Mine is very similar, but with some upgrades. The basic box is a Data General 486DX/33 probably about a year older than yours. The CPU has been upgraded to a 486DX2/66. It has an ISA SCSI controller with a couple of 2GB disks. It has an ISA 56K modem and some kind of NE2000 ISA NIC. It runs FreeBSD, NAT, Squid, and Apache and doesn't even breath hard. Well, actually when it does start to breath hard, I replace the fan, just like you do.
It has been in more or less continuous use for ten years, first as the kids' homework and play computer then as the firewall. That's not the oldest machine around here, though. The PC/XT that my father in law bought in 1987 or so is sitting here collecting dust. I should try to boot it up and see if I still remember how to use Word Perfect. It worked fine the last time I used it a couple of years ago.
Even that's not the oldest working machine in the family. My mom has an Apple//c from about 1985 that she still uses every month to print out mailing labels for a newsletter. It's a classic case of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." She has a printer and software that works with it and sees no reason to change it.
I like to think that this suit is my fault. Let me explain. I have complained to Google more than once about these and other similar leeches and their link-farm ripoff crapola. So I flatter myself to think that Google changed their ranking in response to my complaints. I just hope they don't expect me to contribute too much toward their legal costs . . . .
I was able to track it down to a
simple.dll file. This file as the board points out is called
bpboh.dll and is placed in one's C:/windows and
interacts with Internet Explorer 6.0 (I did not test any
earlier versions of IE, and all versions of Netscape are
unaffected) in such a way as to cause redirects first to
referral sites than to the appropriate website.
The problem is that sometimes, for people who need to do seriously high-performance I/O, you want to be able to know the drive's geometry and reference sectors at specific cylinder/head locations, to optimize sequential access and minimize seeks.
It's a seductive idea. I've even written that code back in the olden days. Of course mine was nowhere near the level of Mel's scary code. But I sure wouldn't want to attempt it today.
Modern disk drives with zoned recording, megabytes of cache, and automatic bad block remapping would make any attempt at software optimization a nightmare. You could easily end up pessimizing by abusing the cache on the controller or accessing sectors that the drive controller says are contiguous but which in reality have been transparently remapped to Lower Slobbovia. I don't think there is any way to get guaranteed accurate geometry any more. I am afraid you just have to take what the drive is willing to give you and hope for the best.
Of course, what never gets pointed out is that the CD title and the track names are themselves copyrighted material, owned by the copyright holder (in this case the record company.)
Perhaps the reason it never gets pointed out is that it is not true. See for example, item number 5 on Brad Templeton's Myths about copyright page. Sheesh.
The meaning of terms or XML codes used on a Web page can be defined by pointers from the page to an ontology.
Great. Back at TB-L's example, what actually happened is that Lucy's handheld browser was running MSSemanticAgent 2.0 while the doctor's office's web page was running MSSemantic 1.1 which pointed to an ontology that was no longer available on MS's server so the prescribed treatment tag came up undefined. So she set up a search for providers by hand. Unfortunately, some of the provider lists were running OpenSourceSemantic so MSSemanticAgent 2.0 refused to recognize their tags.
Lucy scrolled through the list, looking for familiar names, and tried to run them against Mom's health plan's server to find out if any were in-plan but the health plan's server must have been down because all she got back was connection refused.
By trial and error, she found a couple of plausible-looking providers. She wanted the agent to find providers with a rating of excellent or very good but the only compatible rating site seemed to be slash-dotted so she tried to check appointment times. Unfortunately, the first provider's web page hadn't been updated recently -- it was offering appointments for some time last fall. They probably put up the appointment page and forgot about it so they never noticed that it got disconnected from their appointment book when they upgraded their scheduling application.
When she found a provider that she thought might be in-plan that had a plausible-looking appointment schedule, she thought she would at least find out if it was within a 20-mile radius. The mapping site couldn't find the address, so all it could say was that the center of town was within a 20-mile radius. She decided that she had wasted enough time already, so she tried to have her agent send the search to Pete's agent, having complete trust in Pete's agent. At least it would have had complete trust, except that one or the other of them was running with an expired certificate (although Pete had accepted a forged Microsoft certificate earlier in the day by routinely clicking on OK when presented with a warning message).
After trying unsuccessfully for some minutes to figure out from the cryptic error message what was wrong, Pete gave up and re-entered the search himself. His agent told him the appointment would work without rescheduling any less important appointments. Unfortunately, that was because the last time he had sync'ed his PDA with his web calendar, it had quietly failed to copy some appointments. Or perhaps it had put up an error message which he had reflexively dismissed because there was a blizzard of pointless warning messages and pop-up ads every time he accessed his web calendar.
And so on and so on. Pete and Lucy would have been better off just to make a couple of phone calls, talk to a couple of humans and get the whole thing done.
Don't worry. From the Passport Q&A: Why should I trust Microsoft with my information?
In recent years, Microsoft has consistently been ranked as one of the most respected corporations in North America by the general public.
In addition, Microsoft has been a champion of Internet privacy standards and privacy organizations for many years.
See? Nothing to worry about. Microsoft is one of the most respected corporations in North America.
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Mine is very similar, but with some upgrades. The basic box is a Data General 486DX/33 probably about a year older than yours. The CPU has been upgraded to a 486DX2/66. It has an ISA SCSI controller with a couple of 2GB disks. It has an ISA 56K modem and some kind of NE2000 ISA NIC. It runs FreeBSD, NAT, Squid, and Apache and doesn't even breath hard. Well, actually when it does start to breath hard, I replace the fan, just like you do.
//c from about 1985 that she still uses every month to print out mailing labels for a newsletter. It's a classic case of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." She has a printer and software that works with it and sees no reason to change it.
It has been in more or less continuous use for ten years, first as the kids' homework and play computer then as the firewall. That's not the oldest machine around here, though. The PC/XT that my father in law bought in 1987 or so is sitting here collecting dust. I should try to boot it up and see if I still remember how to use Word Perfect. It worked fine the last time I used it a couple of years ago.
Even that's not the oldest working machine in the family. My mom has an Apple
I like to think that this suit is my fault. Let me explain. I have complained to Google more than once about these and other similar leeches and their link-farm ripoff crapola. So I flatter myself to think that Google changed their ranking in response to my complaints. I just hope they don't expect me to contribute too much toward their legal costs . . . .
I was able to track it down to a simple .dll file. This file as the board points out is called
bpboh.dll and is placed in one's C:/windows and
interacts with Internet Explorer 6.0 (I did not test any
earlier versions of IE, and all versions of Netscape are
unaffected) in such a way as to cause redirects first to
referral sites than to the appropriate website.
Another good reason not to use IE.It's a seductive idea. I've even written that code back in the olden days. Of course mine was nowhere near the level of Mel's scary code. But I sure wouldn't want to attempt it today.
Modern disk drives with zoned recording, megabytes of cache, and automatic bad block remapping would make any attempt at software optimization a nightmare. You could easily end up pessimizing by abusing the cache on the controller or accessing sectors that the drive controller says are contiguous but which in reality have been transparently remapped to Lower Slobbovia. I don't think there is any way to get guaranteed accurate geometry any more. I am afraid you just have to take what the drive is willing to give you and hope for the best.
Perhaps the reason it never gets pointed out is that it is not true. See for example, item number 5 on Brad Templeton's Myths about copyright page. Sheesh.
Not to mention ontologies that have gone 404.
From the article:
The meaning of terms or XML codes used on a Web page can be defined by pointers from the page to an ontology.
Great. Back at TB-L's example, what actually happened is that Lucy's handheld browser was running MSSemanticAgent 2.0 while the doctor's office's web page was running MSSemantic 1.1 which pointed to an ontology that was no longer available on MS's server so the prescribed treatment tag came up undefined. So she set up a search for providers by hand. Unfortunately, some of the provider lists were running OpenSourceSemantic so MSSemanticAgent 2.0 refused to recognize their tags.
Lucy scrolled through the list, looking for familiar names, and tried to run them against Mom's health plan's server to find out if any were in-plan but the health plan's server must have been down because all she got back was connection refused.
By trial and error, she found a couple of plausible-looking providers. She wanted the agent to find providers with a rating of excellent or very good but the only compatible rating site seemed to be slash-dotted so she tried to check appointment times. Unfortunately, the first provider's web page hadn't been updated recently -- it was offering appointments for some time last fall. They probably put up the appointment page and forgot about it so they never noticed that it got disconnected from their appointment book when they upgraded their scheduling application.
When she found a provider that she thought might be in-plan that had a plausible-looking appointment schedule, she thought she would at least find out if it was within a 20-mile radius. The mapping site couldn't find the address, so all it could say was that the center of town was within a 20-mile radius. She decided that she had wasted enough time already, so she tried to have her agent send the search to Pete's agent, having complete trust in Pete's agent. At least it would have had complete trust, except that one or the other of them was running with an expired certificate (although Pete had accepted a forged Microsoft certificate earlier in the day by routinely clicking on OK when presented with a warning message).
After trying unsuccessfully for some minutes to figure out from the cryptic error message what was wrong, Pete gave up and re-entered the search himself. His agent told him the appointment would work without rescheduling any less important appointments. Unfortunately, that was because the last time he had sync'ed his PDA with his web calendar, it had quietly failed to copy some appointments. Or perhaps it had put up an error message which he had reflexively dismissed because there was a blizzard of pointless warning messages and pop-up ads every time he accessed his web calendar.
And so on and so on. Pete and Lucy would have been better off just to make a couple of phone calls, talk to a couple of humans and get the whole thing done.
Don't worry. From the Passport Q&A:
Why should I trust Microsoft with my information?
In recent years, Microsoft has consistently been ranked as one of the most respected corporations in North America by the general public.
In addition, Microsoft has been a champion of Internet privacy standards and privacy organizations for many years.
See? Nothing to worry about. Microsoft is one of the most respected corporations in North America.