When I think "overlooked but influential" I tent to think of games like "Hovertank 3D" (ever heard of that - it's from the same people that made Quake II) or Smurfs for the uh... Coleco console.
why has Apple never gotten into this business/quote
They made the Pippin back in 1996 and nowadays they got the itouch. I wouldn't call any product Apple has offered "off the wall" however, just good marketing and good implementations that are regularly refined to stay competitive.
Virtual Boy anyone? I thought they did this before:P
The VirtualBoy should never have left the prototype stage. To play it you had to sit in an awkward position and the "3D" was pretty much just a gimmick. E.g. in Wario the blocks swing in and out of the screen instead of up and down like in Mario games. I recall wondering what Nintendo was thinking when they released a product even the ardent Ninentdo fanboys back then had trouble praising.
Elaborate, please? I've never had a hardlock with my VBox machines. You're saying that one month continuous uptime on the VM will do that? Do you have any idea why?
When VT is disabled my system will sometimes hardlock. This happens rarely so it's difficult to assert for certain if vbox was the guilty party but it only happened while vbox was running and was sometimes foreshadowed by vbox first crashing and the host following shortly.
Fortunately there's no reason not to activate VT unless you don't have it or run another VM that needs VT alongside vbox.
From the document: "As VRML takes off--which it almost certainly will--PNG will go along for the ride."
LOL they were hoping VRML would make PNG popular. Surprised that Microsoft embraced the format that early and Netscape rejected it, exact opposite of the impression I held.
The other day I downloaded a mouse driver for my shiny new mouse. I remember a time when a big mouse driver that used 25KB of memory was big, now they need 25MB for the compressed download and about the same amount of RAM.
Imagine if these drivers existed when Windows95 was new. "System requirements: Win95 PC with 25MB RAM and 100MB free space"... WUT NO WEY
At the possibility of being flamebait here, how the heck does MS keep publishing products full of security holes?
Because many security flaws are in old software - which they aren't "pushing" any more. Today's flaw is a exception but requires a user that use XP mode in such a way that an attacker can get at it (say - if you're running an old insecure version of Firefox in XP mode) which, you have to be honest here, is not all that likely since XP mode will be more used for old games and business apps.
As for the the "0day flaw" you mentioned, if it was an Open Source project you'd likely been asked to update to IE8 instead of whining about them pushing insecure software
VirtualBox is great, only drawback is that some of it's features (USB for instance) have had BSODy issues in the past. I also recommend using VT/AMDV mode all the time when running XP in a VM, VirtualBox hardlocks the host after about a month running XP without VT on my system.
The central database for media is a little annoying but only until you get the media you usually use in it and then you can pretty much forget about it. Have actually come in handy sometimes when I need to figure out on what disk and folder a CD image is stored.
Oh, and never run Virtual PC and VirtualBox at the same time unless you make sure only one of em uses the VT feature.
I suppose that it's not impossible that if the situation was reversed - Industrial revolution in China - Europe would be the "old empire" and China would be the squabbling states. Amusing thought, but the Yellow river's tendency to flood and kill millions probably set China back enough that it was unlikely for China to industrialize first.
One interesting difference between Europe and China is how technology was handled*. For instance, in both Europe and China water driven clocks were invented "around the same time". Both works of brilliant men. But then, over the next hundred of years the European clocks got gradually more sophisticated, while China seemed to reinvent the clock every time they needed one. For some reason "high end tech" tended to live and die with the pioneers - For instance, they had big ships, simple rockets, crude guns, workable cannons before any Europeans had sailed to China but by the time the Portuguese came for a visit they happily bought arms from them, so I suspect the people that knew how to make that stuff died and their knowledge was left in some dusty archive for no-one to see.
Every year is certainly do-able. Still, my last remote's first batteries were thrown out with the TV.
Similarly my RF ball mouse have held the same batteries for ~4 years and my RF keyboard is going 2 - while my Bluetooth mouse (the VT470 is an excellent mouse BTW) have had several battery changes in the last year.
It was kind of crappy -- looked sort of like Apple's ProDOS. Not much more than a file shell, really.
I've heard this "not more than a file shell" statement several times. Checking out windows 1.0 I found it to be not all that different from v.3.0 with the exception of not having "icons" for starting applications and not having overlapping windows.
If I compare it with Amiga OS 1.0 (which also got released in 1985) I'd dare say Windows compares well enough. Windows had working copy&paste, ran multiple applications (though not preemptively) while having a relatively sane calling convention (slower but allowing for virtual and (later) protected memory to be implemented) and having some device independents (i.e drivers for hardware that could be switched as needed).
The big benefits of Amiga OS and Macintosh hinged a lot on the hardware. MacOS had an big option ROM, for instance, that did way more than the BIOS and helped on load times and such while Amiga programs could impress with stereo audio and 32 color graphics with relatively sophisticated raster effects (Amiga had a blitter, a copper and interrupts on every scan line - at the cost of pretty much tying the OS and software to the hardware).
If all else was equal I think Windows had the better tradeoffs whenever by accident or design. It had "good enough" multitasking, device independence, printer support and working copy&paste, MacOS has working copy&paste, printing, superior fonts and probably a superior file system, AmigaOS had a nice design but had a few major failings like a calling convention that prevented them from implementing protected and virtual memory and Copy & Paste that never worked as well as in Windows and MacOS (it's possible the fault lies more with the apps than the OS though).
OS/2 is probably a better OS but it never had a chance. Just installing OS/2 was a challenge in itself and there were no apps for it since the dev tools cost a small fortune.
Antec Solo case (Antec makes the quietest cases, but stay away from their power supplies)
Also stay away from their fans. That case is fitted with a "Tricool" fan. Called "tricool" because it got three settings: Hairdryer, Vacuum-cleaner and Wind-tunnel.
Got three of those fans back in 2007 but they were all noisier than running an AMD XP with stock cooler and one of those cheap PSUs.
You can use other programs instead of iTunes to put music on your iPod. Do a Google search.
It's a bit of a PITA though. Got an iPod last xmas and I didn't find a way to get it to play the music I put on it. It could play games and show videos but not music. I finally managed to get it working by using iTunes on an old PC, toggling a checkbox and first then it could play the music I had copied over earlier.
Not very nice of Apple.
In any case I eventually went back to my crappy old MP3 player since it turns out I just want to play music. First sign of old age perhaps? Hmm.
VHS is better than Beta! People often compare high quality beta players with cheap VHS players, but that's not fair at all. The better VHS players have just as good an image as Beta and has longer playtime too.
...nothing quite like revisiting an old horse I'm afraid.
It's not my estimate, comes from the documentary uh... "Stories from the Stone Age" IIRC and I belive it was 3 weeks for one person to feed a family for a whole year.
Yes actually, it took some 2000 years before our ancient ancestors started planting seeds themselves. According to BBC or some other TV documentary anyway.
The thought that humans 60 000 years ago may be smarter than us today amused me. I've not read any study on the subject and the larger brain thing is just something I've heard with a foot note that larger != better tacked on.
I do suspect that an agricultural lifestyle with husbandry requires more synapses than a nomadic hunter lifestyle since wolfs, bears, etc, can manage the latter, but it would still be amusing if the OP's joke was correct in that we've gotten dumber since then (Hey, when you regularly face down grizzlies with only a stick you need smarts:).
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What am I doing wrong?
When I think "overlooked but influential" I tent to think of games like "Hovertank 3D" (ever heard of that - it's from the same people that made Quake II) or Smurfs for the uh... Coleco console.
why has Apple never gotten into this business/quote They made the Pippin back in 1996 and nowadays they got the itouch. I wouldn't call any product Apple has offered "off the wall" however, just good marketing and good implementations that are regularly refined to stay competitive.
Virtual Boy anyone? I thought they did this before :P
The VirtualBoy should never have left the prototype stage. To play it you had to sit in an awkward position and the "3D" was pretty much just a gimmick. E.g. in Wario the blocks swing in and out of the screen instead of up and down like in Mario games. I recall wondering what Nintendo was thinking when they released a product even the ardent Ninentdo fanboys back then had trouble praising.
Elaborate, please? I've never had a hardlock with my VBox machines. You're saying that one month continuous uptime on the VM will do that? Do you have any idea why?
When VT is disabled my system will sometimes hardlock. This happens rarely so it's difficult to assert for certain if vbox was the guilty party but it only happened while vbox was running and was sometimes foreshadowed by vbox first crashing and the host following shortly.
Fortunately there's no reason not to activate VT unless you don't have it or run another VM that needs VT alongside vbox.
From the document: "As VRML takes off--which it almost certainly will--PNG will go along for the ride."
LOL they were hoping VRML would make PNG popular. Surprised that Microsoft embraced the format that early and Netscape rejected it, exact opposite of the impression I held.
The other day I downloaded a mouse driver for my shiny new mouse. I remember a time when a big mouse driver that used 25KB of memory was big, now they need 25MB for the compressed download and about the same amount of RAM.
Imagine if these drivers existed when Windows95 was new. "System requirements: Win95 PC with 25MB RAM and 100MB free space"... WUT NO WEY
At the possibility of being flamebait here, how the heck does MS keep publishing products full of security holes?
Because many security flaws are in old software - which they aren't "pushing" any more. Today's flaw is a exception but requires a user that use XP mode in such a way that an attacker can get at it (say - if you're running an old insecure version of Firefox in XP mode) which, you have to be honest here, is not all that likely since XP mode will be more used for old games and business apps.
As for the the "0day flaw" you mentioned, if it was an Open Source project you'd likely been asked to update to IE8 instead of whining about them pushing insecure software
VirtualBox is great, only drawback is that some of it's features (USB for instance) have had BSODy issues in the past. I also recommend using VT/AMDV mode all the time when running XP in a VM, VirtualBox hardlocks the host after about a month running XP without VT on my system.
The central database for media is a little annoying but only until you get the media you usually use in it and then you can pretty much forget about it. Have actually come in handy sometimes when I need to figure out on what disk and folder a CD image is stored.
Oh, and never run Virtual PC and VirtualBox at the same time unless you make sure only one of em uses the VT feature.
I suppose that it's not impossible that if the situation was reversed - Industrial revolution in China - Europe would be the "old empire" and China would be the squabbling states. Amusing thought, but the Yellow river's tendency to flood and kill millions probably set China back enough that it was unlikely for China to industrialize first.
One interesting difference between Europe and China is how technology was handled*. For instance, in both Europe and China water driven clocks were invented "around the same time". Both works of brilliant men. But then, over the next hundred of years the European clocks got gradually more sophisticated, while China seemed to reinvent the clock every time they needed one. For some reason "high end tech" tended to live and die with the pioneers - For instance, they had big ships, simple rockets, crude guns, workable cannons before any Europeans had sailed to China but by the time the Portuguese came for a visit they happily bought arms from them, so I suspect the people that knew how to make that stuff died and their knowledge was left in some dusty archive for no-one to see.
*Not that I've studied the subject mind you.
Every year is certainly do-able. Still, my last remote's first batteries were thrown out with the TV.
Similarly my RF ball mouse have held the same batteries for ~4 years and my RF keyboard is going 2 - while my Bluetooth mouse (the VT470 is an excellent mouse BTW) have had several battery changes in the last year.
It was kind of crappy -- looked sort of like Apple's ProDOS. Not much more than a file shell, really.
I've heard this "not more than a file shell" statement several times. Checking out windows 1.0 I found it to be not all that different from v.3.0 with the exception of not having "icons" for starting applications and not having overlapping windows.
If I compare it with Amiga OS 1.0 (which also got released in 1985) I'd dare say Windows compares well enough. Windows had working copy&paste, ran multiple applications (though not preemptively) while having a relatively sane calling convention (slower but allowing for virtual and (later) protected memory to be implemented) and having some device independents (i.e drivers for hardware that could be switched as needed).
The big benefits of Amiga OS and Macintosh hinged a lot on the hardware. MacOS had an big option ROM, for instance, that did way more than the BIOS and helped on load times and such while Amiga programs could impress with stereo audio and 32 color graphics with relatively sophisticated raster effects (Amiga had a blitter, a copper and interrupts on every scan line - at the cost of pretty much tying the OS and software to the hardware).
If all else was equal I think Windows had the better tradeoffs whenever by accident or design. It had "good enough" multitasking, device independence, printer support and working copy&paste, MacOS has working copy&paste, printing, superior fonts and probably a superior file system, AmigaOS had a nice design but had a few major failings like a calling convention that prevented them from implementing protected and virtual memory and Copy & Paste that never worked as well as in Windows and MacOS (it's possible the fault lies more with the apps than the OS though).
OS/2 is probably a better OS but it never had a chance. Just installing OS/2 was a challenge in itself and there were no apps for it since the dev tools cost a small fortune.
Antec Solo case (Antec makes the quietest cases, but stay away from their power supplies)
Also stay away from their fans. That case is fitted with a "Tricool" fan. Called "tricool" because it got three settings: Hairdryer, Vacuum-cleaner and Wind-tunnel.
Got three of those fans back in 2007 but they were all noisier than running an AMD XP with stock cooler and one of those cheap PSUs.
You can use other programs instead of iTunes to put music on your iPod. Do a Google search.
It's a bit of a PITA though. Got an iPod last xmas and I didn't find a way to get it to play the music I put on it. It could play games and show videos but not music. I finally managed to get it working by using iTunes on an old PC, toggling a checkbox and first then it could play the music I had copied over earlier.
Not very nice of Apple.
In any case I eventually went back to my crappy old MP3 player since it turns out I just want to play music. First sign of old age perhaps? Hmm.
VHS is better than Beta! People often compare high quality beta players with cheap VHS players, but that's not fair at all. The better VHS players have just as good an image as Beta and has longer playtime too.
...nothing quite like revisiting an old horse I'm afraid.
It's not my estimate, comes from the documentary uh... "Stories from the Stone Age" IIRC and I belive it was 3 weeks for one person to feed a family for a whole year.
Ahh, cow manure. It is amazing (and revolting) what shit can be used for.
I mean, who doesn't hate that Apple symbol with the bite taken out of it?
I've heard some religious think Apple is in league with the devil cause of that symbol - quick google - Darwin kernel and chmod 666. Hehe.
In what kind of scenario would you have access to the PSU of the server you attacked? Private key servers should not be directly accessible after all.
Pretty cool. Didn't know mud bricks had any hope lasting that long. I presume you kept them from getting wet somehow.
Yes actually, it took some 2000 years before our ancient ancestors started planting seeds themselves. According to BBC or some other TV documentary anyway.
The thought that humans 60 000 years ago may be smarter than us today amused me. I've not read any study on the subject and the larger brain thing is just something I've heard with a foot note that larger != better tacked on.
:).
I do suspect that an agricultural lifestyle with husbandry requires more synapses than a nomadic hunter lifestyle since wolfs, bears, etc, can manage the latter, but it would still be amusing if the OP's joke was correct in that we've gotten dumber since then (Hey, when you regularly face down grizzlies with only a stick you need smarts
I dare say that's pretty frequent for a remote.
Get Flashblock. I use it to good effect on my netbook.
So our ancestors had 12.5% larger brains.
Meant: May have had 12.5% larger brains, brain size probably vary a lot :)