A simple NAS enclosure or NAS device might be what you are looking for. You can get a single drive NAS enclosure, and add a drive, that you can carry around just like a regular portable drive. You can move it between networks and use any connection method the NAS device happens to implement (SMB, FTP, NFS, etc). Some even let you optionally connect it directly via USB or eSATA to access the file system directly, and some may have encryption or other security features as well.
Of course, check to make sure you have permission and that connecting things to your network does not violate any policies. If connecting a network device directly to the your network is not permitted then perhaps you can add a second, dedicated, network card to the computers.
If it is a myth or not depends on how you look at it. Back in the day I was able to run Windows 98 (98Lite) without any trace of IE and at the same time run IE 4 under Wine without Windows.
But the catch was IE is heavily made up of components that other applications could make use of (and too often did regardless if it made sense or not). In fact, the entire Windows 98 "integrated" shell depended on many of these components and would fail to run if IE was removed in its entirety. (In that case the Windows 95 shell had to be used instead). Since the OS bundle was therefore unusable to normal users without the IE application, they called it "integrated with the OS".
These components still exist and are unfortunately heavily depended on by Windows and numerous applications.
The worst part about this is that Microsoft has painted themselves in to a corner because of the way it is implemented. It is not possible to cleanly remove IE in its entirety (well, *I* think this should be possible) or run multiple versions of IE in any officially supported manner under the same instance of Windows.
If I needed to access a webby app that only worked in Netscape 4, I probably could install Netscape 4 under Windows 7 and access it just fine in conjunction with any other newer browsers. No such luck with IE, those that need to use IE 6 HAVE to use Windows XP only and can not even install IE 8 at the same time. (Yes, there are some hacks out there but the only official way Microsoft supports running IE 6 under Vista/7 is using XP in VM!)
>The point is that we don't know what's worth preserving.
And it is worth pointing out that games get all of the publicity. Utilities, operating systems, and boring old applications are also worth preserving because they can shed light on many aspects of computing history.
I can think of several computing platform that may never see usable emulators because there were no games to speak of for them. (Still wanting a 68k NeXT emulator)
And there were many ancient old versions of applications that were copy "protected" that have probably disappeared forever off of the face of the universe because nobody was motivated to crack the protection. (Microsoft Word for DOS version 1.x comes to mind)
Oh, and to me it seemed kind of funny they mentioned DOOM as I was playing a modern internet multi-player DOOM port just yesterday. There is a game that will live on forever, in part because it is open source.
>The web is about where MacOS was 20 years ago in terms of ability to deliver a rich application UI experience.
Don't insult the mac like that. There were Mac apps back in 1984 that you can still only badly mimic via a web "application."
The fact is that a web browser is an application that retrieves and renders hypertext documents over a network, and nothing more. Just because it has scripting and the web can make available documents to huge numbers of people, too many people think they can shoehorn any kind of application in to it.
There is a huge demand for data entry and reporting (both viewing and printing) that web browser just aren't up to. If web browser ever get to the point where they have drag-and-drop form/report creation with a user interface that can be reliably delivered to client computers then great. Until then there needs to be something else to fill this void, and there just isn't. There used to be some very nice client/server GUI form and reporting tools back in the 90s, but most of those have devolved in to half-assed web tools with insane setup, configuration, and support requirements (and usually exorbitant enterprise pricing to boot).
Heck, the last time I checked no web browser could even reliably be told automatically to print a page landscape!
Over all I have been happy with DTV, I even dropped (evil comcast) cable because of it.
That said, I once and a rare while run in to an odd problem where something in the preview guide information will cause my digital converter box to crash. I try and bring up the preview guide, box will go nuts and then shut off. Also, some channels aren't very reliable about providing that information. I guess they don't consider I might actually stick around and watch a show if I knew what was coming up next.
That reminds me, I still need to really look around for a DTV portable that can be powered by standard batteries, but that hasn't been a priority.
'Cars are already provided with brakes and seatbelts... There is no reason why the internet should be provided without the necessary restrictive mechanisms built into it.'
There is no line of thinking that would make a reasonable person make this direct comparison. Cars are dangerous tools. They can physically injure or kill you. Porn will not. Despite what some people may believe, porn is not dangerous. People are dangerous. People who seriously make this kind of comparison are dangerous.
While I like Firefox and also SeaMonkey just fine, I have always been a bit bothered by applications (and there are many of them) that take their time updating the screen or make the UI unresponsive. Look back at the original Mac running on a 8mhz 68k or Windows 1.0 running on an 8088. Menus, dialogs and such display almost instantly after a mouse click. Now we have multi-gigahertz CPUs with multiple cores and video cards that have such powerful GPUs you almost need a built in nuclear reactor to power them! What is the excuse for not being able to display a menu the very next video frame/refresh? If data is slowly tickling in over a network, why not display what you have the instant it comes in?
I remember running the first public Mozilla Suite builds on a Pentium 200 and how incredibly slow they were. I know there have really have been many speed improvements, but sometimes it feels like Mozilla just let the hardware get faster rather than addressing some of the core speed issues that Chrome is now putting them to shame on.
It looks like their solution to slow menus is to remove the menus? The standard way people have been interfacing with GUI applications since 1984? You people do know Chome is just trying to look like IE 7, which was trying to look like Safari, which actually does have menus just not attached to each browser window?
On the topic of video, I wish more people would provide direct downloadable links to video files so even if my browser doesn't know how to play a video, I can view it in an external player like VLC. And it seems like the only realistic answer for bundled in-browser video here is if Mozilla can negotiate some kind of special licensing agreement with the h.264 folks. Although I seriously think video should be implemented as some kind of plug-in that can be updated separately as the video-codec-of-the-day changes.
All that aside, it is interesting how open Mozilla appears to be in discussing their plains. Apple keeps their plans top secret with not a word uttered, Microsoft's plans are openly "leaked" so people feel naughty when a preview/beta , Oracle's plans are covered with legalese and subject to contract terms, Linux plans are written in some cryptic programming language or something. Well, it is just nice seeing somebody try to be open like this (even if they still wind up doing their own thing)
Hollywood also thinks it is easy to "hack" in to any particular system to get whatever important piece of information is needed to move the story along.
While in real life some systems may not exactly be super secure, they would likely spend days digging through the system going "what the hell is this crap?" before actually finding any meaningful, correct data. And you never hear them say "Oh, we can't get in to this system because it is properly firewalled, up to date, and secured."
And on the other end there always seems to be some security room with lots of monitors where someone instantly detects the "hack" and asks the big bad/good guy what they should do.
In real life their system has been p0wned for the last two years and they never noticed, and nobody knows enough about the system to fix it.
-Terry for the 50th time: what is the password?" -"fuckyou"
Unfortunately that may be how the conversation actually went, but without the joke. I would like to think that in a situation like that most people would say something like: "I want to help, I really do, but if I may please explain, there is a policy..."
However real people under real stress can behave in less than rational ways. And, sadly, in the real world even a small single negative action can result in an avalanche of unpleasant reactions.
Sound like this could have some bad repercussions for IT folks. Of course all I know about the situation is what has been posted on Slashdot. There could be, and usually is, more to the story. Now that the trial is over with will the court records be posted somewhere?
I remember when reading the manuals were the ONLY way to figure out how to play a game. On Atari 2600 games and the likes you would often need them to figure out what those little pixelated blobs were supposed to be on the screen and what to do with them, and the manual certainly wouldn't fit in 4k bytes of rom. On text based Infocom interactive fiction games you would always need to read through an example session in the manual to figure out the basic vocabulary understood by the particular game.
Utilities and tools would often come with multiple manuals hundreds of pages long, describing every little feature in accurate detail. And they all needed to be fairly well written because the manufacturers could not just push a button and update the books to fill in any incomplete parts.
But for quite a while now most applications have included electronic documentation or built-in tutorials in addition to a printed manual, sometimes even with the exact same content! So it does seem reasonable to only maintain that information in one place if the user can do without.
Documentation in some form is very important and reduces the amount of time users spend figuring out things. Imagine if you had product with a million users, and something all of them need to do took each user 15 minutes to figure out on their own, but could be reduced to nothing by properly documenting it... how many lifetimes have you just saved? (Although it seems like some companies these days intentionally keep things undocumented or obscure so they can keep overpriced contractors and trainers employed)
My guess is the browser will be come the desktop for operating systems. The browser will no longer be a separate program you have to launch, but rather just a layer of the operating system. Think about when the last time was you used a computer and didn't open a browser window.
My Guess is that idiots that don't understand what a browser is or what a computer operating system is, or think there is nothing else you can do with a computer than browse the web, will keep spewing this kind of mumbo jumbo.
The computing universe does not revolve around web browsing. There is a significant design and implementation benefit by keeping the OS, shell, and browser separate. IE and Windows has proven why merging these a bad idea.
I often don't have a web browser window open, because I'm working on databases, word processing, graphics, file management, or playing video games - all of which *gasp* don't need a web browser window! And when I am doing those I don't want one!
Oh, let me see, I predict that 5 years from now, browsers are going to be about the freaking same. Perhaps, as usual, with a few more useless bells and whistles nobody really needs but some PHB though would be cool.
Why? Well, a browser is an application that retrieves web documents, renders them on your screen, and enables you to navigate through them using hyper links. Nothing more, nothing less. It won't make your toast and it won't replace your operating system. People may try things like that but then it's not just a browser any more, and it is usually a bad idea.
The basic functionality of a browser really hasn't changed much since Tim Berners-Lee released his "World Wide Web" browser in 1991. Feel free to try and come up with something new that meets the needs of the world better. I dare say there is room for improvement, but I just don't that kind of innovation happening much any more - people just keep trying to shoehorn "applications" in to something that is only meant to render documents and keep scratching their head as to why that doesn't work very well.
To me it is obvious what has happened here. Some years ago some one probably thought it would be a good idea to implement an automated timekeeping system, without doing a proper cost/benefit analysis, thinking they could just quickly drop some slightly customized system in place and never have to touch it again.
Government agencies usually have many complicated and unusual timekeeping rules that sometimes even change. Often this is the result of various laws they have to deal with that private companies would not have to deal with. They almost certainly underestimated the amount of customization needed for a time keeping program like this, especially if this is based on an existing system that was never designed to deal with their kinds of rules.
Don't blame on corruption what can be adequately explained by stupidity.
I worked at a job where we had to swipe our badges in/out. Management noticed that people would just give their badges to a friend and leave early. The friend would swipe them out on time (and they would switch back and forth). The solution was to install a thumb print scanner.
And before long they will be giving each other their thumbs, or something like that.
That's what happens when you throw technology at a people problem rather than dealing with the people directly.
> So far, MSIE still is getting on 100% despite the 'browser ballot'
The technically correct solution to this problem would have been to go forward with the release of Windows 7e and add some kind of protection (keep an eye on the number of legs broken) to make sure OEMs were in no way influenced by Microsoft as to which browser the OEM choses to bundle. This way the OEMs choice of bundle would hopefully be related directly to what users actually want, and as a result selling more units for the OEM.
I'm not sure why this deal fell through. Up until the last minute it seemed like they were going to ship Windows 7e instead.
I worked with a lot of MFM (ST506 interface) drives back in the day, and from my experience it was very unlikely that different models of MFM controller cards could read the drives from one another. If I installed a newer MFM disk controller card in a machine or moved the drive to a different machine with a different MFM controller, I would almost always have to re-low level format the drive before I could even run DOS format. (And mine were just FAT16 so the file system was never the issue)
So even if you have another MFM controller card, unless it is the exact same model of card it is unlikely that you could read sectors off of the drive. Their underlying low-level formats seemed to differ.
I also actually had the pleasure of briefly using an older model Altos 8600. That model had a bunch of serial ports for dumb terminals, an 8 inch floppy drive and an *8 inch* 40 meg Quantum Q2040 hard drive. I still have the 8" Microsoft Xenix floppy disks.
It is unreasonable to expect a vendor to continue to support their old products forever.
Programmers must draw a line somewhere, how much of an OS do they want to re-implement in their application? Sometimes such re-implement has to be done, but other times it is just too much work and maintenance. It is all about balance.
On a related note Mozilla just released their final update to SeaMonkey 1.1 (1.1.19). Here is a screen shot of it running on NT 3.51! Very impressive work keeping it running on a 15-year old OS for this long.
Calling it "OOXML" certainly can be confusing since it is easy to not know or remember what the "OO" stands for. But on top of that, the average person knows this format only as the "Microsoft Office 2007" format.
And rightfully, the "Microsoft Office 2007" format is all it is.
I look at user agents from time to time, and it blows my mind how much stuff some programs are permitted to put in there. It seems like every toolbar, add-on, and browser re-branding these days wants to put itself in you user agent.
I wonder what the longest non-fake user agent is these days? I recall there was a problem a while back on the Mozillazine forums because it records user agent strings for support purposes, but only allocated so many characters. Thanks to some new toolbars and such some people couldn't post because their user agent string was to long.
I don't think people realize that what some programs can add to their user agent sting can potentially be a privacy issue.
Really, even with a most basic user agent string there is, arguably, still information that probably doesn't need to be there any more. Do web sites really need to know your specific Windows version? CPU Type? Rendering engine version? Browser minor revision? And what is with all the MS.Net verison info anyway? It just seems like a lot of detail.
Slashdot Mirror
A simple NAS enclosure or NAS device might be what you are looking for. You can get a single drive NAS enclosure, and add a drive, that you can carry around just like a regular portable drive. You can move it between networks and use any connection method the NAS device happens to implement (SMB, FTP, NFS, etc). Some even let you optionally connect it directly via USB or eSATA to access the file system directly, and some may have encryption or other security features as well.
Of course, check to make sure you have permission and that connecting things to your network does not violate any policies. If connecting a network device directly to the your network is not permitted then perhaps you can add a second, dedicated, network card to the computers.
If it is a myth or not depends on how you look at it. Back in the day I was able to run Windows 98 (98Lite) without any trace of IE and at the same time run IE 4 under Wine without Windows.
But the catch was IE is heavily made up of components that other applications could make use of (and too often did regardless if it made sense or not). In fact, the entire Windows 98 "integrated" shell depended on many of these components and would fail to run if IE was removed in its entirety. (In that case the Windows 95 shell had to be used instead). Since the OS bundle was therefore unusable to normal users without the IE application, they called it "integrated with the OS".
These components still exist and are unfortunately heavily depended on by Windows and numerous applications.
The worst part about this is that Microsoft has painted themselves in to a corner because of the way it is implemented. It is not possible to cleanly remove IE in its entirety (well, *I* think this should be possible) or run multiple versions of IE in any officially supported manner under the same instance of Windows.
If I needed to access a webby app that only worked in Netscape 4, I probably could install Netscape 4 under Windows 7 and access it just fine in conjunction with any other newer browsers. No such luck with IE, those that need to use IE 6 HAVE to use Windows XP only and can not even install IE 8 at the same time. (Yes, there are some hacks out there but the only official way Microsoft supports running IE 6 under Vista/7 is using XP in VM!)
>The point is that we don't know what's worth preserving.
And it is worth pointing out that games get all of the publicity. Utilities, operating systems, and boring old applications are also worth preserving because they can shed light on many aspects of computing history.
I can think of several computing platform that may never see usable emulators because there were no games to speak of for them. (Still wanting a 68k NeXT emulator)
And there were many ancient old versions of applications that were copy "protected" that have probably disappeared forever off of the face of the universe because nobody was motivated to crack the protection. (Microsoft Word for DOS version 1.x comes to mind)
Oh, and to me it seemed kind of funny they mentioned DOOM as I was playing a modern internet multi-player DOOM port just yesterday. There is a game that will live on forever, in part because it is open source.
>The web is about where MacOS was 20 years ago in terms of ability to deliver a rich application UI experience.
Don't insult the mac like that. There were Mac apps back in 1984 that you can still only badly mimic via a web "application."
The fact is that a web browser is an application that retrieves and renders hypertext documents over a network, and nothing more. Just because it has scripting and the web can make available documents to huge numbers of people, too many people think they can shoehorn any kind of application in to it.
There is a huge demand for data entry and reporting (both viewing and printing) that web browser just aren't up to. If web browser ever get to the point where they have drag-and-drop form/report creation with a user interface that can be reliably delivered to client computers then great. Until then there needs to be something else to fill this void, and there just isn't. There used to be some very nice client/server GUI form and reporting tools back in the 90s, but most of those have devolved in to half-assed web tools with insane setup, configuration, and support requirements (and usually exorbitant enterprise pricing to boot).
Heck, the last time I checked no web browser could even reliably be told automatically to print a page landscape!
1929? So the entirety of the content from those things would still be under copyright, right?
Eh, torrent link plz.
Over all I have been happy with DTV, I even dropped (evil comcast) cable because of it.
That said, I once and a rare while run in to an odd problem where something in the preview guide information will cause my digital converter box to crash. I try and bring up the preview guide, box will go nuts and then shut off. Also, some channels aren't very reliable about providing that information. I guess they don't consider I might actually stick around and watch a show if I knew what was coming up next.
That reminds me, I still need to really look around for a DTV portable that can be powered by standard batteries, but that hasn't been a priority.
I hereby sentence you to death by... uh hu uh huhu.. death by.. uh hu uh.. saw off his tweeter! [sound of chainsaw revving]
"At the same time, consumers should learn to always ensure Autorun is disabled, and scan any device for malware before they use it on their computer"
But what if that malware, as it seemingly often is these days, is an actual intentional part of a product?
'Cars are already provided with brakes and seatbelts... There is no reason why the internet should be provided without the necessary restrictive mechanisms built into it.'
There is no line of thinking that would make a reasonable person make this direct comparison. Cars are dangerous tools. They can physically injure or kill you. Porn will not. Despite what some people may believe, porn is not dangerous. People are dangerous. People who seriously make this kind of comparison are dangerous.
If you want a simple, clear explanation of exactly how the series resolved, Lost Untangled will do nothing to clarify things for you.
If you were expecting answers... you have been watching the wrong show for the last 6 years.
While I like Firefox and also SeaMonkey just fine, I have always been a bit bothered by applications (and there are many of them) that take their time updating the screen or make the UI unresponsive. Look back at the original Mac running on a 8mhz 68k or Windows 1.0 running on an 8088. Menus, dialogs and such display almost instantly after a mouse click. Now we have multi-gigahertz CPUs with multiple cores and video cards that have such powerful GPUs you almost need a built in nuclear reactor to power them! What is the excuse for not being able to display a menu the very next video frame/refresh? If data is slowly tickling in over a network, why not display what you have the instant it comes in?
I remember running the first public Mozilla Suite builds on a Pentium 200 and how incredibly slow they were. I know there have really have been many speed improvements, but sometimes it feels like Mozilla just let the hardware get faster rather than addressing some of the core speed issues that Chrome is now putting them to shame on.
It looks like their solution to slow menus is to remove the menus? The standard way people have been interfacing with GUI applications since 1984? You people do know Chome is just trying to look like IE 7, which was trying to look like Safari, which actually does have menus just not attached to each browser window?
On the topic of video, I wish more people would provide direct downloadable links to video files so even if my browser doesn't know how to play a video, I can view it in an external player like VLC. And it seems like the only realistic answer for bundled in-browser video here is if Mozilla can negotiate some kind of special licensing agreement with the h.264 folks. Although I seriously think video should be implemented as some kind of plug-in that can be updated separately as the video-codec-of-the-day changes.
All that aside, it is interesting how open Mozilla appears to be in discussing their plains. Apple keeps their plans top secret with not a word uttered, Microsoft's plans are openly "leaked" so people feel naughty when a preview/beta , Oracle's plans are covered with legalese and subject to contract terms, Linux plans are written in some cryptic programming language or something. Well, it is just nice seeing somebody try to be open like this (even if they still wind up doing their own thing)
Hollywood also thinks it is easy to "hack" in to any particular system to get whatever important piece of information is needed to move the story along.
While in real life some systems may not exactly be super secure, they would likely spend days digging through the system going "what the hell is this crap?" before actually finding any meaningful, correct data. And you never hear them say "Oh, we can't get in to this system because it is properly firewalled, up to date, and secured."
And on the other end there always seems to be some security room with lots of monitors where someone instantly detects the "hack" and asks the big bad/good guy what they should do.
In real life their system has been p0wned for the last two years and they never noticed, and nobody knows enough about the system to fix it.
-Terry for the 50th time: what is the password?"
-"fuckyou"
Unfortunately that may be how the conversation actually went, but without the joke. I would like to think that in a situation like that most people would say something like: "I want to help, I really do, but if I may please explain, there is a policy..."
However real people under real stress can behave in less than rational ways. And, sadly, in the real world even a small single negative action can result in an avalanche of unpleasant reactions.
Sound like this could have some bad repercussions for IT folks. Of course all I know about the situation is what has been posted on Slashdot. There could be, and usually is, more to the story. Now that the trial is over with will the court records be posted somewhere?
I remember when reading the manuals were the ONLY way to figure out how to play a game. On Atari 2600 games and the likes you would often need them to figure out what those little pixelated blobs were supposed to be on the screen and what to do with them, and the manual certainly wouldn't fit in 4k bytes of rom. On text based Infocom interactive fiction games you would always need to read through an example session in the manual to figure out the basic vocabulary understood by the particular game.
Utilities and tools would often come with multiple manuals hundreds of pages long, describing every little feature in accurate detail. And they all needed to be fairly well written because the manufacturers could not just push a button and update the books to fill in any incomplete parts.
But for quite a while now most applications have included electronic documentation or built-in tutorials in addition to a printed manual, sometimes even with the exact same content! So it does seem reasonable to only maintain that information in one place if the user can do without.
Documentation in some form is very important and reduces the amount of time users spend figuring out things. Imagine if you had product with a million users, and something all of them need to do took each user 15 minutes to figure out on their own, but could be reduced to nothing by properly documenting it... how many lifetimes have you just saved? (Although it seems like some companies these days intentionally keep things undocumented or obscure so they can keep overpriced contractors and trainers employed)
My guess is the browser will be come the desktop for operating systems. The browser will no longer be a separate program you have to launch, but rather just a layer of the operating system. Think about when the last time was you used a computer and didn't open a browser window.
My Guess is that idiots that don't understand what a browser is or what a computer operating system is, or think there is nothing else you can do with a computer than browse the web, will keep spewing this kind of mumbo jumbo.
The computing universe does not revolve around web browsing. There is a significant design and implementation benefit by keeping the OS, shell, and browser separate. IE and Windows has proven why merging these a bad idea.
I often don't have a web browser window open, because I'm working on databases, word processing, graphics, file management, or playing video games - all of which *gasp* don't need a web browser window! And when I am doing those I don't want one!
Oh, let me see, I predict that 5 years from now, browsers are going to be about the freaking same. Perhaps, as usual, with a few more useless bells and whistles nobody really needs but some PHB though would be cool.
Why? Well, a browser is an application that retrieves web documents, renders them on your screen, and enables you to navigate through them using hyper links. Nothing more, nothing less. It won't make your toast and it won't replace your operating system. People may try things like that but then it's not just a browser any more, and it is usually a bad idea.
The basic functionality of a browser really hasn't changed much since Tim Berners-Lee released his "World Wide Web" browser in 1991. Feel free to try and come up with something new that meets the needs of the world better. I dare say there is room for improvement, but I just don't that kind of innovation happening much any more - people just keep trying to shoehorn "applications" in to something that is only meant to render documents and keep scratching their head as to why that doesn't work very well.
It is obvious what is happening here.
To me it is obvious what has happened here. Some years ago some one probably thought it would be a good idea to implement an automated timekeeping system, without doing a proper cost/benefit analysis, thinking they could just quickly drop some slightly customized system in place and never have to touch it again.
Government agencies usually have many complicated and unusual timekeeping rules that sometimes even change. Often this is the result of various laws they have to deal with that private companies would not have to deal with. They almost certainly underestimated the amount of customization needed for a time keeping program like this, especially if this is based on an existing system that was never designed to deal with their kinds of rules.
Don't blame on corruption what can be adequately explained by stupidity.
I worked at a job where we had to swipe our badges in/out. Management noticed that people would just give their badges to a friend and leave early. The friend would swipe them out on time (and they would switch back and forth). The solution was to install a thumb print scanner.
And before long they will be giving each other their thumbs, or something like that.
That's what happens when you throw technology at a people problem rather than dealing with the people directly.
So the MPAA/RIAA finally forced YouTube to preemptively address all remaining possible copyright issues?
If they had it their way, they would yank the plug on the entire internet.
> So far, MSIE still is getting on 100% despite the 'browser ballot'
The technically correct solution to this problem would have been to go forward with the release of Windows 7e and add some kind of protection (keep an eye on the number of legs broken) to make sure OEMs were in no way influenced by Microsoft as to which browser the OEM choses to bundle. This way the OEMs choice of bundle would hopefully be related directly to what users actually want, and as a result selling more units for the OEM.
I'm not sure why this deal fell through. Up until the last minute it seemed like they were going to ship Windows 7e instead.
I worked with a lot of MFM (ST506 interface) drives back in the day, and from my experience it was very unlikely that different models of MFM controller cards could read the drives from one another. If I installed a newer MFM disk controller card in a machine or moved the drive to a different machine with a different MFM controller, I would almost always have to re-low level format the drive before I could even run DOS format. (And mine were just FAT16 so the file system was never the issue)
So even if you have another MFM controller card, unless it is the exact same model of card it is unlikely that you could read sectors off of the drive. Their underlying low-level formats seemed to differ.
I also actually had the pleasure of briefly using an older model Altos 8600. That model had a bunch of serial ports for dumb terminals, an 8 inch floppy drive and an *8 inch* 40 meg Quantum Q2040 hard drive. I still have the 8" Microsoft Xenix floppy disks.
It is unreasonable to expect a vendor to continue to support their old products forever.
Programmers must draw a line somewhere, how much of an OS do they want to re-implement in their application? Sometimes such re-implement has to be done, but other times it is just too much work and maintenance. It is all about balance.
On a related note Mozilla just released their final update to SeaMonkey 1.1 (1.1.19). Here is a screen shot of it running on NT 3.51! Very impressive work keeping it running on a 15-year old OS for this long.
Calling it "OOXML" certainly can be confusing since it is easy to not know or remember what the "OO" stands for. But on top of that, the average person knows this format only as the "Microsoft Office 2007" format.
And rightfully, the "Microsoft Office 2007" format is all it is.
I look at user agents from time to time, and it blows my mind how much stuff some programs are permitted to put in there. It seems like every toolbar, add-on, and browser re-branding these days wants to put itself in you user agent.
I wonder what the longest non-fake user agent is these days? I recall there was a problem a while back on the Mozillazine forums because it records user agent strings for support purposes, but only allocated so many characters. Thanks to some new toolbars and such some people couldn't post because their user agent string was to long.
I don't think people realize that what some programs can add to their user agent sting can potentially be a privacy issue.
Really, even with a most basic user agent string there is, arguably, still information that probably doesn't need to be there any more. Do web sites really need to know your specific Windows version? CPU Type? Rendering engine version? Browser minor revision? And what is with all the MS .Net verison info anyway? It just seems like a lot of detail.