24 new of 193 responses total.
Thanks...I have therefore ordered VGA A/B switch and cables too - I can't wait to PLUG & PLAY.
When I checked a while back, the 734-995 branch office had DSL available.
They said it had to be within 12 (cable) miles of a station. I thought that that could hardly be a limit, but the point seems to be that it isn't the exchange that matters alone, but the nature of the lines from the station (distance, and perhaps other factors). They need to add a repeater, or some such. My order for the G4 Cube has gone into the back-ordered, perhaps within 30 days, loop. This would seem to be part of whatever is the mysterious manipulations going on about the Cubes, which no one seems willing to be up-front about.
Re #172: There are actually a number of restrictions on who can get DSL. The length limit is one of them. It's possible for all the DSL "slots" at an exchange to fill up -- they assume that not *everyone* will want DSL, and provision accordingly. If there are any amplifiers or loading coils on your line, DSL won't work. Also, if you live in a neighborhood that's fed by fiber that's then converted to copper before going to your home, you're out of luck -- it has to be copper all the way to the CO.
Now this - received from the big-time catalog vendor from whom I had ordered the G4 Cube: "Regrettably, the product ordered, POWER MAC G4 CUBE 450MHZ/64MB RAM/20GB HD/DVD/56K, is no longer available through our company. Despite our efforts, we were unable to obtain adequate supplies of this product to fulfill our recent demand. Please be advised that you were not charged for this product." I've asked them what is "going on".
Even later news - from yesterday. Apple has discontinued Cube. http://www.insanely-great.com/news/01/contentfeed.html?2001/07/06/13/451350 85
Apple Puts Power Mac G4 Cube on Ice
CUPERTINO, California July 3, 2001 Apple today announced that it
will suspend production of the Power Mac* G4 Cube indefinitely. The
company said there is a small chance it will reintroduce an upgraded
model of the unique computer in the future, but that there are no
plans to do so at this time.
RCube owners love their Cubes, but most customers decided to buy our
powerful Power Mac G4 minitowers instead,S said Philip Schiller,
AppleUs vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing.
The Power Mac G4 Cube, at less than one fourth the size of most PCs,
represented an entirely new class of computer delivering high
performance in an eight-inch cube suspended in a stunning crystal-
clear enclosure.
From Apple Press Release 2001.07.03
There is a Cube users mailinglist - which I've joined. They don't seem to be talking about the end of the Cube - probably because they already have theirs. Mostly they talk about how to interface it with their iAirport, etc.
I thought there were some serious problems with the cube design. One of the most glaring was that the cables -- even the ones that you're supposed to be able to hot-plug, like USB -- were on the bottom where you couldn't get at them without turning off the machine and turning it over. This also meant that if you used a non-Apple monitor with an adapter, there was no room for the adapter. The touch-sensitive power switch was also a poorly-thought-out gimmick. From what I've heard it was extremely easy to turn off the machine by accident because the lightest brush would trigger the switch. To me te Cube seemed like a marketing gimmick, about as "revolutionary" as making a phone shaped like a Corvette and then selling it to car nuts.
In part, yes. But it is also an efficient shape - it has the least area for the volume of a parallelpiped. I want one because I can put it on my computer table and use in parallel with an old desktop, which I could not do with another desktop. The cube has an ordinary VGA monitor connector too. I haven't seen anything (yes) that says you have to turn off the machine to turn it over. It doesn't have a fan and uses natural convection for heat removal, so you would not want to leave it on its side too long. The power switch does appear to be a possible problem - although no one on the Cube mailinglist is grousing about it. The funny thing is, despite the hot-pluggability of USB, I never hot plug USB devices. I'd rather have a hub and just have them all connected. I think this is an extremely minor convenience of USB. USB has other more serious problems - like, power requirements of devices.
Re #179: You should *never* physically move any computer with a hard disk while it's running, much less turn it over. It's very hard on the hard disk bearings, due to the gyroscope effect of the spinning platters. It can also cause a head crash. And yeah, I've heard that USB power requirements are a problem. Specifically, some USB ADSL modems draw so much power that you literally cannot daisychain anything else with them.
Good point on moving HDs, but think of all the laptops that get moved around when they are on. I never had a problem with one due to that (though I admit that I didn't try to juggle or twirl it).
Is that bearing stuff still true today? I can see it with the large diameter, massive disks of years / decades ago but it's much less of an issue with the 3.5" low mass drives of today. I would not be too concerned of it, especially if you do it gently and don't slam it around. I've done it countless times without incident.
Maybe it's not true today, but why take chances? Laptop drives park the heads between accesses to help prevent head crashes. (On my Toshiba you can hear it; there's a very audible "clunk" when the drive hasn't been accessed for about two seconds, as the heads park and lock into place. I still managed to cause a head crash by dropping it with the drive running, one day, though.)
Well, we're not talking about CLUMSY people..... 8^}
I discovered that my old PowerMac 7200, with which this thread started, has been reading this item in Grex, got very upset about the thought of being put into retirement, if not replaced, and died. It crashed on the weekend. Many hours later, I have ascertained it is an intermittant, possible heat related, hardware problem, not the usual HD problems. To learn all this, I went all the way to reinitialize the HD, and reload OS 8.6. It still freezes, sometimes on bootup, sometimes on just installing software, sometimes for no apparent reason. Bummer. I didn't "win" the e-bay auction for a Cube, and now need more power and resources than the Cube alone offers, so I checked out prices of a 466 MHz G4 Tower on the web (ca. $1579-1599 including a "free" 128 M additional RAM). I decided UM Comp Sales was as good as any, so went there yesterday. I am first told that Apple has disontinued the 466 MHz G4, and that the "low end" is the 533 MHz G4, which is selling for ca. $2000. Or was: Apple yesterday reduced the price of the 533 MHz G4 to $1148. What a rollercoaster! So, that will be my new computer. Anyone interested in a flaky PowerMac 7200? I expect I will only remove the ATI and USB PCI boards, and maybe the pityful 1.2 G HD, and scrap the rest. Still, it was a good machine, and I'm only sorry I wasn't kinder in giving it the news, and perhaps offering better retirement benefits.
That's too bad, Rane. I might be able to use the memory out of it. We have a 7600/132 that I just added a 4-port USB card too. (For downloading images from a digital camera.) The digital editing software wants more memory than I have (48M) unless I turn on virtual memory.
You'd have to check on the memory parameters - the 7200 has a non-Apple motherboard. I'll check into that when the time comes, but I'm keeping it until I start setting up the new machine, as once in a while I can make use of the peripherals, such as the SCSI ZIP drive. The roller-coaster story continues. After ordering the 533 G4 I discovered that a built in 56K modem was an option, which I had overlooked. This happened because, while it is included in the *public* model, it is not in the *educational* model. That price above is also the *educational* price for students and faculty, for which I qualify. Anyway, since it was only two days after ordering it, I telephoned Apple to see if I could change the order to include the 56K modem. The Apple salesperson had my order up on his screen, but insisted the 533 G4 had been *discontinued* and I had to order the 733 MHz model anyway, if I wanted to add anything to the order. We went around on this for some time, with him insisting the 533 MHz G4 was no longer offered on the Apple Stores web page, and my telling him I had just looked at it and it was there. Eventually I asked him if he was looking at the *Education* Apple Stores web page. He did not know this existed, found it, and sure enough the 533 G4 is still available under the education program! Whew! So I was able to upgrade the order....... I wonder what it will be next.
What was next was that the 533 G4 was delivered and put into a locked storage room (probably by my ticked off PowerMac 7200) and neither I nor any office staff were told. I found it two weeks later, but now all is well. It is a very nice machine. [Still missing, however, is the "free" printer that was ostensibly sent separately - FEDEX says it arrived, but no clue where it is.] Installing software required another use for an obsolete PC. One application is on 3 3.5 inch diskettes, for which the G4 has no drive. A new external USB floppy drive solved that, but one of the disks was a 700 KB disk, which new floppy drives can't read. To the rescue came an obsolete PowerBook 145, with which I could copy that 700 KB disk to a 1.4 MB disk. I better keep my Zenith 150, with its 5.4" drives, around longer......
I'll give you a dollar for it, if you do not stipulate that it cannot be used for target practice (I am so rusty, I hope I can still hit the broad side of an 8088 at 100 meters).
Ah, the best use for a Tranzeo. .22 short cricket with irons at 100m. You can do that all day before it is too disintegrated. And it really feels good to shoot those damn things. I'm sure Tranzeo means nothing to y'all but shooting them is a fine memory for me...
Resp:190 The WiMax base-stations? That's the only Tranzeo I've ever heard of.
At some point, I want to gut a Sun v880 and turn it into a miniature kegerator (my beer runs 8 engines and 12 GBytes of RAM). IIRC, the old E3500 is almost big enough to support a full size 20L keg, if all your cooling gear is external. I imagine a 30 cal round or two through a processor book from a 390 would be immensely satisfying. A full magazine through the channel processor, even moreso.
Resp:191 I'm going back farther to their 802.11 CPE. Ugh.
You have several choices: