The collected works of un_

When I was young I remember reading about the amazing things people could do with NeXT and SGI machines, also of course it helped that they were very cool looking machines. At Aston university (in Birmingham, UK) we CS students mainly used Sun workstations, in our first year we had old SparcStations with SunOS, but later we were plagued by Sparc classics and incredibly awful installations of an early Solaris. I remember looking in on a grad student who had a really cool purple machine, running an X desktop that didn't have horrible performance. It was an Indigo, but mere undergrads weren't allowed to touch it. The same university had a single lonely NeXT Cube which was sat in a lab with a disused Transputer machine, no one used it except me, it had Framemaker which I used to make documentation for my projects.

Fastforward a few years, I moved to the US after the company I worked for closed their London office. They had done a lot of PDM stuff and had a big selection of interesting computers, including Indigos, Indigo 2s, Indys, even a couple of Octanes. Our project was focused on Windows servers so we never used them. After they sold the PDM department (to Metaphase I think) they had all of these unused machines. I occasionally used one or two to play with, but all our business was on PCs, and we had no use for them. Eventually they cleared the whole lot out to a recycler, I'm still kicking myself, should have picked up a couple of machines! In my defence I had a one bedroom apt at the time.

Anyway after I'd got back into NeXTs again I followed a link here, and was inspired to actually buy an O2. I now have two O2's (a R10k and a R5k), a 540, and an Octane "on the way". I mostly use the R10k O2 to mess about with.

I'm a big Patlabor fan myself, 1&2 are great.

Virtually every computer in Goldeneye was an IBM running OS/2, except the MovieOS screens that the "hacker" used. We thought it was hilarious at the time being university students. Goldeneye has all kinds of horribly obvious product placement, including the BMW roadster and the famous parker pen grenade.

I always wondered whether IBM had considered that having the evil agent be such a prominent Warp user might actually be counterproductive to their image, especially since the computer screens seemed to always be showing the startup screen like they were crashing all the time.

.. and since you can't do anything with it to get your stuff back it might as well have blue screened

The Escom PC I owned at the time Goldeneye came out actually came with OS/2. Since they omitted to include a graphics card that OS/2 supported in more than VGA mode, it was rapidly converted to Windows 95.

I wonder why they sent you that one? Either it was "he'll think this is cool" or they're running out of MIPS h/w and that was what they had to hand.

maaarcooose: bravo! (applause)

iPhones also come with Google Maps and YouTube apps built in, that's what they're referring to. Just no Google voice unfortunately .

Yes, AT&T cheap out on the iphone users, our Skype can't use 3g and neither can the slingbox player. This is presumably to prevent iphone users from bringing their network to the ground (instead of just to it's knees like we usually do )

Same reason tethering isn't allowed etc. Originally, the YouTube app wouldn't play movies over Edge either, but they changed that in 2.0.

Well if you already have an iPhone, you could just ring people.

Ha-de-ha, Google voice is a product that lets you have one phone # and route it to whichever phone you're next to, along with providing a central voicemail system, voice-to-text, etc..

I've always been pretty happy with the old Microsoft Natural Keyboards and Natural Keyboard Pros. The "ergonomic" shape is comfortable and the key action is smooth. I've never had a problem with joint pain from typing since I've been using them.

The newer MS natural keyboards are not so good though, the keyboard feel is "wrong".

The very worst keyboard I've used is a beige job that came with a server the company bought. I'm certain the computer shop was throwing them into every box to try to get rid of them. Some of the keys would actually jam half way down and require a forceful beating to register, it was physically painful to type on.

Didn't SGI have that page before Rackable bought them? I tend to skim over the blurb and look at the price so I don't know if the remarketed is green! claim was there before.

Just a crazy thought, but have you considered getting the same model mp3 player off ebay and putting the drive in that? You might be able to pick up one with a dead drive for example.

Is this the kind of drive that fits in a cf port or what? I've used a camera with a CF port as a card reader in the past.

Dammit archaic posted while I was looking for my card reader

Anyway since I took it and his pictures aren't showing for me yet, here's the shot I took. The colours are (L-R) Purple, black, brown, purple.

I wonder if whoever owned yours previously wanted to run the machine with the side panel off for a while, normally the machine will shut down immediately if you open it.

{edit - make image slightly less ridiculously huge]

It's been ages since I looked, is there an option for that in the graphical setup screen perhaps?

I do have an Origin 200 and I might just try this out

I think I know what happened to this machine. The owner had just finished typing a long ass reply into some web forum when they inadvertently brushed the stupid page back/forward buttons that whoever designed the Thinkpad keyboard added on either side of the up arrow key. These have no purpose except to send you into a fit of apoplexy each time you happen to accidentally hit one and end up on another page knowing that internet explorer just zapped your input.

If my work thinkpad belonged to me I would have removed those two keys with pliers and sent them to the lenovo with a rude letter.

When I was shopping for a car recently I actually seriously considered a second-hand police crown vic. You can get them with the bull bars still attached which I figured would come in handy if I ever got bored in a traffic jam. The sales guy told me that they're designed to be able to drive over a high curb at 50mph without damage.

Then I drove one - let's just say it was better in my imagination.

Given that Sony have done their damnedest to crush the home brew games scene on PSP you might be waiting for a while to get an SDK! Apparently they haven't been having a good time persuading people to buy the PSP Go either.

R-ten-K wrote: I was a tad confused because there are already some homebrew kits for the PSP, I had no clue that it was impossible to load stuff onto them.

http://www.develop-online.net/news/3277 ... P-dev-kits

I hope the days of certain companies thinking that developing for their platforms should be treated as a privilege are numbered.

There's been a homebrew kit for the PSP since it originally came out, at first you had to load the games by exploiting bugs in the v1.5 OS to trick it into running the unsigned applications. Sony then closed those bugs and tried to prevent the homebrew apps from running, but various groups have released custom OS ROMS for it that allow playing them. Sony's motive for closing this down is that the same hacks allow you to play illegally obtained software. That's why I have my doubts that they would ever release a truly open SDK, especially not for the PSP Go, which of course is download-only. Note that the article says they will "consider" releasing one "further down the line", which could just as easily mean "never".

Apple technically don't allow any old software on the iphone either, you have to publish via the app store or via a company share (for company internal apps). They do make an effort to block unlocks but it's fairly half-hearted compared to Sony who had some PSP OS updates solely for the purpose of blocking holes that allowed unlocks, and who made games require the latest version of the OS in order to force people to install the updates.

I have a PSP, which is unlocked so I can play my PS1 games - rather than having to wait for them to turn up on the Sony store to buy them again.

I think in the latter case people were put off by the "temperamental" note on the mla, I know I was!

nekonoko wrote: Yep - that's my thinking as well. I'd post some screenshots but certain of our forum regulars would undoubtably come down on me for posting irrelevant crap so I'll refrain.

I'm not sure how any post could be irrelevant ON YOUR OWN FORUM