Yeah, I got bit by the DOS3 thing a couple times. DOS 2.5 and SpartaDOS 3.2d were pretty much what I stuck with. I was mostly a kid during the heyday of the Atari and my family wasn't in a financial position to get the best of the goodies, so unfortunately I've never experienced the joys of mass storage. I lusted after a Happy Drive too:) We did have an R-verter and an 850 Interface, both of which are apparently somewhat rare today, as well as a couple of US Doubler'd 1050s. I remember when I saw my first hard drive attached to an ST when I was probably 7 or 8 and thought it was the coolest thing. Sadly, by the time my family was in a position to replace the ol' 130XE, the 386 era was already solidly underway and we ended up with a used 286. The Atari stuck around for games and word processing well into the 90's though, and was really only fully replaced around '95 or '96 when I bought my own new computer that the family also used (AMD K5-133 it was), which relegated the 486 they'd replaced the 286 with to backup status.
Even the 8-bit Ataris supported hard drives with later versions of DOS (I always liked SpartaDOS personally). The flash is just an adapter that makes the CF show up as a standard HD to the Atari. Nothing too terribly fancy there. And it only makes sense that an Atari would support its own DOS;)
These days you can even get ethernet and an IDE adapter for the things (though not cheaply).
I think the idea was separate, non-interacting DNS systems. This might mean that US's DNS points slashdot.org at slashdot, but Sweden (just picking a random country, no offense or slight intended) doesn't like Slashdot and makes their DNS point it at goatse. Meanwhile Switzerland might point it at tubgirl, and Norway at Badger Badger Badger. This would break things rather badly as the internet got more and more fragmented from separate DNS systems.
Naturally if there were interactivity and zone transfer agreements and such in place there'd be no problem, but therein lies the rub.
It probably wasn't the most ideal way to do it, but I once used my tablet somewhat like this by connecting via VNC to a desktop with the "compressed full screen" option (the resolutions were different). This let me control the mouse on the desktop from the tablet.
Well, if you're ever in Atlanta, drop by some time;) I use mine [Stylistic 4121] daily for everything from taking notes in class on in Windows Journal in XP Tablet to wardriving with kismet and GPS navigation with gpsdrive in Gentoo. Granted they're still very much a niche technology, but there are those of us who use them then regularly. Most people who have seen me use it haven't really considered a tablet PC. It's not so much that they don't want to use them, they just haven't really looked into it. I know a couple techy people here that have bought a tablet PC and love them after seeing me with mine. I do attach a keyboard or use keyboard/mouse sharing software like Synergy for a lot of the work, though.
That said, I'm not quite sure where this Nokia thing fits in. Shell work on an on screen keyboard sucks mightily, and attaching a keyboard removes most of the advantage this would have over a subnotebook like a picturebook or Libretto. The screen looks to be a bit small for whole-page note taking, plus it's fairly thick. It's also not powerful enough for any really high-level multimedia stuff. To me it seems to be Just Another Webpad, albeit one with some useful built-in features like GPRS. For remote workers, that alone might be enough to justify it.
I'd say that's more likely, just from an attention standpoint. Kids are more likely to be taken in by flashy graphics and gimmicks, the same way toys, kids cartoons, movies, etc. have gotten more flashy and gimmicky lately. It's not that they can't enjoy something older, I have turned the kids of a couple family friends on to classic NES games and they love them, but getting them to stay interested long enough to get to the "meat" of classic games can be hard. Likewise, I think older people have the patience to keep at something to enjoy it rather than dismiss it out of hand because of a 16 color 32x32 sprite with four frames of animation. Not to mention they're more likely to have grown up with at least the awareness of them, if not actually playing them, so they're more likely to enjoy it.
(That's not to say older people can't be taken in by flashy gimmicky things with no substance. Look at BMW's iDrive system for an example. Almost universally panned but BMW can't make enough of them)
Don't underestimate the simple value of basic familiarity. Even the very basic "Oh, that's a computer, I can type on it" can be more useful than you might think. I remember when my elementary school classes all got Apple IIs in the early-mid 80's, the teachers usually ignored them or let the kids mess with them because they were afraid of them. The people closer to my age, even if they've never used a computer, are a lot more comfortable with at least making some use of them because they were at least around them growing up. It's more like someone getting into a new car for the first time and trying out all the buttons and knobs because they have a basic idea of what they do and know they won't make the car blow up if they push the wrong one (security flamethrowers in Africa aside). Compared to someone who might have never ever seen a car before having no idea what things do and being afraid the little red triangle might be something dangerous rather than simply turn on the hazard lights.
At any rate, I do think the handling of the Great Computer Rollout back in the day was handled poorly, but it definitely wasn't a complete waste. Just the other day I was talking to my professor of my digital class about random stuff, and he mentioned how much easier it is for people to use the programmable logic programmer now than 10-15 years ago when he started. By and large everyone now has at least typed a letter on a computer and can handle the basic list of steps necessary to kick off the programmer, compared to 15 years ago when use of the programmer might be some peoples' first experience ever with a computer.
For the average ICE, short jaunts are a lot more stressful on the engine than longer trips since it never gets up to operating temperature. You'd wear out an engine a lot faster by starting it up, running it hard for a short time, stopping it, and letting it sit a bit than having it run moderately hard at temperature.
I do doubt the same applies to a fuel cell powered car, but that would probably be an advantage for some people who just drive short distances all the time.
Yeah, I know. They touted it as a feature because they say it lets users make direct bookmarks. So not only do people get their un's and passes in history, but in bookmarks too. I'm currently helping the owner with a redesign, so I'm hoping I can convince him to go with a GETless design. I'm not sure I'll be successful, but we'll see:)
While I can't say I agree with him on everything, it would be entirely possible. Many e-mail clients include the subject line of an open message in the titlebar, and it would be possible for someone to have a CC number or SSN in the subject line. Granted, this is stupid in and of itself, but I'm just saying it's possible.
Then there are the various form-filler programs like Gator(bleh), Roboform, etc. that may well do something like that at some time. Don't use them myself.
Or how about a badly written commerce site that sticks it up there in a title?
Then there are other private information that while not as critical as CCs and SSNs, you might not want to be in public. Diseases, passwords, etc. I know of at least one poorly written chatsite that puts the username and password in the URL, and then sticks the whole URL in the title. Certainly are ways of getting private info into title bars. Most of them involve already unsafe behavior, but it can happen.
In my experience, Office seems to be one of the most common abusers of using non-native widgets. For example, even in Office 97 they reimplemented a lot of the window controls and menu handlers. If you ran it in NT3.51 you'd still get the Win95-style menus and widgets in the MDI interfaces. Office XP and 2k3 use the shiny shaded menus with pretty highlighting and such.
That said, it would be interesting to compare the speeds of the libraries used.
Cheap hardware, commodity interface and storage media, dirt cheap... Now, you'd need over 18 million of the things for the low-end capacity, but they'd be easily replaceable, probably hot-swappable, and might actually be somewhat durable;)
I'd pay good money to get a tour of a company with rows and rows of iMacs with 127 floppy drives hanging off each one...:)
I got B&W 1 running very nicely in Cedega - right up until you have to evacuate the first island. At that point it crashed hard. Even the various updates didn't fix that, and after running through the tutorial a few times too many I got fed up with it. Haven't played it since, actually, since my save games kept getting corrupted even in Windows. Incredible game, but even with the later patches I was never able to get very far in it. Might have to pick it up again and see if my current system runs it any better.
Went ahead and tried it out, it's not bad looking at all. Has a way to go to replace some of the other webmail clients I've used (currently using squirrelmail on my server. Nice, simple, straightforward) but the install was quick and easy and it does look pretty. Might could use a howto on the mysql part for newbs, but I didn't have any trouble and I'm still pretty new to mysql myself. Does seem a bit slow on low-bandwidth servers like mine, but might be my fault.
Definitely keeping an eye on this, though. I'd not mind a friendlier webmail interface.
Yep, PartitionMagic to resize and then install. I actually didn't have any external boot devices, which made for an interesting install. I have killed the bootloader a couple times which necessitated popping the drive into another computer. I got a USB floppy drive now which should help. I didn't realize at first it could boot off USB, now that I know that I can probably get a USB key booting. I'm actually in a bit of trouble now because my Windows is in need of a reinstall and I can no longer get the restore image to work since the partition layout has changed. I'll probaby burn the install files to a CD and go that route.
One annoyance is I'm running into a PM bug when trying to convert the Windows partition from NTFS to FAT32 so I can use it from Linux properly. Captive NTFS is just too slow for major use. No one seems to have a good answer for it though it's all over Google.
I currently use a tablet PC (Fujitsu Stylistic ST4120) for taking notes in my college classes. Instead of lugging around multiple notebooks filled with smeared pencil or messy ink on increasingly worn paper, I have a few directories full of files. Easy to backup so if something should happen to it, I still have all my notes and problem examples. I can do full text searches and find stuff right away rather than frantically flipping through notebook pages trying to find where I scribbled some key fact or note. If I need a hard copy, I can print it and it even looks pretty much like standard notebook paper. I can convert it to text with surprisingly decent handwriting recognition and make it a Word doc, PDF, web page, etc.
Not to mention some of the side benefits of having everything be digital ink. We were recently doing Karnaugh maps and truth tables in my digital class, so rather than having to redraw the entire thing for each example, I just had to draw a prototype, clipboard it, and paste it whenever I needed another. Five variable truth table? Pull up my template with all the digits filled in, paste it in, and I'm ready to go.
Tablets definitely have a way to go in lots of markets, but I'm fairly convinced they're the Way of the Future(TM) for things like class notes and such. It's been such a drastic improvement I suspect I'll be hanging onto it for the foreseeable future. I haven't personally had any durability issues, I have a stock screen protector on it I replace now and then. Otherwise I just toss it in the bookbag like the rest of my stuff and forget about it. Case has some scuffing and such but it all works fine.
Oh, and for the obligatory "does it run Linux?", I do have Gentoo running fairly happily on it. The main reason I keep it in Windows for class is easy screen rotation and the fact that WinXP Tablet Edition really does do a nice job of integrating the tablet features. I also use the dualhead now and then which I still haven't gotten working properly with the i830 chipset.
This sounds all too much like WebTV, MailStations, iOpener, and similar almost-but-not-quite computers. Thus far there hasn't been a large enough market for almost-computers to keep them running for very long. I used to support a large ISP's rebranded WebTV and ran into the limitations all too much. I'd very frequently get "Well so-and-so's computer can do foo, why can't this?" and I'd have to explain that WebTV wasn't a computer and couldn't do it.
I just think the internet changes enough and has enough stuff on it that it's hard to build a no-touch appliance to work well with enough stuff. At least this is using a mainstream system unlike the proprietary attempts before, but I still think it's doomed to eventual failure. If it can't view the latest and greatest blog site or fancy photo site or whatnot, people are going to avoid it. It may well turn into the next hacker's toy though.
Ah, if only that would happen. The problem is some high percentage of people really do only use cd players. They buy their DRM'd boy band CD, pop it in, listen to it, and wonder what the big deal is. A good portion of the rest who might use it in a computer also use Windows and WMP and also wonder what the big deal is.
I'm sure there are examples where consumer pressure from a relatively small percentage of the market made changes, but I bet they're few and far between. At some point though I still have faith that the general public will rise up against it. It'll probably be around the time they start trying to lock "CDs" to individual brand players or similar. Brand lock in has historically killed far more than it's made profitable, Windows itself not-withstanding.
I'd love to be able to walk to work, but I work in an industrial parkish area that is not entirely friendly to pedestrians by itself, plus the nearest housing isn't close enough to make walking really comfortable. It's also significantly more expensive than I could afford or wish to pay.
As it is I have a 15-20 minute commute on a good traffic day, compared to the 50-90 minute commute (one way!) of many/most of my coworkers (I live in the Atlanta, GA area). So, I have to make due with the necessary evil.
I drive a sports car though and the industrial park roads can be *fun*;) There's this one corner just after a little rise that I love faking out SUV tailgaters on....
That's never a sure statement to make. Remember any of these?
"I don't see Japanese cars seriously competing the automotive market. Chevy and Ford are pretty entrenched in the US Market"
"I don't see Compaq competing in the PC market. IBM is very well entrenched in the home computer market"
Or any more of them. How about Bell with telcos, local cable monopolies, IBM with mainframes, Intel with processors, Apple with pretty GUIs... the list goes on. Just because a company has a seemingly insurmountable market share now means nothing for the future. History is full of companies that once were the only players that are now also-rans, or gone completely. Give it 5, 10, 15 years and Microsoft may well be forgotten.
Er.. what? I've had my oil changed at numerous places, as well as done it myself plenty, and never have I had a place suck it from the oil tube. Not that there's nowhere that does it, but I've never had it happen in the time I've been driving.
Incidentally, there really shouldn't be all that much crap in the oil pan unless your car is having problems that's putting metal shavings in the thing. Most of that sort of thing should end up in the filter. Although it might be a nice diagnostic thing.
I'm currently enrolled in a major that is more or less EE, and pretty much all the various related degrees include both a pair of Circuits classes that cover analog, a bit of digital, electromagnetism, etc, as well as a pair of Digital classes that cover digital tech specifically. I'm still smack in the middle of the two so I don't know what the Circuits II class focuses on but I do know it includes plenty of Analog stuff. Even the Circuits I lab had plenty of oscilloscope time working out frequencies, magnitudes, wave types, etc.
Uhg. I remember those days. I had a handful of bootdisks for various games. The one with EMS enabled for the games that wanted EMS, the one EMS disabled for games that choked on EMS, the one with all the various drivers for the mouse and such, the one with absolute max conventional without any extras... Win95 was an improvement for the intarnets compared to Win31 for those of us already internet active and not lucky enough to have WFW311, but otherwise I wasn't terribly impressed with it.
Incidentally, I remember one of the first things I downloaded was one of Microsoft's Power Toys that added the Winkey as one of the configurable shortcut keys in the shortcut properties. Best bit of code they've put out, probably:) I think it still works on XP, I haven't tried lately due to lack of XP usage;)
They all support pseudo-grayscale via the pixel-flipping method. These days there are even asm libs to automate it. I've had grayscale games on my middle and high school calcs from the TI-82 on up to my current 89 I use in college. Hasn't had any real games on it in ages though as I actually use it for math and I have a Gameboy for the occasional gaming fix:) Although that hasn't had any real gameboy games in it in awhile either, thanks to flash carts and NES emus.
Slashdot Mirror
But... he forgot 130! Probably the second most common error I ran into after 170.
;)
Yes, I do love vague error numbers
Scott
Yeah, I got bit by the DOS3 thing a couple times. DOS 2.5 and SpartaDOS 3.2d were pretty much what I stuck with. I was mostly a kid during the heyday of the Atari and my family wasn't in a financial position to get the best of the goodies, so unfortunately I've never experienced the joys of mass storage. I lusted after a Happy Drive too :) We did have an R-verter and an 850 Interface, both of which are apparently somewhat rare today, as well as a couple of US Doubler'd 1050s. I remember when I saw my first hard drive attached to an ST when I was probably 7 or 8 and thought it was the coolest thing. Sadly, by the time my family was in a position to replace the ol' 130XE, the 386 era was already solidly underway and we ended up with a used 286. The Atari stuck around for games and word processing well into the 90's though, and was really only fully replaced around '95 or '96 when I bought my own new computer that the family also used (AMD K5-133 it was), which relegated the 486 they'd replaced the 286 with to backup status.
Ahh, memories...
Even the 8-bit Ataris supported hard drives with later versions of DOS (I always liked SpartaDOS personally). The flash is just an adapter that makes the CF show up as a standard HD to the Atari. Nothing too terribly fancy there. And it only makes sense that an Atari would support its own DOS ;)
These days you can even get ethernet and an IDE adapter for the things (though not cheaply).
I think the idea was separate, non-interacting DNS systems. This might mean that US's DNS points slashdot.org at slashdot, but Sweden (just picking a random country, no offense or slight intended) doesn't like Slashdot and makes their DNS point it at goatse. Meanwhile Switzerland might point it at tubgirl, and Norway at Badger Badger Badger. This would break things rather badly as the internet got more and more fragmented from separate DNS systems.
Naturally if there were interactivity and zone transfer agreements and such in place there'd be no problem, but therein lies the rub.
It probably wasn't the most ideal way to do it, but I once used my tablet somewhat like this by connecting via VNC to a desktop with the "compressed full screen" option (the resolutions were different). This let me control the mouse on the desktop from the tablet.
:)
I expect there are better ways to do it.
Circle 75 here
Well, if you're ever in Atlanta, drop by some time ;) I use mine [Stylistic 4121] daily for everything from taking notes in class on in Windows Journal in XP Tablet to wardriving with kismet and GPS navigation with gpsdrive in Gentoo. Granted they're still very much a niche technology, but there are those of us who use them then regularly. Most people who have seen me use it haven't really considered a tablet PC. It's not so much that they don't want to use them, they just haven't really looked into it. I know a couple techy people here that have bought a tablet PC and love them after seeing me with mine. I do attach a keyboard or use keyboard/mouse sharing software like Synergy for a lot of the work, though.
That said, I'm not quite sure where this Nokia thing fits in. Shell work on an on screen keyboard sucks mightily, and attaching a keyboard removes most of the advantage this would have over a subnotebook like a picturebook or Libretto. The screen looks to be a bit small for whole-page note taking, plus it's fairly thick. It's also not powerful enough for any really high-level multimedia stuff. To me it seems to be Just Another Webpad, albeit one with some useful built-in features like GPRS. For remote workers, that alone might be enough to justify it.
I'd say that's more likely, just from an attention standpoint. Kids are more likely to be taken in by flashy graphics and gimmicks, the same way toys, kids cartoons, movies, etc. have gotten more flashy and gimmicky lately. It's not that they can't enjoy something older, I have turned the kids of a couple family friends on to classic NES games and they love them, but getting them to stay interested long enough to get to the "meat" of classic games can be hard. Likewise, I think older people have the patience to keep at something to enjoy it rather than dismiss it out of hand because of a 16 color 32x32 sprite with four frames of animation. Not to mention they're more likely to have grown up with at least the awareness of them, if not actually playing them, so they're more likely to enjoy it.
(That's not to say older people can't be taken in by flashy gimmicky things with no substance. Look at BMW's iDrive system for an example. Almost universally panned but BMW can't make enough of them)
Don't underestimate the simple value of basic familiarity. Even the very basic "Oh, that's a computer, I can type on it" can be more useful than you might think. I remember when my elementary school classes all got Apple IIs in the early-mid 80's, the teachers usually ignored them or let the kids mess with them because they were afraid of them. The people closer to my age, even if they've never used a computer, are a lot more comfortable with at least making some use of them because they were at least around them growing up. It's more like someone getting into a new car for the first time and trying out all the buttons and knobs because they have a basic idea of what they do and know they won't make the car blow up if they push the wrong one (security flamethrowers in Africa aside). Compared to someone who might have never ever seen a car before having no idea what things do and being afraid the little red triangle might be something dangerous rather than simply turn on the hazard lights.
At any rate, I do think the handling of the Great Computer Rollout back in the day was handled poorly, but it definitely wasn't a complete waste. Just the other day I was talking to my professor of my digital class about random stuff, and he mentioned how much easier it is for people to use the programmable logic programmer now than 10-15 years ago when he started. By and large everyone now has at least typed a letter on a computer and can handle the basic list of steps necessary to kick off the programmer, compared to 15 years ago when use of the programmer might be some peoples' first experience ever with a computer.
For the average ICE, short jaunts are a lot more stressful on the engine than longer trips since it never gets up to operating temperature. You'd wear out an engine a lot faster by starting it up, running it hard for a short time, stopping it, and letting it sit a bit than having it run moderately hard at temperature.
I do doubt the same applies to a fuel cell powered car, but that would probably be an advantage for some people who just drive short distances all the time.
Yeah, I know. They touted it as a feature because they say it lets users make direct bookmarks. So not only do people get their un's and passes in history, but in bookmarks too. I'm currently helping the owner with a redesign, so I'm hoping I can convince him to go with a GETless design. I'm not sure I'll be successful, but we'll see :)
While I can't say I agree with him on everything, it would be entirely possible. Many e-mail clients include the subject line of an open message in the titlebar, and it would be possible for someone to have a CC number or SSN in the subject line. Granted, this is stupid in and of itself, but I'm just saying it's possible.
Then there are the various form-filler programs like Gator(bleh), Roboform, etc. that may well do something like that at some time. Don't use them myself.
Or how about a badly written commerce site that sticks it up there in a title?
Then there are other private information that while not as critical as CCs and SSNs, you might not want to be in public. Diseases, passwords, etc. I know of at least one poorly written chatsite that puts the username and password in the URL, and then sticks the whole URL in the title. Certainly are ways of getting private info into title bars. Most of them involve already unsafe behavior, but it can happen.
In my experience, Office seems to be one of the most common abusers of using non-native widgets. For example, even in Office 97 they reimplemented a lot of the window controls and menu handlers. If you ran it in NT3.51 you'd still get the Win95-style menus and widgets in the MDI interfaces. Office XP and 2k3 use the shiny shaded menus with pretty highlighting and such.
That said, it would be interesting to compare the speeds of the libraries used.
One thing came to mind when reading this:
;)
:)
http://ohlssonvox.8k.com/fdd_raid.htm
Cheap hardware, commodity interface and storage media, dirt cheap... Now, you'd need over 18 million of the things for the low-end capacity, but they'd be easily replaceable, probably hot-swappable, and might actually be somewhat durable
I'd pay good money to get a tour of a company with rows and rows of iMacs with 127 floppy drives hanging off each one...
I got B&W 1 running very nicely in Cedega - right up until you have to evacuate the first island. At that point it crashed hard. Even the various updates didn't fix that, and after running through the tutorial a few times too many I got fed up with it. Haven't played it since, actually, since my save games kept getting corrupted even in Windows. Incredible game, but even with the later patches I was never able to get very far in it. Might have to pick it up again and see if my current system runs it any better.
Scott
Went ahead and tried it out, it's not bad looking at all. Has a way to go to replace some of the other webmail clients I've used (currently using squirrelmail on my server. Nice, simple, straightforward) but the install was quick and easy and it does look pretty. Might could use a howto on the mysql part for newbs, but I didn't have any trouble and I'm still pretty new to mysql myself. Does seem a bit slow on low-bandwidth servers like mine, but might be my fault.
Definitely keeping an eye on this, though. I'd not mind a friendlier webmail interface.
Yep, PartitionMagic to resize and then install. I actually didn't have any external boot devices, which made for an interesting install. I have killed the bootloader a couple times which necessitated popping the drive into another computer. I got a USB floppy drive now which should help. I didn't realize at first it could boot off USB, now that I know that I can probably get a USB key booting. I'm actually in a bit of trouble now because my Windows is in need of a reinstall and I can no longer get the restore image to work since the partition layout has changed. I'll probaby burn the install files to a CD and go that route.
One annoyance is I'm running into a PM bug when trying to convert the Windows partition from NTFS to FAT32 so I can use it from Linux properly. Captive NTFS is just too slow for major use. No one seems to have a good answer for it though it's all over Google.
I currently use a tablet PC (Fujitsu Stylistic ST4120) for taking notes in my college classes. Instead of lugging around multiple notebooks filled with smeared pencil or messy ink on increasingly worn paper, I have a few directories full of files. Easy to backup so if something should happen to it, I still have all my notes and problem examples. I can do full text searches and find stuff right away rather than frantically flipping through notebook pages trying to find where I scribbled some key fact or note. If I need a hard copy, I can print it and it even looks pretty much like standard notebook paper. I can convert it to text with surprisingly decent handwriting recognition and make it a Word doc, PDF, web page, etc.
Not to mention some of the side benefits of having everything be digital ink. We were recently doing Karnaugh maps and truth tables in my digital class, so rather than having to redraw the entire thing for each example, I just had to draw a prototype, clipboard it, and paste it whenever I needed another. Five variable truth table? Pull up my template with all the digits filled in, paste it in, and I'm ready to go.
Tablets definitely have a way to go in lots of markets, but I'm fairly convinced they're the Way of the Future(TM) for things like class notes and such. It's been such a drastic improvement I suspect I'll be hanging onto it for the foreseeable future. I haven't personally had any durability issues, I have a stock screen protector on it I replace now and then. Otherwise I just toss it in the bookbag like the rest of my stuff and forget about it. Case has some scuffing and such but it all works fine.
Oh, and for the obligatory "does it run Linux?", I do have Gentoo running fairly happily on it. The main reason I keep it in Windows for class is easy screen rotation and the fact that WinXP Tablet Edition really does do a nice job of integrating the tablet features. I also use the dualhead now and then which I still haven't gotten working properly with the i830 chipset.
This sounds all too much like WebTV, MailStations, iOpener, and similar almost-but-not-quite computers. Thus far there hasn't been a large enough market for almost-computers to keep them running for very long. I used to support a large ISP's rebranded WebTV and ran into the limitations all too much. I'd very frequently get "Well so-and-so's computer can do foo, why can't this?" and I'd have to explain that WebTV wasn't a computer and couldn't do it.
I just think the internet changes enough and has enough stuff on it that it's hard to build a no-touch appliance to work well with enough stuff. At least this is using a mainstream system unlike the proprietary attempts before, but I still think it's doomed to eventual failure. If it can't view the latest and greatest blog site or fancy photo site or whatnot, people are going to avoid it. It may well turn into the next hacker's toy though.
Ah, if only that would happen. The problem is some high percentage of people really do only use cd players. They buy their DRM'd boy band CD, pop it in, listen to it, and wonder what the big deal is. A good portion of the rest who might use it in a computer also use Windows and WMP and also wonder what the big deal is.
I'm sure there are examples where consumer pressure from a relatively small percentage of the market made changes, but I bet they're few and far between. At some point though I still have faith that the general public will rise up against it. It'll probably be around the time they start trying to lock "CDs" to individual brand players or similar. Brand lock in has historically killed far more than it's made profitable, Windows itself not-withstanding.
I'd love to be able to walk to work, but I work in an industrial parkish area that is not entirely friendly to pedestrians by itself, plus the nearest housing isn't close enough to make walking really comfortable. It's also significantly more expensive than I could afford or wish to pay.
;) There's this one corner just after a little rise that I love faking out SUV tailgaters on....
As it is I have a 15-20 minute commute on a good traffic day, compared to the 50-90 minute commute (one way!) of many/most of my coworkers (I live in the Atlanta, GA area). So, I have to make due with the necessary evil.
I drive a sports car though and the industrial park roads can be *fun*
That's never a sure statement to make. Remember any of these? "I don't see Japanese cars seriously competing the automotive market. Chevy and Ford are pretty entrenched in the US Market" "I don't see Compaq competing in the PC market. IBM is very well entrenched in the home computer market" Or any more of them. How about Bell with telcos, local cable monopolies, IBM with mainframes, Intel with processors, Apple with pretty GUIs... the list goes on. Just because a company has a seemingly insurmountable market share now means nothing for the future. History is full of companies that once were the only players that are now also-rans, or gone completely. Give it 5, 10, 15 years and Microsoft may well be forgotten.
Er.. what? I've had my oil changed at numerous places, as well as done it myself plenty, and never have I had a place suck it from the oil tube. Not that there's nowhere that does it, but I've never had it happen in the time I've been driving. Incidentally, there really shouldn't be all that much crap in the oil pan unless your car is having problems that's putting metal shavings in the thing. Most of that sort of thing should end up in the filter. Although it might be a nice diagnostic thing.
I'm currently enrolled in a major that is more or less EE, and pretty much all the various related degrees include both a pair of Circuits classes that cover analog, a bit of digital, electromagnetism, etc, as well as a pair of Digital classes that cover digital tech specifically. I'm still smack in the middle of the two so I don't know what the Circuits II class focuses on but I do know it includes plenty of Analog stuff. Even the Circuits I lab had plenty of oscilloscope time working out frequencies, magnitudes, wave types, etc.
Uhg. I remember those days. I had a handful of bootdisks for various games. The one with EMS enabled for the games that wanted EMS, the one EMS disabled for games that choked on EMS, the one with all the various drivers for the mouse and such, the one with absolute max conventional without any extras... Win95 was an improvement for the intarnets compared to Win31 for those of us already internet active and not lucky enough to have WFW311, but otherwise I wasn't terribly impressed with it.
:) I think it still works on XP, I haven't tried lately due to lack of XP usage ;)
Incidentally, I remember one of the first things I downloaded was one of Microsoft's Power Toys that added the Winkey as one of the configurable shortcut keys in the shortcut properties. Best bit of code they've put out, probably
They all support pseudo-grayscale via the pixel-flipping method. These days there are even asm libs to automate it. I've had grayscale games on my middle and high school calcs from the TI-82 on up to my current 89 I use in college. Hasn't had any real games on it in ages though as I actually use it for math and I have a Gameboy for the occasional gaming fix :) Although that hasn't had any real gameboy games in it in awhile either, thanks to flash carts and NES emus.