Comments for oswald.us

Comment on ARR! Ahoy thar Congress! by Jasonzo6

Jasonzo6 — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 16:37:15 +0000

“But I don’t wanna be a pirate!” — Jerry

Comment on ARR! Ahoy thar Congress! by cpkdak

cpkdak — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 16:03:37 +0000

Gives a whole new meaning to getting booty in the oval office.

Comment on Schneier’s Comments on Airline Security by Jasonzo6

Jasonzo6 — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 17:31:14 +0000

The best comment I heard so far about the “liquids being removed” is that the airlines are throwing everything in the dumbster AFTER it is picked through by their staff. So what do they think will happen if someone actually tossed their bomb making materials or an actual bomb into one of those trashcans?

Just think what we could prevent if we took the money that has been spent on the war in Iraq and tossed that money to our intelligence agencies. Oops! How did that political comment get in here? hehe

Comment on Geek Activism – Required Reading by Jasonzo6

Jasonzo6 — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 16:05:33 +0000

The most important one on that list… “vote”.

Comment on Do you have a special place in your heart for the smell of styrofoam and ozone? by joe

joe — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 01:16:41 +0000

Scary to think how we’ll look back in 10 years at our kick-ass gaming machines and laugh at how pathetic they are… Well, hopefully we will anyway. [grin]

Comment on Hint Hint… by Jasonzo6

Jasonzo6 — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 16:44:47 +0000

That makes TWO friends now…

Oh, and don’t lie to me and tell me you don’t wear it to bed. We know the truth! hehe

Comment on Hint Hint… by joe

joe — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 18:34:06 +0000

Um… got one. A cheapie though. Bought it for Jack’s 6th BD party where we did a mock LOTR qwest for him. Complete with Shelob’s Web and a working, lava-spewing Orodruin.

Comment on Do you have a special place in your heart for the smell of styrofoam and ozone? by Jasonzo6

Jasonzo6 — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 17:46:08 +0000

Oh yeah! I remember getting my Texas Instruments TI-99/4A on Christmas of 1982! I was eleven and thought it was the greatest thing I had ever seen in my life, especially next to the Monogram models and D&D monster books I had received. I learned TI BASIC programming on that puppy at an early age. Wow, that came in handy… kinda’ like gym classes in middle school. haha

Okay, so you want the specs on my TI? Read them and weep!

- The TI-99/4A’s CPU, motherboard, and cartridge slot were built into a single unit with the keyboard. The power supply regulator board (linear in early systems, switching in later systems) was housed below and in front of the cartridge slot under the sloped area to the right of the keyboard.

- Available peripherals included a 5¼” floppy disk drive, an “RS-232″ card comprising two serial ports and one parallel port, a “P-Code” card for PASCAL support, a thermal printer, an acoustic coupler, and a 32KB memory expansion card.

- In the early1980s, TI was known as a pioneer in speech synthesis, and a plug-in speech module was also available for the TI-99/4 and 4A (and was very popular). [This really helped fulfill that "Wargames" image, especially when playing the game "Parsec"! - haha]

- The TI-99/4A had a 16-bit TMS9900 CPU running at 3.3 MHz. The TMS9900 was based on TI’s range of TM990 mini computers and has been recognised as being one of the earliest RISC chips. Another unique feature is that it doesn’t use stack, but instead allows the programmer to maintain groups of registers in main memory. These were called Workspaces. A workspace could be changed very fast compared to other chips of that era, making the TI-99 very fast at assembly language level. To speed up the workspace switching, a portion of RAM called the “scratchpad” was included which was much faster than normal memory, but because of the memory costs of the time, only 256 bytes was added.

WOW! WHAT A MACHINE! hehe 3.3 MHz… funny to look back and see the specs on these things that we grew up with.

Comment on Geek Clothing… by Jasonzo6

Jasonzo6 — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 17:26:22 +0000

If you were younger and wearing one of these, you would still be single. haha

Comment on Hint Hint… by Jasonzo6

Jasonzo6 — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 17:25:26 +0000

They forgot something… this is for the REAL nerds. hehe

http://mystic-caravan.com/elvish/onering.htm

Of course, I actually have a friend who wears one of these… sigh, that means I’m a nerd-by-association.