And there's an even simpler non-electrical centrifuge: a human spinning a bucket.
My veterinarian in Montana, being a livestock vet who had little use for expensive or breakable gadgets, simply packed the blood tube in towels in a bucket, tied a rope to the bucket handle, and sent whoever was handy out to the parking lot to whirl it around their head a few dozen times. Worked fine.
Only 3rd party defragger I can think of that there's a good reason for is Diskeeper for enterprise use (realtime continuous defragging, a very good thing for big active databases). IIRC, WinXP's defragger is a basic version of Diskeeper anyway.
I sometimes use VOPT v7 for speed and to get a more compacted final result (run it first, then DK), but no longer really trust it... it ain't the same app as it was in the DOS era. I'm not entirely sure it's really doing the job anymore, and found ways to crash v5 while in action -- something defraggers need to be immune to.
If any of the defraggers still had a Sort By Date function, 99% of the need and risk goes away -- if files are sorted by date, only the very arse end of the drive is ever fragmented, so it's extremely fast to do and only the most recent files are touched.
Nope. The real killer is total failure to defrag, and it won't hurt Windows any, it'll just slow things down, and make apps that use a lot of file handles unstable (frex, browsers with their large collection of cache and temp files; email clients that rewrite the entire database every time they do anything; shit like that). Windows gets the blame but it's really not the problem, other than the filesystem and design limits that were pretty much the rule in consumer OSs back then.
Yeah, it helps to run a registry scrubber now and again (I use ToniArts EasyCleaner -- free from http://personal.inet.fi/business/toniarts/ecleane.htm), and I beat my clients over the head until they get in the habit of doing so (along with defragging), but fact is W9x can survive without it. It takes about 3 years of total neglect to finally get to the aforementioned unhappy state, which can be fixed, usually back to 100% perfect, with two minutes of EasyCleaner and the hour or so it takes to kill tempfiles and do a defrag.
Mind you I also think using RegEdit is normal, so I'm pretty familiar with rooting around in there. I've learned that you DON'T find bales and bales of the sort of crud we've been led to believe. I've never seen a genuinely "corrupted" registry. The worst is conflicting crud left by crapware with shitty uninstallers like Norton, and even that cleans up readily enough.
We get numerous machines donated to the club that have Win95/98, had belonged to schools and gov't offices, and have never had the first scrap of maintenance -- and in most cases just basic cleanup per above fixes what ails 'em. It's very rare that I deem one a reinstall candidate.
As to whether maintenance should be necessary... You wouldn't let your car struggle with the same old tired oil and filters for years on end, would you? Why should you expect a computer, an equally complex beast, to do without the most basic maintenance? Yet people do, including people who should know better, and then wonder why after a few years it no longer runs well. Your car wouldn't do so well on clogged filters and gummy oil, either.:)
As to "but it shouldn't be vulnerable to shitware like Norton, or malware either" -- do you say the same when you hit a major pothole in the dark and knock your car out of alignment??
Being an old DOShead myself, I initially approached Windows with skeptical disgust, and I glare suspiciously at each new incarnation, but over the years I've found it's actually pretty durable, especially considering the neglect and abuse most people heap on it.
I don't know how Win7 does it, but in XP only the first restore point is large, and not always then. It apparently only records incremental changes, not whole snapshots.
It must exist but behave different for XP -- mine is on FAT32 with 4k clusters, I think (yes, it's old) and has no such problem. Someone just complained to me about their WinXP having lost all its restore points after defragging; his is NTFS with cluster size at the default (which IIRC is 4k). Got any insight on that??
[blink] Which defrag utility, do you recall? The other day someone was whining to me about WinXP restore points having gone walkabout after defragging, and all I could tell 'em is that I'd never heard of such nonsense. Well, now I have!!
Having removed Norton from a few systems and left Windows perfectly intact (and working much better), I beg to differ.
As to the original complaint -- I've never had to reinstall either, and my four "everyday use" Windows setups (95, 98, ME, and XP) have a combined service history of 38 YEARS.
Yeah, but that's an actual floppy drive, priced more or less in line with normal floppy drives. This is a floppy port to USB port convertor that you can plug a flash drive into. Tho unless you buy an extra gadget they also sell, you're limited to 1.44mb per directory!!
Not very damned cost-effective unless your work environment nukes floppy disks/drives too often.
"I concur to the already mentioned opinion that the Floppy-to-USB converter market will soon thrive."
I'd agree, except that the cheapest price I found for this clearly simple gadget was $244 (185 euros). EACH. Ten bucks would be a tidy profit; this is beyond gouging, but the industrial market needs what it needs NOW and will pay, so...
At $275 each, I can see why this hasn't caught on.
If it were in the $10 range (which is probably realistic considering it can't be much more than a chip, its embedded software, a cable, and two ports) it would sell like hotcakes. As it is, I doubt it sells at all except to the desperate.
Thanks for the on-the-spot report. I had a feeling the article was a trifle skewed and was meant to get us well-fed westerners hot under the collar... as you point out every industrializing society goes through exactly such a stage. American and western Europe have already been there, done that, and moved on. Asia is running 100 years behind us, is all.
BTW I was skeptical just from viewing the photo, given that it appeared to be general naptime -- *everyone* has their head down AND their workspace cleared so they can do so. You wouldn't expect it all at once if it were "exhausted workers falling asleep at their desk" -- right into the pile of parts in progress, as it would be in that case.
Yeah, but wouldn't that be "realistic"?? to blow up a house you'd only need a grenade; to blow up that reinforced bunker you might have to go find a pocket nuke. So I'd say it's a matter of what's explodable being reasonably logical, depending on the materials it's made of. You wouldn't expect steel plate to fall apart like balsa after just a few shots; personally I'd be disappointed if everything had the same shatter strength.
Of course the same should apply to enemy fire and your cover;)
That's a good point, and shouldn't enemy fire have the same capacity to eventually blast through your cover?? the advantage then becomes who knows where the other guy is, which could go to you or them. Sounds like fun to me:)
...it's just that having your concentration disrupted, even on a subliminal level, is irritating, which in turn quite typically makes people impatient, and more liable to just do whatever the hell is in front of them rather than giving it thought first.
Yep (they inherited GTE's protected monopoly areas; I know, cuz I live in one of them) and yes, your description is an apt for the whole damned company.
The "get your brakes checked" crowd also fails to remember that the heavier the vehicle, the greater the distance required to stop it, no matter how perfect your brakes and reactions and road conditions are. (Since I drive a truck, frequently with a heavy load, I'm aware of this on an everyday basis.)
I used to live near a light like that (had to go through there to get to town) -- I timed it, and it was green on average 6 to 7 seconds. Just enough for one car to get going, never enough for two -- might as well have been a four-way stop. Fortunately not a high-traffic intersection, but still mighty annoying.
I wonder how much of it is an internal corporate struggle, between
1) management, who says, "Look, the internet is doing all our promotion for free, why the hell should we pay someone to do it?? Fire the marketdroids and save a lot of money!" and
2) the marketing department, who says, "No no no, the internet is stealing it from us, and that's why you still need to pay us marketdroids to promote it!"
Sure, they're kids. But they're no longer being required to eventually grow up, and that was my point. So now we have nominal-adults who know only short-term thinking......
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And there's an even simpler non-electrical centrifuge: a human spinning a bucket.
My veterinarian in Montana, being a livestock vet who had little use for expensive or breakable gadgets, simply packed the blood tube in towels in a bucket, tied a rope to the bucket handle, and sent whoever was handy out to the parking lot to whirl it around their head a few dozen times. Worked fine.
Only 3rd party defragger I can think of that there's a good reason for is Diskeeper for enterprise use (realtime continuous defragging, a very good thing for big active databases). IIRC, WinXP's defragger is a basic version of Diskeeper anyway.
I sometimes use VOPT v7 for speed and to get a more compacted final result (run it first, then DK), but no longer really trust it... it ain't the same app as it was in the DOS era. I'm not entirely sure it's really doing the job anymore, and found ways to crash v5 while in action -- something defraggers need to be immune to.
If any of the defraggers still had a Sort By Date function, 99% of the need and risk goes away -- if files are sorted by date, only the very arse end of the drive is ever fragmented, so it's extremely fast to do and only the most recent files are touched.
Nope. The real killer is total failure to defrag, and it won't hurt Windows any, it'll just slow things down, and make apps that use a lot of file handles unstable (frex, browsers with their large collection of cache and temp files; email clients that rewrite the entire database every time they do anything; shit like that). Windows gets the blame but it's really not the problem, other than the filesystem and design limits that were pretty much the rule in consumer OSs back then.
Yeah, it helps to run a registry scrubber now and again (I use ToniArts EasyCleaner -- free from http://personal.inet.fi/business/toniarts/ecleane.htm), and I beat my clients over the head until they get in the habit of doing so (along with defragging), but fact is W9x can survive without it. It takes about 3 years of total neglect to finally get to the aforementioned unhappy state, which can be fixed, usually back to 100% perfect, with two minutes of EasyCleaner and the hour or so it takes to kill tempfiles and do a defrag.
Mind you I also think using RegEdit is normal, so I'm pretty familiar with rooting around in there. I've learned that you DON'T find bales and bales of the sort of crud we've been led to believe. I've never seen a genuinely "corrupted" registry. The worst is conflicting crud left by crapware with shitty uninstallers like Norton, and even that cleans up readily enough.
We get numerous machines donated to the club that have Win95/98, had belonged to schools and gov't offices, and have never had the first scrap of maintenance -- and in most cases just basic cleanup per above fixes what ails 'em. It's very rare that I deem one a reinstall candidate.
As to whether maintenance should be necessary... You wouldn't let your car struggle with the same old tired oil and filters for years on end, would you? Why should you expect a computer, an equally complex beast, to do without the most basic maintenance? Yet people do, including people who should know better, and then wonder why after a few years it no longer runs well. Your car wouldn't do so well on clogged filters and gummy oil, either. :)
As to "but it shouldn't be vulnerable to shitware like Norton, or malware either" -- do you say the same when you hit a major pothole in the dark and knock your car out of alignment??
Being an old DOShead myself, I initially approached Windows with skeptical disgust, and I glare suspiciously at each new incarnation, but over the years I've found it's actually pretty durable, especially considering the neglect and abuse most people heap on it.
I don't know how Win7 does it, but in XP only the first restore point is large, and not always then. It apparently only records incremental changes, not whole snapshots.
This is with the default defragger, right?
It must exist but behave different for XP -- mine is on FAT32 with 4k clusters, I think (yes, it's old) and has no such problem. Someone just complained to me about their WinXP having lost all its restore points after defragging; his is NTFS with cluster size at the default (which IIRC is 4k). Got any insight on that??
[blink] Which defrag utility, do you recall? The other day someone was whining to me about WinXP restore points having gone walkabout after defragging, and all I could tell 'em is that I'd never heard of such nonsense. Well, now I have!!
Having removed Norton from a few systems and left Windows perfectly intact (and working much better), I beg to differ.
As to the original complaint -- I've never had to reinstall either, and my four "everyday use" Windows setups (95, 98, ME, and XP) have a combined service history of 38 YEARS.
Yeah, but that's an actual floppy drive, priced more or less in line with normal floppy drives. This is a floppy port to USB port convertor that you can plug a flash drive into. Tho unless you buy an extra gadget they also sell, you're limited to 1.44mb per directory!!
Not very damned cost-effective unless your work environment nukes floppy disks/drives too often.
Now that's clever... gonna have to stop throwing out those dead floppies. :)
"I concur to the already mentioned opinion that the Floppy-to-USB converter market will soon thrive."
I'd agree, except that the cheapest price I found for this clearly simple gadget was $244 (185 euros). EACH. Ten bucks would be a tidy profit; this is beyond gouging, but the industrial market needs what it needs NOW and will pay, so...
And if Things Fall Apart, which locomotive would you rather have to hand??
At $275 each, I can see why this hasn't caught on.
If it were in the $10 range (which is probably realistic considering it can't be much more than a chip, its embedded software, a cable, and two ports) it would sell like hotcakes. As it is, I doubt it sells at all except to the desperate.
I know at $10 I'd buy 'em just to have on hand.
Thanks for the on-the-spot report. I had a feeling the article was a trifle skewed and was meant to get us well-fed westerners hot under the collar... as you point out every industrializing society goes through exactly such a stage. American and western Europe have already been there, done that, and moved on. Asia is running 100 years behind us, is all.
BTW I was skeptical just from viewing the photo, given that it appeared to be general naptime -- *everyone* has their head down AND their workspace cleared so they can do so. You wouldn't expect it all at once if it were "exhausted workers falling asleep at their desk" -- right into the pile of parts in progress, as it would be in that case.
Those pictures of well-aimed citizen resistance brought a smile to my face and joy to my heart. All is not lost in Britain just yet!
Fanny packs have a different end we should know about??!
Yeah, but wouldn't that be "realistic"?? to blow up a house you'd only need a grenade; to blow up that reinforced bunker you might have to go find a pocket nuke. So I'd say it's a matter of what's explodable being reasonably logical, depending on the materials it's made of. You wouldn't expect steel plate to fall apart like balsa after just a few shots; personally I'd be disappointed if everything had the same shatter strength.
Of course the same should apply to enemy fire and your cover ;)
That's a good point, and shouldn't enemy fire have the same capacity to eventually blast through your cover?? the advantage then becomes who knows where the other guy is, which could go to you or them. Sounds like fun to me :)
...it's just that having your concentration disrupted, even on a subliminal level, is irritating, which in turn quite typically makes people impatient, and more liable to just do whatever the hell is in front of them rather than giving it thought first.
Yep (they inherited GTE's protected monopoly areas; I know, cuz I live in one of them) and yes, your description is an apt for the whole damned company.
The "get your brakes checked" crowd also fails to remember that the heavier the vehicle, the greater the distance required to stop it, no matter how perfect your brakes and reactions and road conditions are. (Since I drive a truck, frequently with a heavy load, I'm aware of this on an everyday basis.)
I used to live near a light like that (had to go through there to get to town) -- I timed it, and it was green on average 6 to 7 seconds. Just enough for one car to get going, never enough for two -- might as well have been a four-way stop. Fortunately not a high-traffic intersection, but still mighty annoying.
Makes a person wonder about all sorts of agenda-driven statistics, don't it??
I wonder how much of it is an internal corporate struggle, between
1) management, who says, "Look, the internet is doing all our promotion for free, why the hell should we pay someone to do it?? Fire the marketdroids and save a lot of money!" and
2) the marketing department, who says, "No no no, the internet is stealing it from us, and that's why you still need to pay us marketdroids to promote it!"
The book-reading part, yeah. The rest -- per the previous actual field study, not so much.
Sure, they're kids. But they're no longer being required to eventually grow up, and that was my point. So now we have nominal-adults who know only short-term thinking......