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I don't know about if it's kept in RAM (tho it's not that big compared to typical RAM on concurrent machines) but the easy way to keep it tidy is to apply this free tool (which I've been using for 15? years now, and have never seen it screw up):

http://personal.inet.fi/busine...

And for ghu's sakes, defrag. I don't care what Windows says. Defrag. Regularly.

You wouldn't run your car forever without changing the oil, would you? Computers need maintenance too.

As to the wipe and reinstall thing... I consider that the resort of ignorance, like buying a new car instead of changing the oil or brake pads in the old one. I have very old Windows setups (from 3.1 onward), some with over a decade in everyday use, that are still as slick as the day it was installed. How, you ask? I defrag and apply EasyCleaner regularly, and occasionally kill tempfiles. That's it.

Nope. The real killer is total failure to defrag, and it won't hurt Windows any, it'll just slow things down, and make apps that use a lot of file handles unstable (frex, browsers with their large collection of cache and temp files; email clients that rewrite the entire database every time they do anything; shit like that). Windows gets the blame but it's really not the problem, other than the filesystem and design limits that were pretty much the rule in consumer OSs back then.

Yeah, it helps to run a registry scrubber now and again (I use ToniArts EasyCleaner -- free from http://personal.inet.fi/business/toniarts/ecleane.htm), and I beat my clients over the head until they get in the habit of doing so (along with defragging), but fact is W9x can survive without it. It takes about 3 years of total neglect to finally get to the aforementioned unhappy state, which can be fixed, usually back to 100% perfect, with two minutes of EasyCleaner and the hour or so it takes to kill tempfiles and do a defrag.

Mind you I also think using RegEdit is normal, so I'm pretty familiar with rooting around in there. I've learned that you DON'T find bales and bales of the sort of crud we've been led to believe. I've never seen a genuinely "corrupted" registry. The worst is conflicting crud left by crapware with shitty uninstallers like Norton, and even that cleans up readily enough.

We get numerous machines donated to the club that have Win95/98, had belonged to schools and gov't offices, and have never had the first scrap of maintenance -- and in most cases just basic cleanup per above fixes what ails 'em. It's very rare that I deem one a reinstall candidate.

As to whether maintenance should be necessary... You wouldn't let your car struggle with the same old tired oil and filters for years on end, would you? Why should you expect a computer, an equally complex beast, to do without the most basic maintenance? Yet people do, including people who should know better, and then wonder why after a few years it no longer runs well. Your car wouldn't do so well on clogged filters and gummy oil, either. :)

As to "but it shouldn't be vulnerable to shitware like Norton, or malware either" -- do you say the same when you hit a major pothole in the dark and knock your car out of alignment??

Being an old DOShead myself, I initially approached Windows with skeptical disgust, and I glare suspiciously at each new incarnation, but over the years I've found it's actually pretty durable, especially considering the neglect and abuse most people heap on it.

My experience parallels yours, and I maintain a similar array of systems. Fact is, Windows is extremely tolerant of "bad users"; in my experience it takes at least 3 years of *total* neglect to start showing negative effects, or a great deal of junkware and random deletia to mess it up beyond recall. Abuse a linux box the same way and see how long it lasts!

In my observation, linux does indeed need more fault tolerance and recovery capacity, and this video failsafe mechanism is a big step in the right direction. (Speaking as one who has been repeatedly frustrated in my efforts to find a wholly-satisfactory replacement for Windows.)

BTW if you don't know about ToniArts Easycleaner, you'll want to add it to your toolkit; by far the best registry scrubber. Tests best in every evaluation I've seen, and I've been using it routinely for 6 years and have never seen it screw up (and I've hand-vetted what it wants to kill). Freeware from http://personal.inet.fi/business/toniarts/

The video and the talk of replicating made me think of this

For god's sake, KILL IT!

There are some major cross-platform apps, e.g. Firefox.

I quite like Rainmeter myself, though I'm sure Mac has something equally pretty.

No, it's a 404: real linky

If you are like me, searching for simplicity, then may I suggest Rainlendar http://vapaa.dc.inet.fi/~rainy/index.php.

Yes, yes, it doesn't have 1% of those omg leet calendar applications, but it is really, really simple so you don't caught up in bloat :)

But it does beat all those calnedar apps when it comes to looks, however.

This happened to Tony Arts - only worse - his domain was ripped away from him, and then whoever done it started charging for his free[ware] software!! (and he codes some good stuff - I used to use a few in my winders days)

The 'Official' Toni Arts page now:

http://personal.inet.fi/business/toniarts/index.ht m

and the unofficial 'ripped off' one:

http://www.toniarts.com/

If ever a site needs removing, it's that one :-(

http://personal.inet.fi/koti/eeri/pipari2004/valmi s.jpg

http://www.aurinkokivi.net/muro/pipari/1.jpg

http://bulbasaur.ton.tut.fi/echramath/misc/piparit /ech-bukkake.jpg

http://www.muropaketti.com/pipari2003/ enjoy :)

"I've also seen the performance degradation in Windows boxes as the registry gets junked over time. So, a PC that started out "fast" eventually seems "slow" artificially unless you do a re-install."

Actually, this is a symptom of neglect. To prevent the "old age slows", do the following religiously once a week:

Kill tempfiles, defrag, and scrub the registry with Toniarts Easycleaner (freeware): http://personal.inet.fi/business/toniarts/

That's all there is to it. This will also cure the majority of stability issues that aren't directly caused by iffy hardware, bad drivers, or (on Win9*) applications with resource leaks.

As to installing new applications that are too much for old hardware, or that expect Win2K/XP and therefore don't bother to clean up memory after themselves, there I can't help you :) But a good rule of thumb is to not install any application that is more than 4 years newer than the hardware and/or OS it's expected to run on, because chances are it won't be well-behaved on the older OS, or it will overwhelm the hardware of that previous era.

I have Win95 setups that are 9 years old and no bitrot. There are freeware tools available to keep the registry in pristine condition, and no excuse not to use 'em. I use Toniarts Easycleaner: http://personal.inet.fi/business/toniarts/

[grin] I've tried and tried to like linux; I even went to Linuxworld back in '99, when linux for the masses was still new and exciting. Linux kept rapping my knuckles for my trouble. Finally I tried Mandrake, and tho it's not yet to where I can use it for everyday, at least I *like* it. Progress. :)

If you have an SBLive, be aware that it dumps noise onto the PCI bus, and VIA chipsets don't handle that very well; latest VIA drivers help but do not cure the problem. Intel chipsets don't seem to be bothered by it.

XP doesn't seem to have any issues with DirectX, which when games have an issue was historically the usual culprit; indeed, I've not seen that as a problem in quite some time (not since DX7 on pre-WinME boxen, in fact). XP isn't as stable as Win2K, but shouldn't be falling over even when abused -- it's pretty anal about killing apps to protect itself. When XP does crash, it's usually some Explorer component at fault. (D'oh!!) Do remember to let the stupid thing finish cooking after a restart... on my lowly P3-500, it takes about two minutes from "desktop *looks* ready" til "it actually *works*".

Anyway, my long experience is that if the hardware is sound, and basic maintenance is done, Windows of any species crashes seldom to never. I strongly recommend that once a week, you defrag whether it "needs" it or not, and run EasyCleaner http://personal.inet.fi/business/toniarts/ too.

In addition to sticking to Intel CPU and chipset, I prefer Tyan motherboards and Matrox video cards for stability -- I have four Tyans and a crapload of G200's (every which sub-model) and not once has one caused an issue. Also, make your life easier and stick to motherboards with 4 memory slots. Those with 3 memory slots get nasty about mix-and-matching different sizes/types of memory.

And remember that onboard video is an invention of the devil :)

of course America wouldnt try to hide anything would they ?

out of sight, out of mind perhaps ? or is it just some people can't handle the truth no matter how horrible it is.

it seems like a lot of countries still have issues they need to face , from rampant anti-semitism (which presumably France is trying to appease with this yahoo action)

can you see a pattern in all this trouble ?

"Aside from the CPU and northbridge, the chips involved are standard components, and should be familiar to anyone who knows PCs. This is an early revision, not sporting evidence of Firewire (though there are some mysterious pin-headers lurking about) or RAID, but you can see a Via 686B handling sound and legacy ports, and the usual surface-mounts backing up the Ethernet and perhaps USB 2.0. What's that big one marked 'Radeon?' :-D (Speculation says it may be a Mobility Edition, which would bode well for both power consumption and board size -- those pack their own RAM in the package.) Everything else is definitely wait-and-see; I have to wonder if they really meant 'Cardbus' instead of 'CF.'

"Obviously it's no alternative if Windows is your thing, but Linux is available -- in fact, it's the only option until AmigaOS 4 ships. Debian, SuSE, and Yellow Dog are known to run and have accepted patches for the platform (outdated product pages to the contrary; AmigaOnes have no relation to last-generation APUS hardware), and Gentoo is at least in-progress. Users who like their penguins cool *and* fast take note; benchmarks are thin on the ice right now, and RC5 numbers are by no means a good comparison, but the G3s were cranking those without an unfair boost from Altivec.

Lisa, if you don't like your job, you don't strike: you just go in every day and do it really half assed. That's the American way.

personal.inet.fi/taide/karjalainen/homer.html

Pekka Nissinen had recently updated his AmigaOne (and Pegasos) benchmarks comparison webpage, providing information on various benchmark performance tests for AmigaOne-SE and AmigaOne-XE motherboards.

Do note however that the G4 benchmarks do not include any Altivec optimised software tests, in which case the overall performance can be significantly improved, depending on the software type used and degree of optimisation.

I did that (convert it to nicer format that is). Ogg media stream container, mpeg4 video using mencoder+libavcodec (2pass, high quality, 4 motion vectors per macroblock, bitrate 800 kbit), Ogg Vorbis audio (quality 1). Result is a 58MB big file. Obviously there is quality loss (the original was 141MB), and mencoder seems not to encode all frames, making it a bit skippy at times (this also probably explains the small size).

It is good quality IMHO (good enough for me to dump the original), and the audio is in sync (the original file has two audio streams, but mplayer ignores the shorter one, for this encoding I decoded both streams to raw pcm, concatenated the streams and encoded the one stream). If you don't like it, don't use it.

Oh, and I had to split it in two since I don't have enough webspace in one spot for 58 megs. Either play them consecutively or join them with ogmcat(1) found in the ogmtools .

File 1, 39MB
File 2, 19MB

links to porn

Yes! Hate speech is good!

Imagine someone reading for example Pekka Siitoin's pages. Does that give a good impression on Nazism? NO! People laugh at it. They can see themselves how stupid their ideologies are.

Rumours and similar memes are much more dangerous. The badly html-formatted, speling erorr-containing sites can actually do more good than harm, because no one trusts them. Face-to-face, it is harder to disagree and laugh.

Hate speech is already banned on many of the countries of EC, so for example here in Finland nothing would change. There are always providers outside Europe, and they will host the sites no matter what EC legistlation is. Tracing them is not feasible.

do the Swedish-speaking minority see themselves as some kind of elite and tend to stick to themselves? And while we're on the subject, what position do Lapps have? And any descendants of Russians?

Hmm. While I don't purport to speak for the majority of Finn-Swedes I can relate an experience in Finland as an American of Finn-Swede descent.

My parents are from the Swedish speaking part of Finland, and consider themselves Finns, not Swedes. This is a matter of some debate. Sweden used to own Finland, and many Swedes vacation in Finland like snowbirds do in Florida. Once when I was a kid a female friend of mine screamed something that amounted to *GO HOME* at a passing car with a Swedish emblem and later explained that "we" did not like Swedes who came over and acted like they owned the place. Take from that what you will.

Finland and Russia once fought a war and it was not pretty. I don't think much love is lost there. I haven't heard much about the Lapps - it might just be so damn cold up there that they don't say much to anyone - what was the last time an American heard from an Alaskan Eskimo?

Finns on a whole are isolationist in my experience. I do not mean they keep to themselves as families - visiting friends is extremely common. However - Finns tend to mind their own business when they are not already acquainted with someone. Example - when I was about twelve I was with my family at a bus station in Pori and a tall old man carrying two suitcases tripped on the cobblestone street and fell on his face, cutting open his forehead. My older brother was standing right there and helped the man to his feet. No one else even seemed to notice. At the time I thought of this as inconsdieration, but now I think maybe they were just trying to give the man his dignity. <shrug>

But to my real point. As i said, i have had this cable isp for over year now (closing on to 2) and while most of the time i get decent speed while downloading stuff, all pings are horrible. I have never and i do mean never seen steady ping under 100ms except to the next hop in my traceroute to the world. No matter if the site im pinging is in Finland, or Sweden or States, pings can vary from 80-2000ms. Thou most usually its around 130-300ms. And the frigin packet loss. 10-35%. Man, try writing code thu ssh with packet loss of 30% and ping around 500 and you see how things are with cable connections (atleast in Finland & with HTV) (And yes, there is nothing wrong in cabling, all have been tested with good equipment)

As a comparisement, all finnish isp that support DSL service have much better reputation (infact, im going to work in one) and people have made websites out of their own experience with they have turned down their cable and ordered dsl lines. Here's some "downtime" statistics pages of people who use HTV cable line. First, Second and third one

For a bit of amusement, i must say that people are starting to act like those "cable subscribers" in that Pasific Bell DSL commercial (check out adcritic for laughs, and sorry, no linux there, its in *quicktime*). Well, when i first saw it, it made me laugh too but now, its so so real.
--

But to my real point. As i said, i have had this cable isp for over year now (closing on to 2) and while most of the time i get decent speed while downloading stuff, all pings are horrible. I have never and i do mean never seen steady ping under 100ms except to the next hop in my traceroute to the world. No matter if the site im pinging is in Finland, or Sweden or States, pings can vary from 80-2000ms. Thou most usually its around 130-300ms. And the frigin packet loss. 10-35%. Man, try writing code thu ssh with packet loss of 30% and ping around 500 and you see how things are with cable connections (atleast in Finland & with HTV) (And yes, there is nothing wrong in cabling, all have been tested with good equipment)

As a comparisement, all finnish isp that support DSL service have much better reputation (infact, im going to work in one) and people have made websites out of their own experience with they have turned down their cable and ordered dsl lines. Here's some "downtime" statistics pages of people who use HTV cable line. First, Second and third one

For a bit of amusement, i must say that people are starting to act like those "cable subscribers" in that Pasific Bell DSL commercial (check out adcritic for laughs, and sorry, no linux there, its in *quicktime*). Well, when i first saw it, it made me laugh too but now, its so so real.
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http://personal.inet.fi/cool/ne t/mozilla/splash.htm

-jwb