Great list....

2. Input for a keyboard & pointer.

Hmmmm. So is the display/control module also a Firewire hub??

When the alarm is triggered, it turns the empeg on and plays "Help! I'm being stolen" repetitively at ear-drum splitting levels, or alternatively plays 'I should be so lucky' by Kylie Minogue, at said levels, which should be enough to drive the would-be thief insane.

I love it. But does it only play "I'm being stolen" until it is pulled from the sled?


Unfortunately, yes. But that is tempered by the fact that everytime the thief attempts to get it out of the sled he gets a very nasty electrical shock
In fact with all these pain technologies, the empeg is cypto-locked into the sled just to make it's removal more painful.

The iButton seems like the trick. What's the range on the readers, though (and the power consumption)? Would having an iButton on your key ring (in the ignition) be close enough to activate through a sensor in the display module?


The power consumption is very low. But the range is basically zero - iButton works on the Dallas 1-wire specs (1 wire + ground, multiple device serial), and requires the button to be 'touched' to a reader clip. Actually, you could program the empeg so that the crypto button was only needed after constant 12V had failed, similar to how most OEM stereo code-locks work nowadays, (only much stronger than a 4 digit pin obviously).

Built-in DAB Radio
Built-in amplifier
I would still like it to be din, but permanently wired into the car, and I would prefer if the media was portable, and that could be plugged into a home docking station which could be wired into an amplifier (for playback) and PC.

I would still like it to be din, but permanently wired into the car, and I would prefer if the media was portable, and that could be plugged into a home docking station which could be wired into an amplifier (for playback) and PC.

How exactly is this any different than what we're already using?

My dream additions would be a firewire port, a color (or colour if you prefer) display, and integrated 802.11b networking capability so I could update the empeg while it was in the car. A VGA or TV out port would also be nice so you could hook up an aux LCD display in the car.

<spelling police mode>
LCD display

You are aware that you just wrote "liquid crytsal display display", right?
</spelling police mode>

Other than that: My dream empeg would be almost like the current one, except for the following things:

• 802.11 support (well, should be the upcoming 54Mbit variant I suppose) would be nice, but this is no must for me.
• 100Mbit ethernet
• USB2.0 and USB master for network cards, USB2serial adapters and the like
• IEE1394 would be nice
• DMA mode for discs
• more RAM
• a CPU a little bit faster
• color display (which smoked lense), though only for one reason: to allow the display to have a perfect match with any possible dash lighting, as configured by the user.
• speedometer sense input, for speed based volume adjustments
• digital output
• possibility to record tuner or AUX input while playing tuner/aux/mp3. And allow instant replay on tuner at least.
• CF or PCMCIA card slot (hidden) would be nice to quickly add a few tunes without taking the empeg to the computer and/or using WLAN
  

What I certainly don't need is a VGA or TV output. This would only make sense to me, if the empeg was capable of decoding MPEG2 or MPEG4 video. But I don't see any reason why it should.

cu,
sv"SCNR"en

It is like when M$ says "Windows NT Technology"

I never quite understood that one.

That's because NT doesn't stand for ``N* Technology''. Rather, WNT is VMS++.

Isn't NT short for "New Techology" (or was is "Neanderthal Technology" )?

So they claim, sometimes. However:

There was an operating system designed in the mid 70s called VMS. It was the primary operating system that ran on the VAX computers developed by Digital (DEC). The VAX itself was an offshoot of the popular PDP series of computers. Regardless, VMS became the most popular operating system on the VAX machines (you'll find some people refer to VAX and VMS interchangeably, even though that's incorrect).

One of VMS's principal architects was Dave Cutler. Later, Dave would go on to be the head of the project at Microsoft that was their portion of the OS/2 project. Windows NT and VMS share a lot of ideas. The most prominent from a user point of view is probably file permissions, but there are many others. Including the fact that if you add one letter to each of the ``digits'' of VMS, you get WNT. Coincidence? Cutler claims that it's not.

Don't forget our buddy "H.A.L." who was one step before "I.B.M."

Regardless, VMS became the most popular operating system on the VAX

That's partly because VAX had hardware memory protection with varying privilege levels, over and above anything has recently. VMS made explicit use of it to provide inter-application protection, IIRC.

You could get VMS on Alpha for a while back then, too.

<shudder>

I just wandered back into this thread and saw all the VMS and PDP stuff. My first personal computer (not a PC, but every student was required to have one) was a DEC PRO350 - a PDP11 based box that ran VMS with a windowing system on top of it... Ah, the memories... PRO/ToolKit, P/OS, preformatted RX50 floppies (5-1/4"), etc.

You can still get VMS on Alpha. That's when they changed the name to OpenVMS, to point out the fact that they made it portable. In fact, you'll soon be able to get VMS on Itanium. I wonder how much of the portablility went away between the VAX-to-Alpha transition and now.

It's also interesting to note that Compaq just recently EOL'd VAX machines. You can still buy remanufactured ones from them, even.

i cut my teeth on VMS and i have to say that running authorize was a lovely way to configure accounts and DCL rocks for scripting.

Don't forget it's clustering capabilities. I have yet to see a modern os that does it as cleanly and simply as vms.

This was key for an instalation of the largest ada codebase in the world, and the system I used to work on for a living up until a few months ago:

http://www.fas.org/spp/military/program/nssrm/initiatives/ccposr.htm

There are several papers on the internet about it, interesting stuff. If you've ever toured norad or us strategic command, or wondered what the real "WOPR" is, this is it, and it's vax/vms.

Redesigning part of it and saving taxpayers $80k in the first year from my changes (air force IDEA program) is what made my empeg purchase possible.

You still can, under license.

Other than RMS, another RT OS produced by DEC as well. This actually sold more licenses since it was used in a lot of embedded applications. The scanner system I worked on in the late '80s used this with one of the first compact MicroVax II's that they produced. I actually had one of these here up to about 2 years ago, and it worked fine with one of the largest ESDI drives ever made (a 700M unit! Blimey, that was stretching the technology in 1984) until it scratched the boot track. At which point it became known as "The Doorstop" as I used it to hold open the door to the computer room in the summer. I would occasionally connect up a serial terminal and watch it plaintively call to the disk for the boot loader, whispering sweet nothings to a dead lover as if it was still there. The Dutch Computer Museum took it away when I couldn't stand it any longer, along with several boxes of S-100 bus cards (including a very rare Sytek 64K memory card, yes you read it right a 64 KILOBYTE card) and an SMPTE Computers dual processor unit. I sobbed all night: but the best thing is, my babies have been brought back to life and are running quite happily at the museum keeping in-the-know tourists in laughs most summer days.

Hang on, where did this story start off, anyway? Did I tellyou the one about the first SMP processor rack we tried on a TORUS NMR scanner back in '88? Boy, you had to make sure you put your keys in the locker before you worked on that one, or you risked decapitation (or worse, depending on which end of the magnet you were working on )

What about the delightful:

"Windows 2000 - based on NT Technology!"

You gotta laugh when a marketing department f**** up like that. They must have fired the entire NT marketing department, burnt all the documents, and then hired a group of newbies before they put that one together.

Yeah, forward that one to the Department of Redundancy Department.

But really, these acronyms do kinda take on a life of their own, to the point where we forget that they're acronyms at all. They just become words. I never think that RAM is "Random Access Memory" because I've known that fact for so long that RAM is just RAM now. I don't decompose these acronyms in my brain anymore like I had to when I was learning them.

Not to defend the boneheads in Redmond, but I can see that they wanted to leverage the NT moniker since NT 4.0 did rather well. I doubt 90% of their customers knew what NT stood for when they had NT 4.0 running on their desktops, it was just "Windows NT." So why not use it?

...and 'NT' was a pretty stupid and near-redundant name to start with when you think about it. Just who would have bought 'Windows OT (Old Technology)' ? Even the later consumer versions of Windows based on the older technology of Win95 had new technologies in them such as USB. Oh well.

Am I right in thinking that NTFS therefore stands for New Technology File System? Another amazing feat of imaginative nomenclature.

Am I right in thinking that NTFS therefore stands for New Technology File System?

Yup.

hey!
POTS stands for Plain Old Telephone System.

For your regular consumer phone lines.

I still like saying CLID than Caller ID.

Actually the funniest thing is that M$ had to pay Northern Telecom to use the term NT. Part of the reason behind removing the NT in 2000.

Many years ago, when the PC went from 8 bit to 16 bit, IBM called the new machines 'AT' - Advanced Technology, IIRC. Of course, their motherboards were 'AT boards'. Later for a short time some companies tried to introduce a new standard motherboard specification called NEAT: New Enhanced Advanced Technology. Talking about reduncancy... :-)

Cheers
Daniel

It's a wonder they didn't try to tack a "brighter whitening power" or "with enzymes" in there too.

<spelling police mode>
LCD display

You are aware that you just wrote "liquid crytsal display display", right?
</spelling police mode>

Acronymfinder.com has it both ways, LCD=Liquid Crystal Diode or Liquid Crystal Display. I always knew it as the former for years.
Anyway I still prefer the current type display if it could only be a bit brighter. My friends all have different types of displays on their stereos from LCD to OEL and while some are a tad more readable in the daylight they are way to busy and in a smaller screen size. That's what the pet peeve was on my old Kenwood HU, too many buttons that had double uses and me not remembering how to use the seldom used but important button sequences. I know, the Empeg has multiple button sequences as well but for some reason I have no trouble with them I guess because of the more logical way they are implemented.
I too would very much like to see voice used to it's fullest capacity.