hear people have immense difficulty or distaste for something and the reason is because they don't know what they're doing.
Well, perhaps you ought to redirect your criticisms elsewhere...
They're cool looking computers, but in the end that entire stack of SGIs shown in the fellow's home office probaby has about as much power as the Nvidia/AMD box sitting on my desktop.
:-)
A few years ago now, I had access to an old Silicon Graphics machine - a Indigo 2, or something like that. It was quite fun being able to mess around with what had originally been an incredibly expensive machine, and of playing with another UNIX I hadn't used. I even got Blender running on it...
Of course, the machine (well, IRIX) promptly killed itself, and nobody knew the equivalent of the BIOS password to allow reinstallation from the IRIX CDs and bootable SCSI CD-ROM drive we'd spent weeks hunting down. There turned out to be no way of resetting that password, at least not without wiping the MAC address too. Given that the machine was only useful as an X terminal and web browsing machine, it didn't seem worth doing.
Looking inside, at the multi-boarded graphics subsystem covered with huge custom-built chips, it seemed rather sad that even a bargain-basement PC of the time would have massively outperformed it. And now, when I run Half-Life 2 on my current, elderly PC, complete with all sorts of per-pixel shaders and suchlike thanks to its inconceivably powerful (yet obsolete) Geforce 4, I think about how impressed I'd been by a couple of gouraud-shaded polygons...
The only thing I really miss is the screensaver. I forget what it was called, there's an attempted simulation in Xscreensaver called 'stonerview' or similar, but it's nowhere near as good as the original.
Uh, moderators, why am I being moderated as "flamebait"? I was commenting on MY OWN COMMENT! I replied to myself.
:-)
Look, if you're going to pick fights with yourself, please take it outside!
HELLO? YEAH, I'M ON THE PLANE! I'M ON ME MOBILE!
(Slashdot said: "Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING." Well, duh!)
Come to think of it - how come my cat isn't smart enough to get a degree?
Interestingly, your cat does have moderation points on Slashdot!
Apple has text to synthetic voice capability for dialog boxes for quite a while.
...
...
;-)
Argh... Just had a sudden vision of it having a telephone-style keypad.
Press power button.
Hello, and welcome to iPod Micro. To browse your music tracks, press one. To change track details, press two. To delete a track out of sheer embarrassment, press three.
Press '1'. Beep...
Please hold!
(Cue twenty seconds of vile music you didn't know you had. Then, in a completely different voice...)
You have - fifty. Three. Albums and - two. Hundred - and eleven. Tracks. To list albums - one. To - ten, press one. To list
You probably get the idea by now.
In my experience, Epson really cares about color-matching. Their printer ink actually has a larger gamut than standardized CMYK, and their drivers come with very well-calibrated color profiles (and are ColorSync-compatible on the Mac.
... Which is why all the printouts on my iBook with my Epson Stylus Photo 1290 at first had a truly horrible mauve haze to them. Disabling ColorSync and manually tweaking the colour balance has helped a lot, but I must have wasted loads of ink and paper getting the colours vaguely match up with the (calibrated!) display.
:-)
I had to do something similar in The GIMP on Linux when the printer was connected to my PC - moving my photos to the Mac, I thought I'd be free of such pain. It would appear not.
Seriously, if anyone knows what might be going on, I'd love to know. The purple problem has stumped everyone I've asked so far...
Now, the REAL accomplishment would be to produce the movie in second person. :)
:-)
I've read a book that was written in both first and second person - somewhat unsurprisingly, it was written by a certain Iain [M.] Banks...
... you cannot pick up a dumpster or, indeed, anything larger than a file cabinet or book case.
;-)
Unless, of course, you're Dog.
I was reading through the list of things Microsoft were adding, thinking that it's just another place Google are at already, then I realised that while there's Gmail, there's no Gmessenger or similar as far as I'm aware.
:-)
How long do you reckon before Google launches such a thing, potentially pushing MSN Messenger out the market?
Doesn't seem to make much sense that a multiplayer deathmatch is not included, especially in a game like HL2.....
They did include some completely revamped thing called 'Counter-Strike: Source', however. Apparently the original is fairly popular...
Something I've liked in the past from compiling development versions of the Gimp are the development splash screens. Frequently containing giant photos of bugs (for squashing, obviously), fake news report screengrabs or some other warped aspects of the programmers' humour, they often show that programmer art isn't necessarily a bad thing.
:-)
Although a couple of them were astoundingly crude - but I think that was intentional.
Check out this list of towers for a better understanding.
:-P
Rubbish list. Doesn't mention any Fawlty Towers whatsoever...
I'm running the game on a system slightly below the average stats and it is easily the best visuals I have seen in a PC game.
:-)
My terrible, built-on-the-cheap PC is over three years old now, and I'm utterly amazed how well Half-Life 2 runs on it.
1.1GHz Athlon XP (chip capable of 1.4GHz or something, but it was an emergency replacement after the old one toasted itself - don't ask). 512MB PC133 memory. 20GB main hard disk, mostly used for Linux, and an 8GB pile of rubbish I fished out a skip for Windows games' drive D:. Win98SE. 128MB Nvidia GeForce 4200Ti, or whatever it's called. Somewhat elderly Soundblaster PCI card (probably from 1999 or so).
And, bizarrely, I've been steadily turning the graphics options up (quite a few things are already on 'High'), and it's still completely playable...
There's the stuttering problem (I was playing without Steam having finished downloading the game, so I may not have the latest patches yet) and maps do take ages to load, but it's not nearly as painful an experience as I thought it would be. Actually, it's rather enjoyable.
Likewise, if you no longer have any use for a mounted volume (server or removable media), dragging it to the Trash tells the OS that you are done with it and it should no longer be recognized by the OS. The volume does not get deleted, it's merely discarded and moved out of your way.
:-)
That particular old Mac way of ejecting disks is still crap - personally, I tend not to store important things in my rubbish bin, 'cause that's where rubbish goes.
The Mac method particularly rankled me because I had an Atari ST, with the so-similar-Apple-sued-Digital-Research GEM desktop. Where, of course, dragging a disk icon to the trash would delete everything from the disk. It would ask first, mind...
I do think he has a point - desktop computers have been engineered in such a way that losing power, even momentarily, is data-destroying.
As a wild, thought-up-in-seconds hardware solution that's possibly simpler than his, a small battery and a laptop-style suspend system could be one idea. If power is suddenly lost, the battery saves processor and hardware state and keeps the memory contents alive for long enough for normal power to be restored. My iBook lasts forever while suspended on its battery, while never saving any memory contents to disk - I don't think this method would necessarily need a huge, expensive battery for a desktop machine to survive half an hour or so.
He does appear a bit off when it comes to, say, loss of data when it comes to filling in web forms:Sadly, as far as I know, a cookie has to be explicitly set by the server when it sends a page - the only way the server can set the cookie containing the user's data is if the data has already been sent.
I'm a big fan of saving state client-side for forms - many sites are horrible at trashing user input at any and every opportunity, often mangling the 'Back' button with Javascript or dodgy server-side coding - but unfortunately the server usually has to be involved...
The wings that fold out of the iBook power supply so you can wrap the cable, the button and LEDs on that battery so you can check charge without using the computer, everywhere you look there a nice touches which added together make for a far nicer experience.
:-)
I was really surprised to discover that my father's (awful) Dell laptop has that LEDs-on-battery thing - except its design is ever so slightly broken.
The only way you can see the LEDs is to remove the battery...
ie: having their forensics guy take a 320x200-ish video surveillance snapshot and enhancing it to see the bad guy in a reflection from someone's eyeball, etc...
;-)
Kind of like this?
I've heard of some very impressive computer forensics (I think these guys are the acknowledged experts in the UK, even if their poetry is awful), but I've also heard of some seriously cack-handed investigation, filling hard disks with irrelevant files. Something like a semi-automated Knoppix thing could be highly beneficial for some, but anything with any real legal weight would have to be done by a proper specialist...
Doesn't this strike people as Nintendo being stunningly... Uninnovative? A case of 'well, everyone else will be doing it, so we will too'?
Japan, probably Nintendo's biggest market, has pretty good broadband uptake - apparently as of September 2003, Japan had "8 per cent penetration per head of population for DSL lines alone". So, it sounds like the telecoms infrastructure's definitely getting there - it's not like the Dreamcast's limited dialup capabilities.
Instead of Nintendo's usual supposed innovation, where they'd 'define' the future, it sounds more like a meek 'meh'...
Steam is the spyware.
Except it's not very good spyware - it asks if you wish to participate in the purely voluntary hardware survey, and I think (although I could be wrong) it even shows you precisely what it'll send to Valve if you do agree.
Is this license agreement on the box in a place where I can view it before I purchase it? Not the last time I checked.
;-)
Why not read it online?
Oh, wait, this 'try before you buy' thing only applies to full retail products, not EULAs...