It is still a very hit and miss affair, many many USB drives will simply not work when doing this and I have had absolutely no luck installing XP with any USB device.
I have a suggestion, if you still want to be able to do this:
Create a bootable Linux USB drive. Either include an OS image on the disk, or pull one across the network from your fileserver, and use dd to put it on the drive. Of course, this requires that you have managed to get XP on that hardware at some point in the past...
I still think CDs are the way to go for cheap, disposable media, but the above might help you out.
That's a pretty blatant misrepresentation. The question at the time was when would the floppy be obsolete. At that time CDs were still fairly expensive to use, IIRC the CD burners that were included were still several hundred dollars, I know my ZipCD was over $200 about that time. Floppies were affordable and mostly worked. Most files of that era were still small enough to fit on a floppy as internet connections and most programs didn't require them to be huge.
So yes, the ridicule was well justified, nobody believed that the 3.5" disks were going to survive the future, but it wasn't until years later that they were really ready for being removed from computers.
For example, my (admittedly cheap) ASUS motherboard doesn't even have a floppy connection on it - I had to purchase an external USB floppy drive in order to install XP64 on it, because the hardware drivers required in order for the OS to even see my hard drives (SATA (fake)RAID) have to be installed from A:
4. burning DVDs for the large number of people who own a DVD player that happens not to have a USB input and don't already have a home theater PC.
I love/. sometimes. Careful analysis reveals that an optical drive can be used for burning files from BitTorrent, while missing the glaringly obvious: They put optical drives in laptops so people can play DVDs.
And lest we forget, BluRay just won the media war a couple years ago - those drives are only now getting cheap enough to call them "consumer hardware".
Really? Which game do you want to install that isn't in {insert online download service here}?
... and please do tell me how you get those installed without a suitable internet connection.
Oh, and before you go calling me a Luddite, I bet you can tell me at least 5 reasonable situations entailing someone not having available at their current location an internet connection suitable for installing a game that might require up to 20GB of downloading before being playable.
I try not to buy things that don't come on disk. Old habits die hard, but I can't keep myself from thinking about wanting to play some game 10 or 20 years from now, and wishing the company that made it hadn't gone under for whatever reason.
I still play Diablo, Diablo II, StarCraft (and the Broodwars expansion), Quake2, Quake3Arena, and many other "old" games... and I have multiple disks of a couple of them, for retro-gaming LAN parties. I won't buy StarCraft II because I can't be sure it will work next week, next year, or a decade from now - who's to say Blizzard will still be around (and won't have deactivated the activation server)?
Installation from physical media, without a requirement for an internet connection at any step of the process... it makes me happy to know that I can play these 10 and 15 year old games without worrying about whether the companies that produced them will go under.
As another example, how will we (legally) install Windows, when Microsoft shuts down the activation server for the unsupported version? There's still nothing "wrong" with XP, despite the Vista/Win7/Win8 hype.
I have a huge collection of DVD/VHS movies, despite having digital versions of almost all of them (I'm still in the process of format-shifting them). Physical media says I never have to contact an "activation server" to "acquire and authenticate" media that I already paid for, even if my home file server dies in a fire, flood, or other major disaster (yes, many of my physical copies of my movies are stored offsite).
Another (possibly irrelevant) example: I have iso images of Linux operating systems dating all the way back to 1996, "just in case". I also have images of my Windows install media through the years. Yeah, I collect some weird data. I've just gotten into the habit, over the years, of making backups of everything.
My point is that physical media, unencumbered by DRM, means that the content of that media is accessible in most cases, years or even decades later.
Ya know, you sure do make a lot of fuss about stuff you haven't got a clue about.
I know you don't have a clue, because most humans don't have a clue. Hell, we can't even agree on what electricity is, nevermind what might be required in a space-faring vessel intended for colonization - with or without human cargo.
Full Autonomy is extremely hard. If earth goes down the toilet, you can't rely on yearly shipments of equipment and technology. You'd have to build *everything* in your colony, which would require a huge colony indeed (so that you have a factory that makes the robots that manufacturers your mp3 players and *everything else you rely on nowadays*) and thus an even greater effort.
3D Printing could mitigate that to an extent, as would bringing enough supplies (and robots) to get a robot factory built and operational - at which point it is a self-sustaining resource-gathering engine, using solar power as the energy source. Humans might not show up there for another 200-300 years, so there's not even a need to be efficient - just be patient, and the perfect habitat will be being built while we wait.
In the meantime, we can see about getting some grips on that exponential-population-increase issue we've got on this planet.
Don't like the religious persecution all the atheists and agnostics are shoving your way? Raise a few trillion dollars from your sheep, and get the flock away from the oppressive society! Found a NEW WORLD! Worship whoever/whatever/whenever/however you want to!
Come to think of it, I might even contribute to getting some of these groups off-planet, myself.
The link goes to a site dedicated to "50/50 by 2150". Interesting concept.
One major flaw I can see, right off the bat:
How, exactly are you going to get 3.5 billion people to let the other 3.5 billion people move into their living/working space?
Nothing personal, but... if it wasn't for the "heavy industry folks cranking up the world's thermostat", we'd be in the middle of an ice age right now.
if the human race can not make life great on this planet then living in space where being even more efficient and much more benevolent is required to survive will never succeed.
humans are just inherently too stupid and greedy to survive for generations in some space ship or artificial planetoid type thing considering the track record we've made here on earth.
On the other hand, if being not-stupid and not-greedy actually is necessary for sustainable life, how long do you think it will take for the stupid/greedy people to hit the airlocks?
The stupids should actually self-select for attrition, whereas the greedy will most likely be selected as attrition candidates by others.
Beware, shameless plugs ahead (and they're not even my companies):
Williamson's book (along with many others) is available for FREE at the Baen Free Library! This is a publisher who embraces "piracy" as advertisement (the way it should be!). Enjoy your free SciFi/Fantasy binge. Ya don't even have to tell 'em I sent ya, and I don't think I would get anything if you did.
Also, if you purchase one of their books in hardback, you get a legally copyable CD full of eBooks along with it - check your local library, the CDs inside are excellent.
I recommend Aldiko for eBook reading on Android, and Calibre on Windows/Mac/Linux. Sorry, I don't use iOS - so I don't know what reader you would need for that.
Of course, there are valid moral objects to raising kids without any human contact and as part of a laboratory experiment.
... such as the fact that without "loving contact", the children tend to become severely disturbed - this does not make for ideal colonization material.
They didn't. They said that bottled water makers can't use that to advertise their products. Since a label like that is likely to make less intelligent people think that it has an additive making it more effective than other sources, not allowing them to do so makes a lot of sense to me. They did the right thing.
If they're that unintelligent, then they deserve to have an increased attrition rate. I vote we take the warning labels off of everything that wouldn't require a college education to understand is harmful in some fashion, and let it work itself out on its own.
However, the first thing we should do is lock the 21 scientists in a room - just them, and a single hammer. We'll check it in a year to see what happened - Admittedly, that's only a third of the time it took them to decide that water isn't wet, but I figure that's long enough.
I see nothing in the quote 'regular consumption of significant amounts of water can reduce the risk of development of dehydration' that indicates only bottled water can do that.
As a matter of fact, it boggles my mind that this statement needed any kind of "Food Standards Authority" approval in the first place.
My new favorite Ideocracy quote: "Spend three years, with 20 separate pieces of correspondence before summoning 21 professors to Parma where they decide with great solemnity that drinking water cannot be sold as a way to combat dehydration."
It is still correct to say that drinking a large amount of water per day will prevent dehydration. Bottled water obviously can not be the only thing that can make the claim, but on the other hand, you can't say it is incorrect either.
I'm not a Windows coder. You read something in that wasn't there. The only coding I'm currently doing is Android development (and a few off-the-cuff bash scripts, but those don't really count).
Your spelling sucks, considering you supposedly have a PhD.
"There are several missed aches that a spell checker can't can't catch catch. For instant, if you accidentally leave out word, your spell checker won't put it in you."
- Taylor Mali, "The the Impotence of Proofreading"
Also, the spell checker wouldn't catch "gong" instead of "going", because they're both actual dictionary words.
Reposted because some might find it interesting that Motorola is suing Apple, even if it's slightly off-topic in that it has little to do with Microsoft vs. Barnes and Noble. It seems to me that it's on-topic, in that it has to do with "Established Operating Systems vs. Android".
I also took the liberty of making the URL into a link.
As an aside, I think a little tit-for-tat is deserved in this case - Samsung can't sell its Android offering in Australia, and Apple may soon not be able to sell its iOS offering in Germany. Eye for an eye, and all that.
Slashdot Mirror
It is still a very hit and miss affair, many many USB drives will simply not work when doing this and I have had absolutely no luck installing XP with any USB device.
I have a suggestion, if you still want to be able to do this:
Create a bootable Linux USB drive. Either include an OS image on the disk, or pull one across the network from your fileserver, and use dd to put it on the drive. Of course, this requires that you have managed to get XP on that hardware at some point in the past...
I still think CDs are the way to go for cheap, disposable media, but the above might help you out.
That's a pretty blatant misrepresentation. The question at the time was when would the floppy be obsolete. At that time CDs were still fairly expensive to use, IIRC the CD burners that were included were still several hundred dollars, I know my ZipCD was over $200 about that time. Floppies were affordable and mostly worked. Most files of that era were still small enough to fit on a floppy as internet connections and most programs didn't require them to be huge.
So yes, the ridicule was well justified, nobody believed that the 3.5" disks were going to survive the future, but it wasn't until years later that they were really ready for being removed from computers.
For example, my (admittedly cheap) ASUS motherboard doesn't even have a floppy connection on it - I had to purchase an external USB floppy drive in order to install XP64 on it, because the hardware drivers required in order for the OS to even see my hard drives (SATA (fake)RAID) have to be installed from A:
4. burning DVDs for the large number of people who own a DVD player that happens not to have a USB input and don't already have a home theater PC.
I love /. sometimes. Careful analysis reveals that an optical drive can be used for burning files from BitTorrent, while missing the glaringly obvious: They put optical drives in laptops so people can play DVDs.
And lest we forget, BluRay just won the media war a couple years ago - those drives are only now getting cheap enough to call them "consumer hardware".
Crap must be someone new at Apple PR running the above account. Can't keep history straight.
Must be the Reality Distortion Field. I guess Jobs left it behind when he left.
Really? Which game do you want to install that isn't in {insert online download service here}?
... and please do tell me how you get those installed without a suitable internet connection.
Oh, and before you go calling me a Luddite, I bet you can tell me at least 5 reasonable situations entailing someone not having available at their current location an internet connection suitable for installing a game that might require up to 20GB of downloading before being playable.
You don't pop in a LiveCD and dd the drive over the network as one of the steps in making a new PC yours?
Oh, wait... no optical drive. Right.
Well, toss an image on a thumb-drive, then. Principle is still sound.
I try not to buy things that don't come on disk. Old habits die hard, but I can't keep myself from thinking about wanting to play some game 10 or 20 years from now, and wishing the company that made it hadn't gone under for whatever reason.
I still play Diablo, Diablo II, StarCraft (and the Broodwars expansion), Quake2, Quake3Arena, and many other "old" games... and I have multiple disks of a couple of them, for retro-gaming LAN parties. I won't buy StarCraft II because I can't be sure it will work next week, next year, or a decade from now - who's to say Blizzard will still be around (and won't have deactivated the activation server)?
Installation from physical media, without a requirement for an internet connection at any step of the process... it makes me happy to know that I can play these 10 and 15 year old games without worrying about whether the companies that produced them will go under.
As another example, how will we (legally) install Windows, when Microsoft shuts down the activation server for the unsupported version?
There's still nothing "wrong" with XP, despite the Vista/Win7/Win8 hype.
I have a huge collection of DVD/VHS movies, despite having digital versions of almost all of them (I'm still in the process of format-shifting them). Physical media says I never have to contact an "activation server" to "acquire and authenticate" media that I already paid for, even if my home file server dies in a fire, flood, or other major disaster (yes, many of my physical copies of my movies are stored offsite).
Another (possibly irrelevant) example: I have iso images of Linux operating systems dating all the way back to 1996, "just in case". I also have images of my Windows install media through the years. Yeah, I collect some weird data. I've just gotten into the habit, over the years, of making backups of everything.
My point is that physical media, unencumbered by DRM, means that the content of that media is accessible in most cases, years or even decades later.
there is just no way you can have fun with a game where you empty a sub-machine gun less than 20 feet from a guy and do NOT get a single hit!
... and this is how automatic weapons behave in the real world. Full-auto is not your friend. ;)
Ya know, you sure do make a lot of fuss about stuff you haven't got a clue about.
I know you don't have a clue, because most humans don't have a clue. Hell, we can't even agree on what electricity is, nevermind what might be required in a space-faring vessel intended for colonization - with or without human cargo.
Full Autonomy is extremely hard. If earth goes down the toilet, you can't rely on yearly shipments of equipment and technology. You'd have to build *everything* in your colony, which would require a huge colony indeed (so that you have a factory that makes the robots that manufacturers your mp3 players and *everything else you rely on nowadays*) and thus an even greater effort.
3D Printing could mitigate that to an extent, as would bringing enough supplies (and robots) to get a robot factory built and operational - at which point it is a self-sustaining resource-gathering engine, using solar power as the energy source. Humans might not show up there for another 200-300 years, so there's not even a need to be efficient - just be patient, and the perfect habitat will be being built while we wait.
In the meantime, we can see about getting some grips on that exponential-population-increase issue we've got on this planet.
They can be the new pilgrims...
Don't like the religious persecution all the atheists and agnostics are shoving your way?
Raise a few trillion dollars from your sheep, and get the flock away from the oppressive society!
Found a NEW WORLD!
Worship whoever/whatever/whenever/however you want to!
Come to think of it, I might even contribute to getting some of these groups off-planet, myself.
The link goes to a site dedicated to "50/50 by 2150". Interesting concept.
One major flaw I can see, right off the bat:
How, exactly are you going to get 3.5 billion people to let the other 3.5 billion people move into their living/working space?
Nothing personal, but... if it wasn't for the "heavy industry folks cranking up the world's thermostat", we'd be in the middle of an ice age right now.
A little math and history goes a long way.
Maybe he just drives an SUV back and forth between work and his 2500 sq ft house?
Seriously, what we need is a good predator that preys upon the fat and stupid.
CAD? (Coronary Artery Disease)
Zombies to keep us fit, and aliens to give us a common enemy - the human race can be saved in only two horror movies.
if the human race can not make life great on this planet then living in space where being even more efficient and much more benevolent is required to survive will never succeed.
humans are just inherently too stupid and greedy to survive for generations in some space ship or artificial planetoid type thing considering the track record we've made here on earth.
On the other hand, if being not-stupid and not-greedy actually is necessary for sustainable life, how long do you think it will take for the stupid/greedy people to hit the airlocks?
The stupids should actually self-select for attrition, whereas the greedy will most likely be selected as attrition candidates by others.
References:
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein
Freehold, by Michael Z Williamson
Beware, shameless plugs ahead (and they're not even my companies):
Williamson's book (along with many others) is available for FREE at the Baen Free Library! This is a publisher who embraces "piracy" as advertisement (the way it should be!).
Enjoy your free SciFi/Fantasy binge. Ya don't even have to tell 'em I sent ya, and I don't think I would get anything if you did.
Also, if you purchase one of their books in hardback, you get a legally copyable CD full of eBooks along with it - check your local library, the CDs inside are excellent.
I recommend Aldiko for eBook reading on Android, and Calibre on Windows/Mac/Linux.
Sorry, I don't use iOS - so I don't know what reader you would need for that.
Of course, there are valid moral objects to raising kids without any human contact and as part of a laboratory experiment.
... such as the fact that without "loving contact", the children tend to become severely disturbed - this does not make for ideal colonization material.
see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Harlow
They didn't. They said that bottled water makers can't use that to advertise their products. Since a label like that is likely to make less intelligent people think that it has an additive making it more effective than other sources, not allowing them to do so makes a lot of sense to me. They did the right thing.
If they're that unintelligent, then they deserve to have an increased attrition rate. I vote we take the warning labels off of everything that wouldn't require a college education to understand is harmful in some fashion, and let it work itself out on its own.
However, the first thing we should do is lock the 21 scientists in a room - just them, and a single hammer. We'll check it in a year to see what happened - Admittedly, that's only a third of the time it took them to decide that water isn't wet, but I figure that's long enough.
I see nothing in the quote 'regular consumption of significant amounts of water can reduce the risk of development of dehydration' that indicates only bottled water can do that.
As a matter of fact, it boggles my mind that this statement needed any kind of "Food Standards Authority" approval in the first place.
My new favorite Ideocracy quote:
"Spend three years, with 20 separate pieces of correspondence before summoning 21 professors to Parma where they decide with great solemnity that drinking water cannot be sold as a way to combat dehydration."
It is still correct to say that drinking a large amount of water per day will prevent dehydration. Bottled water obviously can not be the only thing that can make the claim, but on the other hand, you can't say it is incorrect either.
... but they did.
I'm not a Windows coder. You read something in that wasn't there. The only coding I'm currently doing is Android development (and a few off-the-cuff bash scripts, but those don't really count).
Your spelling sucks, considering you supposedly have a PhD.
You're still a punk.
I thought the whole point of SecureBoot was to ensure a secure boot chain?
Also, what exactly are we arguing about, if we're in agreement about my point?
"There are several missed aches that a spell checker can't can't catch catch. For instant, if you accidentally leave out word, your spell checker won't put it in you."
- Taylor Mali, "The the Impotence of Proofreading"
Also, the spell checker wouldn't catch "gong" instead of "going", because they're both actual dictionary words.
Reconsider what is 'an essential service', or reconsider what are 'disagreeable terms'.
That's right, lower your standards.
I know, I know. but still.
http://www.slashgear.com/motorola-anti-icloud-patent-suit-success-tipped-for-2012-18196549/
Reposted because some might find it interesting that Motorola is suing Apple, even if it's slightly off-topic in that it has little to do with Microsoft vs. Barnes and Noble. It seems to me that it's on-topic, in that it has to do with "Established Operating Systems vs. Android".
I also took the liberty of making the URL into a link.
As an aside, I think a little tit-for-tat is deserved in this case - Samsung can't sell its Android offering in Australia, and Apple may soon not be able to sell its iOS offering in Germany. Eye for an eye, and all that.