I don't know if they have done anything about this recently, but there was a problem with domain parking sites putting up a robots.txt that instructs Archive.org to delete or suppress any archives of the site that was there previously. Have run in to a few sites like that. If someone dies and their site goes with them, it isn't right for some squatter to remove their work from history.
And I wish I could pull up historic copies of the original altavista.digital.com.
> So what you're saying is that it's worth me upgrading from my 14" CRT and windows 95?
A 14" CRT would work great with Windows 8's metro apps. That is about the screen size it was designed for. Your fancy 40" monitor is obsolete now as you must replace it with something SMALLER.
The summary puts "touch" and "future" together as if touch is a new thing.
Look up the HP 150. This was a desktop computer with a touch screen back in 1983. I'm sure Bill Gates saw this at the 1983 Comdex - a few booths down MS was demonstrating a vaporware product called "Windows". There are reasons we don't waste our money on touch screens for desktop computers, and they were all hashed out a long time ago. But somehow touch screens are magically new and the old reasons magically don't exist any more.
Microsoft BOB was also easy to learn. But do you really want to do all your work like that?
Over the years I have learned more GUIs and UIs than I can even count. Many of them required reading 100+ page manuals. It only took me a few minutes of experimenting to "figure out" windows 8. The problem with Windows 8 isn't that it is hard to learn (although some visual cues for certain features would be helpful). The problem is that it doesn't work in the way I need do to my work, no mater how much I "relearn"
I stepped up to a windowing environment back in the early 90s when I no longer was stuck with a tiny little monitor. Now they want to throw me back to DOS-Like full screen applications with Metro! (I refuse to call it "Modern UI" because it is not)
Are we somehow now saying that all the people who wanted a windowing document oriented file-folder interface with the Xerox Star, Apple Lisa/Macintosh, and Windows 9x were totally wrong?
If this new dumbed down MS BOB-like interface really makes some people happy then fine, but it creates a problem for the rest of us.
> Stop Bitching and complaining about every change in technology and get use to the the Damn thing.
It scares me that your comment was modded up so high. If everyone, as you suggest, stops "bitching", and instead starts happily taking everything up the ass, then what incentive is there for anything to change for the better?
Imagine that someone told the people around caveman Ogg to Stop Bitching about the inability to easily move things around. He was going to invent the wheel, but aparently everyone is happy with things the way they are!
> "We believe that Internet Explorer is a really good browser" - Steve Jobs, 1997
Steve Jobs said that at Macworld Boston 1997 when announcing a deal with Microsoft where they would make IE the default on the Mac, essentially in exchange for Microsoft to continue producing MS-Office for the Mac. He got BOOED loudly when announcing that. Anybody really interested in that quote should see the video. The way he said it, you could tell he had a virtual gun to his head.
Don't know if this was mentioned on slashdot before (or there weren't enough dupes to notice) but it seems some domain parkers are using rouge robots.txt files to delete or suppress Archive.org's archives of whatever site what there prior.
I'm mentioning this because if/when Slashdot is replaced by our good friend "backpack girl" or similar, the history could be lost. (not that Archive.org copies everything anyway)
Already ran in to a few sites like that while trying to do some research. Dead links pointing to parked domains, and Archive.org refused to give anything out based on a current robots.txt.
Worse yet, some companies have asked for removal of archived content after buyouts and such. Good luck finding info on the original search engine altavista.digital.com. No *.digital.com archives remain.
I was reading SlashDot before back before accounts. Originally I read CNET news back in those days and some of their articles started linking to some new little "SlashDot" site.
Unfortunately I didn't have a valid e-mail address I could use at the time, so there is probably a Zaphod Beeblebrox (what I was going by on a couple of places at the time) account sitting around with a validation e-mail sent to a@b.com, nathan@none.com or something similar.:(
It wasn't until later I got my own e-mail and the motivation to sign up again to rant about some IE stuff. And by then all the good nics were taken.
Anyway, I have seen soooo many sites come and go over the years, I am very pleasantly surprised that SlashDot has not yet gone 404. Here is to hoping it will be around in another 15!
It's great to see computer history getting some more attention. Many people like to turn up their nose at anything "old", but there is much that can be learned from computing history. There was much innovation and not all ideas were fully explored.
And the mistakes of history are repeating themselves. Anyone who thinks touch screens are new should look up the 1983 HP 150 touch screen computer.
Last thing I need is for an idiot in some far and distant place to think it fun to roll out a new version and trigger an update on all my computers that may render all the corporate apps unusable.
> , there was a raid, then there wasn't, now there was... WTF?
Exactly. There was a RAID... and then there wasn't!
Just had to say that.:)
Anyway, Demonoid has bounced back so many times in the past it just doesn't seem right to think that it might finally be gone for good. Guess we will have to just wait and see.
So after reading through the entire article (wait, was I supposed to do that?) the bottom line is that there is no significant difference that any regular user would care about.
I don't think shaving a second or two off of boot time is going to impress people when they see the user interface is "all different" now.
"Landlines" aren't going anywhere. Just because some idiots think they need to be connected 24/7 doesn't mean that they will go away. And if cell phone prices go up from all of this sue-happy nonsense, then more people will simply switch back to regular phones as they realize the luxury isn't worth it.
I'm tired so I hope I haven't gotten these numbers mixed up:
So there are roughly three hundred million people in the USA and 1.3 million requests? Since they mention emergencies I presume they are including 911 calls. There are probably some requests for the same people but they don't say. But with what they give, this means one out of every 230 has either called 911 this last year, or has been investigated.
I get it now. He says the PC is changing. Because he (well, Microsoft) is going to MAKE it change. Change to a locked down environment that can only run Microsoft approved OSes. And do things the Microsoft way. And you are going to like it because they will spend bazillions in marketing dollars making everyone think it is the best thing since sliced bread.
This reminds me of a while back when I was telling some people about this cool recording device I have.
It is not tied to any provider, no subscription needed, I can record shows off of cable or OTA TV, it stores them on removable media that I can give to anyone with a similar unit to play back, it can quickly move past commercials, etc...
Likewise, if I didn't like IE on my Windows 98 box, I could have just bought a Mac or a UNIX workstation. The U.S. government didn't see it that way.
Well then you were in a lucky position. If *I* didn't like IE on my Windows 9x machine back then, then I was pretty much SOL because 99% of the software I NEEDED to use was for Windows only.
The vast majority of other computer users at the time were in the same boat. Critical business software was rarely ported to the Mac, only select games, and Wine wasn't a viable option back then.
If you wanted to run the latest Windows 98-only software (usually not the fault of MS), then you had to install Windows 98 bundled with IE (the fault of MS).
My advice would be to find some inexpensive USB or eSATA drive enclosures for the smaller drives and just use them as off-line storage.
Take some data you don't need instant access to, put it on one drive, and make an identical copy on a second for backup. Put them in a corner and only power them up when needed.
Or just use the smaller drives as partial backup for a larger NAS. Can be handy if you suddenly need to grab a collection of files and go.
Like everyone else is saying, no sense keeping them spinning and eating up power. Might even think twice about the larger drives unless they are power efficient models.
It seems as if Windows 8 for ARM is simply turning in to another Windows CE. That is, it is a fork rather than a direct port of the Windows OS with many unique differences.
Back in the NT 4 days you could sit at a DEC Alpha machine and not even notice you were running on a different architecture until you tried to run an x86 executable. (Even then it could run 16-bit Windows 3.1 via an emulator that visually looked exactly the same as running a 16-bit program on NT 4 x86 and later there was FX32) The point is it had the same functionality as the other ports.
Where I live, these smart meters are already viewed as unreliable by the general public. The local news has reported numerous stories about how people's water bills suddenly went up after these new "smart" meters were installed.
The thing is, there is no way for the general public to verify how accurate or reliable these meters are.
Ideally these should be extremely simple, easily auditable, devices. But I can imagine the specs for something like this growing until it can send e-mail... using a database... and object orientation... and XML... on the web... in Microsoft.NET... now with HTML 5... and so on.
Not entirely true. Back in the days of MFM/RLL drives, SpinRite could perform a "low level" format on each track. This ensured every last magnetic 1 and 0 was re-written to the disk. Back in the day I witnessed many times when SpinRite would completely recover bad sectors, presumably damaged by electrical/controller issues rather than physical surface issues, and a full pattern test would prove the space was safe to use.
Modern IDE drives don't allow low-level formatting, and as far as I know, even re-writing the user content of the drive does not re-write sector header data. Modern IDE drives also have hidden reserved space for "spare" tracks and space where they store their firmware, which likewise never gets tested or re-written.
Additionally, on MFM/RLL drives SpinRite could use low-level formatting to optimize the sector interleave for the specific system. (You would be surprised, moving some disks and their ISA controllers to a faster system would actually require a higher interleave, slowing them down incredibly until SpinRite was run)
Still, SpinRite is the only program that I know of that can do a controlled read/write pattern test and modify the underlying file system when needed.
All those sounds, and no mention of loading programs from cassette tape. Nothing like actually being able to HEAR the software as it loads in to your TI-99/4A.
I don't know if this will work for you, but it works for some big companies:
Just post the full unprotected software for download on your web site. Make it clear that if they want security updates, bug fixes, permission to use it for production, or any other kinds of support, that they must purchase a license. (And be sure to post scary sounding security bulletins periodically, with the actual updates only being available if they have a paid license account with you)
The advantage is that with an official download source any torrents will likely dry up over night. This also makes it easier for people to evaluate your software for possible use, potentially bringing in new customers. You will get some a-holes who try to use it for unlicensed production, but hopefully they will eventually want security updates, fixes and other support from you.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know if they have done anything about this recently, but there was a problem with domain parking sites putting up a robots.txt that instructs Archive.org to delete or suppress any archives of the site that was there previously. Have run in to a few sites like that. If someone dies and their site goes with them, it isn't right for some squatter to remove their work from history.
And I wish I could pull up historic copies of the original altavista.digital.com.
> So what you're saying is that it's worth me upgrading from my 14" CRT and windows 95?
A 14" CRT would work great with Windows 8's metro apps. That is about the screen size it was designed for. Your fancy 40" monitor is obsolete now as you must replace it with something SMALLER.
BTW, happily posted with:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win95; en-US; rv:1.8.1.25pre) Gecko/20110912 SeaMonkey/1.1.20pre
The summary puts "touch" and "future" together as if touch is a new thing.
Look up the HP 150. This was a desktop computer with a touch screen back in 1983. I'm sure Bill Gates saw this at the 1983 Comdex - a few booths down MS was demonstrating a vaporware product called "Windows". There are reasons we don't waste our money on touch screens for desktop computers, and they were all hashed out a long time ago. But somehow touch screens are magically new and the old reasons magically don't exist any more.
Microsoft BOB was also easy to learn. But do you really want to do all your work like that?
Over the years I have learned more GUIs and UIs than I can even count. Many of them required reading 100+ page manuals. It only took me a few minutes of experimenting to "figure out" windows 8. The problem with Windows 8 isn't that it is hard to learn (although some visual cues for certain features would be helpful). The problem is that it doesn't work in the way I need do to my work, no mater how much I "relearn"
I stepped up to a windowing environment back in the early 90s when I no longer was stuck with a tiny little monitor. Now they want to throw me back to DOS-Like full screen applications with Metro! (I refuse to call it "Modern UI" because it is not)
Are we somehow now saying that all the people who wanted a windowing document oriented file-folder interface with the Xerox Star, Apple Lisa/Macintosh, and Windows 9x were totally wrong?
If this new dumbed down MS BOB-like interface really makes some people happy then fine, but it creates a problem for the rest of us.
> Stop Bitching and complaining about every change in technology and get use to the the Damn thing.
It scares me that your comment was modded up so high. If everyone, as you suggest, stops "bitching", and instead starts happily taking everything up the ass, then what incentive is there for anything to change for the better?
Imagine that someone told the people around caveman Ogg to Stop Bitching about the inability to easily move things around. He was going to invent the wheel, but aparently everyone is happy with things the way they are!
> "We believe that Internet Explorer is a really good browser" - Steve Jobs, 1997
Steve Jobs said that at Macworld Boston 1997 when announcing a deal with Microsoft where they would make IE the default on the Mac, essentially in exchange for Microsoft to continue producing MS-Office for the Mac. He got BOOED loudly when announcing that. Anybody really interested in that quote should see the video. The way he said it, you could tell he had a virtual gun to his head.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxOp5mBY9IY
Don't know if this was mentioned on slashdot before (or there weren't enough dupes to notice) but it seems some domain parkers are using rouge robots.txt files to delete or suppress Archive.org's archives of whatever site what there prior.
I'm mentioning this because if/when Slashdot is replaced by our good friend "backpack girl" or similar, the history could be lost. (not that Archive.org copies everything anyway)
Already ran in to a few sites like that while trying to do some research. Dead links pointing to parked domains, and Archive.org refused to give anything out based on a current robots.txt.
Worse yet, some companies have asked for removal of archived content after buyouts and such. Good luck finding info on the original search engine altavista.digital.com. No *.digital.com archives remain.
Probably for a different reason, but Archive.org is currently blocking access to the original Chips and Dips site (fortunately I pulled out a copy ages ago before they did that): http://wayback.archive.org/web/*/http://www.cs.hope.edu/~malda/cnd/
I was reading SlashDot before back before accounts. Originally I read CNET news back in those days and some of their articles started linking to some new little "SlashDot" site.
Unfortunately I didn't have a valid e-mail address I could use at the time, so there is probably a Zaphod Beeblebrox (what I was going by on a couple of places at the time) account sitting around with a validation e-mail sent to a@b.com, nathan@none.com or something similar. :(
It wasn't until later I got my own e-mail and the motivation to sign up again to rant about some IE stuff. And by then all the good nics were taken.
Anyway, I have seen soooo many sites come and go over the years, I am very pleasantly surprised that SlashDot has not yet gone 404. Here is to hoping it will be around in another 15!
It's great to see computer history getting some more attention. Many people like to turn up their nose at anything "old", but there is much that can be learned from computing history. There was much innovation and not all ideas were fully explored.
And the mistakes of history are repeating themselves. Anyone who thinks touch screens are new should look up the 1983 HP 150 touch screen computer.
A way while back there was a very similar attempt by Coke to put a GPS in a coke can, and swoop in and award the winner.
This raised a lot of security concerns, as there are many places where it would be bad for this to go off in, such as inside a military base.
Links:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/03/09/30/189208/track-a-soda-can-with-gps
http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/04/05/06/136205/gps-cell-phone-in-soda-can-form
And that is why you should download and install the Firefox Extended Support Release: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/all.html instead of their version-of-the-month.
Hopefully future ESR releases will remain able to manage updates.
> , there was a raid, then there wasn't, now there was... WTF?
Exactly. There was a RAID... and then there wasn't!
Just had to say that. :)
Anyway, Demonoid has bounced back so many times in the past it just doesn't seem right to think that it might finally be gone for good. Guess we will have to just wait and see.
Obligatory Dilbert strip:
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1996-09-07/
So after reading through the entire article (wait, was I supposed to do that?) the bottom line is that there is no significant difference that any regular user would care about.
I don't think shaving a second or two off of boot time is going to impress people when they see the user interface is "all different" now.
"Landlines" aren't going anywhere. Just because some idiots think they need to be connected 24/7 doesn't mean that they will go away. And if cell phone prices go up from all of this sue-happy nonsense, then more people will simply switch back to regular phones as they realize the luxury isn't worth it.
I'm tired so I hope I haven't gotten these numbers mixed up:
So there are roughly three hundred million people in the USA and 1.3 million requests? Since they mention emergencies I presume they are including 911 calls. There are probably some requests for the same people but they don't say. But with what they give, this means one out of every 230 has either called 911 this last year, or has been investigated.
Really?
I get it now. He says the PC is changing. Because he (well, Microsoft) is going to MAKE it change. Change to a locked down environment that can only run Microsoft approved OSes. And do things the Microsoft way. And you are going to like it because they will spend bazillions in marketing dollars making everyone think it is the best thing since sliced bread.
Count me out.
This reminds me of a while back when I was telling some people about this cool recording device I have.
It is not tied to any provider, no subscription needed, I can record shows off of cable or OTA TV, it stores them on removable media that I can give to anyone with a similar unit to play back, it can quickly move past commercials, etc...
Them: "wow that is awesome, what is it called?"
Me: A VCR.
Well then you were in a lucky position. If *I* didn't like IE on my Windows 9x machine back then, then I was pretty much SOL because 99% of the software I NEEDED to use was for Windows only.
The vast majority of other computer users at the time were in the same boat. Critical business software was rarely ported to the Mac, only select games, and Wine wasn't a viable option back then.
If you wanted to run the latest Windows 98-only software (usually not the fault of MS), then you had to install Windows 98 bundled with IE (the fault of MS).
My advice would be to find some inexpensive USB or eSATA drive enclosures for the smaller drives and just use them as off-line storage.
Take some data you don't need instant access to, put it on one drive, and make an identical copy on a second for backup. Put them in a corner and only power them up when needed.
Or just use the smaller drives as partial backup for a larger NAS. Can be handy if you suddenly need to grab a collection of files and go.
Like everyone else is saying, no sense keeping them spinning and eating up power. Might even think twice about the larger drives unless they are power efficient models.
It seems as if Windows 8 for ARM is simply turning in to another Windows CE. That is, it is a fork rather than a direct port of the Windows OS with many unique differences.
Back in the NT 4 days you could sit at a DEC Alpha machine and not even notice you were running on a different architecture until you tried to run an x86 executable. (Even then it could run 16-bit Windows 3.1 via an emulator that visually looked exactly the same as running a 16-bit program on NT 4 x86 and later there was FX32) The point is it had the same functionality as the other ports.
Where I live, these smart meters are already viewed as unreliable by the general public. The local news has reported numerous stories about how people's water bills suddenly went up after these new "smart" meters were installed.
The thing is, there is no way for the general public to verify how accurate or reliable these meters are.
Ideally these should be extremely simple, easily auditable, devices. But I can imagine the specs for something like this growing until it can send e-mail... using a database... and object orientation... and XML... on the web... in Microsoft .NET... now with HTML 5... and so on.
>Still works 100% as HDD tech is still the same
Not entirely true. Back in the days of MFM/RLL drives, SpinRite could perform a "low level" format on each track. This ensured every last magnetic 1 and 0 was re-written to the disk. Back in the day I witnessed many times when SpinRite would completely recover bad sectors, presumably damaged by electrical/controller issues rather than physical surface issues, and a full pattern test would prove the space was safe to use.
Modern IDE drives don't allow low-level formatting, and as far as I know, even re-writing the user content of the drive does not re-write sector header data. Modern IDE drives also have hidden reserved space for "spare" tracks and space where they store their firmware, which likewise never gets tested or re-written.
Additionally, on MFM/RLL drives SpinRite could use low-level formatting to optimize the sector interleave for the specific system. (You would be surprised, moving some disks and their ISA controllers to a faster system would actually require a higher interleave, slowing them down incredibly until SpinRite was run)
Still, SpinRite is the only program that I know of that can do a controlled read/write pattern test and modify the underlying file system when needed.
All those sounds, and no mention of loading programs from cassette tape. Nothing like actually being able to HEAR the software as it loads in to your TI-99/4A.
I don't know if this will work for you, but it works for some big companies:
Just post the full unprotected software for download on your web site. Make it clear that if they want security updates, bug fixes, permission to use it for production, or any other kinds of support, that they must purchase a license. (And be sure to post scary sounding security bulletins periodically, with the actual updates only being available if they have a paid license account with you)
The advantage is that with an official download source any torrents will likely dry up over night. This also makes it easier for people to evaluate your software for possible use, potentially bringing in new customers. You will get some a-holes who try to use it for unlicensed production, but hopefully they will eventually want security updates, fixes and other support from you.