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Samir

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Posts posted by Samir

  2. Posted

    I just got an older atari flashback that has this installed and went looking for a pdf of the printed manual because I thought it was just another game I never could buy back in the 2600 heydays--HOLY COW THIS IS A FUN GAME THAT BRINGS IT ALL BACK 100%!!

     

    Seriously, this game is the type of fun that made the 2600 a joy to own back in its heyday.  I could only imagine what type of endless fun we would have had if this game existed back then.  So glad it exists!

     

    Anyways, I was just wondering what all the different 'games' were because I was looking for a 1 player mode with just a single square as that cheating computer always knows where the next square will be.  (Yes, the computer always cheats--it's always been that way in every computer game ever made--I swear! :D That's why the player will lose, lol).

     

    Anyways, thank you for the fun. :) I hope you got paid licensing fees for your work because it is very, very good work. :)

  5. Posted

    It has been several years since I've visited this thread. I used to host the 3 http mirrors of the original ftp archive which I manually updated when I had time. I'm actually searching my servers right now for these as I still have the computers but moved hence breaking the links. If I find them, I will see if I have a way of putting them back online.

    • Like 1

  6. Posted

    Hi everyone, I haven't looked at the thread in several months now as I actually got back to working on my web site. And it seems my links have stopped working long before I came back here. :( And with that, I have some bad news--I can no longer host the copies I have as I need the disk space.

     

    I had no idea I'd generate this much data this year, so something has to give. I still have a copy on one of my archive drives, so I still have some of the issues if something happens to the project, but I hope that the project continues as it brings back a bygone era of computing that was very exciting. I only saw a glimpse of it when I went to a c64 user group meeting back in the 80s with my dad, but it had an excitement that I've never found anywhere else.

     

    I'll still try to check in on this thread to see the progress, and it's interesting to see that the new owners of Byte want this project done too. :)

  7. Posted

    Knology came by and fixed my modem issue. My IP addresses stayed the same and shouldn't change anymore. :)

     

    These are the correct addresses for my mirrors (same as before):

    http://24.96.150.90/events/byte/index.html

    http://24.96.150.75/events/byte/index.html

    http://76.73.219.7/events/byte/index.html

     

    Sorry for any hiccups.

    Well, I spoke too soon. Hopefully whatever changes they're working on are done. All my addresses changed. :(

     

    New urls:

    http://69.73.38.248/events/byte/index.html

    http://24.214.130.70/events/byte/index.html

    http://69.73.59.122/events/byte/index.html

     

    Sorry again for any hiccups.

  9. Posted

    These are the correct addresses for my mirrors right now:

    http://24.96.150.90/events/byte/index.html

     

    Oh, you have dynamic ip addresses? I'd rather not have to keep editing each time they change, so may I suggest perhaps setting up some dyndns names for your machines, as we can use them ?

    They are dynamic, but they very rarely change (only every few years when the ISP is changing something on their back-end). That one cable modem hasn't properly synced in days now, so I'm going to have to have a technician come out and look at it, but the others are working perfectly and their addresses are the same as they have been for years.

  10. Posted

    The IP address changed on one of my cable modems.

     

    This:

    http://24.96.150.90/events/byte/index.html

     

    is now this:

    http://24.214.130.70/events/byte/index.html

    Looks like my ISP is doing some work on their end. I've been having problems with one of the cable modems keeping sync for the last two weeks, and there's more IP address changes.

     

    These are the correct addresses for my mirrors right now:

    http://24.96.150.90/events/byte/index.html

    http://24.96.150.75/events/byte/index.html

    http://76.73.219.7/events/byte/index.html

     

    I'll post updates here as I see the addresses change.

  11. Posted

    I'd love to see one for a 486dx-33. :o

     

    crikey! If you take that to recycling you can free up some space for a nice Atari computer ;-)

    But then three mirrors would be gone. ;) Besides, the two Atari 2600s have their own room along with all the other vintage computer stuff. :)

  12. Posted

    To the person who offered UPS, thanks, but in the end, ThumpNugget has a backlog of magazines so there is no need to get them there fast. Australia Post will get them there fast enough.
    I wasn't concerned about speed, but replacement if the shipment got damaged. UPS is very good on payment for damaged shipments as well as a refund of the shipping costs if it's not on time, even on their slowest (cheapest) shipment methods.

  13. Posted

    Thank you for the explanation. :) I have a very old web server that no one would believe is acting as the server and turning off directory listings turns off the automatic indexes (which I need for privacy for the other things served by this server). Oh well, no biggie.

     

    you cant control directory listings on a per directory basis? Sounds like you need an upgrade.

    I'd love to see one for a 486dx-33. :o

  14. Posted

    The IP address changed on one of my cable modems.

     

    Have updated the mirror redirector.

    Thank you!

     

    One question about the mirror redirector. Does it simply redirect to the actual files or to the index files? I have to manually build the index files and that keeps me from rapidly add new releases even though the files are there. If your redirector points directly to the files, then that solves my problem of updating the index files.

     

    it redirects to the root of your mirror. what index files are you having to update? if you mean the directory listing, then just let your webserver generate it perhaps.

    Thank you for the explanation. :) I have a very old web server that no one would believe is acting as the server and turning off directory listings turns off the automatic indexes (which I need for privacy for the other things served by this server). Oh well, no biggie.

  15. Posted

    The IP address changed on one of my cable modems.

     

    Have updated the mirror redirector.

    Thank you!

     

    One question about the mirror redirector. Does it simply redirect to the actual files or to the index files? I have to manually build the index files and that keeps me from rapidly add new releases even though the files are there. If your redirector points directly to the files, then that solves my problem of updating the index files.

  18. Posted

    I'm sorry but MTBF is irrelevant to this discussion and doesn't really mean anything about the quality of a product.
    I have to disagree. Any drive manufactured today can be easily ranked in quality by it's MTBF. Enterprise class drives have a 1.2m MTBF. Consumer drives do not. It's not an indicator of the actual quality of a particular drive, but it does show what class or product it is. And the price tells you something as well.

     

    Case in point is the Western Digital RE3 drives I bought. Checking on pricescan shows that a Western Digital Caviar Green 1tb goes for $55. And on the same screen, the RE3 is $130. I don't believe the quality of the Caviar Green is the same as the RE3.

     

    Older drives might me a bit more reliable simply because they have less platters inside and less disk heads and the technology inside allowed for the disk heads to stay further away from the surface, preventing "stickiness" or surface scratches due to accidental shocks.

    Newer drives have the disk heads much closer to the surface and the data density is bigger (there's more content per square inch of a platter) but keep in mind the quality of construction (precision and accuracy) is much better than in the old days and while the density of the data causes reading errors all the time, the processors on the disk PCB are much more powerful and can recover and correct errors without user noticing.

    I completely agree with you. The older drives did have a lot less heat, less 'speed' in moving parts, and much less density to deal with. While it may explain increased reliability, that doesn't excuse modern day products for a lack of reliability if they are supposedly built with the same mindset.

     

    It's amazing to see a 1gb and 1tb drive side-by-side in the same form factor. Even though it's been 15 years of technological evolution, 1000x as much data in the same space is still quite a feat.

    In my opinion, the best backup solution today would be to get 2 or more disk drives from different series (not made in sequence on the same day). I would also choose a disk drive that has less rotation speed (because there's less heat fluctuations and vibration). I would also use hard drives with "advanced format", which have 4 KB sectors, therefore internally these drives have much more error correction data so in long term they can self correct data they read for longer time:

     

    FESmall.png

     

    These drives with 4 KB sectors have bigger data density while having much more error correction information per volume of data and you can buy disks with just one platter and 2 read/write heads when for the same capacity you'd buy disk drives with 2-3 platters (the spec sheets on the mfg sites tell how many disk heads/platters each disk has).

     

    Of course, I would also use PAR2 or some additional way to add error correction (rar archives with error recovery volumes for example).

     

    See this very informative about these new drives: http://www.anandtech.com/show/2888

     

    After backing up data, I would store one or more disks in a separate location, just in case the house burns up or there's some lightning strike/flood.

    I've read about the 4k sectored drives. There's some incompatability issues currently, but I think that will go away just like the 4gb memory limit as things evolve. My long term plan is to migrate to zfs on two manually mirrored freenas's connected via a vpn. This should decrease the likelihood of data corruption by an order of magnitude. Each freenas shouldn't have corruption issues and each unit can compare with the other to confirm that. Worse case scenario--3 freenas with zfs.

  19. Posted

    I really have to dispute this. Inexpensive consumer drives are built to standards today the industry couldn't dream of delivering in earlier eras. What was once reserved for the very expensive high end units is now just typical of the stuff on the shelf at Best Buy. I've been involved in data recovery as one of my jobs for nearly twenty years. The rate of drives just up and dying for no apparent reason is almost non-existent compared to what once passed for normal.

     

    The thing to keep in mind about that five year old 80 GB drive is that by that time it was a niche market item largely aimed at the corporate desktop market. For these machines the local storage needs are very low as most data is kept on the server(s). This market would be satisfied with 40 GB drives still but the drive makes will only do so much to accommodate this market. (Personally, the only spinning platter drive smaller than 100 GB I still use regularly is an old Apricorn 1.8" USB model that is very handy but quite obsolete.) Drive reliability is also a lesser concern for this market as the effort of replacing a failed drive with a new unit containing the standard image is trivial. So the likes of Del and HP keep those drives around to make the idiot CFOs think they're getting a bargain but nobody else should be bothered.

    I have to dispute what you're saying. Find the MTBF on an older drive and a consumer one made today. The consumer drive MTBF isn't the same. The aforementioned Seagate drives have a 1,000,000 hour MTBF. Most consumer drives have a 400,000 hour MTBF with an 'office' duty cycle--not the 24x7 duty cycle testing of the past.

     

    When I bought the 80GB drive is was one of the largest capacity USB external drives available, and it was so new that was only available in USB 1.0. This was a top-of-the-line product, on par with other higher-end products of the time.

     

    I don't trust any drive from this decade for more than a year or two. I have two Western Digital 1gb drives that were manufactured in 1996 that were recycled after seeing duty in harsh environments, and they still work fine. And I have 4 failed drives from this decade--more than the whole history of my computing with PCs back to 1988. (I've only had one Maxtor lxt213s and two Quantum 4gb Atlas drives fail.)

     

    A $60 drive is built better than one that cost $1000? I think things have gotten better, but not enough to warrant a 10x reduction in cost without compromising quality. And this cost reduction doesn't even account for inflation. There's just no way.

    • Like 1

  21. Posted

    This is totally off topic, but there are tools to deal with this. Rsync reads back the copy it makes and calculates a checksum to ensure the copy was made correctly. If you're worried about data going bad on disk, you can include redundancy in the form of PAR2 files. If you're not beholden to Microsoft, you can even use filesystems that automate all this data integrity stuff for you, e.g. zfs or btrfs.

     

    Sorry about that, please continue with your regularly scheduled Byte releases. :cool:

    Thank you for this post! I had no idea zfs existed. That's what I need. And it looks like FreeNas has an implementation of it. Man that would save a lot of hassle!

  23. Posted

    I just buy the USB drives in pairs - AND ONLY IN PAIRS. Last year, $70 each for 1TB USB externals, each a copy of the other. This year, $60 each for 2TB USB externals, each a copy of the other. Not likely to lose data this way. If I get nervous, then I'll have to buy them in triplicate, but so far, so good, and I think the liklihood both will fail is next to nil. One lives in the original box, and I rotate them once in a while. As soon as one fails, I will buy a new pair and hopefully the surviving drive will live long enough to pull the data off it. For $1100 worth of 2TB drives, I don't think I'd ever worry, though.
    I used to do that until I found files miscomparing between drives. I've got two full 640gb drives that I compare every year. And every year I find a file or two that miscompare. Luckily, I pull this from a third backup to figure out which file was correct and which was wrong. These are Seagate/Maxtor SATA drives formatted NTFS. And the crazy thing is I've seen the same thing on a pair of 160gb drives that were IDE and formatted FAT32. I think as areal densities have increased, the error rate has stayed the same, so the likelyhood of having an error has increased even though the error rate spec has stayed the same.

     

    I use three Western Digital RE3 drives manually mirrored and am transferring all of my usb drive pairs to them. Data migration sucks.

  24. Posted

    Another, much much older lady I know actually refuses to let the internet into her house because satan might come out of the coax-cable. With all the evil-ness surrounding pr0n and finances and trading and child coercion and online crime and corporate greed and id theft and stuff - she feels justified. She is serious, because she has kids and they have to go to the library. Which is a way aways. It's not like they can't afford it or anything, being in an affluent neighborhood. So her hubby discussed getting wireless internet, and he argued the point that everything happens above ground. No buried cables running past the gates of hell deep in the bowels of the earth. But, noooooo, she complained that it could act like a lightning rod and attract the corrupt spirits that oozed up through the ground which had escaped from hell. She said it could be worse, because as the information floats in the air it could seep into your brain and get you that way.

     

    So one time I asked her about the electricity, she said that any evil coming out those wires in the ground would be fried crisply and thoroughly. And she said something similar for the natural gas lines, that it would be suffocated and "stinked away" by the smell!

     

    You can probably guess this person has a thorough water filtration system set up too.

     

    I tell you man.. there's some serious weirdos out there!

    Wow. She takes the cake. I'd love to see her go to a shrink and get a professional assessment.
    Especially since 2TB external USB drives can be had for $60 sometimes, on sale. Soon the problem will be trying to figure out which one in the pile has you mag collection.
    Or if the drive has failed. Drives are built no-where near as well as they once were. I have an 80gb that's not even 5yrs old that was filled and put away start clicking when I went to retrieve the data. I have a SCSI raid full of 9gb 2nd generation Seagate Cheetah drives that I booted up after almost a decade and they worked perfectly. You get what you pay for--the Cheetah drives were $1100 each back in the 90s.

    Hello,

     

    I've found this thread on ascii.textfiles.com (Jason Scott's blog: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2672) and I have to say it made my week. I love reading these old magazines and see how technology evolved - here in Romania where I live we only got some rare imports of Byte, usually also very expensive, and the other IT magazines focused more on general IT news, product reviews and so on.

     

    I'd like to give back a little so I've mirrored the files on a dedicated server:

     

    ftp:// helpedia.com/pub/archive/temp/Byte/

    Please copy the link, remove the space and paste it in a new browser window/tab or in your favourite FTP client/download manager. It's configured to accept 2 downloads at the same time from the same IP and up to 20 simultaneous connections, so at least 10 people at a time should be able to download files easily and fast - server is on a 100 mbps unmetered connection in Holland.

     

    Feel free to publish the link in the first post but please don't make it clickable, I don't want it indexed by search engines.

     

    I've also uploaded the files posted so far on Rapidshare, using my own premium account, so there is not wait time and you'll get the maximum speed possible (if you're in Europe at least).

    The RS links for each pdf are in the only text file in the FTP folder. I'd rather not post them here and look like I'm spamming links. If a mod/admin or OP says it's OK I can also post them.

     

    OP, if you wish I can create an account on the FTP server so you can upload the PDF files directly to it and take the strain off your computers.

    I'm glad you've joined us. :) Just in time! My poor little server is getting hammered like never before. It actually got stuck mid-reboot earlier this morning, so all my mirrors were down for a good 8hrs. :(

  25. Posted

    Or that if I ever get abducted by extra-terrestrials I might only have time to grab my usb drive before we leave. And if so, then I'd have some good reading material for the flight to their homeworld. And to boot, I'd have some materials with which to barter.

    LOL!! "Can you say floppy?" "Flop-eee"
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