So this is like a ham license for landlines which sort of *act* like public airwaves. It's actually not SUCH a bad idea -- it sure keeps the S/N ratio up in the ham bands. Even if the test is virtually unfailable, the overall sense of earned-privilege vs. god-given-right seems to add a few percent to the general level of maturity you get. It'll never happen though!
Can't resist the nitpick -- the twee's name is spelled Apple//e. The square brackets are for the Apple ][ and Apple ][+.
It's definitely true though -- ever since the original Mac (with its hard-to-open case and lack of expansion slots), Apple totally turned its back on hobbyists, which is bizarre because the Apple ]['s success was entirely because of its easy-to-interface-to expansion bus and the fact that the commented ROM listings were available in a manual that high penniless high school kids could afford. IBM copied both ideas and mopped the floor with the Mac market, until IBM themselves got lost in the woods with MCA and the PS/2 (but at least they came to their senses later after the clone market taught them some respect).
At the same time it seems like it would be hard for present-day geeks to follow in the exact footsteps of us old codgers. One of the nice things about an Apple ][ or a Commodore PET or a TRS-80 was that it was entirely possible for a suitably nerdly high school kit to understand pretty much every single detail about it, if they read the ROM listings and marked up the schematics and traced through the OS with a debugger or whatever. Even minis and mainframes had wonderful documentation (cheap too) and often some access to source code. These days all the important stuff is hidden inside undocumented ASICs and vendor-supplied drivers and it's just not possible for one person to understand the entire system with the kind of detail that was possible with the little toy computers we used to have such fun with. Well at least there are PIC CPUs!
I use tons of macros in my assembly code but the main reason I do is because present-day assemblers provide a GREAT macro language -- MUCH better than what C has. So while macros can also be used to package purely rote operations, they're also great for code which contains lots of assembly-time checks and will do the right thing if constants change in the headers, or whatever.
If you think JMPing is tedious then that just means you're not an assembly programmer, which is fine. The classic problem is for HLL programmers to think in their native HLL and then try to translate HLL operations into assembly code. So it makes sense for HLL programmers to chafe at all the JMPs and want to wrap things up to look like REPEAT-UNTIL, or DO, or whatever. Assembly programmers are used to thinking in tiny steps so it makes perfect sense -- ask a question and then branch based on the answer. That's how the computer works so that's what I have to tell it. Since there's no stigma on JMPing (it's the only way to do anything anyway) we embrace it and learn how to do it well (it's not always spaghetti code just because it won't lie flat on the page).
I definitely agree that having a clear grasp of what you're doing and when beats any amount of low-level tweaking. But you can have both! And all those 2% speedups really start to add up if you do them all the time. But of course the real motivation is the same as for anyone else -- C programmers use C because they like C. I use assembly because I like assembly. I have all kinds of justifications (just like a C programmer does) and some of them are right (as are some for C) but mostly I just love it, and almost anything else makes my skin crawl.
Or you could get WASM (part of the Open Watcom package at www.openwatcom.org) which is open-source AND uses something approaching standard syntax.
NASM unfortunately falls into the common trap of figuring that, since MASM-style syntax has a lot wrong with it, the syntax should be changed. But as with all such projects, the syntax is changed to fit someone's particular taste, and now you'll write source code which isn't compatible with anything. And IMHO NASM's syntax is no improvement over MASM anyway. ALL aftermarket assemblers do this -- yes I understand why it's hard to resist but it rarely solves anything. MASM syntax is a mess but it's very expressive and gets the job done. And anyone who thinks that numbered macro arguments are better than named ones needs to have their head examined!
That's a real shame! But my impression is that for a long time now, college-level assembly instruction has consisted almost entirely of indoctrinating the students to believe that assembly language programming is difficult and unpleasant and must be avoided at all costs. Which couldn't be more wrong -- it's AWESOME!
Even on the x86 with all its flaws, being able to have that kind of control makes everything more fun. The fact that your code runs like a bat out of hell (unless you're a BAD assembly programmer, which a lot of people are but they don't realize it so they bad-mouth the language) is just icing on the cake. You should definitely teach yourself assembly, if you can find the time.
Seriously! If they think numbers like these are a wash then please make me 14.5% LESS likely to get cancer in the next study, since apparently they think it's all just statistical noise anyway. Also, talking about recent upward trends in use over the whole population tells us nothing. Smoking for ten years won't give you cancer either -- you need to follow the same people for many decades.
Anyway what about the reports of higher incidence of testicular cancer among traffic cops who use RADAR? That's not X-rays, just plain old microwave RF. Sure radio waves have been around for a while, but keeping the antenna close to your body while transmitting continually is a relatively new phenomenon. Frankly I'd be surprised if they don't eventually figure out that cell phones and/or WiFi contribute to cancer, even if the effect is so low that most people wouldn't get cancer until long after they've been brought down by something else. Bathing your body in RF just doesn't feel smart. I'm still thinking that 80m full-wave loop antenna I hung *around* our house when I was a kid wasn't such a smart idea...
Was this a fresh install or an upgrade? I just spent a very long couple of hours on my WinMe box trying to revert after the 10.10 installation yielded a browser that exploded on startup every time. I've been running Opera on this box for years (including 10.01). After a bunch of uninstalls of the dead husks of old versions (MAN you get a lot of crap lying around if you upgrade each time) and reinstalls of both 10.01 and 10.10, things seem to work again now -- and as usual for any Windows fix, I have no idea what I did that finally did the trick.
Re:Sorry, what you're asking for is too easy to ab
on
Reusing Old TiVo Hardware?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The abuse is in the percieved theft of service. If you're using a TiVo, as a TiVo, without paying TiVo, you're 'stealing'.
This is a self-regulating phenomenon that popped up in the TiVo community.
I totally don't get it, unless people are talking about the guide data (which of course makes sense). I bought my TiVo when they first came out -- it was $400 and it belongs to ME. I didn't have to promise to buy their service to get the box at that price, and I never did -- I already know what channels all my shows are on, so I just use it as a plain DVR and program it by hand. How am I a criminal? Now I just wish the damn thing knew about the new daylight savings rules, or at least had a way to set the clock short of pulling out the hard drive and adding a command to the startup script (the RS232 port has never worked). Plus it would be nice to make it stop giving an error screen every time I go to the main menu, badgering me to buy the service. Why is it considered sacrilege to ask how to deal with that, on an expensive box that I already paid for?
Yeah but you must hold a copyright in order to put a license on the code in the first place. And my understanding (possibly out of date and/or misinformed) is that US law forbids the federal government from holding copyrights, for the reasons that wizardforce said (WE paid for it so it already belongs to all of us). Controlling distribution is exactly what a license does, since by default, copyright law basically says "no copying!" -- so the license gives conditions under which the copyright holder will allow users to copy the software.
>and recommends that in certain cases the DoD release software as OSS.
How can the DoD release software under a copyleft license when the federal government is incapable of holding copyrights in the first place? I thought it was all automatically PD if it's not secret? Not that that's stopped anyone from asserting copyright when it suits them.
OK I see why that makes sense from the lender's point of view (they're just trying to balance things) but it's absolutely insane from the borrower's point of view. The high interest rates are what are paid by the people who DIDN'T default. They punish the wrong people -- the actual expense of the moochers is borne by the people who turned out not to be moochers after all.
Totally, TSS/8 was amazing! 20 users in 12 KW of memory... I mean sure it was very VERY limited but the fact that it did anything at all was incredible. BASIC, FORTRAN II, FOCAL, PAL-D, pretty slick for a teeny tiny system!
All I meant was, as closed-source systems go, it sure was easy for mere mortals to get ahold of the sources. So it seems like there should be different levels of "closed" instead of just a black-and-white label (especially one which tends to carry so much anger with it, at least when certain people say it). DEC was always *way* cooler about throwing sources around than other companies I've dealt with -- you could even get the source to the microcode for some of their CPUs.
I think you may hold the record for most progress on a real KS! Well my email address is the same as always (the one I have for you is 4 years old) so if you'd really be interested in the RM80, let me know. And I'd love to hear about the SCSI project!
Hmm... Daniel? I give up otherwise -- I've given away a *lot* of hardware (that I got for free too) and I know better than to ask what happened to it (as long as it wasn't on purpose...).
Actually I forget what the problem is with each KS. One of them had a blown bus xcvr, which I replaced (luckily 8646As were still available from DEC at the time). I forget what's wrong with the other one (other than being short on a board or two that I've had to borrow from the known dead machine). Glad to hear you've still got one on ice!
To someone who could give me an 18-bit image of it (or a:DUMP tape, whatever, anyway I was working on a DELUA Ethernet driver that I'd like to recover) -- absolutely! It's in central Mass. Absolutely no guarantee that it still works, but it did in 1993 (when I had it hooked up to my boss's KS10 in NJ and would run ITS after work). Neither of my KSes works...
Probably doesn't count as "major" but there were a lot of users (campus-wide IBM mainframe systems at something like nine colleges at its peak in the 1980s). There was talk of running it under emulation back when the mainframes were being shut down but if that happened, it never escaped captivity at UMich. I used it on a dual-processor 3081 (and later 3090) at RPI and absolutely despised it, until they replaced it with RS/6000s and Suns and we all realized how much more work you can get done on a system that actually STAYS UP! And has an absolutely insane printing system, and half a dozen 9-track tape drives, and a plotter, and network coprocessors, etc. etc. etc. Great system for doing real work on. Now it's apparently gone without a trace. I'd *love* to have it running on Hercules or something.
Is it different from Model II TRS-DOS? I could swear I have an original 2.0a disk around here somewhere, and I thought the 12 was essentially similar but with half-height floppies and a less ugly color. Disk images would be annoying though, since the first track is SD and the rest is DD.
I make my living supporting RT/RSX/RSTS customers so I can assure you they're alive (the copyrights are now held by Mentec). Hobbyists run them too -- telnet to mim.update.uu.se to see an RSX system. Maintenance -- well yeah they've been stagnant since the Y2K fixes went in, but so are the applications so changes would just break things at this point.
And yes they're closed source as in, you can't just download the source for free, but the source was *available* for a fairly reasonable price (and it's *beautiful*, much more readable than any free stuff I've seen). Dunno what to call that but "closed source" is a little strong -- this isn't Windows by a long shot!
ITS runs fine under emulation (and it's been centuries since it ran on the PDP-6 -- they moved it to the KA10 with a homebrew paging box, then the KL10 and KS10 both with custom microcode to emulate the paging box). I have an RM80 drive with ITS installed on it which worked the last time I powered it on... but OK that was a while ago.
Huh? I've used it for years as my main web-browsing and PuTTY system, just because I hate NT/XP/etc. so much. I'm using WinMe to type this right now. Oh wait, you said USEFUL task.
Exactly! It's painful to see all the slashdotters making final pronouncements about stuff they don't care about. I mean I'm sure plenty of violinists think MS-DOS is just as good as Unix.
To a life-long musician, differences between instances of the instrument they play are really obvious. You'd think that all this wonderful space-age technology would make every modern instrument perfect but it's just not being applied. I mean, why doesn't artificially flavored food taste exactly like the real thing? It should!
I play the harpsichord, badly, anyway its recent history is relevant -- it underwent a really stupid mini-revival (yes I know, that no one but me cares about) in the early 20th century. It was exactly the same kind of thing -- a bunch of dweebs thought then-modern technology could "fix" the harpsichord, so they started cranking out monstrosities with cast iron frames, plywood soundboards, aluminum or plexiglass guides, brass jacks, felt-bushed keyboards, etc. etc. etc. It took them decades to get around to remembering that harpsichords underwent THREE HUNDRED YEARS of development by true craftsmen who devoted their lives to one thing, and these days the best harpsichords are abject imitations of antiques, right down to the glue.
Still, I think the fungi guys are on the right track. The wood is actually the biggest problem -- there are no old-growth forests any more, so now we have small trees that grew too fast with too much sun. We'll probably never be able to replicate the old spruce or boxwood or African blackwood etc. etc. etc. that grew very slowly over a long period of time, with tight, uniform grain, but we should try anyway. Just taking a bunch of low-density Home Depot style wood and blindly tossing it on a CNC router will never replicate what could be done in the old days by someone with a real ear for hand-carving high quality tone wood who's learned how to perfect each individual part long before the instrument is assembled. We SHOULD have the technology, but we don't.
I might actually care what they were saying if they weren't already nickel-and-diming me with little fees. I understand why they don't include taxes in the quoted price (I think that's state law, for most things other than fuel the sales tax *has* to be itemized separately) but they stick in a bunch of other fees that *aren't* taxes but somehow they feel OK pretending that the quoted price is real. (Yes I know all the other cell companies do it too but that doesn't make it OK.) So I don't believe for a second that the $1.50 is anything other than yet another cash grab.
It doesn't help that T-Mobile is so awful. I've had them (and their predecessors Voicestream and Omnipoint) for over ten years (only because I refuse to sign a contract, and Sprint PCS and Virgin Mobile had even worse quality), and I can't think of *anywhere* that used to have no coverage but now does. Do they EVER put up new towers? Where I live now, I have to drive into town just to check my voice mail. LOTS of dropped calls everywhere else (including interstates). Anyway an extra $1.50 a month would be enough to remind me that crappy cell phone service is something I don't really need in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
I wish (US) copyright law worked this way around ... right now there's essentially no risk in tacking on a questionable copyright notice.
So this is like a ham license for landlines which sort of *act* like public airwaves. It's actually not SUCH a bad idea -- it sure keeps the S/N ratio up in the ham bands. Even if the test is virtually unfailable, the overall sense of earned-privilege vs. god-given-right seems to add a few percent to the general level of maturity you get. It'll never happen though!
Can't resist the nitpick -- the twee's name is spelled Apple //e. The square brackets are for the Apple ][ and Apple ][+.
It's definitely true though -- ever since the original Mac (with its hard-to-open case and lack of expansion slots), Apple totally turned its back on hobbyists, which is bizarre because the Apple ]['s success was entirely because of its easy-to-interface-to expansion bus and the fact that the commented ROM listings were available in a manual that high penniless high school kids could afford. IBM copied both ideas and mopped the floor with the Mac market, until IBM themselves got lost in the woods with MCA and the PS/2 (but at least they came to their senses later after the clone market taught them some respect).
At the same time it seems like it would be hard for present-day geeks to follow in the exact footsteps of us old codgers. One of the nice things about an Apple ][ or a Commodore PET or a TRS-80 was that it was entirely possible for a suitably nerdly high school kit to understand pretty much every single detail about it, if they read the ROM listings and marked up the schematics and traced through the OS with a debugger or whatever. Even minis and mainframes had wonderful documentation (cheap too) and often some access to source code. These days all the important stuff is hidden inside undocumented ASICs and vendor-supplied drivers and it's just not possible for one person to understand the entire system with the kind of detail that was possible with the little toy computers we used to have such fun with. Well at least there are PIC CPUs!
I use tons of macros in my assembly code but the main reason I do is because present-day assemblers provide a GREAT macro language -- MUCH better than what C has. So while macros can also be used to package purely rote operations, they're also great for code which contains lots of assembly-time checks and will do the right thing if constants change in the headers, or whatever.
If you think JMPing is tedious then that just means you're not an assembly programmer, which is fine. The classic problem is for HLL programmers to think in their native HLL and then try to translate HLL operations into assembly code. So it makes sense for HLL programmers to chafe at all the JMPs and want to wrap things up to look like REPEAT-UNTIL, or DO, or whatever. Assembly programmers are used to thinking in tiny steps so it makes perfect sense -- ask a question and then branch based on the answer. That's how the computer works so that's what I have to tell it. Since there's no stigma on JMPing (it's the only way to do anything anyway) we embrace it and learn how to do it well (it's not always spaghetti code just because it won't lie flat on the page).
I definitely agree that having a clear grasp of what you're doing and when beats any amount of low-level tweaking. But you can have both! And all those 2% speedups really start to add up if you do them all the time. But of course the real motivation is the same as for anyone else -- C programmers use C because they like C. I use assembly because I like assembly. I have all kinds of justifications (just like a C programmer does) and some of them are right (as are some for C) but mostly I just love it, and almost anything else makes my skin crawl.
Or you could get WASM (part of the Open Watcom package at www.openwatcom.org) which is open-source AND uses something approaching standard syntax.
NASM unfortunately falls into the common trap of figuring that, since MASM-style syntax has a lot wrong with it, the syntax should be changed. But as with all such projects, the syntax is changed to fit someone's particular taste, and now you'll write source code which isn't compatible with anything. And IMHO NASM's syntax is no improvement over MASM anyway. ALL aftermarket assemblers do this -- yes I understand why it's hard to resist but it rarely solves anything. MASM syntax is a mess but it's very expressive and gets the job done. And anyone who thinks that numbered macro arguments are better than named ones needs to have their head examined!
That's a real shame! But my impression is that for a long time now, college-level assembly instruction has consisted almost entirely of indoctrinating the students to believe that assembly language programming is difficult and unpleasant and must be avoided at all costs. Which couldn't be more wrong -- it's AWESOME!
Even on the x86 with all its flaws, being able to have that kind of control makes everything more fun. The fact that your code runs like a bat out of hell (unless you're a BAD assembly programmer, which a lot of people are but they don't realize it so they bad-mouth the language) is just icing on the cake. You should definitely teach yourself assembly, if you can find the time.
Seriously! If they think numbers like these are a wash then please make me 14.5% LESS likely to get cancer in the next study, since apparently they think it's all just statistical noise anyway. Also, talking about recent upward trends in use over the whole population tells us nothing. Smoking for ten years won't give you cancer either -- you need to follow the same people for many decades.
Anyway what about the reports of higher incidence of testicular cancer among traffic cops who use RADAR? That's not X-rays, just plain old microwave RF. Sure radio waves have been around for a while, but keeping the antenna close to your body while transmitting continually is a relatively new phenomenon. Frankly I'd be surprised if they don't eventually figure out that cell phones and/or WiFi contribute to cancer, even if the effect is so low that most people wouldn't get cancer until long after they've been brought down by something else. Bathing your body in RF just doesn't feel smart. I'm still thinking that 80m full-wave loop antenna I hung *around* our house when I was a kid wasn't such a smart idea...
Was this a fresh install or an upgrade? I just spent a very long couple of hours on my WinMe box trying to revert after the 10.10 installation yielded a browser that exploded on startup every time. I've been running Opera on this box for years (including 10.01). After a bunch of uninstalls of the dead husks of old versions (MAN you get a lot of crap lying around if you upgrade each time) and reinstalls of both 10.01 and 10.10, things seem to work again now -- and as usual for any Windows fix, I have no idea what I did that finally did the trick.
The abuse is in the percieved theft of service.
If you're using a TiVo, as a TiVo, without paying TiVo, you're 'stealing'.
This is a self-regulating phenomenon that popped up in the TiVo community.
I totally don't get it, unless people are talking about the guide data (which of course makes sense). I bought my TiVo when they first came out -- it was $400 and it belongs to ME. I didn't have to promise to buy their service to get the box at that price, and I never did -- I already know what channels all my shows are on, so I just use it as a plain DVR and program it by hand. How am I a criminal? Now I just wish the damn thing knew about the new daylight savings rules, or at least had a way to set the clock short of pulling out the hard drive and adding a command to the startup script (the RS232 port has never worked). Plus it would be nice to make it stop giving an error screen every time I go to the main menu, badgering me to buy the service. Why is it considered sacrilege to ask how to deal with that, on an expensive box that I already paid for?
Yeah but you must hold a copyright in order to put a license on the code in the first place. And my understanding (possibly out of date and/or misinformed) is that US law forbids the federal government from holding copyrights, for the reasons that wizardforce said (WE paid for it so it already belongs to all of us). Controlling distribution is exactly what a license does, since by default, copyright law basically says "no copying!" -- so the license gives conditions under which the copyright holder will allow users to copy the software.
>and recommends that in certain cases the DoD release software as OSS.
How can the DoD release software under a copyleft license when the federal government is incapable of holding copyrights in the first place? I thought it was all automatically PD if it's not secret? Not that that's stopped anyone from asserting copyright when it suits them.
OK I see why that makes sense from the lender's point of view (they're just trying to balance things) but it's absolutely insane from the borrower's point of view. The high interest rates are what are paid by the people who DIDN'T default. They punish the wrong people -- the actual expense of the moochers is borne by the people who turned out not to be moochers after all.
Totally, TSS/8 was amazing! 20 users in 12 KW of memory ... I mean sure it was very VERY limited but the fact that it did anything at all was incredible. BASIC, FORTRAN II, FOCAL, PAL-D, pretty slick for a teeny tiny system!
All I meant was, as closed-source systems go, it sure was easy for mere mortals to get ahold of the sources. So it seems like there should be different levels of "closed" instead of just a black-and-white label (especially one which tends to carry so much anger with it, at least when certain people say it). DEC was always *way* cooler about throwing sources around than other companies I've dealt with -- you could even get the source to the microcode for some of their CPUs.
I think you may hold the record for most progress on a real KS! Well my email address is the same as always (the one I have for you is 4 years old) so if you'd really be interested in the RM80, let me know. And I'd love to hear about the SCSI project!
Hmm ... Daniel? I give up otherwise -- I've given away a *lot* of hardware (that I got for free too) and I know better than to ask what happened to it (as long as it wasn't on purpose...).
Actually I forget what the problem is with each KS. One of them had a blown bus xcvr, which I replaced (luckily 8646As were still available from DEC at the time). I forget what's wrong with the other one (other than being short on a board or two that I've had to borrow from the known dead machine). Glad to hear you've still got one on ice!
To someone who could give me an 18-bit image of it (or a :DUMP tape, whatever, anyway I was working on a DELUA Ethernet driver that I'd like to recover) -- absolutely! It's in central Mass. Absolutely no guarantee that it still works, but it did in 1993 (when I had it hooked up to my boss's KS10 in NJ and would run ITS after work). Neither of my KSes works...
/ JOHNW@AI (turist)
Yes, those still exist -- The Logical Company's NuPDP product. Disclaimer: it's my emulator.
Probably doesn't count as "major" but there were a lot of users (campus-wide IBM mainframe systems at something like nine colleges at its peak in the 1980s). There was talk of running it under emulation back when the mainframes were being shut down but if that happened, it never escaped captivity at UMich. I used it on a dual-processor 3081 (and later 3090) at RPI and absolutely despised it, until they replaced it with RS/6000s and Suns and we all realized how much more work you can get done on a system that actually STAYS UP! And has an absolutely insane printing system, and half a dozen 9-track tape drives, and a plotter, and network coprocessors, etc. etc. etc. Great system for doing real work on. Now it's apparently gone without a trace. I'd *love* to have it running on Hercules or something.
Is it different from Model II TRS-DOS? I could swear I have an original 2.0a disk around here somewhere, and I thought the 12 was essentially similar but with half-height floppies and a less ugly color. Disk images would be annoying though, since the first track is SD and the rest is DD.
I make my living supporting RT/RSX/RSTS customers so I can assure you they're alive (the copyrights are now held by Mentec). Hobbyists run them too -- telnet to mim.update.uu.se to see an RSX system. Maintenance -- well yeah they've been stagnant since the Y2K fixes went in, but so are the applications so changes would just break things at this point.
And yes they're closed source as in, you can't just download the source for free, but the source was *available* for a fairly reasonable price (and it's *beautiful*, much more readable than any free stuff I've seen). Dunno what to call that but "closed source" is a little strong -- this isn't Windows by a long shot!
ITS runs fine under emulation (and it's been centuries since it ran on the PDP-6 -- they moved it to the KA10 with a homebrew paging box, then the KL10 and KS10 both with custom microcode to emulate the paging box). I have an RM80 drive with ITS installed on it which worked the last time I powered it on ... but OK that was a while ago.
Huh? I've used it for years as my main web-browsing and PuTTY system, just because I hate NT/XP/etc. so much. I'm using WinMe to type this right now. Oh wait, you said USEFUL task.
Exactly! It's painful to see all the slashdotters making final pronouncements about stuff they don't care about. I mean I'm sure plenty of violinists think MS-DOS is just as good as Unix.
To a life-long musician, differences between instances of the instrument they play are really obvious. You'd think that all this wonderful space-age technology would make every modern instrument perfect but it's just not being applied. I mean, why doesn't artificially flavored food taste exactly like the real thing? It should!
I play the harpsichord, badly, anyway its recent history is relevant -- it underwent a really stupid mini-revival (yes I know, that no one but me cares about) in the early 20th century. It was exactly the same kind of thing -- a bunch of dweebs thought then-modern technology could "fix" the harpsichord, so they started cranking out monstrosities with cast iron frames, plywood soundboards, aluminum or plexiglass guides, brass jacks, felt-bushed keyboards, etc. etc. etc. It took them decades to get around to remembering that harpsichords underwent THREE HUNDRED YEARS of development by true craftsmen who devoted their lives to one thing, and these days the best harpsichords are abject imitations of antiques, right down to the glue.
Still, I think the fungi guys are on the right track. The wood is actually the biggest problem -- there are no old-growth forests any more, so now we have small trees that grew too fast with too much sun. We'll probably never be able to replicate the old spruce or boxwood or African blackwood etc. etc. etc. that grew very slowly over a long period of time, with tight, uniform grain, but we should try anyway. Just taking a bunch of low-density Home Depot style wood and blindly tossing it on a CNC router will never replicate what could be done in the old days by someone with a real ear for hand-carving high quality tone wood who's learned how to perfect each individual part long before the instrument is assembled. We SHOULD have the technology, but we don't.
I might actually care what they were saying if they weren't already nickel-and-diming me with little fees. I understand why they don't include taxes in the quoted price (I think that's state law, for most things other than fuel the sales tax *has* to be itemized separately) but they stick in a bunch of other fees that *aren't* taxes but somehow they feel OK pretending that the quoted price is real. (Yes I know all the other cell companies do it too but that doesn't make it OK.) So I don't believe for a second that the $1.50 is anything other than yet another cash grab.
It doesn't help that T-Mobile is so awful. I've had them (and their predecessors Voicestream and Omnipoint) for over ten years (only because I refuse to sign a contract, and Sprint PCS and Virgin Mobile had even worse quality), and I can't think of *anywhere* that used to have no coverage but now does. Do they EVER put up new towers? Where I live now, I have to drive into town just to check my voice mail. LOTS of dropped calls everywhere else (including interstates). Anyway an extra $1.50 a month would be enough to remind me that crappy cell phone service is something I don't really need in the first place.