Indeed, quite a weird situation. On the other hand, VMWare is quite a thing on it's own. Well, in my previous post I didn't mention that the first bootup did do a nice BSOD....that should have been enough indication to me that *something* went wrong.
As I mentioned, sometimes a nice delete-orgy within the registry solves a lot of problems. I still prefer the manual configuration (setting IRQ's I/O myself, yessir!) over the PnP crap Windows 2000 forces you to use. As soon as you get a bit out of standard hardware it just freaks (heck, a network card is standard hardware) Besides, weird thing that I noticed is that W2K seems to share IRQ's like mad. I don't know why, and I don't know how to change it.
I don't hate windows either,...using MS products since the DOS 3.xx ages, but since over a year I'm using Linux with WindowMaker on my old laptop (P120/32Meg) and I actually love it. Such a small machine an good enough to do my basic surfing/mailing needs: it just speaks for Linux:-)
try {
// Many lines of code
}
catch ( Exception e ) {
System.out.println( "Something went wrong!" );
}
Yes, I saw such code...often.:-( Each time I see it, my heart nearly stands still. Worse are the methods that do "throws Exception". How am I supposed to do detailed error handling when having to handle all errors at once? Checking types works/casting works but that's about it and looks mighty ugly!
But then my co-workers wonder why I do paranoid error checking.... Sorry for letting of my frustration:-(
The interesting thing is that I'm not sure what would happen if you made a copy of IE using the IEAK that contained a custom UA string that had the word "Opera 5" in it. I wonder if it'd get blocked too.:)
Hmmm...actually that was my first thought, no actually it was along the lines of the post of an Anonymous Coward, but that doesn't matter much. The fact is that I immediately tried changing the User Agent for IE5. In the registry I found at "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\Internet Settings" the key "User Agent" with content "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Win32)". I simply changed the string to "Opera", nothing more nothing less. Did a Logout/Login (running W2K) to be sure my settings would be current and started IE5.0. Too bad, msn.com did still work, so changing the user agent of IE5.x is not as easy as I thought.
I tend to disagree with you here. Just yesterday I switched my network card from one PCI slot to another one (I had my reasons...don't ask). Now, Windows 2000 decided instantly that I had installed a second network card? Remember the "first" wasn't there anymore! I still have no clue why it did that....problem was, since it had the drivers, it installed it transparantly without asking me the IP address/netmask etc... I didn't notice this until I had to access my network. Boy, was I astonished finding no computers on my network!
Changing this under NT changing would have been easy: Control Panel/Network. Under 2000 it took me a while to figure out that I had to go to "My network connections", right click on "Lan connection 2" (Hey, second network card == second LAN...logical!) and change the stuff for the TCP/IP protocol.
You find that easy? I don't! The Network applet in the control panels was the logical place to look, but behold: it doens't exist anymore. I had already tons of surprises of this kind in W2K. *sigh*:-(
Well, I ended up loading regedit and killing all references to 3Com: W2K forgot "both" network cards and I could start from stratch installing the drivers. Because it wanted the Windows 2000 CD, I had to reapply SP2 and then all the hotfixes...<SARCASM> but that's a small price to pay for putting a network card in another PCI slot.</SARCASM> Note that my Linux partition (on the same machine) didn't even complain. Honestly, I loved NT: it did everything I needed. The lack of support for USB made me switch....seems I pay the price now.
Hmmmmm...and why would you need Visio on a production server, anyway?:-) I get your point of course, and you are right...but it would apply to server-software like webservers, databases etc... On a desktop PC (workstation), rebooting is just a hassle (an unnessecary evil, dare I say).
Point is that most installers have the reboot option on my default even if it is not needed. I installed some programs (don't recall which ones) that asked me to reboot my machine. I just said no to the dialog, ran the program and it worked correctly. I also think that a lot of programmers are scared that their new registry entries (made by the installer) aren't recognised before a new reboot.:-)
After about an hour of UT, the machine generally locks up solid.
I had this too last week on my Pentium Pro 200 Workstation which runs W2K. (Yes, old machine, but I like that baby) Any game I ran (Halflife/The Sims) or when Seti@Home started as screensaver my machine locked up solid. I had no clue why, until this weekend I opened up the box and saw that the CPU-fan wasn't working anymore. I installed a new fan, and it stays rock-solid now. I'm just glad the CPU didn't end up in smoke:-) So I'd advise to check all the fans within your machine and check if the heat is evacuated (install an extra fan perhaps).
Just trying to help:-)
So they exist in the wild....:-) Well, I still never saw anyone with one on the bus or train, but then I could mix them up with normal CD players.
I just visited the site, it's about the same price I (and my sister) payed for a portable MD player. I was sceptical on the amount of music (suspecting memory sticks or so), but indeed a full CD-R is not bad. For the same results, I should lug around about 17 MiniDiscs (note that most of the time I lug around about 8, which is equivalent to a working day). On the other hand, the site doesn't say anything about CD-RW, which would be the *real* equivalent of MD. It makes no sense to burn all your MP3's to a CD-R and, when you get sick of the music, you can only use the CD as a coaster. I use my MD's most of the time to dub a CD I own, listen to it a couple of days, remove all, record other CD, and so on. So unless it takes CD-RW's it still can't replace tapes .
Other things, like not needing a computer to "record" the music still apply as an advantage to normal consumers, in favour of MD.
One question I have for you: how do you manage about 400 songs (estimated 3min/song) with such a tiny display? Sounds hard to me, but then I don't own a MP3 player.
Besides, the car-stereo stuff...well, if you knew how much I payed for the stereo system in my car, you woudn't consider changing it anytime soon either;-) Of course the size of the display on that device looks more convenient...
You are going to laugh, but back in the days (good ole DOS days, not even Win 3.xx), the extention.DOC indicated a plain text ASCII file. The first time I openend a.DOC with a texteditor and got gibberisch on my screen I was actually wondering what happened.
Oh, well, must be evolution;-)
Minidiscs ARE, however, ideal replacements for TAPES.
You summarized it perfectly: they replace audio-tapes, *not* CD's or MP3. It's exactly in that segment where MDs profilerate in Europe. My sister just recently shelved her Walkman (tape) to replace it with MD. I did that some years ago. As far as I could see about 75% of my sisters friends already replaced tapes with MD. (We're talking teenagers) On the other hand, I never saw an MP3 player "in the wild" here in Europe. Note: I don't say that they don't exists. I just never saw any. Too bad that car-MD players are not yet very common (they exist and are expensive). I have a CD charger but that is really a hassle:-(
Well, actually you make it sound worse than it actually is. I have 2 minidisc players (1 portable, 1 in the HiFi) and the only occasion I had that the copy protection activated itself was when I tried to record a CD-R Audio that was recorded on a saloon CD-writer. The CD in question was a live-peformance of a friend of mine which he gave me. Yes, it pissed me off a bit, but I could have rewritten it on CD-R (Data) and recorded it from there.
The copy protection you talk about, MD to MD, is mostly not really an issue. I never ever saw a a dual MD deck (like dual casette). The other way would be, to connect one MD player to another. If this is done optically, it is true, it won't copy. On the other hand: you connect the two MD's analogically it will copy like a charm. Quality, you say? No big deal... I didn't notice much difference between the two copies (but I'm no audiophile). Besides, I heard that the professional gear didn't have that restriction (but I'm not sure).
Actually it just "brings you back" to the times when CD and audio-casette dominated the world: you made your pirate copies direct from CD to audio-casette and casette2casette copies were just out of the question.
But then, I do not pirate music...so I don't bother.:-)
:-)
Yes, I know that... I know that now, but I didn't when I started out. I read the stuff I needed in the README files, and I didn't take the default.config file of my distro because I use a mini-distribution (Hey, I don't have DSL/Cable) which comes without it.
Actually I'm glad I did it the "harder" way, because the machine is quite old and I had some hardware that is not by default compiled in most kernels, but you coudn't know that. And why would I need USB support, if I don't have USB...You know, that kind of stuff. It's very interesting to customize a kernel (and the help in make menuconfig is really good).
Nowadays (for that machine) I have my customized.config I keep around on backup "just in case", and if I want to recompile the latest kernel I just retrieve it.
My point was not that there isn't an easier way (other comments refer to the automatic binary installs via rpm), there is, but my point was just that it is even easy if you take the "hard way" and read the documentation. No, I'm not one of those RTFM-guys, I'd help anyone compiling his/her kernel if they ask (and are willing to learn).
Admins "starting out" on linux may not know how to upgrade their kernels
Well, I only "Admin" of a very small network and when I started out with Linux (nearly 2 years ago) I thought: updating a kernel?!? Oh, no! I'm sure I'll never be able to do that!
Ehm, well, some nice evening, when I had a lot of spare time, I downloaded the latest kernel and only read the README (or was it INSTALL???) and compiled/installed and was running my own custom compiled kernel.
No, an Admin worthy of the name should at least be able to read the (provided) docs and type at the command line. The Linux-kernel people really made it easy to compile your kernel IMNSHO. Honestly, even an NT-Admin must be able to read the docs otherwhise he woudn't know that, for example, after Windows asks it's original CD you have to re-apply your service-packs.:-) I admit, between Linux and Windows the environment changes, but the ability to read the instructions is needed everywhere as an Admin (and dare I say, as a normal user too!)
Besides, any sane admin has a production and testing environment....so compiling the kernel on prod machines should only be done after extensive testing.
Hehe, I exactly wondered the same thing on seeing the screenshots. At first I thought it would be the developers girlfriend, but that seems quite improbable, I mean, would *you* code a new OS if you had a girlfriend, I sure woudn't:-)
On the other hand I had the reflex to click on "members" and you'll see someone called "Indra Gunawan" which is the webmaster and debugged the bootcode. Last time I checked "Indra" is a female name, so I'd bet that it's her...displaying her pic Hitchcock-style on her webpage.
No, I'm not sure...but I'd be very glad to meet a geetekke like her:-)
Encode a MP3 at 12kbps, at tell me the average Joe won't care.
Strange, I just received a 210KByte large MP3 file encoded at 24Kbps, 11025Hz, Mono.....and I enjoyed it. Not because the quality of the sound was good, but because the content was funny. The parent, you replied, to tried to make that clear: sometimes it's the content that matters not the quality if the media. Unfortunately that (content above everything) concept has disappeared when the WWW came along, but that is of course another story:-)
Yup, that's true (speed and such).....but Netscape 4.76 runs on my P120 laptop (which I use for surfing) and Mozilla doens't. The machine runs Linux, in case you wonder.
On the other hand I use Opera with it now, and it seems to be the "Right Tool for the Job". Just too bad I cannot import my certificates from Netscape, so I have to fall back to Netscape when doing some online banking.
Why not just load up DOS 5 for old games? Oh, wait, you can't...
I can't? I can't? Wait a second, I know exactly where my MS Dos disks are! My personal computers always had DOS installed "just to be sure". Having a DOS bootable partition often helped me out of deep sh*t. For the record: they are completely legal copies. Back in the day I bought version 3.33, version 5.0, version 6.22 (okay that one is OEM). Yup, I even have PC DOS version 7. Besides why would I have lost my licence when I installed Win3.11? Back in the day they were completely separate products. If I install 95 Upgrade over a 3.11 install, I can't imagine you aren't allowed to go back to 3.11, same would apply to going back from any Windows version to DOS as long as you still have the licence for DOS. That of course only if you want to be 100% legal. Come on it's DOS, I know some factories that use DOS on 286 machines to control some of their machines (well the soft runs on it). How many do you bet they can't find the DOS licences for those? If Bill Gates gets on your back for using an old copy of DOS, he is really a bigger ***hole than I already though he is;-)
I know of the existence of FreeDOS, and I gave it a try about a year ago: it trashed my partition table badly (on my main machine, yes my own stupid fault trying stuff on an important machine), so FreeDOS is right out of the question for the moment.
The machine I'm typing this on is a DOS6.22/Linux dual booter, and the reason I kept DOS is to play XCom2 - terror from the deep. Love that game. DosEMU doesn't seem to support my graphics card I tried:-(
(Note: for the poor suckers that don't have any DOS install disks, and really, really, need it badly...email me, if you ask nicely I could consider typing 'dd if=/dev/fd0 of=dos622-disk1' for you and mail it to you)
That's why we are having trouble buying stuff from america or outside the EU for that matter.
Now, now....I never had trouble buying stuff in the US! I can guarantee you that they know how to tax stuff that comes from the US. Recently I bought a whole batch of T-shirts from ThinkGeek for our development team (hey, we did a good job, we deserved it!) Since the whole batch cost quite a lot money the customs noticed it and I had to pay a humungous import tax...and I live in an EU country known as a tax paradise.
Of course taxing downloaded MP3's would be a very difficult thing, but in essence they'll just shift the way of taxing. For example, tax your internet connection more (just like "kijkgeld", you know what I talk about, I don't know the english word). There are tons of ways to tax some service that is untaxable in an direct way.
Oh, by the way, shoudn't you say "The Netherlands" instead of "Holland"?;-)
Hmmm, I have an AGP camera and it stores the date and time with the picture on the film. Of course I had to set the time on my camera once but that shouldn't be a problem. At development, that information is printed on the back of the photograph.
Besides, on normal 36mm camera's I saw a similar procedure of just blending in the time/date when the shot is taken (visible in the picture). I don't thing PI's will have any trouble finding good timed evidence because Polaroid would be out fo bussiness.
To stay on topic: I will still be using chemical films for my photographs. I enjoy having a good printout of the picture and the printouts I saw up until now (good inkjet printer + special photo paper) are just sub-par. In quality they cannot compete with chemical photographs: the problem is not the digitalisation, but the printing. Most consumers won't buy the nessecary equipment to correctly put their digital pictures on paper.
Winzip is more powerful... sure. But its not free (nagware), and you have to open a seperate program to use it. Compressed folders are a snap with the MS version.
So you like WinZip but you compain it is nagware an not free? Ehm, you paid for Windows didn't you? Well, WinZip never nags me because -just like you-, I like it. That is the reason that I paid for it. Go figure... I'm not too greedy to buy the software I like. Same for my email client, you know, it is free if you don't mind those ads, but I like the software and I want to show that. Yes, the email client I talk about is Eudora and yes I paid for it.
I'm currently considering buying Opera....I like Opera: I now can browse quite fast on an older Linux machine without having to cope with Netscape 4.76 to crash every fifth page I visit.
Yes, I do use some unregistred software but it's software I do not use regularly. Why should I register Realplayer (for example) if I use it once in a blue moon?
No seriously, I think that you should pay for the software you like . If every user has your attitude (and unfortunately they have), it is no wonder that bundeling of software makes Microsofts monopoly stronger. You don't really think that IE or Outlook Express or even Windows Media Player are really free? Everytime someone buys an MS operating system those programs are paid for. I payed for them three times: for each OEM machine I bought. To state the obvious: there is no such thing as a free lunch.
Ehm, I always heard that they didn't have to because the UK (English, I mean,...ehm...British) invented the stamps. Before invention of the stamps the receiver paid for the delivery, now imagine paying to get your bills;-) (Okay, I know you already do indirectly)
Okay, postal workers are humans and thus by definition untrustworthy. Now consider this: I get a real mail that was openend, I will see that quite quickly because of the damaged envelope and can go complain to my Post Office. (Not that I expect that they'll do anything about it). With emails this is not true: if my email has been intercepted, duplicated and stored by someone detection by me is not possible, since it's justs bits 'n bytes. So, how am I going to prove that anyone read my email? I can't.... even if there are laws that forbid to read my mail, how can we enforce those laws if you can never prove an infraction. It simply is not possible. This need a whole new infrastructure for encrypted mail, ditching the old standards, and *that* is not going to happen.
Slashdot Mirror
As I mentioned, sometimes a nice delete-orgy within the registry solves a lot of problems. I still prefer the manual configuration (setting IRQ's I/O myself, yessir!) over the PnP crap Windows 2000 forces you to use. As soon as you get a bit out of standard hardware it just freaks (heck, a network card is standard hardware) Besides, weird thing that I noticed is that W2K seems to share IRQ's like mad. I don't know why, and I don't know how to change it.
I don't hate windows either,...using MS products since the DOS 3.xx ages, but since over a year I'm using Linux with WindowMaker on my old laptop (P120/32Meg) and I actually love it. Such a small machine an good enough to do my basic surfing/mailing needs: it just speaks for Linux :-)
But then my co-workers wonder why I do paranoid error checking.... Sorry for letting of my frustration :-(
Hmmm...actually that was my first thought, no actually it was along the lines of the post of an Anonymous Coward, but that doesn't matter much. The fact is that I immediately tried changing the User Agent for IE5. In the registry I found at "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\Internet Settings" the key "User Agent" with content "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Win32)". I simply changed the string to "Opera", nothing more nothing less. Did a Logout/Login (running W2K) to be sure my settings would be current and started IE5.0. Too bad, msn.com did still work, so changing the user agent of IE5.x is not as easy as I thought.
Anyone got more success?
Changing this under NT changing would have been easy: Control Panel/Network. Under 2000 it took me a while to figure out that I had to go to "My network connections", right click on "Lan connection 2" (Hey, second network card == second LAN...logical!) and change the stuff for the TCP/IP protocol.
You find that easy? I don't! The Network applet in the control panels was the logical place to look, but behold: it doens't exist anymore. :-(
I had already tons of surprises of this kind in W2K. *sigh*
Well, I ended up loading regedit and killing all references to 3Com: W2K forgot "both" network cards and I could start from stratch installing the drivers. Because it wanted the Windows 2000 CD, I had to reapply SP2 and then all the hotfixes...<SARCASM> but that's a small price to pay for putting a network card in another PCI slot.</SARCASM> Note that my Linux partition (on the same machine) didn't even complain. Honestly, I loved NT: it did everything I needed. The lack of support for USB made me switch....seems I pay the price now.
Point is that most installers have the reboot option on my default even if it is not needed. I installed some programs (don't recall which ones) that asked me to reboot my machine. I just said no to the dialog, ran the program and it worked correctly. I also think that a lot of programmers are scared that their new registry entries (made by the installer) aren't recognised before a new reboot. :-)
I had this too last week on my Pentium Pro 200 Workstation which runs W2K. (Yes, old machine, but I like that baby) Any game I ran (Halflife/The Sims) or when Seti@Home started as screensaver my machine locked up solid. I had no clue why, until this weekend I opened up the box and saw that the CPU-fan wasn't working anymore. I installed a new fan, and it stays rock-solid now. I'm just glad the CPU didn't end up in smoke :-) :-)
So I'd advise to check all the fans within your machine and check if the heat is evacuated (install an extra fan perhaps).
Just trying to help
Iggy, disregard my CD-RW comments, I just skimmed over the text, and didn't see it... :-) More coffee...I need more coffee!
:-)
I just visited the site, it's about the same price I (and my sister) payed for a portable MD player. I was sceptical on the amount of music (suspecting memory sticks or so), but indeed a full CD-R is not bad. For the same results, I should lug around about 17 MiniDiscs (note that most of the time I lug around about 8, which is equivalent to a working day). On the other hand, the site doesn't say anything about CD-RW, which would be the *real* equivalent of MD.
It makes no sense to burn all your MP3's to a CD-R and, when you get sick of the music, you can only use the CD as a coaster. I use my MD's most of the time to dub a CD I own, listen to it a couple of days, remove all, record other CD, and so on. So unless it takes CD-RW's it still can't replace tapes .
Other things, like not needing a computer to "record" the music still apply as an advantage to normal consumers, in favour of MD.
One question I have for you: how do you manage about 400 songs (estimated 3min/song) with such a tiny display? Sounds hard to me, but then I don't own a MP3 player.
Besides, the car-stereo stuff...well, if you knew how much I payed for the stereo system in my car, you woudn't consider changing it anytime soon either ;-) Of course the size of the display on that device looks more convenient...
All of the above. ;-)
You are going to laugh, but back in the days (good ole DOS days, not even Win 3.xx), the extention .DOC indicated a plain text ASCII file. The first time I openend a .DOC with a texteditor and got gibberisch on my screen I was actually wondering what happened. ;-)
Oh, well, must be evolution
You summarized it perfectly: they replace audio-tapes, *not* CD's or MP3. It's exactly in that segment where MDs profilerate in Europe. My sister just recently shelved her Walkman (tape) to replace it with MD. I did that some years ago. As far as I could see about 75% of my sisters friends already replaced tapes with MD. (We're talking teenagers) On the other hand, I never saw an MP3 player "in the wild" here in Europe. Note: I don't say that they don't exists. I just never saw any. :-(
Too bad that car-MD players are not yet very common (they exist and are expensive). I have a CD charger but that is really a hassle
In my eyes you're a +1 Insightfull.
The copy protection you talk about, MD to MD, is mostly not really an issue. I never ever saw a a dual MD deck (like dual casette). The other way would be, to connect one MD player to another. If this is done optically, it is true, it won't copy. On the other hand: you connect the two MD's analogically it will copy like a charm. Quality, you say? No big deal... I didn't notice much difference between the two copies (but I'm no audiophile). Besides, I heard that the professional gear didn't have that restriction (but I'm not sure).
Actually it just "brings you back" to the times when CD and audio-casette dominated the world: you made your pirate copies direct from CD to audio-casette and casette2casette copies were just out of the question.
But then, I do not pirate music...so I don't bother. :-)
Yes, I know that... I know that now , but I didn't when I started out. I read the stuff I needed in the README files, and I didn't take the default
Actually I'm glad I did it the "harder" way, because the machine is quite old and I had some hardware that is not by default compiled in most kernels, but you coudn't know that. And why would I need USB support, if I don't have USB...You know, that kind of stuff. It's very interesting to customize a kernel (and the help in make menuconfig is really good).
Nowadays (for that machine) I have my customized .config I keep around on backup "just in case", and if I want to recompile the latest kernel I just retrieve it.
My point was not that there isn't an easier way (other comments refer to the automatic binary installs via rpm), there is, but my point was just that it is even easy if you take the "hard way" and read the documentation. No, I'm not one of those RTFM-guys, I'd help anyone compiling his/her kernel if they ask (and are willing to learn).
Well, I only "Admin" of a very small network and when I started out with Linux (nearly 2 years ago) I thought: updating a kernel?!? Oh, no! I'm sure I'll never be able to do that! :-)
Ehm, well, some nice evening, when I had a lot of spare time, I downloaded the latest kernel and only read the README (or was it INSTALL???) and compiled/installed and was running my own custom compiled kernel.
No, an Admin worthy of the name should at least be able to read the (provided) docs and type at the command line. The Linux-kernel people really made it easy to compile your kernel IMNSHO. Honestly, even an NT-Admin must be able to read the docs otherwhise he woudn't know that, for example, after Windows asks it's original CD you have to re-apply your service-packs.
I admit, between Linux and Windows the environment changes, but the ability to read the instructions is needed everywhere as an Admin (and dare I say, as a normal user too!)
Besides, any sane admin has a production and testing environment....so compiling the kernel on prod machines should only be done after extensive testing.
On the other hand I had the reflex to click on "members" and you'll see someone called "Indra Gunawan" which is the webmaster and debugged the bootcode. Last time I checked "Indra" is a female name, so I'd bet that it's her...displaying her pic Hitchcock-style on her webpage. :-)
No, I'm not sure...but I'd be very glad to meet a geetekke like her
Strange, I just received a 210KByte large MP3 file encoded at 24Kbps, 11025Hz, Mono.....and I enjoyed it. Not because the quality of the sound was good, but because the content was funny. The parent, you replied, to tried to make that clear: sometimes it's the content that matters not the quality if the media. :-)
Unfortunately that (content above everything) concept has disappeared when the WWW came along, but that is of course another story
On the other hand I use Opera with it now, and it seems to be the "Right Tool for the Job". Just too bad I cannot import my certificates from Netscape, so I have to fall back to Netscape when doing some online banking.
I can't? I can't? Wait a second, I know exactly where my MS Dos disks are! My personal computers always had DOS installed "just to be sure". Having a DOS bootable partition often helped me out of deep sh*t. For the record: they are completely legal copies. Back in the day I bought version 3.33, version 5.0, version 6.22 (okay that one is OEM). Yup, I even have PC DOS version 7. ;-)
Besides why would I have lost my licence when I installed Win3.11? Back in the day they were completely separate products. If I install 95 Upgrade over a 3.11 install, I can't imagine you aren't allowed to go back to 3.11, same would apply to going back from any Windows version to DOS as long as you still have the licence for DOS. That of course only if you want to be 100% legal. Come on it's DOS, I know some factories that use DOS on 286 machines to control some of their machines (well the soft runs on it). How many do you bet they can't find the DOS licences for those? If Bill Gates gets on your back for using an old copy of DOS, he is really a bigger ***hole than I already though he is
I know of the existence of FreeDOS, and I gave it a try about a year ago: it trashed my partition table badly (on my main machine, yes my own stupid fault trying stuff on an important machine), so FreeDOS is right out of the question for the moment.
The machine I'm typing this on is a DOS6.22/Linux dual booter, and the reason I kept DOS is to play XCom2 - terror from the deep. Love that game. DosEMU doesn't seem to support my graphics card I tried :-(
(Note: for the poor suckers that don't have any DOS install disks, and really, really, need it badly...email me, if you ask nicely I could consider typing 'dd if=/dev/fd0 of=dos622-disk1' for you and mail it to you)
Now, now....I never had trouble buying stuff in the US! I can guarantee you that they know how to tax stuff that comes from the US. Recently I bought a whole batch of T-shirts from ThinkGeek for our development team (hey, we did a good job, we deserved it!) Since the whole batch cost quite a lot money the customs noticed it and I had to pay a humungous import tax...and I live in an EU country known as a tax paradise.
Of course taxing downloaded MP3's would be a very difficult thing, but in essence they'll just shift the way of taxing. For example, tax your internet connection more (just like "kijkgeld", you know what I talk about, I don't know the english word). There are tons of ways to tax some service that is untaxable in an direct way.
Oh, by the way, shoudn't you say "The Netherlands" instead of "Holland"? ;-)
s/AGP/APS
Sorry...
Besides, on normal 36mm camera's I saw a similar procedure of just blending in the time/date when the shot is taken (visible in the picture). I don't thing PI's will have any trouble finding good timed evidence because Polaroid would be out fo bussiness.
To stay on topic: I will still be using chemical films for my photographs. I enjoy having a good printout of the picture and the printouts I saw up until now (good inkjet printer + special photo paper) are just sub-par. In quality they cannot compete with chemical photographs: the problem is not the digitalisation, but the printing. Most consumers won't buy the nessecary equipment to correctly put their digital pictures on paper.
So you like WinZip but you compain it is nagware an not free? Ehm, you paid for Windows didn't you? Well, WinZip never nags me because -just like you-, I like it. That is the reason that I paid for it. Go figure... I'm not too greedy to buy the software I like.
Same for my email client, you know, it is free if you don't mind those ads, but I like the software and I want to show that. Yes, the email client I talk about is Eudora and yes I paid for it.
I'm currently considering buying Opera....I like Opera: I now can browse quite fast on an older Linux machine without having to cope with Netscape 4.76 to crash every fifth page I visit.
Yes, I do use some unregistred software but it's software I do not use regularly. Why should I register Realplayer (for example) if I use it once in a blue moon?
No seriously, I think that you should pay for the software you like . If every user has your attitude (and unfortunately they have), it is no wonder that bundeling of software makes Microsofts monopoly stronger. You don't really think that IE or Outlook Express or even Windows Media Player are really free? Everytime someone buys an MS operating system those programs are paid for. I payed for them three times: for each OEM machine I bought.
To state the obvious: there is no such thing as a free lunch.
Ehm, I always heard that they didn't have to because the UK (English, I mean,...ehm...British) invented the stamps. ;-) (Okay, I know you already do indirectly)
Before invention of the stamps the receiver paid for the delivery, now imagine paying to get your bills
"The bomb will never go off. I speak as an expert in explosives." -- Admiral William Leahy, U.S. Atomic Bomb Project.
Okay, postal workers are humans and thus by definition untrustworthy. Now consider this: I get a real mail that was openend, I will see that quite quickly because of the damaged envelope and can go complain to my Post Office. (Not that I expect that they'll do anything about it). With emails this is not true: if my email has been intercepted, duplicated and stored by someone detection by me is not possible, since it's justs bits 'n bytes. So, how am I going to prove that anyone read my email? I can't.... even if there are laws that forbid to read my mail, how can we enforce those laws if you can never prove an infraction. It simply is not possible.
This need a whole new infrastructure for encrypted mail, ditching the old standards, and *that* is not going to happen.