atari

04/24/2001

Dave Farquhar General , , , , ,

A sense of wonder. It must have been almost 20 years ago, I read a short story in a magazine involving a wondrous new tool. I don’t exactly remember the plot line, but it was something similar to this: a preteen boy comes into a sum of money under questionable circumstances. He’s uncomfortable going to his parents about it, or even his peers. Not knowing where else to go, he turns on his dad’s computer and types his story into it–whether this was a built-in Basic language interpreter like a Commodore or Atari, or a command line like CP/M or MS-DOS, it didn’t say. At the end of the story he hits Return, or Enter, or whatever that key’s supposed to be called, and the computer responds with one sentence:

Sorry, can’t compute.

That line gave the story its title.

I don’t know why I remember that story, except maybe for the technical inaccuracy. At any rate, I seem to recall he left without turning the computer off, so his dad came home, noticed the computer was on, read what was on screen, and confronted him. And that was pretty much the end, at least how I remember it.

Last night I was making up a batch of barley and mushroom soup from a recipe I found over the weekend. I know when I’m out of my element, and trying new recipes without any help at all is among them. The recipe called for 4 tablespoons of dry sherry. Now, I’m not a wine drinker, unless drinking wine twice a year counts. I was pretty sure that sherry is a type of wine. But white wine? Red wine? I didn’t know. As I was picking up the other ingredients I needed, I went to the wine and liquor section of the local grocery store and wandered around a while. I couldn’t find any sherry.

So I went home. I figured I was probably in the minority as far as not knowing anything about dry sherry, but I also figured I probably wasn’t the first one to have questions about it. I fired up a Web browser, went to Google, and typed a question: What is dry sherry? I was able to infer very quickly from the site hits that, indeed, dry sherry is a wine. But I couldn’t find any. So I typed in another search phrase: “dry sherry substitute.” That put me in business. A lot of people have asked that question. One of the first documents hit offered several suggestions, marsala among them. I have a little bottle of marsala in one of my kitchen cabinets. So I made the soup, and it wasn’t bad.

The moral of that short story remains unchanged: A computer still can’t answer questions on its own, particularly questions of ethics–the experiments of www.mindpixel.com notwithstanding. What Mindpixel is doing is storing and cross-referencing the answers to millions of simple questions in hopes of one day being able to answer complex ones. (The results of that are fairly impressive–last night I asked it several simple questions like, “Was Ronald Reagan president of the United States in 1981?” and “Is Joe Jackson the name of both a famous musician and a famous baseball player?” and it answered all of them correctly.) But what Mindpixel, or for that matter, any good search engine can do effectively is gather and retain information. And that in itself is extremely useful, and the idea of search engines indexing a global database and answering simple–and not-so-simple–questions was unthinkable to most people just 20 years ago.

And I found a sale. I’m suddenly in need of a large number of network cards, as regular readers know. Just out of curiosity, I checked CompUSA’s pricing on Bay Netgear FA311 NICs, and–drum roll–they’re $14.99 with a $5 mail-in rebate. That’s a steal. It’s not quite as striking as the deal I found on D-Link cards at Circuit City back in January, but I like the Netgear–or at least its predecessor, the FA310TX–better anyway.

The AT’s coming out of retirement

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , , , ,

Scary thoughts. UPS dropped off a pair of Soyo AT socket 370 motherboards while I was at work yesterday. So I’ll be picking those up from the apartment office after it opens this morning. That only means one thing. My PC/AT is about to come out of retirement.

Let’s think about that for a minute. When this ancient thing was built, Ronald Reagan was just starting his second term. The Soviet Union still existed, and the Evil Empire loomed large. The most popular game console wasn’t the Sony Playstation–it was the Atari 2600. Some popular rock’n’roll bands of the day: The Police and Duran Duran. U2 was on the map and rock critics knew them, but to the majority of people, the name conjured up images of a spyplane if it meant anything at all. The minivan as we know it today was just coming onto the market.

Dell Computer Corp. existed only as an operation out of a dorm room at the University of Texas at Austin, and it was known as PCs Limited. Gateway 2000 didn’t yet exist. The #2 maker of IBM-compatible PCs was Tandy.

Popular movies included Romancing the Stone, The Terminator, and Sixteen Candles.

U.S. airlines that were still in business: TWA, Eastern, and Pan Am. The most troubled airline at the time was Branniff Airways, which was in a long bankruptcy proceeding (it would later make a comeback, then die again).

Anyway… I pulled the PC/AT case out of storage, dug out some drive rails, found some Phillips screws that fit it (IBM insisted on using old-style slotted screws for some insane reason–I hate those), and I even dug out a vintage YE Data 1.2 MB 5.25″ floppy drive like IBM used. Then, noticing the 17 years’ worth of accumulated grime, I gave the case a bath. Now it looks two years old instead of 17. Actually, it looks pretty darn good. They don’t build ’em like that anymore. Of course, for what that case would cost to build today, an OEM can probably build an entire PC.

I’ve also accumulated other components: a junky Trident-based AGP video card is also about to come out of retirement, as is my old Media Vision Pro Audio Spectrum card with SCSI interface. That CD-ROM drive died long ago, but I’ve got an NEC 2-speed SCSI drive that looks great in the case. (This system’s all about retro looks; if I need speed, I’ll use a CD-ROM drive off my network.) To accomodate that, I’ve got a D-Link 10/100 PCI NIC.

Just one thing’s holding up this project: Computer Surplus Outlet just shipped my Celeron processors. I ordered the boards and chips the same day. That’s annoying.

01/09/2001

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , , ,

Mailbag:

DOS games under Windows; Today’s post; Disk I/O tweaking

Overheard: [I’d] rather spend a lot of money for a new top-notch and super-light mountain bike, dive gear or quality clothing than on another computer system. The performance of my PC is just fine for the work I do and the games I happen to play once in a blue moon. My PC is over a year old! Shocking!

–Thomas Pabst, of Tom’s Hardware Guide, in his Duron 850 review released Monday

I think that’s another argument for optimizing your PC right there. If Tom Pabst, of all people, can keep a PC for more than a year, then so should everyone else.

Let’s talk about cheap PCs. In college I lived next door to a marketing guy. In 1994, a couple of years before PCs broke the $1,000 barrier for good, I was thinking about $700 PCs. At that time, 386DX motherboards retrofitted with Cyrix 486DLC processors were dirt cheap, and I figured with 4 MB of RAM and a sub-300 MB hard disk, it would be possible to build a PC for that, and I figured it would sell on price alone.

My marketing buddy agreed. Then we did nothing with the idea. But I still think about cheap PCs.

There’s an article over at The Register today talking about a new motherboard from PC Chips that sells for about $80, based on the SiS 730S chipset. An unnamed vendor states that he can buy these PC Chips boards, slap a low-end Duron on them, put it in a case with the smallest hard drive available, and voila, you’ve got a $300 PC. He’s right. For $80, you get audio, video, modem, and LAN. All you need is a CPU ($60), memory (under $50), hard drive ($85), case ($35), and a keyboard and mouse ($15). It won’t be a high-powered system, but it’s miles ahead of anything we had three years ago and we weren’t complaining.

Now, I don’t trust PC Chips motherboards one bit, but I expect a lot of people will follow this dealer’s plan. This will lead to sales and market share for AMD, but it might come at the expense of reputation. You and I can assume people will blame the inevitable problems they’ll have with these systems on the dealer, or on the motherboard, but historically that’s never happened. People equate the CPU with the computer, so problems tend to fall on AMD or Cyrix, right or wrong. But AMD is hedging its bets, rightly focussing on the business market, where it got its big break last week: Micron will be offering Athlons in their Client Pro line of business PCs.

And speaking of Cyrix, they’ve revised the Cyrix III chip yet again, adding L2 cache. Performance is still lackluster, leading people to predict Cyrix’s demise, but I’m not so sure of that. If VIA can sell Cyrix chips at a significantly lower price than Intel or AMD are willing to charge and still make a profit, there’s room. That $300 PC can become a $250 PC if VIA prices its CPUs at $35 and dealers cut available memory.

Inexpensive PCs done right do sell. Commodore and Atari proved that. Their demise came when they reached the point where they no longer could (or would) sell a useful computer at a significantly lower price than everyone else. The Amiga was tremendously useful, but it was at a me-too price. Here was Commodore, the budget computer maker, selling a computer for twice as much as Packard Bell. Hence its demise. Atari’s price was closer to Packard Bell, but the software compatibility wasn’t there. Packard Bell’s death was inevitable once HP and Compaq started eroding their price territory. Packard Bell had a terrible reputation, but they sold until they lost their price advantage. People aren’t going to settle for a Kia if they can get a Honda for about the same price.

Mailbag:

DOS games under Windows; Today’s post; Disk I/O tweaking

A Mac Norton Antivirus tip

Dave Farquhar Macintosh , , , , , , , , ,

Mac Norton AntiVirus tip. If this affects you, you probably already know this, but just in case, I’ll metnion it. NAV under Mac OS 9 isn’t exactly reliable. Its autodetection of installing software (so it can offer to disable itself during the process) likes to crash the system. The conventional advice of rebooting without extensions to install software is no longer a suggestion in this environment. It’s a must.

I don’t like having antivirus software running all the time personally (it slows down systems something fierce and I find it preferable to just not engage in high-risk activities because sometimes things slip past antivirus software–I’ve always thought it’s better to promote responsible behavior than it is to try to make irresponsible behavior safe), but sometimes that’s unavoidable, e.g. in corporate environments where there are policies mandating such things.

Weird day yesterday. My boss and I had talked about moving me on to bigger and better things. Yesterday was the day. I totally forgot. I was wondering about mid-day why I hadn’t had anything to do when someone else mentioned it. Oops. So now I’m Office 2000 Deployment Czar. Sort of. Yuck. Didn’t I see a pile of IBM Selectrics somewhere…?

And then this… My songwriting partner asks about the feasibility of writing an original Christmas song for the Christmas Eve 11 pm service. Ooh. Is there such thing as an original Christmas song? But this is like being asked to write a song for your best friend’s wedding or something, so if there’s a way to still write an original Christmas song, I’ll find it.

~~~~~~~~~~

From: “Gary Mugford” <mugford@nospam.aztec-net.com>
Subject: The definition of rich
David,

  From the Great White North, have a great holiday season. We struggle
away ourselves, having already had the holiday
back in October.

  Your pastor’s saying brought back a memory of something I wrote way back
in Grade 9. Haven’t changed belief in it much
since then. It was a poetry assignment in English that was supposed to
combine traditional and non-traditional form.
It’s lousy, but I’ve never written a poem since then. To me, I’d done
better than I could ever do again. And since I had
the marks to afford it, I declined to ever write another poem. Schmaltzy,
yeah. Crazy for sure. But i’s gotta be me!

  I unabashedly give you …

The Richest Man in the World

“Rich,” he said, “That’s what I’ll be!”
“I’ll own the world, just you wait and see!”

And then he met her.

And his world started to shrink, not grow larger.
And his wallet grew thinner, not fatter.

As the years passed by,
and life passed unto death,
there came to be erected
in the Olde Church graveyard,
a tombstone bearing an inscription,

“Here lies a very, very rich man.
She loved him.”
~~~~~

Poetically, sure, there’s room to criticize it, but that doesn’t change the
message one bit. That is the coolest thing I’ve read in a long time. Thanks!
~~~~~~~~~~

From: “Don Armstrong” <darmst@nospam.yahoo.com.au>
Subject: Ergonomic thingies

Dave, have you checked out 3M’s CWS (Computer Workstation Solutions) site, particularly their Ergonomics section, and particularly what they call their Renaissance Mouse?

It’s at http://www.3m.com/cws/index.html

Now, the “Renaissance Mouse” obviously owes a lot of its ancestry to gamer’s joysticks, but it seems to me to make a lot of sense when I play-act going through the motions of using it. There are other things there – like gel-filled wrist-rests – that also make sense. I’ve used them before, and they help.

Regards, Don Armstrong
~~~~~

I just checked the site. The renaissance mouse looks much like the old
third-party joysticks people bought for Atari 2600 consoles. Definitely
interesting. I may be putting my credit card to use…

Thanks!

~~~~~~~~~~

From: Edwards, Bruce
Subject: Ripping audio

Hi Dave:

I noticed that yesterday you talked about ripping audio from your CDs.  What sound card do you recommend as a good choice for encoding audio from LPs to either WAV or MP3 format?  I am interested in (when I build my next PC in about three to four months) getting a sound card that will provide excellent fidelity from an analog line in source.  I know there will then be interference issues within the PC too, are certain sounds cards more immune to this than others?

Thanks for any comments.

By the way, I ordered you book off Amazon last Friday and they were selling it for 50% off list.

Sincerely,

Bruce

~~~~~

It’d be really hard to beat the Sound Blaster Live! series (just avoid the Value version of the card, now discontinued). The card itself has excellent sound quality, and a much larger number of capacitors on it than I’m used to seeing these days, which will cut down on excess noise. The sound inputs are outstanding as well. The only way you’ll do better would be to get a truly professional-grade audio card, such as those from Digital Audio Labs (but you’ll pay more for it and you’ll have a card with zero multimedia capability–no MIDI, no nothing).
 
I see as well that the book’s at 50% off list. I wonder if that means it’s nearing the end of the line? It’s still at 20% off in the UK, which is where my sales are anyway, so if it stays in print there I’m in good shape.

eMachine upgrade advice

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , ,

I got some mail some time back about eMachine upgrades that I never got around to posting. I’ll just summarize because that’s easier (it keeps me off the mouse).
First off, definitely look into a new hard drive. You can pick up a 7200-rpm drive of decent size (10-15 gig) for under $100 these days. I’ve had trouble getting Western Digital drives to work with older disk controllers, but no problems with Maxtors, and I get better performance and reliability from Maxtors anyway.

Next, eMachines tend to have problems with their power supplies. Get a replacement from PC Power & Cooling. It’s $45. Cheap insurance. And chances are the hard drive will perform better, since the PCP&C box will actually be supplying the wattage it claims to supply (which may or may not be true of the factory box). And remember: low-cost PCs have always had skimpy power supplies. Commodore and Atari made great low-cost computers 20 years ago, but they had horrendous power supplies. Given a properly made third-party power supply, a Commodore or Atari could run for 10-15 years or more (and often did).

Finally, get 128 megs of RAM in the system somehow. If you’ve got 32, just go buy a 128-meg stick. If you’ve got 64, get a 64-meg stick or, if you can afford it, get a 128.

Since eMachines have pretty wimpy integrated video, you might also look into a PCI video card with a Matrox, nVidia or 3Dfx chipset. Matrox gives slightly better 2D display quality, while nVidia and 3Dfx give better speed with 3D games. If you’re into gaming, definitely look into a new card.

That’s the strategy I follow with any upgrade. Get a modern disk in there, then get more memory, and replace anything else that seems underpowered. Do the disk first, then deal with memory, then possibly the video. Then, and only then, do I start looking at CPU upgrades. I’ve turned 200-MHz junkers into very useful machines again just by adding memory and a fast disk. The CPU isn’t the bottleneck in most systems.

Putting the squeeze play on Linux

Dave Farquhar Linux , ,

Want the smallest, fastest OS possible? I stumbled across several Linux assembly language projects today. There’s asmutils, which attempts to give full functionality of various common Linux tools but in smaller, faster assembly language packages, and there’s Tiny ELF, a page of assembly language utilities that are somewhat useful, but the intent appears to be more to just see how small of a program he can write.
If you want to see just how far the insanity can go, check out this, which is about the craziest thing I’ve seen in a long time. I remember that mentality. It was the mentality of an Atari 2600 programmer. As one who replaced most of the standard Amiga commands with smaller, faster versions, I can appreciate these two projects. Maybe I’m just an old-timer or a sicko, but for some reason I get a kick out of seeing that my text editor uses a scant 68K of memory (with a large file open). The scary thing is, the command window that allows you to run all these tiny programs will itself occupy a meg or more. Sigh. Progress.

If you can’t buy it, is it legal to copy?

Dave Farquhar Music , , , , , , ,

3/29/00
Here’s a big, hairy question:

From: Francisco Garcia Maceda
Subject: Napster
To: Dave Farquhar

I have also been playing around with Napster for a couple of days and as you have seen there are a couple of rough edges still in the design and implementation. However, I think this is going to grow to something bigger and probably very different from the original implementation. There is already Wrapster, which allows you to “wrap” files, images, videos, programs, etc. in MP3 headers so you can exchange this “wraps” as if they were actual MP3’s. We’ll see.

The other day I was talking to a friend that made some research into copyright law both in the US and locally (Mexico). It appears that in both countries you can copy ANY copyrighted material that is out of print or distribution as long as you do not redistribute it or profit from it. This could be very important for people that don’t want to encourage piracy but at the same time is looking for some old tunes/books/etc. that are impossible to obtain today since they have been out of print for years/decades. Maybe you or one of your readers could shed some light in this topic regarding copyright law in the US and even in the EU?

Francisco Garcia Maceda

My understanding is that copyright law makes no provisions for material that’s in print or out of print, and until the copyright holder says it’s OK to freely copy something, freely copying it is illegal.

Tracking down the copyright holder can be a real pain. I wrote Optimizing Windows, but I don’t hold the copyright on it. If O’Reilly takes the book out of print, that doesn’t mean people can freely copy it. And in the case of my contract, O’Reilly retains the copyright, so you can’t get my permission to copy it–because I can’t give it. Sometimes the rights revert back to the author, but only the publisher and author can generally answer that question.

Those Young Snakes tunes I was referring to are a case point. Aimee Mann doesn’t own the copyrights on those, so she can’t give permission to freely copy them. She’s toyed with the idea of buying back the rights, but that’s never happened. So, technically, yes, by owning those MP3s, I’m breaking the law. Whether anyone cares is another question. Since no one’s making money off this 20-year-old EP that’s been out of print for probably 18 or 19 years, probably not. As Pournelle says, you have to let your conscience be your guide. [Ironic note: Some months later, Andy Breslau, the album’s producer, mailed me. We had a long, pleasant discussion over e-mail, and $10 later, I have a legal copy of the EP. So sometimes copyright holders will find you.]

Music is a bit hairy, because there’s the copyright on the lyrics and notes themselves, but then there’s the copyright on the recording. The label owns the copyright on the recording. The songwriter owns the copyright on the lyrics and notes. If an artist breaks from a label, the recordings don’t go with them, but they have the rights to re-record the song. Prince has long been threatening to do exactly this (and for all I know he’s made good on it).

That leads us into live concert recordings. A recording that a sound technician makes by splicing into the soundboard or that a fan makes by smuggling in a recording device isn’t covered by the label’s copyright, nor are they covered by the artist’s copyright, which is why the courts have upheld the rights of bootleggers. When you go into a record store and plunk down $40 for a Tori Amos live CD, Amos never sees a dime of it. The live recordings field is an underground industry, living on the very fringe of the law. As I said before, some artists worry about this stuff a lot, while other artists go so far as to encourage it. You have to be a fan to love these recordings, so I don’t see any problem with them. Record labels do, but the law isn’t on their side in this case. They may argue that this hinders their ability to sell live CDs, but I don’t buy that. I own every live Joy Division album their record label ever put out, plus every bootleg I’ve managed to find. The fanatics will buy anything that has their favorite band’s name on it, and those are the people who plunk down obnoxious amounts of money for these bootlegs. If those MP3s hurt anyone, it’s the bootleg record companies and the record stores that deal in them.

The other place where this question comes up a lot is old software. The author doesn’t make a dime if you go buy an Atari 2600 cartridge at a flea market for a buck, so it doesn’t make any difference to the author, I would assume, if you bought a copy of it or just downloaded the ROM image and played it with an emulator–though it makes a big difference to the law. With software this old, frequently the publisher is long gone, the author may or may not still be alive, but the copyrights are still valid for a few more years and someone, somewhere, owns them and could choose to enforce them.

Really, what it comes down to is two questions: 1. Am I hurting the owner of the copyright? And 2. If I’m not hurting the owner, morally I can do this, but legally I may not be able to, so am I willing to take that risk?

I hope that answers your question. I’m sure others will pipe in as well.

Dave

More thoughts on MP3. Record sales are down. The industry blames MP3. But as labels consolidate, they axe artists by the hundreds or thousands. The end result is fewer people recording music, and, probably, fewer sales. Plus, many artists don’t hit it big right away. It took U2 seven years and five albums. Today, they’re Ireland’s biggest industry. They wouldn’t have survived if they had come along in 1999 rather than 1979–Boy was a great album, a really great album, but probably wouldn’t have been a great commercial success in any era.

I don’t think MP3 hurts teenybopper bands like The Backstreet Boys and ‘NSync. Sure, those songs get pirated by the boatload, but they also sell by the boatload, and much of the money surrounding bands like that is in merchandising–lunch boxes, bedsheets, posters, videos… The records are an afterthought. (And it shows.) Those bands will disappear within a couple of years, just like the New Kids on the Block did in the late ’80s/early ’90s and the Bay City Rollers in the mid-1970s.

I think who the MP3s really hurt are the one-hit wonders. You know, bands like Deep Blue Something, who record an album with exactly one catchy song (“Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” in that band’s case) that goes on to become a mega-hit, but with no obvious followup the band drops off the face of the earth.

I don’t see how MP3s can hurt established bands any more than radio taping does. And record companies fall all over themselves to get their acts played on the radio.