Posts by Stoneshop 5954 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Oct 2009
Software availability was so bad that there wasn't even an offline usenet client for years - the only native ones available assumed you didn't pay for dial-up local calls.
Changi (not a Usenet client in itself, but a local news spool thingie like leafnode)
Mail clients were bloody terrible until PMMail.
That's what kept me on OS/2 (eCS) until about two years ago.
There was a decent graphics package but I can't for the life of me remember what it was.
PMView.
IBM. The only company in the Netherlands that (at the time) made you wear a tie to work.
Well, at DEC FS my manager repeatedly insisted very, very strongly I'd wear a tie, but he did stop short of forcing me.
"What do you think a customer prefers, a FS engineer with or without tie?"
"One who fixes his broken stuff, I'd say" (which I undisputedly did)
Which made it the last of his attempts.
Started with 2.11 on a 486/66, 8 Meg memory, ATI VLB video, Adaptec VLB SCSI card - no problem, except the tedium of shuffling those umpteen floppies.
Upgraded to 3.0, no problem (this time from CD, yay)
Moved to an AMD K5/450, 32 Meg memory, ATI PCI video, Adaptec PCI SCSI card - no problem again, just a bit of bother actually getting hold of a driver for an ISDN card, but it worked rightaway.
Upgraded to Warp 4 - once again, no problems.
Upgraded the system to an Athlon 1000, 512 Meg, moved the cards and disks - no problems
Upgraded to eCS 1.2 - no problems once more (actually, I think I did a reinstall that time; all my apps and data were on a different disk, so except for recreating the shortcuts no big deal)
These were Antec TruePower 480W units, don't know who OEMed them, but I had one fail, replaced under RMA (which took an inordinate amount of time too), then the other failed just out of warranty, and then shortly after the replacement unit went too, all with low-ish and wildly unstable 5V rails.
No more Antec for me.
A friend of mine designed the electronics for videorecorders, back when they were more than a big chip, a smaller (but still biggish) chip, and a handful of discrete components sprinkled around them. He was told not to bother whether he could save on transistors; his time thinking about such trivialities was more valuable than those parts. Once he was done, the schematic and prototypes would be scrutinized by the Parts Decimation Team, who would do what their (unofficial) name suggests while trying to keep the functionality and quality more or less unaffected.
I've seen several cases that come with vent holes, fan mounting points and those funnels that are meant to end up over the CPU, and at least one that looks exactly like the case pictured here, so strike the 'ghetto fan install'. The only thing people need to be aware of is that there should be enough air intake capacity, to match the exhaust capacity of the fans blowing outwards. Which means either a large grille in the front, or that side fan blowing inwards.
Five years old, but still valid.
Scenario: incoming missile, possibly loaded with an ABC warhead (the human operator who launched it thought nothing of this). Surely it will harm humans when it comes down. Does the robot defense system take action to destroy it in flight?
E_DILEMMA. decision by zero, conscience dumped.
a quick call to the man on the ISS
The big problem there will be the reentry speed. I'm genuinely curious whether a paper airplane could handle that, slowing down sufficiently from whatever drag there is at >100km altitude, before hitting more serious air density, or not.
the arcane spells that need to be typed into the shell, and so on.
With most distros, at some point in the install process (which is just as graphical as Windows') you get to the point where it wants to know what disks it can use. You click the appropriate disks, you click that you want those in a RAID set, you click that you want the lot formatted, and there you are.
On top of which, I'd also have to order all the parts and wait for them to be delivered.
You can do other things between ordering and the parts being delivered, you know. Which is roughly the same length of time as a complete system, or a NAS box being delivered. And less time than involved with driving to a shop, finding that they don't have the kit you need, driving to another, finding they do, but only with smaller disks which you (or the shop's techie) needs to replace.
I too was looking for a NAS server thingie, with the main requirements being rackmount (those do exist) and less than 2.5 linguini (35cm, 14") deep (those don't, as far as I've been able to find).
A brief flirt with Travla in the hope of obtaining, at a reasonable price and in a reasonable timeframe, a case that kindof met my requirements failed as the price and timeframe turned out to be anything but reasonable.
So I decided to roll my own. The result: built into a 19" 2HE audio case (those are easily available in the depth I required is a 4x 2.5" drive bay, a mini-ITX board, a Flex-ATX PSU and two temperature-controlled fans. The air "inlet" is past the drives, so they get more than sufficient cooling. The board is mounted with its I/O panel towards the front. Freestanding it's not particularly quiet due to the 6cm fans, but mounted and with the rack door closed you barely notice it. For OS I briefly considered FreeNAS, but went with my favorite distro instead.
"Got a second one, but those boffins have gone and made it invisible, with all my sheet music in it too. So now I'm totally fed up with this whole business, sheds, composing and all. I'm moving to Canada and become a ... Lumberjack!"
"So, it's Arthur Two-Sheds Lumberjack from now on?"
Microsoft can be one step ahead this time *and* use the peeling Surface covers to their advantage: animated page turns initiated when you touch the appropriate (loose) cover corner, like you would a page in a real book.
But they have to be quick and patent it before Apple reads this.
OK, but I can't see a system you're envisioning working without POS hardware at the cash register, because maybe if you even simply hand over the entire card to the merchant, as a sort of variable-denomination banknote, he'll want to hand you back a card with the amount of change for that purchase. And as a pile of pre-loaded cards tends to be somewhat impractical, he'll just want to set the value on that card there and then. Which means POS equipment, which means an organisation certifying, installing and maintaining them, and probably even running the bits to link this system to conventional banking. And I doubt this organisation will do so entirely for free.
There is a system here called the Chipknip, launched a decade ago or so and meant as a small cash payments substitute. You load some amount onto the chip on your bank card (from your account), then proceed to pay by sticking the card into the POS payment terminal, then choosing the Chipknip option, get shown the amount, press OK, amount gets deducted from the value on the card. No communication, no PIN verification. It's all but dead now, I think the only use I'd have is is here in the company cafeteria (which I don't use).
Provded you want it (I most definitely don't) it could retrieve your account balance every time you use one of $YOURBANK's cash dispensers; it could even be a function separate from pulling coloured bits of paper from the thing, just like them having an option to show your balance on screen.
Then just let the host update the display when the device is being dismounted. Could get messy with multiple partitions, though, especially if you're not using all of them from the same OS, but for the more general case of having a single large partition on an external drive it should work OK.
Does it? How do you (and the other party) know the amount displayed is the actual amount available on the card? And cards like you propose will need POS equipment just like the current bank cards and debet/credit cards, equipment that has to be certified and maintained.
Hell, no. Advertising to all who manage to get a peek at them what your balance is?
The infamous Dutch OV-Chipcard, OTOH, could well use this feature, showing whether you've actually checked in or out, and on what travel 'product' you're travelling at the moment*). Balance again? No thanks.
*) apart from the overall fail that it is, there's a specific fail when you transfer from, say, bus or tram (traveling on card balance) to train (traveling on subscription). You have to check out when leaving the bus, and check in when boarding the train, but if that's within 3 minutes the system considers this changeover to be 'continue using the previous travel product', which means it's NOT using the subscription. A travel mode display would show whether it's using the intended product or not.
@Buzzword
You don't have to change the law, you just (err, that may sound simpler than it is) have to get the copyright owner to cooperate. There are quite a few cases where public distribution of a copyrighted work has been deemed totally OK by its author(s), provided people don't start charging money for those copies, or modifying them.
If The Reg is taking sides in copyright issues, it's usually against unilateral landgrabs by $BIGCORP. At least, that's how I perceive their stance on those matters.
Apart from whether that's actually the case or not, this is about making service manuals more easily accessible. You can get them from Toshiba, but it's not a simple search-click-download matter. Also, Toshiba doesn't lose its copyright on the docs by someone else offering them for download, and noone is asking them to forfeit that copyright, rather to be laid-back in enforcing it, especially regarding docs for older models (which, again, doesn't cause them to lose their copyright; it's not a trademark which has "use it or lose it" tacked on).
Instead the odd thing is the way they act when the second hand reaches the 12 o'clock mark.
At the very least Dutch and German railway clocks behave exactly the same way. It's to do with the way they keep time: a synchronous motor driving the hands, and a pawl stopping the seconds hand at 0, which is lifted by an electromagnet driven from a central controller. With the seconds hand running slightly fast you only have to make sure there's the 'proceed' pulse every minute on the minute to keep every clock around in sync, in a very simple way. At work, two desks over there is such a clock, built by Telenorma (now Bosch), and driven by a Bosch Tenotime 2.
I'm not sure even the first PC-clone I owned (an Epson 286) had an Intel processor; everything after that has been AMD for x86-architecture machines, except for one Cyrix MII that I can't recall buying but did emanate from my parts hoard somewhat recently, and a dual PIII found in a skip.
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