The 5200, 5300, 6200, and 6300 (except, for some reason, the 6360) were all basically the same computer with different cases and skins and configuration options. Very strange split architecture that required CPU time for silly things.
My high school had a roomful of Power Macintosh 5300/100LCs. It's no wonder they never bought another Mac again. Terrible, terrible designs.
For me, *not* having to mess around with disks, cassettes, cables, blowing on carts, etc is one of the things I *like* about emulators. I wouldn't be pleased if I had to return to the days of waiting 5 or 10 minutes for a cassette boot error on my emulated Atari, or spend 5 minutes wiggling the virtual cartridge around in the virtual NES to get it to start up right. Would there be a "blow" button (har) or perhaps a microphone that picks up your actual blowing a la some of the DS games?
I don't think the fundamental problem is emulating the base architecture - that's pretty much a programming exercise. The problem is emulating it and having it be fast enough to be playable.
There's nothing keeping you from writing an emulation of a 64 bit Core 2 Duo for Atari 800 and booting Windows 7 on it. You'd just be there for months waiting on it to boot and swapping hundreds (thousands?) of disks for virtual memory. You can already run 64 bit guests on 32 bit hosts in some versions of qemu/VirtualBox and other emulators. It's slow, but it works if you really, really need a 64 bit architecture for something and don't have a real one.
I love my Stylistic 2300s, I've ended up with several. One running Win98 being a BBS, one running Gentoo that was actually a server for awhile, and another I managed to get XP Tablet Edition running on. Actually handles XP better than you'd expect, but it's pretty slow.
Re:Getting back to the topic...
on
Time To Dump XP?
·
· Score: 1
I will have to grant you that the economy is far worse now than when I originally got into work (1999 originally, and 2002 at my current company). It also might depend very highly on where you live; I'm in Atlanta where there's a pretty good tech industry.
One of the best things you can do is network. It's something I've always struggled with myself, but it can make the difference. When interacting with hiring managers, if you get the chance, don't just email/fax a resume and forget about it. Explain that you're trying to work your way into the industry, ask for suggestions, and find out what they're looking for in a worker. If you make it in for an interview, express similar sentiments. Show that you have the ambition to act on any suggestions. My wife got her current job (in a bank call center) because an interviewing manager remembered her from an interview for a job she didn't get, and called her back a couple months later for a different position that fit her better. She had no call center experience and a graphic design degree which has been utterly useless for her. Make a (good) impression.
Unfortunately there's no sure way to get a job in this economy but to keep trying and not give up.
I've always assumed personalized menus were a hackish solution to the problem of menus expanding out to huge sizes while the average person only uses a small fraction of them most of the time. Thus, if it only showed the ones frequently used, it cleans up the clutter. The problem comes when you need to use one of those rarely-used options and either miss it (the average user) or have to pop out all the menus all the time.
Personalized menus is one of the first things I turn off on a new install of anything.
Re:Getting back to the topic...
on
Time To Dump XP?
·
· Score: 1
I don't mean to disparage your tenacity or motivation since there may be more to the story than I know, but a lack of a college degree surely doesn't limit you to food service. One of my biggest regrets is not finishing college, but I've still managed to work myself up the food chain in my company, make decent (if not amazing) money, own a house, etc. You might start out an absolute grunt on a call center floor or something, but with some care and work you can still make a pretty decent life.
Re:Getting back to the topic...
on
Time To Dump XP?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I'm not sure if you've ever had experience supporting people, either over the phone or in person, but a surprisingly large number of people immediately lock up and scream for help if anything the least bit out-of-place happens. Maybe a Word toolbar gets rearranged somehow, or they accidentally move an icon somewhere, or their Big Project drops off the Recently Used list... stuff like that utterly stops workflow. The concept of fumbling around, trying stuff out, or otherwise figuring it out is a foreign concept since they're still in the camp of fearing they're going to break it or get a "virus" somehow.
You can argue they're unemployable, but I'd hazard to say even a majority of the average non-technical office workers are like this. Now throw in Windows 7 and IE8, and suddenly there's a lot of little differences they'll have to learn and/or get used to. Maybe throw Office 2007/2010 with the ribbon in if perhaps they were still using an old version of Office as well. I do tend to think the fear and cost is overstated, but you can't discount it entirely either.
I'm not sure that the primary points people are making are that piracy isn't as rampant as that shows, and indeed the semantics argument is silly. The argument that's being made is that 1 download does not equal 1 lost sale. It's not realistic to say that every download would have translated into a sale.
The morality, right/wrong, stealing/not stealing, etc etc doesn't really enter into it. It's not a realistic number. Just because there were 1000 downloads of Hot New Game 2, it's not realistic to say that the company suffered losses of $50,000 (assuming a $50 purchase price) because it doesn't follow that were that download not available, there would have been 1000 more sales.
Is piracy a problem? Definitely. Is it wrong? Absolutely. Is pointing it out with studies like this accurate? No. They're doing more harm than good by doing it this way precisely because of the frothing that goes on on gaming and other sites from it. There are two separate issues that often get mixed together - The impact of piracy and the ludicrous numbers that get attached to it. They really should be handled separately. People get too caught up on what piracy is and isn't, whether it's justified based on DRM/etc, and such when the real issue is that studies like this get used to the detriment of legitimate gamers.
If there's one thing I've learned from the tech industry, it's that you shouldn't ever say "won't", "can't", or "will always". There were times when people would have told you you were crazy for suggesting IBM would ever not be the dominant PC maker, or mainframe vendor. More recently, there was a time when it was assumed IE would maintain its market share and there'd never be a need for another browser, ever, because IE had won. Before that, suggesting Netscape would ever lose it's dominance would have gotten you called crazy. All it takes is an agile upstart with something special, with perhaps some mistakes from Valve, and everything could be back up in the air again. Or perhaps a superheavyweight getting behind something and using its market position to leverage influence.
That said I still use Steam for a lot, but to suggest it will never end and 50 years from now I'll be able to load up Steam 18.2 and show my grandkids Half Life 2 is unrealistic.
It was mainly intended for network login, or per-user customization. It wasn't intended for real security, per se, just customization profiles. It actually mostly worked for a family with different preferences for font sizes and such.
Along with the other post, the other big impact is player skill. Part of leveling is learning how your character works, skills to use, gear combinations, etc.If someone uses a bot to level, they don't get this. They simply end up with a max-level char or four and no clue how to use them. This greatly impacts any pickup groups they might end up in, and has led to a lot of people (including myself before I quit) almost completely avoiding pickup groups for much of anything and going with their guilds. Or, perhaps, a guild alliance of reasonably trusted folks. I know on my server/guild alliance we kept a list of people who performed especially badly and refused to group with them (not talking middlin'/average players here, we're talking people who'd cause repeated deaths on first pulls of raids/instances). The funniest were level 80 people in level 60-70 basic green quest gear because it "looked cool".
It's possible to play WoW completely solo, but it's tricky to completely avoid grouping.
At least as far back as XP Tablet Edition, and with some tablety extensions to Win2k, there's been a press-and-hold right click option. If you hold down the mouse button/pen/etc, you'll get a little spinner around the cursor which acts like a right click once it makes it around. I'm sure there's third-party addons to do similar on other versions.
Maybe not completely ideal, but it works.
Overall, I've always been reasonably impressed with Windows staying nearly completely usable without a mouse at all. There's very little that can't be done completely on a keyboard.
I wonder where this puts the Great Giana Sisters. Nintendo successfully pressured them into removing the game from market due to similarity in gameplay to Super Mario Bros, despite a few critical and pretty big changes to gameplay. I suppose it's a little different than this situation since we're dealing with a vintage game vs. one still selling, but it's still interesting. I suppose it's possible Nintendo would have lost if it'd gone to court. We'll never know now.
Hail to a fellow vintage Mac user! I have a Classic on my desk with a SCSI-Ethernet adapter; fun little box, though I may see about getting my IIci running properly again - I'd not mind color for a couple things I do. Of course, I'd also not mind an SE/30 or Color Classic, but they're stupidly expensive for old Macs:P
From some googling, it looks like Commodore had the A/D conversion in the tape drive and sent it to the computer as a digital stream. So, any method for connecting an audio player would need that A/D conversion. It's been awhile since I messed with it, but I'm pretty sure the Atari interface was not much more than an audio-in with a motor start/stop pin. I remember having some games for Atari 8-bit that actually had voiceover and narration and stuff - pretty neat for a kid and something not matched again until the CD era.
My family was Atarian growing up, but I did a ton of type-in programs too. Nothing quite like spending half an hour or an hour painstakingly entering lines and lines of DATA statements only to have it crash horribly because you typoed one, and then getting to spend another hour checking them all to find that one you messed up. Ahh, memories.
You may want to Google on iphonevm . It's a virtual memory implementation for jailbroken iphone/ipods. Standard warnings about write cycles on flash apply, but it's made a huge difference with my multitasking on my iPod touch.
I realize I'm an edge case, but I've been known to be listening to streaming music while having an ssh session open in MobileTerminal to my server to check on something, with Facebook and a chat client running in the background that I switch over to now and then.
Uses tend to expand to fill a device's capability.
X-P has a pretty decently tight-knit, if somewhat eccentric community. The main mailing list has a lot of older pilots (60-80 year olds) so it occasionally devolves into semi-OT stories from the 50s and even WWII. Even so it's fascinating.
There's a pretty decent planemaking community, but MSFS probably has a much wider range of random stuff available.
I haven't done any scenerymaking, but I'm told it's kind of a pain currently. The primary format changed awhile back and the dev tools haven't caught up yet. Ultimately I can't imagine it's too terribly difficult though.
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The 5200, 5300, 6200, and 6300 (except, for some reason, the 6360) were all basically the same computer with different cases and skins and configuration options. Very strange split architecture that required CPU time for silly things.
My high school had a roomful of Power Macintosh 5300/100LCs. It's no wonder they never bought another Mac again. Terrible, terrible designs.
For me, *not* having to mess around with disks, cassettes, cables, blowing on carts, etc is one of the things I *like* about emulators. I wouldn't be pleased if I had to return to the days of waiting 5 or 10 minutes for a cassette boot error on my emulated Atari, or spend 5 minutes wiggling the virtual cartridge around in the virtual NES to get it to start up right. Would there be a "blow" button (har) or perhaps a microphone that picks up your actual blowing a la some of the DS games?
Although I suppose that's what options are for.
I don't think the fundamental problem is emulating the base architecture - that's pretty much a programming exercise. The problem is emulating it and having it be fast enough to be playable.
There's nothing keeping you from writing an emulation of a 64 bit Core 2 Duo for Atari 800 and booting Windows 7 on it. You'd just be there for months waiting on it to boot and swapping hundreds (thousands?) of disks for virtual memory. You can already run 64 bit guests on 32 bit hosts in some versions of qemu/VirtualBox and other emulators. It's slow, but it works if you really, really need a 64 bit architecture for something and don't have a real one.
I love my Stylistic 2300s, I've ended up with several. One running Win98 being a BBS, one running Gentoo that was actually a server for awhile, and another I managed to get XP Tablet Edition running on. Actually handles XP better than you'd expect, but it's pretty slow.
I will have to grant you that the economy is far worse now than when I originally got into work (1999 originally, and 2002 at my current company). It also might depend very highly on where you live; I'm in Atlanta where there's a pretty good tech industry.
One of the best things you can do is network. It's something I've always struggled with myself, but it can make the difference. When interacting with hiring managers, if you get the chance, don't just email/fax a resume and forget about it. Explain that you're trying to work your way into the industry, ask for suggestions, and find out what they're looking for in a worker. If you make it in for an interview, express similar sentiments. Show that you have the ambition to act on any suggestions. My wife got her current job (in a bank call center) because an interviewing manager remembered her from an interview for a job she didn't get, and called her back a couple months later for a different position that fit her better. She had no call center experience and a graphic design degree which has been utterly useless for her. Make a (good) impression.
Unfortunately there's no sure way to get a job in this economy but to keep trying and not give up.
I've always assumed personalized menus were a hackish solution to the problem of menus expanding out to huge sizes while the average person only uses a small fraction of them most of the time. Thus, if it only showed the ones frequently used, it cleans up the clutter. The problem comes when you need to use one of those rarely-used options and either miss it (the average user) or have to pop out all the menus all the time.
Personalized menus is one of the first things I turn off on a new install of anything.
I don't mean to disparage your tenacity or motivation since there may be more to the story than I know, but a lack of a college degree surely doesn't limit you to food service. One of my biggest regrets is not finishing college, but I've still managed to work myself up the food chain in my company, make decent (if not amazing) money, own a house, etc. You might start out an absolute grunt on a call center floor or something, but with some care and work you can still make a pretty decent life.
I'm not sure if you've ever had experience supporting people, either over the phone or in person, but a surprisingly large number of people immediately lock up and scream for help if anything the least bit out-of-place happens. Maybe a Word toolbar gets rearranged somehow, or they accidentally move an icon somewhere, or their Big Project drops off the Recently Used list... stuff like that utterly stops workflow. The concept of fumbling around, trying stuff out, or otherwise figuring it out is a foreign concept since they're still in the camp of fearing they're going to break it or get a "virus" somehow.
You can argue they're unemployable, but I'd hazard to say even a majority of the average non-technical office workers are like this. Now throw in Windows 7 and IE8, and suddenly there's a lot of little differences they'll have to learn and/or get used to. Maybe throw Office 2007/2010 with the ribbon in if perhaps they were still using an old version of Office as well. I do tend to think the fear and cost is overstated, but you can't discount it entirely either.
I'm not sure that the primary points people are making are that piracy isn't as rampant as that shows, and indeed the semantics argument is silly. The argument that's being made is that 1 download does not equal 1 lost sale. It's not realistic to say that every download would have translated into a sale.
The morality, right/wrong, stealing/not stealing, etc etc doesn't really enter into it. It's not a realistic number. Just because there were 1000 downloads of Hot New Game 2, it's not realistic to say that the company suffered losses of $50,000 (assuming a $50 purchase price) because it doesn't follow that were that download not available, there would have been 1000 more sales.
Is piracy a problem? Definitely. Is it wrong? Absolutely. Is pointing it out with studies like this accurate? No. They're doing more harm than good by doing it this way precisely because of the frothing that goes on on gaming and other sites from it. There are two separate issues that often get mixed together - The impact of piracy and the ludicrous numbers that get attached to it. They really should be handled separately. People get too caught up on what piracy is and isn't, whether it's justified based on DRM/etc, and such when the real issue is that studies like this get used to the detriment of legitimate gamers.
If there's one thing I've learned from the tech industry, it's that you shouldn't ever say "won't", "can't", or "will always". There were times when people would have told you you were crazy for suggesting IBM would ever not be the dominant PC maker, or mainframe vendor. More recently, there was a time when it was assumed IE would maintain its market share and there'd never be a need for another browser, ever, because IE had won. Before that, suggesting Netscape would ever lose it's dominance would have gotten you called crazy. All it takes is an agile upstart with something special, with perhaps some mistakes from Valve, and everything could be back up in the air again. Or perhaps a superheavyweight getting behind something and using its market position to leverage influence.
That said I still use Steam for a lot, but to suggest it will never end and 50 years from now I'll be able to load up Steam 18.2 and show my grandkids Half Life 2 is unrealistic.
It was mainly intended for network login, or per-user customization. It wasn't intended for real security, per se, just customization profiles. It actually mostly worked for a family with different preferences for font sizes and such.
Along with the other post, the other big impact is player skill. Part of leveling is learning how your character works, skills to use, gear combinations, etc.If someone uses a bot to level, they don't get this. They simply end up with a max-level char or four and no clue how to use them. This greatly impacts any pickup groups they might end up in, and has led to a lot of people (including myself before I quit) almost completely avoiding pickup groups for much of anything and going with their guilds. Or, perhaps, a guild alliance of reasonably trusted folks. I know on my server/guild alliance we kept a list of people who performed especially badly and refused to group with them (not talking middlin'/average players here, we're talking people who'd cause repeated deaths on first pulls of raids/instances). The funniest were level 80 people in level 60-70 basic green quest gear because it "looked cool".
It's possible to play WoW completely solo, but it's tricky to completely avoid grouping.
There's an interesting discussion at http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2007/12/24/6849530.aspx about the role DOS played in Win9x. It's sort of an interesting mix of bits.
At least as far back as XP Tablet Edition, and with some tablety extensions to Win2k, there's been a press-and-hold right click option. If you hold down the mouse button/pen/etc, you'll get a little spinner around the cursor which acts like a right click once it makes it around. I'm sure there's third-party addons to do similar on other versions.
Maybe not completely ideal, but it works.
Overall, I've always been reasonably impressed with Windows staying nearly completely usable without a mouse at all. There's very little that can't be done completely on a keyboard.
Also, recent versions of Chrome have built-in support for most Greasemonkey scripts. Every one I regularly use has dropped in and worked fine.
Actually, you'd be surprised.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1082094.ece
I haven't researched it to ensure authenticity, but I remember it when it first came across.
I wonder where this puts the Great Giana Sisters. Nintendo successfully pressured them into removing the game from market due to similarity in gameplay to Super Mario Bros, despite a few critical and pretty big changes to gameplay. I suppose it's a little different than this situation since we're dealing with a vintage game vs. one still selling, but it's still interesting. I suppose it's possible Nintendo would have lost if it'd gone to court. We'll never know now.
Hail to a fellow vintage Mac user! I have a Classic on my desk with a SCSI-Ethernet adapter; fun little box, though I may see about getting my IIci running properly again - I'd not mind color for a couple things I do. Of course, I'd also not mind an SE/30 or Color Classic, but they're stupidly expensive for old Macs :P
From some googling, it looks like Commodore had the A/D conversion in the tape drive and sent it to the computer as a digital stream. So, any method for connecting an audio player would need that A/D conversion. It's been awhile since I messed with it, but I'm pretty sure the Atari interface was not much more than an audio-in with a motor start/stop pin. I remember having some games for Atari 8-bit that actually had voiceover and narration and stuff - pretty neat for a kid and something not matched again until the CD era.
http://www.zimmers.net/anonftp/pub/cbm/documents/projects/interfaces/soundcard2tape.html
My family was Atarian growing up, but I did a ton of type-in programs too. Nothing quite like spending half an hour or an hour painstakingly entering lines and lines of DATA statements only to have it crash horribly because you typoed one, and then getting to spend another hour checking them all to find that one you messed up. Ahh, memories.
10 print "Enter Phone Number? "
20 input A$
30 OPEN "COM1:9600,N,8,1,DS,CD" FOR OUTPUT AS #1
40 print #1,"atdt " + A$
You may want to Google on iphonevm . It's a virtual memory implementation for jailbroken iphone/ipods. Standard warnings about write cycles on flash apply, but it's made a huge difference with my multitasking on my iPod touch.
I realize I'm an edge case, but I've been known to be listening to streaming music while having an ssh session open in MobileTerminal to my server to check on something, with Facebook and a chat client running in the background that I switch over to now and then.
Uses tend to expand to fill a device's capability.
I SMS from/to my iPod Touch all the time, though it needs wifi access. Works nicely.
X-P has a pretty decently tight-knit, if somewhat eccentric community. The main mailing list has a lot of older pilots (60-80 year olds) so it occasionally devolves into semi-OT stories from the 50s and even WWII. Even so it's fascinating.
There's a pretty decent planemaking community, but MSFS probably has a much wider range of random stuff available.
I haven't done any scenerymaking, but I'm told it's kind of a pain currently. The primary format changed awhile back and the dev tools haven't caught up yet. Ultimately I can't imagine it's too terribly difficult though.