Maybe it comes from the fact that those operating systems probably have a completely different way of working and as such aren't affected (e.g. it might just crash instead of giving up privileges?) None of the above are multi user so maybe it just hangs the machines. And to be honest, a 98 machine hanging is not exactly critical and none of the above are EVER used on servers, just desktops, so it's even less critical if it happens to crash.
Reading the related article on www.theregister.co.uk, it seems that Microsoft DID know about these before and the fix was already incorporated into SP2.
1) It's always been in the Steam EULA and no story appeared about this when Steam was launched.
2) They won't be able to charge you for something you don't specifically agree to, i.e. a game "subscription" or similar.
3) If you agree to a subscription and paid via credit card straight to Steam, then you've just bought yourself a contract that says they'll take out next month's money next month. My ISP does the same, so do my hosting providers, etc. what's the difference?
4) If they suddenly start changing ALL games on Steam over to subscription, bye-bye 90% of their users, hello some other 3D FPS.
5) (quite a minor point considering 2 and 3)... how would they automatically charge my credit card when there's not one registered on the account? Answer: They can't. Buy the game in-shop, install and you don't ever need to enter anything but a CD-Key.
Don't blow this out of proportion, it's no worse than any other EULA and it's all there in black and white and has been for a long time..
Statistically speaking this is next to useless. Okay, when I loaded the Steam survey up, I had absolutely no intention of buying HL2, which is what the survey is for. That might mean that they are basing HL2's defaults and performance on this and previous surveys.
Now, that means that you will only get the people who THINK they can run HL2 to actually reply and there've been rumours around for years that the specs required for HL2 will be phenomenal. This is going to bias this survey towards high-end answers which will mean that the actual game will require or assume you have them. The hype that surrounds a game's performance determines it?
This might sound petty but when you consider that I never thought in a million years that my PC would ever run anything on the source engine and CS:Source actually matched performance for CS on the same computer then you have a problem.
My computer is a 1.2Ghz, 512Mb with a PCI (yes, PCI) Geforce4 MX. This is very low-end by modern standards but if I hadn't tried CS:Source demo, I wouldn't even bother to think about Source or HL2 until I'd upgraded whereas in fact it is no less playable than a game which I'm perfectly happy playing (I get constant 25+ fps in CS and CS:S and I don't care what you think, that's more than good enough).
Also, it looks like someone's either been tampering with the survey or the survey's results are not always accurate (the 6bpp entries etc.). This means that this survey isn't even worth taking a rough estimate from for any practical purpose.
I was once present at a meeting where we were buying a brand-new £40K network for a school I work at. The main selling point was 16 laptops on a trolley which connected to the network wirelessly.
I nearly pissed myself when I said that I was concerned about the security of a wireless network connected to a broadband connection in the middle of a suburban area where anyone could tap into it (I would not be responsible for the wireless network, they would). He replied that it was 54MB/s so I didn't need to worry.
Didn't have the heart to tell him that that only meant I could break the encryption twice as fast, and no, he wasn't referring to stronger encryption with the 54Mb/s networks... it's still only got basic 40-bit WEP key generated using an easily-guessable passphrase and anyone with a laptop and a wireless card can break it in a few minutes.
According to the Groklaw article, the comparison took approximately 10 hours on a dual-3GHz. I really don't see that having to do a comparison over again is really that relevant. In "court time", 10 hours is nothing and even if it takes a month, it takes a month, there's nothing you can do to help that.
It's blows SCO's 25,000 man-years prediction out of the water, anyway.
It's not so much about who owns what or what rights anyone has, it's more down to common sense. Are McDonald's going to sue me because I print my own "I love McDonald's" T-Shirts? They just might but you have to ask yourself, what would be the point? You are destroying your own customer's opinion of you.
They meant no harm, they are actually helping to propogate your brand, their little silly project isn't going to step on the toes of your next official release but yet they want to send a cease and desist. It's not about who's right or wrong, it's a question of why would you want to destroy perfectly good, free advertising for no profitable reason?
Games Workshop do the same with their silly little miniatures. Lots of companies are trying to shut down "Ihate.com" but they shouldn't really be shutting down "Ilove.com" without a half decent reason.
Okay... let's be stupid a minute here. You want to take a penknife through an airport. It's not hard... put it in your luggage.
I would no more expect to be able to carry a knife openly through customs than a diamond-edged cutting saw but you don't see people complaining that they won't buy one cos they can't take it through an airport.
Use your noddle, bung it in your luggage, not your hand luggage (carry on's for you americans). It's not difficult, it's not brain surgery and it's common sense that you should be using anytime you use a plane. The knife's not the problem, it's where you want to put it.
"Excuse me officer, but I have this dual-barrel shotgun but it's attached to my keyring and it's got a USB drive..."
Dunno about the USA but in the UK we have the same rules... and penknives tend to come into the safe category. Also, the fact that a penknife is not a locking knife means that you're able to carry it if it is useful for your job, etc. I always have a 2" penknife on me for cutting cable ties, opening bottles, etc.
I once had similar ideas for reusing the bits out of all the old PC's that collect around me (mostly P233's and desktop cases, for some reason, but I've got a PS/2 hiding somewhere).
Was going to use the old fans to make sure airflow went through my PC and even throughout the wooden cabinet that my PC is in so that it wouldn't get too hot.
Or:
Actually once crafted a primitive noise baffle for the exhaust fan from a PC by using an empty 5.25" casing and some defunct floppies arranged so that the air would zig-zag through the 5.25 case (off of a CDROM if I remember rightly, with the bits taken out).
Or:
The metal casing of an old PC is good for keeping all those ADSL routers, printer server boxes, ethernet hubs etc. that are on 24/7 but just get in the way when you're rereouting cables.
Bung them inside an old desktop case (even mount them in the drivebays or whatnot), run all the cables through the PCI backplates and power them off the inside of the power socket (even room for a power strip with a few "brick" power adaptors in there). If your stuff needs 12 or 5v, you could even run it direct off of the old PSU, I suppose.
That way, one box and plug powers all the silly peripherals but you haven't got millions of wires tangling and twenty brick adaptors stuck to the wall.
You can move the bits inside around so that you can see the LED status of things from the drive bays etc., can power from the power supply, can even re-use the PSU or case fans to make sure they have adequate cooling etc.
Or:
Some people try to hide their computers in their furniture (e.g. wooden cabinets/cupboards/desks), why not go the other way... convert the front of a desktop case to become a fold-open drawer or storage area.:-)
Or:
See how many LED's you can fit onto the outside of an old PC case so that you can have that authentic "Star Trek" feel. Bonus points for them actually working, extra for flashing effects etc.
Or:
Build a race track using old PCI cards as barriers, upside-down motherboards as the floor and the balls from mice as the "cars", like blow football, only more geeky.
1) Windows design... correct, but that's the OS the article discusses and that I use for my main desktop.
2) "Yes, and as you say... you have never had a virus either at your school" - I said I have never had a virus... the schools get them about once a month, if we're lucky. One laptop had five different viruses at one point, all within a day of being cleaned. Viruses can be cleaned properly... identify, read up on the exact variant, realise every capability of the particular virus in question and remove manually (hashes and instructions are online for every virus within a few days of discovery).
3) "The 98/95 uptime claims are unrealistic for most users" - Correct. Not many people have 9x running for so long, not so much uptime as useable life.
"The registry is a pile of crap." - Agreed.
"Even Micro$oft tech support admits 98 needs to be installed every 6 months to a year because it craps all over itself." - Maybe, but they're wrong... carefully managed computers don't need this. This is my point.
"Once you make so many updates to that registry you are going to have a slow computer." - Nope. Not really. Computer still as fast as the day I installed it (have benchmarks around somewhere). Only "slowdowns" are conscious changes to the system that I've made, e.g. installing Zonealarm or whatever, which obviously impact performance.
"This is an OS design flaw with a crappy work around." - Agreed.
Agree with the points regarding appliance/PC though. Thanks for reading.
Reformat and reinstall seems to be everyone's answer. Personally, I see that as a final resort.
Do you have any idea how long it took me to get my programs runnning the way I like them? That "personal" data is spread across a registry that, in this case, was probably not good enough to backup and just restore.
I've NEVER reformatted a computer unless it was a new hard drive. NEVER. My job is to keep four different schools' computer networks (all mixed 95, 98, 2K and XP) up and running, everything from mouse cleaning to network installation. I've NEVER had to reformat any of the PC's.
Personally, I run 98, on my main desktop machine, ever since 98 was launched and before that 95 was on my previous main desktop machine that WAS STILL WORKING 5 years later when I decommissioned it (now a Linux router with the original hardware still going strong and the Windows partition still working from a LILO prompt).
Reformat and reinstall is a stock answer that means "I don't know how to fix this." or "It's too big a job for me to be bothered with." My computer has gone up the creek any number of times (99% bad drivers/software, 1% user stupidity, 0% viruses or other rubbish) and it's always salvageable, proof is that I'm running the same machine here and now.
It's 98SE... it's on the net (broadband), it's patched up, it's got AdAware, SpyBot, Zonealarm (with antivirus, though it's disabled because I don't run anything I don't know... never had a virus except a brief glimpse of one from a computer magazine's cover CD demo of SIN... no damage, detected and fixed within a few hours).
People like this poor unfortunate person don't know that their PC is not an appliance. It's not Plug and Play (no matter what MS or Linus may tell you) but it *should* be by now. We put a man on the moon 40 years ago but we can't stop a twelve-year-old writing software that bypasses Microsoft's security. This shouldn't be a poke at the user who had this problem or the techy who took so long to fix it... the problem is much deeper... it's not even a case of user education... user's should NOT have to worry about things like this.
Reformatting someone's PC is damnright rude. They use that PC, they don't want to have to go through all the business of setting up and installing their programs again. It may save you time, but it costs them twice as much in the long run.
It would take a few hours to fix this PC, if you did it properly... especially with reboots, crashes etc in between, but fewer and fewer technicians bother... it annoys me as a technician that people still think formatting is an answer... it's not... it's an admission of defeat.
I had a bug-ridden laptop brought to me a few months back, with Win2K. AdAware showed over 300 seperate pieces of crap on it, not to mention viruses and being unpatched for over three years (it had been on the QE2 cruise liner all that time, with only occasional internet access). It was cleaned, pruned, had a few bits installed to prevent it happening again (as the user is a bit of a tech-dummy) and it's running fine, without the need for a reinstall.
Bad defaults, hole-y operating systems, no thought of a "dumb" user in the design process and lack of a decent auto-update (hey, MS, why not send out a free update CD to every single Windows registered owner and have a single-download EXE online, updating it about twice a year?) are the problems here, not the user.
Oh, and I miss the days of a DOS boot floppy with an up-to-date Virus scanner on it... You need control of the entire computer to properly flush out a virus without getting yourself reinfected or into "this file is in use" trouble, especially on the DOS-based Windows. There's no point virus-scanning when you're running the virus scanner off your hard drive... how do you know that's not been compromised? I'll leave that idea there for the next generation of virus writers.
I was expecting this to be something along the lines of the LOTR original 70's "cartoon movie" but it's more like edge detection and then crayon in the shape. Although clever, hardly groundbreaking, especially as it's not even automatic.
When they can feed in a film and get out something like the LOTR animation out of it without having to fiddle every single second of footage, maybe then it'll have a use.
I dunno how true this is or where it applies, but I'm pretty sure that here in the UK, having any sort of moving display showing on a vehicle is illegal.
Otherwise, don't you think that all these advertisers would have 50-foot-high Plasma screens driving along the motorways advertising their wares?
I had an RM (Research Machines - read Microsoft Mk 2 for all UK schools) engineer come in to set up a brand new server that would run a new network of sixteen computers.
Bloke arrived late, after I'd been hanging round for an hour waiting for him. Spent 30 minutes opening boxes because I'd been instructed not to open anything. Asked me to lend him a screwdriver. Previously, I'd had to unpack, cable up and position 16 PC's because of course they wouldn't do that for us, even though the whole lot came from them and the engineer was in the place all day.
He unpacked server, connected cables, turned it on. When pre-installed OS booted up to a script where he had to type in the settings, I went to phone an RM bloke to ask for some of the settings because the engineer's little reminder sheet didn't have the settings I thought it ahould.
Bloke on phone talks to RM engineer, says I was right, tells him different IP numbers. Engineer types in new numbers, clicks a single button and it starts going through an hour's worth of set up scripts which were pre-installed. He typed about fifty characters tops, from a pre-prepared sheet.
Half way through, phone call from RM saying they'd given him the wrong settings, gave him a third set of different addreses. Now he's buggered because the process is already half-way through. Has to dig out his manual to see what has to be changed.
Wanted to know what IP a printer server was getting from DHCP and neither of us knew (I only work at the school, they set this stuff up). He seemed baffled so I said just wait and then we can lookup the MAC address of the printer server which was printed on the bottom. Might as well have told him to flugalarize the canton sprocket.
Oh, and he point-blank refused to install the latest service pack for the machine which had arrived in a seperate envelope the day before and required the machine to reboot, so the next month we caught Sasser and all sorts because it hadn't been patched and we couldn't take it down in the meantime as people had been using it all the time.
I build websites for some local companies and one is my brother's boss, who's very nice and knows me personally. Having had the FTP access for over a year and knowing I was the ONLY person with the username and password (not even she had it), some files on the server to do with the website mysteriously disappeared.
Nobody had the password, this is guaranteed.
The website went a bit weird and then I get a phone call from her saying the website's not working properly.
I notice the files are missing and tell her to phone tech support, tell them files are missing and get them to change the password.
Ten minutes later, I get a phone call from an extremely annoyed tech support at the hosting company trying to talk over me and how dare they tell their customers that their deleting files.
Instantly, they've lost my respect and, luckiily, I happen to be recording the phone call (I still have the MP3 lying around somewhere). I tell them I'm the only one who's EVER had the password and files have gone missing. They say they haven't. I point out that only I know what files are supposed to be there.
Getting increasingly annoyed and obviously not interested in checking their system, they tell me that their customer must have done it. This is a person who has never really used a computer. I tell them that's obviously not true.
I ask if they have access logs, they don't. I know it's happened in the past week or so, but they have no way of checking who's accessed the FTP or anything. I suggest that maybe they've system's had, e.g. a bad sector on a hard drive or something. They totally dispute the possibility.
Fine, I say, after giving several suggestions for them to look into, include making sure they at least log the IP's going into their FTP. They start to calm down realising that I actually know more then they do (they were obviously some sort of manager or something at the hosting company).
I don't care, I have backups (they don't), so can they just change the password on the off-chance that they are correct and that someone could have logged in with a UN/PW that only I've ever seen. They agree. Their systems don't even allow a customer to change a password themselves, they have to go via the company's tech support.
Three years on, the password is still exactly the same despite repeated requests and we haven't anybody "logging in" since. The MP3 still makes me laugh to this day, the change from "what lies are you telling to our customers" to "okay, sorry, we'll see what we can do" is very amusing.
Do you think that WINE will have to become a full emulator/virtualisation suite (or even be distributed as a merged set with an emulator) in order to fulfill the demand for a complete Windows replacement, i.e. VXD's, DirectX, drivers etc?
I can see someone Lindows-like who will try to sell, at some point, "Windows on Linux", i.e. a copy of Linux that boots up a Windows-perfect interface and runs and installs anything just like Windows would. To achieve this with the majority of hardware drivers would require emulation or some kind of virtualisation. Do you see this eventually becoming a part of mainstream WINE in order to improve compatibility with older or heavily-tied-in software?
Sorry, I used to run CS at 640x480 on a P233 with a Voodoo 2... it was more than adequate and I hardly changed the options... I played all through Half life with that original setup. In fact, in CS it handled smoke flawlessly, unlike many of the newer graphics cards. I don't know how many times I've heard people whinging that I use smoke on my own server.
I complete just about every PC game that I buy, assuming I don't get bored first. It used to be very different.
On my spectrum, I only ever completed ONE game, Nonterraqueous, and that took me, my dad and my brother, carefully plotting a map and playing for days on end.
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Maybe it comes from the fact that those operating systems probably have a completely different way of working and as such aren't affected (e.g. it might just crash instead of giving up privileges?) None of the above are multi user so maybe it just hangs the machines. And to be honest, a 98 machine hanging is not exactly critical and none of the above are EVER used on servers, just desktops, so it's even less critical if it happens to crash.
Reading the related article on www.theregister.co.uk, it seems that Microsoft DID know about these before and the fix was already incorporated into SP2.
1) It's always been in the Steam EULA and no story appeared about this when Steam was launched.
2) They won't be able to charge you for something you don't specifically agree to, i.e. a game "subscription" or similar.
3) If you agree to a subscription and paid via credit card straight to Steam, then you've just bought yourself a contract that says they'll take out next month's money next month. My ISP does the same, so do my hosting providers, etc. what's the difference?
4) If they suddenly start changing ALL games on Steam over to subscription, bye-bye 90% of their users, hello some other 3D FPS.
5) (quite a minor point considering 2 and 3)... how would they automatically charge my credit card when there's not one registered on the account? Answer: They can't. Buy the game in-shop, install and you don't ever need to enter anything but a CD-Key.
Don't blow this out of proportion, it's no worse than any other EULA and it's all there in black and white and has been for a long time..
Statistically speaking this is next to useless. Okay, when I loaded the Steam survey up, I had absolutely no intention of buying HL2, which is what the survey is for. That might mean that they are basing HL2's defaults and performance on this and previous surveys.
Now, that means that you will only get the people who THINK they can run HL2 to actually reply and there've been rumours around for years that the specs required for HL2 will be phenomenal. This is going to bias this survey towards high-end answers which will mean that the actual game will require or assume you have them. The hype that surrounds a game's performance determines it?
This might sound petty but when you consider that I never thought in a million years that my PC would ever run anything on the source engine and CS:Source actually matched performance for CS on the same computer then you have a problem.
My computer is a 1.2Ghz, 512Mb with a PCI (yes, PCI) Geforce4 MX. This is very low-end by modern standards but if I hadn't tried CS:Source demo, I wouldn't even bother to think about Source or HL2 until I'd upgraded whereas in fact it is no less playable than a game which I'm perfectly happy playing (I get constant 25+ fps in CS and CS:S and I don't care what you think, that's more than good enough).
Also, it looks like someone's either been tampering with the survey or the survey's results are not always accurate (the 6bpp entries etc.). This means that this survey isn't even worth taking a rough estimate from for any practical purpose.
I was once present at a meeting where we were buying a brand-new £40K network for a school I work at. The main selling point was 16 laptops on a trolley which connected to the network wirelessly.
I nearly pissed myself when I said that I was concerned about the security of a wireless network connected to a broadband connection in the middle of a suburban area where anyone could tap into it (I would not be responsible for the wireless network, they would). He replied that it was 54MB/s so I didn't need to worry.
Didn't have the heart to tell him that that only meant I could break the encryption twice as fast, and no, he wasn't referring to stronger encryption with the 54Mb/s networks... it's still only got basic 40-bit WEP key generated using an easily-guessable passphrase and anyone with a laptop and a wireless card can break it in a few minutes.
According to the Groklaw article, the comparison took approximately 10 hours on a dual-3GHz. I really don't see that having to do a comparison over again is really that relevant. In "court time", 10 hours is nothing and even if it takes a month, it takes a month, there's nothing you can do to help that.
It's blows SCO's 25,000 man-years prediction out of the water, anyway.
It's not so much about who owns what or what rights anyone has, it's more down to common sense. Are McDonald's going to sue me because I print my own "I love McDonald's" T-Shirts? They just might but you have to ask yourself, what would be the point? You are destroying your own customer's opinion of you.
They meant no harm, they are actually helping to propogate your brand, their little silly project isn't going to step on the toes of your next official release but yet they want to send a cease and desist. It's not about who's right or wrong, it's a question of why would you want to destroy perfectly good, free advertising for no profitable reason?
Games Workshop do the same with their silly little miniatures. Lots of companies are trying to shut down "Ihate.com" but they shouldn't really be shutting down "Ilove.com" without a half decent reason.
Okay... let's be stupid a minute here. You want to take a penknife through an airport. It's not hard... put it in your luggage.
I would no more expect to be able to carry a knife openly through customs than a diamond-edged cutting saw but you don't see people complaining that they won't buy one cos they can't take it through an airport.
Use your noddle, bung it in your luggage, not your hand luggage (carry on's for you americans). It's not difficult, it's not brain surgery and it's common sense that you should be using anytime you use a plane. The knife's not the problem, it's where you want to put it.
"Excuse me officer, but I have this dual-barrel shotgun but it's attached to my keyring and it's got a USB drive..."
"I'll guess you'll have to take it on, then."
Dunno about the USA but in the UK we have the same rules... and penknives tend to come into the safe category. Also, the fact that a penknife is not a locking knife means that you're able to carry it if it is useful for your job, etc. I always have a 2" penknife on me for cutting cable ties, opening bottles, etc.
I once had similar ideas for reusing the bits out of all the old PC's that collect around me (mostly P233's and desktop cases, for some reason, but I've got a PS/2 hiding somewhere).
:-)
Was going to use the old fans to make sure airflow went through my PC and even throughout the wooden cabinet that my PC is in so that it wouldn't get too hot.
Or:
Actually once crafted a primitive noise baffle for the exhaust fan from a PC by using an empty 5.25" casing and some defunct floppies arranged so that the air would zig-zag through the 5.25 case (off of a CDROM if I remember rightly, with the bits taken out).
Or:
The metal casing of an old PC is good for keeping all those ADSL routers, printer server boxes, ethernet hubs etc. that are on 24/7 but just get in the way when you're rereouting cables.
Bung them inside an old desktop case (even mount them in the drivebays or whatnot), run all the cables through the PCI backplates and power them off the inside of the power socket (even room for a power strip with a few "brick" power adaptors in there). If your stuff needs 12 or 5v, you could even run it direct off of the old PSU, I suppose.
That way, one box and plug powers all the silly peripherals but you haven't got millions of wires tangling and twenty brick adaptors stuck to the wall.
You can move the bits inside around so that you can see the LED status of things from the drive bays etc., can power from the power supply, can even re-use the PSU or case fans to make sure they have adequate cooling etc.
Or:
Some people try to hide their computers in their furniture (e.g. wooden cabinets/cupboards/desks), why not go the other way... convert the front of a desktop case to become a fold-open drawer or storage area.
Or:
See how many LED's you can fit onto the outside of an old PC case so that you can have that authentic "Star Trek" feel. Bonus points for them actually working, extra for flashing effects etc.
Or:
Build a race track using old PCI cards as barriers, upside-down motherboards as the floor and the balls from mice as the "cars", like blow football, only more geeky.
1) Windows design... correct, but that's the OS the article discusses and that I use for my main desktop.
2) "Yes, and as you say... you have never had a virus either at your school" - I said I have never had a virus... the schools get them about once a month, if we're lucky. One laptop had five different viruses at one point, all within a day of being cleaned. Viruses can be cleaned properly... identify, read up on the exact variant, realise every capability of the particular virus in question and remove manually (hashes and instructions are online for every virus within a few days of discovery).
3) "The 98/95 uptime claims are unrealistic for most users" - Correct. Not many people have 9x running for so long, not so much uptime as useable life.
"The registry is a pile of crap." - Agreed.
"Even Micro$oft tech support admits 98 needs to be installed every 6 months to a year because it craps all over itself." - Maybe, but they're wrong... carefully managed computers don't need this. This is my point.
"Once you make so many updates to that registry you are going to have a slow computer." - Nope. Not really. Computer still as fast as the day I installed it (have benchmarks around somewhere). Only "slowdowns" are conscious changes to the system that I've made, e.g. installing Zonealarm or whatever, which obviously impact performance.
"This is an OS design flaw with a crappy work around." - Agreed.
Agree with the points regarding appliance/PC though. Thanks for reading.
Reformat and reinstall seems to be everyone's
answer. Personally, I see that as a final resort.
Do you have any idea how long it took me to get my programs runnning the way I like them? That "personal" data is spread across a registry that, in this case, was probably not good enough to backup and just restore.
I've NEVER reformatted a computer unless it was a new hard drive. NEVER. My job is to keep four different schools' computer networks (all mixed 95, 98, 2K and XP) up and running, everything from mouse cleaning to network installation. I've NEVER had to reformat any of the PC's.
Personally, I run 98, on my main desktop machine, ever since 98 was launched and before that 95 was on my previous main desktop machine that WAS STILL WORKING 5 years later when I decommissioned it (now a Linux router with the original hardware still going strong and the Windows partition still working from a LILO prompt).
Reformat and reinstall is a stock answer that means "I don't know how to fix this." or "It's too big a job for me to be bothered with." My computer has gone up the creek any number of times (99% bad drivers/software, 1% user stupidity, 0% viruses or other rubbish) and it's always salvageable, proof is that I'm running the same machine here and now.
It's 98SE... it's on the net (broadband), it's patched up, it's got AdAware, SpyBot, Zonealarm (with antivirus, though it's disabled because I don't run anything I don't know... never had a virus except a brief glimpse of one from a computer magazine's cover CD demo of SIN... no damage, detected and fixed within a few hours).
People like this poor unfortunate person don't know that their PC is not an appliance. It's not Plug and Play (no matter what MS or Linus may tell you) but it *should* be by now. We put a man on the moon 40 years ago but we can't stop a twelve-year-old writing software that bypasses Microsoft's security. This shouldn't be a poke at the user who had this problem or the techy who took so long to fix it... the problem is much deeper... it's not even a case of user education... user's should NOT have to worry about things like this.
Reformatting someone's PC is damnright rude. They use that PC, they don't want to have to go through all the business of setting up and installing their programs again. It may save you time, but it costs them twice as much in the long run.
It would take a few hours to fix this PC, if you did it properly... especially with reboots, crashes etc in between, but fewer and fewer technicians bother... it annoys me as a technician that people still think formatting is an answer... it's not... it's an admission of defeat.
I had a bug-ridden laptop brought to me a few months back, with Win2K. AdAware showed over 300 seperate pieces of crap on it, not to mention viruses and being unpatched for over three years (it had been on the QE2 cruise liner all that time, with only occasional internet access). It was cleaned, pruned, had a few bits installed to prevent it happening again (as the user is a bit of a tech-dummy) and it's running fine, without the need for a reinstall.
Bad defaults, hole-y operating systems, no thought of a "dumb" user in the design process and lack of a decent auto-update (hey, MS, why not send out a free update CD to every single Windows registered owner and have a single-download EXE online, updating it about twice a year?) are the problems here, not the user.
Oh, and I miss the days of a DOS boot floppy with an up-to-date Virus scanner on it... You need control of the entire computer to properly flush out a virus without getting yourself reinfected or into "this file is in use" trouble, especially on the DOS-based Windows. There's no point virus-scanning when you're running the virus scanner off your hard drive... how do you know that's not been compromised? I'll leave that idea there for the next generation of virus writers.
I was expecting this to be something along the lines of the LOTR original 70's "cartoon movie" but it's more like edge detection and then crayon in the shape. Although clever, hardly groundbreaking, especially as it's not even automatic.
When they can feed in a film and get out something like the LOTR animation out of it without having to fiddle every single second of footage, maybe then it'll have a use.
I just want to tell you both good luck, we're all counting on you.
113692nd, not "th", surely.
How to name numbers
I dunno how true this is or where it applies, but I'm pretty sure that here in the UK, having any sort of moving display showing on a vehicle is illegal.
Otherwise, don't you think that all these advertisers would have 50-foot-high Plasma screens driving along the motorways advertising their wares?
I had an RM (Research Machines - read Microsoft Mk 2 for all UK schools) engineer come in to set up a brand new server that would run a new network of sixteen computers.
Bloke arrived late, after I'd been hanging round for an hour waiting for him. Spent 30 minutes opening boxes because I'd been instructed not to open anything. Asked me to lend him a screwdriver. Previously, I'd had to unpack, cable up and position 16 PC's because of course they wouldn't do that for us, even though the whole lot came from them and the engineer was in the place all day.
He unpacked server, connected cables, turned it on. When pre-installed OS booted up to a script where he had to type in the settings, I went to phone an RM bloke to ask for some of the settings because the engineer's little reminder sheet didn't have the settings I thought it ahould.
Bloke on phone talks to RM engineer, says I was right, tells him different IP numbers. Engineer types in new numbers, clicks a single button and it starts going through an hour's worth of set up scripts which were pre-installed. He typed about fifty characters tops, from a pre-prepared sheet.
Half way through, phone call from RM saying they'd given him the wrong settings, gave him a third set of different addreses. Now he's buggered because the process is already half-way through. Has to dig out his manual to see what has to be changed.
Wanted to know what IP a printer server was getting from DHCP and neither of us knew (I only work at the school, they set this stuff up). He seemed baffled so I said just wait and then we can lookup the MAC address of the printer server which was printed on the bottom. Might as well have told him to flugalarize the canton sprocket.
Oh, and he point-blank refused to install the latest service pack for the machine which had arrived in a seperate envelope the day before and required the machine to reboot, so the next month we caught Sasser and all sorts because it hadn't been patched and we couldn't take it down in the meantime as people had been using it all the time.
All in all, a complete balls up.
I build websites for some local companies and one is my brother's boss, who's very nice and knows me personally. Having had the FTP access for over a year and knowing I was the ONLY person with the username and password (not even she had it), some files on the server to do with the website mysteriously disappeared.
Nobody had the password, this is guaranteed.
The website went a bit weird and then I get a phone call from her saying the website's not working properly.
I notice the files are missing and tell her to phone tech support, tell them files are missing and get them to change the password.
Ten minutes later, I get a phone call from an extremely annoyed tech support at the hosting company trying to talk over me and how dare they tell their customers that their deleting files.
Instantly, they've lost my respect and, luckiily, I happen to be recording the phone call (I still have the MP3 lying around somewhere). I tell them I'm the only one who's EVER had the password and files have gone missing. They say they haven't. I point out that only I know what files are supposed to be there.
Getting increasingly annoyed and obviously not interested in checking their system, they tell me that their customer must have done it. This is a person who has never really used a computer. I tell them that's obviously not true.
I ask if they have access logs, they don't. I know it's happened in the past week or so, but they have no way of checking who's accessed the FTP or anything. I suggest that maybe they've system's had, e.g. a bad sector on a hard drive or something. They totally dispute the possibility.
Fine, I say, after giving several suggestions for them to look into, include making sure they at least log the IP's going into their FTP. They start to calm down realising that I actually know more then they do (they were obviously some sort of manager or something at the hosting company).
I don't care, I have backups (they don't), so can they just change the password on the off-chance that they are correct and that someone could have logged in with a UN/PW that only I've ever seen. They agree. Their systems don't even allow a customer to change a password themselves, they have to go via the company's tech support.
Three years on, the password is still exactly the same despite repeated requests and we haven't anybody "logging in" since. The MP3 still makes me laugh to this day, the change from "what lies are you telling to our customers" to "okay, sorry, we'll see what we can do" is very amusing.
Kind of ironic, I think, considering that quite a few UK petrol stations actually house mobile-phone antennae in their petrol price displays.
Do you think that WINE will have to become a full emulator/virtualisation suite (or even be distributed as a merged set with an emulator) in order to fulfill the demand for a complete Windows replacement, i.e. VXD's, DirectX, drivers etc?
I can see someone Lindows-like who will try to sell, at some point, "Windows on Linux", i.e. a copy of Linux that boots up a Windows-perfect interface and runs and installs anything just like Windows would. To achieve this with the majority of hardware drivers would require emulation or some kind of virtualisation. Do you see this eventually becoming a part of mainstream WINE in order to improve compatibility with older or heavily-tied-in software?
Only a madman would try this! Wibble!
"Uhm, Canada (like most of the civilized world) uses metric."
:-) (You could probably tell from the spelling what country I'm from).
I suppose that depends on your definition of civilised.
Sorry, I used to run CS at 640x480 on a P233 with a Voodoo 2... it was more than adequate and I hardly changed the options... I played all through Half life with that original setup. In fact, in CS it handled smoke flawlessly, unlike many of the newer graphics cards. I don't know how many times I've heard people whinging that I use smoke on my own server.
I complete just about every PC game that I buy, assuming I don't get bored first. It used to be very different.
On my spectrum, I only ever completed ONE game, Nonterraqueous, and that took me, my dad and my brother, carefully plotting a map and playing for days on end.
Just off the top of my head but don't you use the second whistle INSIDE the screen where you select which level to warp to, then you go to world 8?