One thing that works against drivers in an unintended acceleration situation, is when they first panic and press the brake, although it may overpower the engine, it won't be a screeching halt, so they may release the brake and reapply. If the engine is at WOT, there will be no vacuum, and the vacuum reserve for the power brakes will be depleted, and the brakes will require a substantial amount more effort.
Try this exercise: Stop a car at the top of a hill (steeper the better), put it in Neutral, and shut off the engine*. Release the brake, now pump it several times to deplete the reserve. See how much force you need to slow the car down. In my experience I basically need to prop myself up with my shoulders, and put all my weight on the pedal. That's as an able body male in a compact car coasting down a hill, not as a frail old biddy mashing the brake and gas in her Camry.
*Someone's going to complain that shutting the engine off will lock the steering. In every automatic I've seen, if the shifter isn't in park, you can't turn the key back far enough to lock the steering, only shut the engine off. With manuals you usually require an extra release button, or other noticeable detent to move it back to lock. You only need to move it one detent. Hell after you kill the engine you can move it back to ON, as long as the engine isn't running. There will be a loss of power steering, but it should still be controllable especially once rolling. Automatics usually only allow a restart in Park or Netural, by using Neutral if you can't overcome the brakes, or steering, restart the engine (will not work in DRIVE, REVERSE, or LOW). In a standard you may want to try leaving it in 2nd, with the engine off but ignition "ON". That way if you need power you can pop the clutch, or restart with key.
The first reaction in the case of a runaway car should be to shift to neutral or de-clutch. All modern cars should have a rev limiter to keep from exceeding the redline, and many modern automatics (at least, don't know about manual) have a very low revlimiter if in neutal or park (they will only go up to 3-4000RPM when the engine redline is 6500RPM), so engine damage shouldn't be a concern. Second reaction if that doesn't work is to shut off the ignition (I hate push button ignitions for this, you usually have to push and hold for a couple seconds for a forced power off... Just when I thought an ATX powersupply was a PITA with a crashed computer) . Third should be to try any available parking brake (don't know how the stupid new electric parking brakes would work), and finally as a last ditch effort, I'd try Park as I look for a nice guard rail I could graze against.
cursive is just a way of trying to make your writing prettier.
I thought cursive was about reducing pen up-pen down operations on fountain pens, not really an issue with ball points or mechanical pencils. There's also some potential benefit in speed.
Nonetheless I think good manuscript printing, and keyboarding are more worthwhile skills.
At work the lease on my T410 was up and replaced with a Thinkpad T440. It's alright, but it has a clickpad (that I hate), and it only has 2 USB ports (my old Thinkpad had 4).
The vertical screen resolution also shrank from 1280x800 to 1366x768. The RAM is the same 4GB as my 3 year old thinkpad, and the CPU isn't appreciably faster.
On a positive note the battery life is good. I was at an 8 hour session running entirely on battery, and still had 33% left at the end of the day.
I never really saw MKV as being super dominant. I would say from 2003-2012 or so I saw AVI as the primary container for run on the mill TV show downloads, now I see primarily MP4, with a splash of MKV.
I prefer MP4 as I can load it into the native iPod Touch library (using CopyTrans Manager as iTunes is Shite), and dock it into the cardio equipment at the gym and watch it on the eliptical's screen, which doesn't work with third party container/codecs that I have to play in third party media players. I have to run MKV files though AVIDemux to change containers.
In terms of speed, I think you also don't understand the real problem. The problem is not comparing the 100-200 MByte/sec linear access time of a HDD to the 500-550 MByte/sec linear access time of a SSD. The problem is that once the computer has to seek that hard drive, that 100-200 Mbytes/sec drops to 20 MBytes/sec, and drops to 2 MBytes/sec in the worst-case. The SSD, on the other hand, will still maintain ~400-550 MBytes/sec even doing completely random accesses. Lots of things can cause this... de-duplication, for example. Background scans. Background applications (dropbox scans, security scans). Paging memory. Filesystem fragmentation. Game updates (fragmented data files). Whatever.
Linear numbers are about right, but I've found random performance much worse than that. 0.8MB/s on a hard drive, and 80MB/s on a consumer Solid State. This is a 100x improvement, but not near saturating the 500MB/s SATA III interface.
But for sure when my PC at work is grinding to a halt I'll open up Resource monitor and see that Norton is randomly thrashing about.
Some people don't understand just how important random I/O access is.
HDD might have 250MB/s linear read, and 0.8MB/s random read. SSD might have 500MB/s read, and 80MB/s random read.
The linear speed is "only" twice as much, but the random is 100x faster. When a computer is grinding to a halt with the disk access light on solid, open up resource monitor in Win 7 or task manager in Win 8. Usually you will see the system is tied up with random access at less than 1MB/s. This is where people see the "Wow!" improvement of Solid State.
That sounds great, but I'll tell you what, a wood-frame house sure is nice when you want to make changes to the floor plan.
One thing concrete has going for it is fire resistance as well. A Concrete structure with mineral wool insulation won't burn. Take a wood structure with EPS (styrofoam), and vinyl siding and it will go up in flames.
I also don't understand the resistance to sprinkler systems. The number I saw was the cost of a residential sprinkler system was 1-1.5% the cost of new construction. To prevent a catastrophic fire in your house (and possible catch other houses on fire). Yes water damage is a mess, but I'd rather lose the kitchen and the rec room underneath than lose everything (especially including loved ones or myself).
The purpose of the mission wasn't just to land something on the surface and have it continuously live stream.
They still have the orbiter with a big instrument suite, which will continue to provide useful data.
The lander had two goals. One was to operate all the instruments and collect data at least once. The non-rechargable 1200Wh Li/SOCl2 batteries allowed this to happen, exactly as planned, even without the sun. It didn't land where planned, but it did land, collect the data, and transmit it.
The second part was a longer term monitoring, which the solar cells recharge the smaller 150Wh Li-Ion batteries to support. This is the part that's in jeopardy.
Remember Voyager 1, the probe sent out in 1977 that's 18 light hours away? The Plasma Spectrometer and Photopolarimeter System sensors were defective. Four others sensors had to be disabled because it's running out of power. What a colossal boondoggle.
Are you sure there is not a size barrier on the BIOS / disk controller? Or that the HDD has a jumper to a lower capacity for compatibility with above mentioned size barrier? I remember with hard drives that were "too big", you'd have to set the jumper, then install overlay software (usually in the MBR) to allow access to the full capacity. Int13 has a limit around 8GB, and is one of those barriers.
'If Microsoft ever does applications for Linux it means I've won.' -- Linus Torvalds
Hardcore neckbeards won't agree. Android, although it has a Linux kernel, and a substantial userbase, and is easy to use, won't count because it doesn't have GNU and X and you can't go "sudo apt-get Msoffice &make &make-install"
The biggest issue with the ELM327 clones is that they're very very flakey - the bain of my life!:)
Some have issues with timing on serial data, resulting in garbled output Some have issues with canbus systems and causing the canbus itself to have internal comms problems (causing your car to complain) Some don't work on all the protocols (a PCB design issue) Some get hot and reset Some have dry joints (ok not a chip issue, but a build quality)
I warn the user (but don't stop them) if they have a clone unit (as it's not too helpful), but my stuff gets a *lot* of flak because the OBD adapter is kaput or doing crappy things (the above).:'-(
My cheap bluetooth ELM327 works okay, with a couple notable issues: -It has to be re-paired everytime it's power cycled -Bluetooth MAC is obviously fraudulent. Like 11:22:33:44:55:66
But won't the OEMs stock up on Win7 (especially if they sell to the business market.)
Windows 7 Pro OEM licenses will continue to be available for a minimum of one more year. As well Windows 8/8.1 Pro include downgrade rights to Windows 7 Pro.
Only benefit for a business customer with Windows 7 would be if they want Windows XP downgrade rights as that is not included with Windows 8. Downgrade rights is why for years corporations could buy PCs with Windows Vista or Windows 7 licenses, and image them to Windows XP for no cost. With actual Volume licensing agreements / Software assurance, you can downgrade all the way back to Windows 95 / NT4 if you want.
However with newer hardware, fewer and fewer support Windows XP. Intel's latest Haswell offerings do not support Windows XP. Ivy Bridge was the last to properly support XP.
With Windows, and NTFS, the MFT (Master File Table) occupies 12.5% of the disk space. Once all other sectors on the disk are full, it will actually store files IN the MFT reserved space, and you run the risk of fragmenting the MFT itself and decreasing performance.
As well the defrag tool (automatically scheduled or not), requires 15% free space to run.
Tabs suck - switching between explorers using the task bar (when set up properly to not combine windows on the taskbar) is good.
What explorer has lacked since Windows 3.1 is two panes in explorer, to simplify moving/sorting stuff between directories. Yeah, you can snap an explorer to each side of the desktop these days but that only works properly if you have just 1 monitor. If I could easily tile explorers on one monitor in a multi-mon setup, that would be far less annoying.
Winkey+left, Winkey+Right to snap to edges of the current monitor in a multimonitor setup. Press it again and the window will jump over to the next monitor.
I've had plenty of success with Crucial and their M500 and M550.
I recently had a new PC built. The shop was offering Kingston V300. A quick search showed that the Sandforce controller runs like crap with incompressible data, and Kingston changed suppliers after media did all their benchmarks, so all new units performed like crap.
So searching for alternatives Samsung 840 EVO was a top pick. I was very close to pulling the trigger when I saw all these dire warnings about performance deteriorating with "old data". I knew a firmware fix was pending, but I didn't trust the fix so I kept looking.
I ended up with a Crucial M550 from Amazon (good price). I hope I don't regret it.
In the research I've done, Intel has an excellent reliability record, and OCZ has amazing performance, but questionable reliability.
The same way that you're suppose to run their DOS executable on a Linux?
The same way you run it on Windows?
64 bit Windows will not even pretend to run 16 bit DOS/Windows 3.1 applications. 32 bit Windows NT (/XP/Vista/7/8) will, but it's in an emulator so it can't access the hardware.
You need a freeDOS bootdisk. You can make it boot from CD or USB since most modern PC's don't have floppy drives.
A DOS executable is almost preferable since it doesn't require a proprietary OS.
SSDs will saturate SATA-3 for sequential reads and writes. My Crucial M550 gets 500MB/s vs 150MB/s on my Western Digital. Over a 3 fold improvement!
However where SSDs really shine is random reads and writes. This is why SSD's make PC's more responsive. My Crucial gets 26MB/s vs. 0.66MB/s on the WD. Almost 40 fold improvement, but not near saturating SATA-3. So there is still improvements to be made on random read/write performance.
More and more I see PC's slowing to a grind, and it's due to the Hard drive thrashing crazily at less than 1MB/s! Put an SSD in (any SSD) and it speeds right up.
It's kind of true. My job in Army was SATCOM, got out almost 4 years ago, about to finish Bachelor's in CS early next year. SATCOM was pretty much IT in the army. Imaging computers, setting up and maintaining network, running cables, troubleshooting software/hardware, etc. Once I got out I did a few years part time in IT while going to college.
. . .
Civilian contractors were always reachable in case we got stuck.
I worked with a bunch of career military guys as well as the standard in and out military folks and I'll tell you it is not much fun talking to someone in the field, trying to walk them through the setup of a router or editing config files in vi. My company's lousy solution was to send non-military people into hot zones and (obviously) these people nearly got themselves killed.
We have electrochemistry kit that is chugging along on a PC running Dos 6.2 and Win 3.11.
Getting your data off requires a floppy disk as an intermediate step. I have no idea what we'll do if that machine ever craps out - it would be a shame to have to retire the potentiostat because the computers that it was designed to talk to have effectively ascended to godhood in the meantime.
It's certainly not the only piece of analytical kit that is tied to legacy hardware. We have a couple of FTIR machines that look like props from Fallout: New Vegas but work just fine and I'm pretty sure the EPR computer is running Win95.
I shudder at the thought of using a floppy. I like the software FastLynx Kind of like Interlink, but it can easily drag and drop files from DOS to a Win95/98/ME/NT4/2K/XP/Vista/7/8 (32 or 64 bit) using Serial or parallel null modem cables. Cheap $2 USB-serial adapter can be had on eBay. To get faster Parallel transfers requires a real LPT port on your modern PC, not a USB adapter. You can get the bundle from them that includes the software, and cables.
If you have a PC with a broken floppy drive, it can even send the software using MODE and CTTY commands.
It also comes for licenses of Windows versions of Interlnk and Intersvr. The way I had it set up, I created an up to 2GB FAT16 Truecrypt image on my modern "Server" PC (you can use some other image software as well). This gets mapped to a drive on the legacy client machine so now you have a massive disk drive expansion. When the drive is mapped, FastLynx has exclusive use of it, and you can't access files on the host OS it until you disconnect from the legacy PC. Alternatively you can map the drives on the DOS PC onto your modern PC.
"most users need" is very often a fallacy based on personal assumptions (anecdotes are not data). One of the things I use home computer for is editing GoPro HD video, and that is a camera that have sold in very significant numbers and footage is unusable without editing (as it would be endless). But editing it's HD video is so slow on my fairly ok desktop that I can't wait for the new X99 platform to stabilize to buy a new PC. This is just one of many examples of "niche" use that put together end up with significant numbers. From what I can read from statistics and surveys it seems a big chunk of the real "just surfing" users have moved to tablets and are no longer in the PC market.
How much editing are you looking to do? If you're just looking to cut and splice, Avidemux works well as it can do quick lossless edits like that, as well as lossless conversion of container types. http://fixounet.free.fr/avidem... A little unstable, and a bit of a learning curve, but it works, and it's quick (if you don't re-encode the video stream).
I found editing HD video on my 7 year old Laptop using Sony Vegas to be a passable experience. I have to basically set all the preview settings to "ultra-crap mode", but I can get my previews, arrange the video, then let it render over night.
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One thing that works against drivers in an unintended acceleration situation, is when they first panic and press the brake, although it may overpower the engine, it won't be a screeching halt, so they may release the brake and reapply. If the engine is at WOT, there will be no vacuum, and the vacuum reserve for the power brakes will be depleted, and the brakes will require a substantial amount more effort.
Try this exercise: Stop a car at the top of a hill (steeper the better), put it in Neutral, and shut off the engine*. Release the brake, now pump it several times to deplete the reserve. See how much force you need to slow the car down. In my experience I basically need to prop myself up with my shoulders, and put all my weight on the pedal. That's as an able body male in a compact car coasting down a hill, not as a frail old biddy mashing the brake and gas in her Camry.
*Someone's going to complain that shutting the engine off will lock the steering. In every automatic I've seen, if the shifter isn't in park, you can't turn the key back far enough to lock the steering, only shut the engine off. With manuals you usually require an extra release button, or other noticeable detent to move it back to lock. You only need to move it one detent. Hell after you kill the engine you can move it back to ON, as long as the engine isn't running. There will be a loss of power steering, but it should still be controllable especially once rolling. Automatics usually only allow a restart in Park or Netural, by using Neutral if you can't overcome the brakes, or steering, restart the engine (will not work in DRIVE, REVERSE, or LOW). In a standard you may want to try leaving it in 2nd, with the engine off but ignition "ON". That way if you need power you can pop the clutch, or restart with key.
The first reaction in the case of a runaway car should be to shift to neutral or de-clutch. All modern cars should have a rev limiter to keep from exceeding the redline, and many modern automatics (at least, don't know about manual) have a very low revlimiter if in neutal or park (they will only go up to 3-4000RPM when the engine redline is 6500RPM), so engine damage shouldn't be a concern. Second reaction if that doesn't work is to shut off the ignition (I hate push button ignitions for this, you usually have to push and hold for a couple seconds for a forced power off... Just when I thought an ATX powersupply was a PITA with a crashed computer) . Third should be to try any available parking brake (don't know how the stupid new electric parking brakes would work), and finally as a last ditch effort, I'd try Park as I look for a nice guard rail I could graze against.
cursive is just a way of trying to make your writing prettier.
I thought cursive was about reducing pen up-pen down operations on fountain pens, not really an issue with ball points or mechanical pencils. There's also some potential benefit in speed.
Nonetheless I think good manuscript printing, and keyboarding are more worthwhile skills.
Au Contraire!
At work the lease on my T410 was up and replaced with a Thinkpad T440. It's alright, but it has a clickpad (that I hate), and it only has 2 USB ports (my old Thinkpad had 4).
The vertical screen resolution also shrank from 1280x800 to 1366x768. The RAM is the same 4GB as my 3 year old thinkpad, and the CPU isn't appreciably faster.
On a positive note the battery life is good. I was at an 8 hour session running entirely on battery, and still had 33% left at the end of the day.
I never really saw MKV as being super dominant. I would say from 2003-2012 or so I saw AVI as the primary container for run on the mill TV show downloads, now I see primarily MP4, with a splash of MKV.
I prefer MP4 as I can load it into the native iPod Touch library (using CopyTrans Manager as iTunes is Shite), and dock it into the cardio equipment at the gym and watch it on the eliptical's screen, which doesn't work with third party container/codecs that I have to play in third party media players. I have to run MKV files though AVIDemux to change containers.
Were they as good as the IBM Deathstar?
In terms of speed, I think you also don't understand the real problem. The problem is not comparing the 100-200 MByte/sec linear access time of a HDD to the 500-550 MByte/sec linear access time of a SSD. The problem is that once the computer has to seek that hard drive, that 100-200 Mbytes/sec drops to 20 MBytes/sec, and drops to 2 MBytes/sec in the worst-case. The SSD, on the other hand, will still maintain ~400-550 MBytes/sec even doing completely random accesses. Lots of things can cause this... de-duplication, for example. Background scans. Background applications (dropbox scans, security scans). Paging memory. Filesystem fragmentation. Game updates (fragmented data files). Whatever.
Linear numbers are about right, but I've found random performance much worse than that. 0.8MB/s on a hard drive, and 80MB/s on a consumer Solid State. This is a 100x improvement, but not near saturating the 500MB/s SATA III interface.
But for sure when my PC at work is grinding to a halt I'll open up Resource monitor and see that Norton is randomly thrashing about.
Some people don't understand just how important random I/O access is.
HDD might have 250MB/s linear read, and 0.8MB/s random read. SSD might have 500MB/s read, and 80MB/s random read.
The linear speed is "only" twice as much, but the random is 100x faster. When a computer is grinding to a halt with the disk access light on solid, open up resource monitor in Win 7 or task manager in Win 8. Usually you will see the system is tied up with random access at less than 1MB/s. This is where people see the "Wow!" improvement of Solid State.
That sounds great, but I'll tell you what, a wood-frame house sure is nice when you want to make changes to the floor plan.
One thing concrete has going for it is fire resistance as well. A Concrete structure with mineral wool insulation won't burn. Take a wood structure with EPS (styrofoam), and vinyl siding and it will go up in flames.
I also don't understand the resistance to sprinkler systems. The number I saw was the cost of a residential sprinkler system was 1-1.5% the cost of new construction. To prevent a catastrophic fire in your house (and possible catch other houses on fire). Yes water damage is a mess, but I'd rather lose the kitchen and the rec room underneath than lose everything (especially including loved ones or myself).
The purpose of the mission wasn't just to land something on the surface and have it continuously live stream.
They still have the orbiter with a big instrument suite, which will continue to provide useful data.
The lander had two goals. One was to operate all the instruments and collect data at least once. The non-rechargable 1200Wh Li/SOCl2 batteries allowed this to happen, exactly as planned, even without the sun. It didn't land where planned, but it did land, collect the data, and transmit it.
The second part was a longer term monitoring, which the solar cells recharge the smaller 150Wh Li-Ion batteries to support. This is the part that's in jeopardy.
Remember Voyager 1, the probe sent out in 1977 that's 18 light hours away? The Plasma Spectrometer and Photopolarimeter System sensors were defective. Four others sensors had to be disabled because it's running out of power. What a colossal boondoggle.
Are you sure there is not a size barrier on the BIOS / disk controller? Or that the HDD has a jumper to a lower capacity for compatibility with above mentioned size barrier? I remember with hard drives that were "too big", you'd have to set the jumper, then install overlay software (usually in the MBR) to allow access to the full capacity. Int13 has a limit around 8GB, and is one of those barriers.
Why, you want to cause Leonard Nimoy to off himself or what?
Don't worry, Sheldon still has Leonard Nimoy's DNA on a napkin Penny gave him. He can always clone more.
I was shocked the last time I was in 'Murica. The fucking Weather Channel wasn't even showing weather anymore. It was all reality shows.
'If Microsoft ever does applications for Linux it means I've won.' -- Linus Torvalds
Hardcore neckbeards won't agree. Android, although it has a Linux kernel, and a substantial userbase, and is easy to use, won't count because it doesn't have GNU and X and you can't go "sudo apt-get Msoffice &make &make-install"
The biggest issue with the ELM327 clones is that they're very very flakey - the bain of my life! :)
Some have issues with timing on serial data, resulting in garbled output
Some have issues with canbus systems and causing the canbus itself to have internal comms problems (causing your car to complain)
Some don't work on all the protocols (a PCB design issue)
Some get hot and reset
Some have dry joints (ok not a chip issue, but a build quality)
I warn the user (but don't stop them) if they have a clone unit (as it's not too helpful), but my stuff gets a *lot* of flak because the OBD adapter is kaput or doing crappy things (the above). :'-(
My cheap bluetooth ELM327 works okay, with a couple notable issues:
-It has to be re-paired everytime it's power cycled
-Bluetooth MAC is obviously fraudulent. Like 11:22:33:44:55:66
To OEMs
But won't the OEMs stock up on Win7 (especially if they sell to the business market.)
Windows 7 Pro OEM licenses will continue to be available for a minimum of one more year. As well Windows 8/8.1 Pro include downgrade rights to Windows 7 Pro.
Only benefit for a business customer with Windows 7 would be if they want Windows XP downgrade rights as that is not included with Windows 8. Downgrade rights is why for years corporations could buy PCs with Windows Vista or Windows 7 licenses, and image them to Windows XP for no cost. With actual Volume licensing agreements / Software assurance, you can downgrade all the way back to Windows 95 / NT4 if you want.
However with newer hardware, fewer and fewer support Windows XP. Intel's latest Haswell offerings do not support Windows XP. Ivy Bridge was the last to properly support XP.
If you have a single process that needs to use more than 1.6 - 2.0 GB of memory ... you need the 64 bit version.
Unfortunately Firefox doesn't have official, stable a 64 bit Windows version yet.
However when they do they will have no problem leaking memory up to 16 Exabytes.
With Windows, and NTFS, the MFT (Master File Table) occupies 12.5% of the disk space. Once all other sectors on the disk are full, it will actually store files IN the MFT reserved space, and you run the risk of fragmenting the MFT itself and decreasing performance.
As well the defrag tool (automatically scheduled or not), requires 15% free space to run.
I won't pretend to make any excuses.
Another hidden gem on Windows 8/8.1 is the "Winkey+X" shortcut. It opens a menu with all sorts of power user goodies.
Tabs suck - switching between explorers using the task bar (when set up properly to not combine windows on the taskbar) is good.
What explorer has lacked since Windows 3.1 is two panes in explorer, to simplify moving/sorting stuff between directories. Yeah, you can snap an explorer to each side of the desktop these days but that only works properly if you have just 1 monitor. If I could easily tile explorers on one monitor in a multi-mon setup, that would be far less annoying.
Winkey+left, Winkey+Right to snap to edges of the current monitor in a multimonitor setup. Press it again and the window will jump over to the next monitor.
I've had plenty of success with Crucial and their M500 and M550.
I recently had a new PC built. The shop was offering Kingston V300. A quick search showed that the Sandforce controller runs like crap with incompressible data, and Kingston changed suppliers after media did all their benchmarks, so all new units performed like crap.
So searching for alternatives Samsung 840 EVO was a top pick. I was very close to pulling the trigger when I saw all these dire warnings about performance deteriorating with "old data". I knew a firmware fix was pending, but I didn't trust the fix so I kept looking.
I ended up with a Crucial M550 from Amazon (good price). I hope I don't regret it.
In the research I've done, Intel has an excellent reliability record, and OCZ has amazing performance, but questionable reliability.
The same way that you're suppose to run their DOS executable on a Linux?
The same way you run it on Windows?
64 bit Windows will not even pretend to run 16 bit DOS/Windows 3.1 applications. 32 bit Windows NT (/XP/Vista/7/8) will, but it's in an emulator so it can't access the hardware.
You need a freeDOS bootdisk. You can make it boot from CD or USB since most modern PC's don't have floppy drives.
A DOS executable is almost preferable since it doesn't require a proprietary OS.
SSDs will saturate SATA-3 for sequential reads and writes. My Crucial M550 gets 500MB/s vs 150MB/s on my Western Digital. Over a 3 fold improvement!
However where SSDs really shine is random reads and writes. This is why SSD's make PC's more responsive. My Crucial gets 26MB/s vs. 0.66MB/s on the WD. Almost 40 fold improvement, but not near saturating SATA-3. So there is still improvements to be made on random read/write performance.
More and more I see PC's slowing to a grind, and it's due to the Hard drive thrashing crazily at less than 1MB/s! Put an SSD in (any SSD) and it speeds right up.
It's kind of true. My job in Army was SATCOM, got out almost 4 years ago, about to finish Bachelor's in CS early next year. SATCOM was pretty much IT in the army. Imaging computers, setting up and maintaining network, running cables, troubleshooting software/hardware, etc. Once I got out I did a few years part time in IT while going to college.
. . .
Civilian contractors were always reachable in case we got stuck.
You sound like the military guy AC above was talking about
I worked with a bunch of career military guys as well as the standard in and out military folks and I'll tell you it is not much fun talking to someone in the field, trying to walk them through the setup of a router or editing config files in vi. My company's lousy solution was to send non-military people into hot zones and (obviously) these people nearly got themselves killed.
We have electrochemistry kit that is chugging along on a PC running Dos 6.2 and Win 3.11.
Getting your data off requires a floppy disk as an intermediate step. I have no idea what we'll do if that machine ever craps out - it would be a shame to have to retire the potentiostat because the computers that it was designed to talk to have effectively ascended to godhood in the meantime.
It's certainly not the only piece of analytical kit that is tied to legacy hardware. We have a couple of FTIR machines that look like props from Fallout: New Vegas but work just fine and I'm pretty sure the EPR computer is running Win95.
I shudder at the thought of using a floppy. I like the software FastLynx Kind of like Interlink, but it can easily drag and drop files from DOS to a Win95/98/ME/NT4/2K/XP/Vista/7/8 (32 or 64 bit) using Serial or parallel null modem cables. Cheap $2 USB-serial adapter can be had on eBay. To get faster Parallel transfers requires a real LPT port on your modern PC, not a USB adapter. You can get the bundle from them that includes the software, and cables.
If you have a PC with a broken floppy drive, it can even send the software using MODE and CTTY commands.
It also comes for licenses of Windows versions of Interlnk and Intersvr. The way I had it set up, I created an up to 2GB FAT16 Truecrypt image on my modern "Server" PC (you can use some other image software as well). This gets mapped to a drive on the legacy client machine so now you have a massive disk drive expansion. When the drive is mapped, FastLynx has exclusive use of it, and you can't access files on the host OS it until you disconnect from the legacy PC. Alternatively you can map the drives on the DOS PC onto your modern PC.
"most users need" is very often a fallacy based on personal assumptions (anecdotes are not data). One of the things I use home computer for is editing GoPro HD video, and that is a camera that have sold in very significant numbers and footage is unusable without editing (as it would be endless). But editing it's HD video is so slow on my fairly ok desktop that I can't wait for the new X99 platform to stabilize to buy a new PC. This is just one of many examples of "niche" use that put together end up with significant numbers. From what I can read from statistics and surveys it seems a big chunk of the real "just surfing" users have moved to tablets and are no longer in the PC market.
How much editing are you looking to do? If you're just looking to cut and splice, Avidemux works well as it can do quick lossless edits like that, as well as lossless conversion of container types. http://fixounet.free.fr/avidem... A little unstable, and a bit of a learning curve, but it works, and it's quick (if you don't re-encode the video stream).
I found editing HD video on my 7 year old Laptop using Sony Vegas to be a passable experience. I have to basically set all the preview settings to "ultra-crap mode", but I can get my previews, arrange the video, then let it render over night.