WWIV, lordy was that a miserable thing from the user's POV... totally linear and no way to read/reply offline... I'm a Wildcat fan myself.:)
I remember the name "Ethereal Realms", probably from one of the BBS lists that floated around back in the day. -- I maintained the list of BBSs local to Santa Clarita CA.
Telnet-based BBSs can still have "that old time local coffeehouse flavour" (try telnet://techware.dynip.com for a good example) but I think that may well be restricted to those that started life with dialup, or at least are run by a sysop who hies from the dialup era, and knows what sort of user-environment he wants to create.
And I think the difference is largely that with telnet, you get a random sample of users from everywhere, whereas with dialup, you got mainly folks in the local calling distance, plus subsets of regulars on other BBSs that shared the same messaging networks. So with dialup, there was already a shared culture factor, just from proximity.
Tho among the messaging networks, FIDO and RIME never had the down-home goodness of U'NI-net (my personal favourite, now gone) and ILink (which I still use).
The attraction of the BBS was that it was like your own local coffeehouse. The internet lacks that -- chat rooms are far less personal-feeling than even the most primitive BBS (your cable across the room trick almost qualifies!:) A good BBS had its own ambience, its own regulars, its own specialties of the house, not duplicated anywhere else.
BTW, I'm a 1955 model, and started doing the BBS thing in 1993, with a 286 running DOS6, and a 2400 baud modem -- which at the time was quite sufficient.
I don't normally post in quite such inflammatory language, but I'd had a moron-infested day... and the urge to improve the gene pool was still with me:)
Not to mention the morons and lunatics now walking around being enabled by political correctness; in a prior era, someone would have long since had enough of their behaviour, and shot 'em.
Same here... been with ELN 10 years, and in addition to the entrenched email (which remains attractive if only because ELN's is damnear 100% reliable) I've also got websites there that get over 50k hits a year, mainly from referral links; can you imagine tracking down all those??! yeah, I could put my domains anywhere, but what about all the referrers pointing to home.earthlink.net URLs that predate my domain names? some referrers don't have a functional update method, either.
As to the broken DNS thing, ISTM the simplest fix, if they're damned bound and determined to keep it, would be to make that strictly OPT-IN, as an option in ELN's own software. That way all the normal customers could have real DNS, and the people who miss AOL could have an ad portal.
Which generation indeed... I'm in the over-50s:) But I was referring mainly to neoadults, ie. the teen thru college and new-job-yuppie set; and average folks, who tend not to have the average geek's bristly response to such stuff.
Tho I think you're right in that apathy is a large factor -- today's kids are growing up in an entrenched society that they don't see any way to change, and often don't see any NEED to change. And from what I'm seeing, most lack the older generation's level of education in things historical. So they don't truly grok that change is possible -- far as they know, it's "always been this way".
Witness how many kids here believe the Bill of Rights is a list of "all things not compulsory are forbidden", rather than its true meaning of "All things not specifically prohibited are allowed".
[thinking] Ah, I see the problem. Gov't has taken it to mean anything We-The-People haven't forbidden them to do, they CAN do.:/
The scariest part is that most of the current generation has already accepted this as "normal".
One factor is that there are no longer any viable frontiers to escape to. Thus the concept that anywhere was once free of surveillance is itself going away.
And once people like us (who are old enough to remember when "none of your business" was the order of the day) have aged out of the power structure, there'll be no hope of going back.
"... to live under this great experiment in voyeurism."
One has to wonder about the concurrent rise in "reality TV" with its implication that it's such great fun to live under a microscope......at least, for the dude in the white laboratory smock.
But where do you draw the line? If a corporation is =required= to *facilitate* your freedom of speech, the logical extension is that *anyone* is required to do so as well.
Under the current system, if some stranger on the street hands you a diatribe and demands that you read it aloud to the whole world, you can refuse, and your refusal does not impinge on this person's freedom of speech.
Under a system where corporations (which by extension, means ANY person) are *required* to facilitate freedom of speech, you would be *required* to read aloud this person's diatribe, whether you agreed with it or not. Essentially, anyone could put a gun to your head and say "publish THIS". (The inverse of putting a gun to your head and saying "DON'T publish this.")
So while I hate to see a supposedly-neutral party like a registrar cave in under pressure that amounts to "shut your client up, or we'll shut YOU up", forcing corporations (or persons) to facilitate speech is not the way to go either.
In fact this should have gone straight to a libel suit, with GoDaddy not involved at all. After all, in a sane legal world, you wouldn't go after Amazon for selling books written and printed by other parties.
More drivers might have come in with SP2, I dunno.
With XP Pro original or SP1 (the two that I've worked with -- I'm the hardware dude for the local PC user group) most ATI cards are not recognised, not even fairly old ones (1998?!) Croggling, considering how common they are. XP-concurrent S3 and Matrox cards are usually recognised; NVidia sometimes.
In my random pokes at various linux disties, I've found the dividing line for whether video works right off is VESA 1.x vs 2.0 -- the latter usually work, the former often don't.
That is indeed one of the things that made me prefer Mandrake -- oh look, I can futz around in here and get my sound card and modem working that it didn't recognise during install, and I can try different settings without winding up stuck because I have no idea how to reset 'em, etc, etc.
So... what advantages does this PCLinuxOS have over Mandrake? (I can't get broadband so can't just download 'em and throw 'em at the test machine:(
As to Ubuntu... I've messed with v5 and v6, and it's going the right way for a one-size-fits-all simplified linux for the masses, almost to where I could hand it to a newbie, but it feels too Mac-like for me (some of which is Gnome... I prefer KDE). I do have a suspicion that a lot of its fans are Mac users in Real Life.
On a related note... when I first got internet access in 1996, one of the first places I had to go was to microsoft.com to download an update. Well, someone there had just discovered FRAMES, and you've never seen a frames hell quite like this... the download frame was buried among half a dozen other frames, and was so small that I almost couldn't SEE the link I needed, let alone click it.
So I took a screen capture and sent it off to webmaster@microsoft.com, with a vociferous complaint.
My XP box isn't used online, so I see no reason to potentially compromise its stability with patches it doesn't need in its boring, unconnected life. If it were used online, I'd probably do critical updates in occasional clumps, but only after other people had stopped bleeding from 'em:)
The Win98 system is my internet box, and it has never been compromised -- and yes, I'd know if it were. (I've ID'd several viruses and trojans in the wild, before any AV apps "knew" them. Hex viewers are your FRIENDS.:)
But I don't use IE/Outlook, I do use a firewall, and I don't download and run every piece of crapware that comes down the pipe.
I think you are right, in that given an ideal design, the easier an OS is for the average joe, the easier it should be in those critical ways -- notably setup and security. For me, Windows is easy, because if you eliminate risky behaviours, and add basic security apps, it's secure enough for all practical userland purposes. (Servers are another realm we won't consider here.)
I view Windows as a big hairy DOS app in drag -- not as a mysterious black box (tho I realise that's how a lot of the anti-M$ fanboys do view it). Conversely userland linux still has something of a blackbox quality to me, and I don't feel comfortable with linux security issues because I don't feel like I can see what's happening like I can on a DOS/Win box.
As to one set of fanboys following around and trying to convert the other set of fanboys, yep -- shades of old-time usenet flamewars!:) Twitter may have FOE'd me, and turned off half his brain out of sheer hatred for M$, but he still occasionally makes good points. In the current case, I might not have bothered to reply (nothing all that new to say), except that I thought the -1 mod his post got wasn't justified.
Sure, there are always stupid bugs and holes that get overlooked until some creative person tries weird stuff like that... once the problem is discovered, it seems way too obvious, but it must not have been at the time, or it wouldn't exist. IANAP, but I expect copy-and-paste code leads to a lot of such issues.
(I'm widely-feared as "the beta tester who can break anything" cuz I'll do what seemed obvious to me, but that the coder never thought of:)
Twitter, we've got way more in common than you realise (I don't care that you've foe'd me, I still read your posts, cuz often enough you say something worth reading), but you just can't see past your rabid anti-M$ prejudice to hear what I'm really saying. Anyway, to answer your various points:
My XP machine has no internet connection (that's the Win98 box's job), but even if it did, I don't let IE wander around loose, I use a firewall, and I always have a very good idea what is happening on my machines. As to the update reboot thing, it is never updated, as there is no update *that machine* needs. (If it were a client's system -- they pay me $65/hr, so I guess I must know something! -- then yeah, I'd rather someone who I can't watch over all the time *does* critical updates, if the machine is used online.)
And I do know *exactly* when any machine of mine reboots -- if nothing else, I can check the date on the bootlog.txt that is created each and every time.
Look, just because you and your buddies don't know how to make Windows stable, that doesn't mean it can't be done, or even that instability is typical. Yet when I complain that my old RedHat6 box crashed all the time, you'll tell me that's because I was too ignorant to fix it. See, it works both ways!!
As to resources, free software and volunteer programmers are all well and good, but that is NO guarantee of quality control, any more than M$'s multibillion dollar budget is. But M$ can go hire more coders any time they want, simply because there are always expert coders available who need to make a living. Conversely, you can't always suck in a volunteer, especially one with enough experience and expertise, every time you need one. If you could, ALL free software would be miles ahead of commercial stuff, instead of mostly playing catchup. Yeah, there are some FOSS apps that are indeed way ahead of the commercial alternatives (and some, like VirtualDub, that will probably never be rivaled by any commercial app), but that's not how it is across the broad spectrum of software.
I wish it wasn't so, because I really, REALLY want there to be a linux, BSD, or *some* non-M$ OS that I could *seamlessly* port my next generation of Windows users to (XP was annoying enough; I really don't approve of the direction Vista is heading) -- and no, the Mac isn't it, because I don't buy into that realm of vendor lock-in (even more restrictive than M$, because with Apple you don't even have the choice of whose hardware you buy).
And that's why every so often I collect up every linux disty I can lay hands on, and try 'em out. Because I keep hoping to find one that I can *painlessly* migrate ordinary users to, and with all the apps they need (yes, including the ability to *seamlessly* install and run every Win/DOS app anyone might ever use). Remember, MOST people are not coders, and cannot reasonably use or configure a system at that level.
It's been getting better -- Ubuntu and Mandrake are to where they'll do for average users who have minimal expectations, and who won't need to add much beyond what comes with the system. SuSE likely will be soon, cuz Novell is pretty good at getting stuff to where Real Users want it. But linux still has a ways to go before it's to where it's suitable for the *critical mass* of users that will be needed to get all the commercial vendors to *routinely* release *NIX versions of their drivers and apps.
And THAT is what's really needed to balance out the power of M$. But a volunteer rabble who can't even agree on how to implement copy-and-paste are not going to take over the OS world, no matter how many their eyes nor how strong their FOSS religion.
Question: how big was the "failed" hard disk, and was the filesystem FAT32 or NTFS?
I ask, because turns out the FDISK "32gb limit" was there for a *reason* -- FAT32 partitions larger than 32GB can experience data wrapping that exactly mimics a HD failure. (There was even a M$ knowledge base article about the problem, tho I've been unable to relocate it.)
Funny how there was a rash of HD "failures" after the advent of 40GB HDs, concurrent with an FDISK update that would do FAT32 partitions larger than 32GB...
NTFS does not have the bug.
Yes, I ran into this bug personally, and it does indeed *look* exactly like a failing HD (files just vanish). And that was why I had to reinstall XP... first time I've *ever* had to reinstall Windows of any species on any of my machines.
Same here -- tho I found it also applied to Win9x: on good hardware, with stable drivers, and with even a modicum of maintenance**, it crashes seldom to never, and uptime can easily be measured in weeks (or even months. 49 days right now on this Win98 box.)
Of course Win2K/XP is better at coping with the *effects* of shit hardware and bad drivers, and at killing and restarting processes at need -- it's amazing how often XP restarts the desktop without the user noticing a thing. I only notice because the keyboard repeat rate gets reset to default, and I have to reset it after the desktop has restarted itself.
** I found that it takes about 3 years of total neglect to get Win9x to an unusable state. Even an annual "tune-up" sufficed to prevent major issues. (Cripes, people, you change the oil and air filter in your car, don't you??)
As to the beta process -- even late RCs aren't necessarily great. I remember testing Win2K RC2... it pissed away 128mb of RAM in an hour, and got to where it took 15 seconds to respond to a mouse click. You'd never know the RTM version was related, it improved THAT much between 'em.
I'm reminded that one of the annoyances in Ubuntu 5 was that it had a broken version of SameGnome. Booo!! But SameGnome was not only fixed, but made better in Ubuntu 6. Yaaay!
It might seem trivial, but that sort of thing affects the "user experience" by helping set the user's opinion of the OS as a whole.
On XP, sometimes a program will appear to not start when clicked, but what's really happened is that the app has done a background crash, and the OS didn't bother notifying you.
WordXP does this 100% of the time (at least if the "Office always in memory" thing is turned off) -- click icon, Word seems to not start, click again, it starts. In fact it's done a background crash and restart, as is evident from the system event log.
Nero does this a lot too.
BTW rebooting is against my religion [g]. My XP box regularly goes months between restarts -- record so far is 11.5 months.
Okay... my little XP box, a lowly P3-500 built mostly from salvage, has an uptime record of 350 days (which only ended when it did because of being powered down during a lightning storm). It thinks this is normal. What am I doing wrong??
Oh, and it spent most of the past month doing work that had CPU usage pegged at a continuous 100%.
BTW, the Win98 box I'm using right now is on day 49 since last restart (no, it doesn't suffer from the rollover bug... that needs a hardware bug to manifest), and yeah, it is getting to where I probably should restart it, if only to clear out the resource heap.
(All small potatoes next to my old DOS6 machine, which got restarted just twice -- in a span of 5 YEARS.)
That's Twitter for ya... he can't believe anyone could possibly have a stable Windows box. He'd probably blow a gasket at my XP box with its 11.5 month uptime record (only ended due to a lightning storm), or even at this Win98 box that right now has been up since [checking] July 20th.
Here's a tip, fanboyz... if you can't get something stable, seek advice from someone who can. Maybe the problem isn't the OS, but shitty hardware, or [gasp] your own ignorance. After all, if us WinDLLs users can't get linux to run stable, you claim it's because we're too stupid to set it up right... well, it works both ways!!
(Oh, and I have a couple linux systems and a Mac in the house too, so don't go accusing me of being a Windoze bigot. I'll try any of 'em.)
Besides, if you want to get into an uptime peeing contest, Netware regularly measures it in years, not mere days or months.
An AC complains, "Then label me a troll because my PC becomes sluggish after being on for 24 hours. I only use Commercial software (MS Office, MS Visual Studio, Dreamweaver, Norton's AntiVirus). [...] The slow downs gets real bad after 24 hours without a reboot. If I right-click on the desktop and got New... it will take over 30 seconds before the next menu appears. This is on a 1 year old P4 2.8GHz"
That's all very typical of a system infected with a recent version of Norton Antivirus. I've seen NAV slow down a P4-3.5GHz/512mb RAM system to literally XT speeds -- it took up to 30 seconds for a simple dialog box to finish drawing, and as long as FOUR MINUTES (I timed it) for it to respond to a mouse click.
Slashdot Mirror
What you want is here: http://www.bbsmates.com/
:)
WWIV, lordy was that a miserable thing from the user's POV... totally linear and no way to read/reply offline... I'm a Wildcat fan myself.
I remember the name "Ethereal Realms", probably from one of the BBS lists that floated around back in the day. -- I maintained the list of BBSs local to Santa Clarita CA.
Telnet-based BBSs can still have "that old time local coffeehouse flavour" (try telnet://techware.dynip.com for a good example) but I think that may well be restricted to those that started life with dialup, or at least are run by a sysop who hies from the dialup era, and knows what sort of user-environment he wants to create.
And I think the difference is largely that with telnet, you get a random sample of users from everywhere, whereas with dialup, you got mainly folks in the local calling distance, plus subsets of regulars on other BBSs that shared the same messaging networks. So with dialup, there was already a shared culture factor, just from proximity.
Tho among the messaging networks, FIDO and RIME never had the down-home goodness of U'NI-net (my personal favourite, now gone) and ILink (which I still use).
The attraction of the BBS was that it was like your own local coffeehouse. The internet lacks that -- chat rooms are far less personal-feeling than even the most primitive BBS (your cable across the room trick almost qualifies! :) A good BBS had its own ambience, its own regulars, its own specialties of the house, not duplicated anywhere else.
... in fact I still use a messaging BBS every day (access via telnet://techware.dynip.com or http://techware.dynip.com/public/bbslogin.wct ) and am the "co-sysop-at-large" for a surviving dialup BBS (see http://eqcity.com/ )
But BBSing is not dead, and you can still experience it
BTW, I'm a 1955 model, and started doing the BBS thing in 1993, with a 286 running DOS6, and a 2400 baud modem -- which at the time was quite sufficient.
LOL!! ain't that the truth.
:)
I don't normally post in quite such inflammatory language, but I'd had a moron-infested day... and the urge to improve the gene pool was still with me
Not to mention the morons and lunatics now walking around being enabled by political correctness; in a prior era, someone would have long since had enough of their behaviour, and shot 'em.
Same here... been with ELN 10 years, and in addition to the entrenched email (which remains attractive if only because ELN's is damnear 100% reliable) I've also got websites there that get over 50k hits a year, mainly from referral links; can you imagine tracking down all those??! yeah, I could put my domains anywhere, but what about all the referrers pointing to home.earthlink.net URLs that predate my domain names? some referrers don't have a functional update method, either.
As to the broken DNS thing, ISTM the simplest fix, if they're damned bound and determined to keep it, would be to make that strictly OPT-IN, as an option in ELN's own software. That way all the normal customers could have real DNS, and the people who miss AOL could have an ad portal.
Which generation indeed... I'm in the over-50s :) But I was referring mainly to neoadults, ie. the teen thru college and new-job-yuppie set; and average folks, who tend not to have the average geek's bristly response to such stuff.
:/
Tho I think you're right in that apathy is a large factor -- today's kids are growing up in an entrenched society that they don't see any way to change, and often don't see any NEED to change. And from what I'm seeing, most lack the older generation's level of education in things historical. So they don't truly grok that change is possible -- far as they know, it's "always been this way".
Witness how many kids here believe the Bill of Rights is a list of "all things not compulsory are forbidden", rather than its true meaning of "All things not specifically prohibited are allowed".
[thinking] Ah, I see the problem. Gov't has taken it to mean anything We-The-People haven't forbidden them to do, they CAN do.
The scariest part is that most of the current generation has already accepted this as "normal".
One factor is that there are no longer any viable frontiers to escape to. Thus the concept that anywhere was once free of surveillance is itself going away.
And once people like us (who are old enough to remember when "none of your business" was the order of the day) have aged out of the power structure, there'll be no hope of going back.
"... to live under this great experiment in voyeurism."
...at least, for the dude in the white laboratory smock.
One has to wonder about the concurrent rise in "reality TV" with its implication that it's such great fun to live under a microscope...
My first thought on reading the story was "And have a nice day, Number Six!"
But where do you draw the line? If a corporation is =required= to *facilitate* your freedom of speech, the logical extension is that *anyone* is required to do so as well.
Under the current system, if some stranger on the street hands you a diatribe and demands that you read it aloud to the whole world, you can refuse, and your refusal does not impinge on this person's freedom of speech.
Under a system where corporations (which by extension, means ANY person) are *required* to facilitate freedom of speech, you would be *required* to read aloud this person's diatribe, whether you agreed with it or not. Essentially, anyone could put a gun to your head and say "publish THIS". (The inverse of putting a gun to your head and saying "DON'T publish this.")
So while I hate to see a supposedly-neutral party like a registrar cave in under pressure that amounts to "shut your client up, or we'll shut YOU up", forcing corporations (or persons) to facilitate speech is not the way to go either.
In fact this should have gone straight to a libel suit, with GoDaddy not involved at all. After all, in a sane legal world, you wouldn't go after Amazon for selling books written and printed by other parties.
I read it the same way.... hey! do you suppose we've already been sentenced, and don't know it??
More drivers might have come in with SP2, I dunno.
With XP Pro original or SP1 (the two that I've worked with -- I'm the hardware dude for the local PC user group) most ATI cards are not recognised, not even fairly old ones (1998?!) Croggling, considering how common they are. XP-concurrent S3 and Matrox cards are usually recognised; NVidia sometimes.
In my random pokes at various linux disties, I've found the dividing line for whether video works right off is VESA 1.x vs 2.0 -- the latter usually work, the former often don't.
That is indeed one of the things that made me prefer Mandrake -- oh look, I can futz around in here and get my sound card and modem working that it didn't recognise during install, and I can try different settings without winding up stuck because I have no idea how to reset 'em, etc, etc.
:(
... I've messed with v5 and v6, and it's going the right way for a one-size-fits-all simplified linux for the masses, almost to where I could hand it to a newbie, but it feels too Mac-like for me (some of which is Gnome ... I prefer KDE). I do have a suspicion that a lot of its fans are Mac users in Real Life.
So... what advantages does this PCLinuxOS have over Mandrake? (I can't get broadband so can't just download 'em and throw 'em at the test machine
As to Ubuntu
LOL! good one.
... when I first got internet access in 1996, one of the first places I had to go was to microsoft.com to download an update. Well, someone there had just discovered FRAMES, and you've never seen a frames hell quite like this... the download frame was buried among half a dozen other frames, and was so small that I almost couldn't SEE the link I needed, let alone click it.
On a related note
So I took a screen capture and sent it off to webmaster@microsoft.com, with a vociferous complaint.
Two weeks later, the frames were gone.
My XP box isn't used online, so I see no reason to potentially compromise its stability with patches it doesn't need in its boring, unconnected life. If it were used online, I'd probably do critical updates in occasional clumps, but only after other people had stopped bleeding from 'em :)
:)
:) Twitter may have FOE'd me, and turned off half his brain out of sheer hatred for M$, but he still occasionally makes good points. In the current case, I might not have bothered to reply (nothing all that new to say), except that I thought the -1 mod his post got wasn't justified.
The Win98 system is my internet box, and it has never been compromised -- and yes, I'd know if it were. (I've ID'd several viruses and trojans in the wild, before any AV apps "knew" them. Hex viewers are your FRIENDS.
But I don't use IE/Outlook, I do use a firewall, and I don't download and run every piece of crapware that comes down the pipe.
I think you are right, in that given an ideal design, the easier an OS is for the average joe, the easier it should be in those critical ways -- notably setup and security. For me, Windows is easy, because if you eliminate risky behaviours, and add basic security apps, it's secure enough for all practical userland purposes. (Servers are another realm we won't consider here.)
I view Windows as a big hairy DOS app in drag -- not as a mysterious black box (tho I realise that's how a lot of the anti-M$ fanboys do view it). Conversely userland linux still has something of a blackbox quality to me, and I don't feel comfortable with linux security issues because I don't feel like I can see what's happening like I can on a DOS/Win box.
As to one set of fanboys following around and trying to convert the other set of fanboys, yep -- shades of old-time usenet flamewars!
Sure, there are always stupid bugs and holes that get overlooked until some creative person tries weird stuff like that... once the problem is discovered, it seems way too obvious, but it must not have been at the time, or it wouldn't exist. IANAP, but I expect copy-and-paste code leads to a lot of such issues.
:)
(I'm widely-feared as "the beta tester who can break anything" cuz I'll do what seemed obvious to me, but that the coder never thought of
Twitter, we've got way more in common than you realise (I don't care that you've foe'd me, I still read your posts, cuz often enough you say something worth reading), but you just can't see past your rabid anti-M$ prejudice to hear what I'm really saying. Anyway, to answer your various points:
My XP machine has no internet connection (that's the Win98 box's job), but even if it did, I don't let IE wander around loose, I use a firewall, and I always have a very good idea what is happening on my machines. As to the update reboot thing, it is never updated, as there is no update *that machine* needs. (If it were a client's system -- they pay me $65/hr, so I guess I must know something! -- then yeah, I'd rather someone who I can't watch over all the time *does* critical updates, if the machine is used online.)
And I do know *exactly* when any machine of mine reboots -- if nothing else, I can check the date on the bootlog.txt that is created each and every time.
Look, just because you and your buddies don't know how to make Windows stable, that doesn't mean it can't be done, or even that instability is typical. Yet when I complain that my old RedHat6 box crashed all the time, you'll tell me that's because I was too ignorant to fix it. See, it works both ways!!
As to resources, free software and volunteer programmers are all well and good, but that is NO guarantee of quality control, any more than M$'s multibillion dollar budget is. But M$ can go hire more coders any time they want, simply because there are always expert coders available who need to make a living. Conversely, you can't always suck in a volunteer, especially one with enough experience and expertise, every time you need one. If you could, ALL free software would be miles ahead of commercial stuff, instead of mostly playing catchup. Yeah, there are some FOSS apps that are indeed way ahead of the commercial alternatives (and some, like VirtualDub, that will probably never be rivaled by any commercial app), but that's not how it is across the broad spectrum of software.
I wish it wasn't so, because I really, REALLY want there to be a linux, BSD, or *some* non-M$ OS that I could *seamlessly* port my next generation of Windows users to (XP was annoying enough; I really don't approve of the direction Vista is heading) -- and no, the Mac isn't it, because I don't buy into that realm of vendor lock-in (even more restrictive than M$, because with Apple you don't even have the choice of whose hardware you buy).
And that's why every so often I collect up every linux disty I can lay hands on, and try 'em out. Because I keep hoping to find one that I can *painlessly* migrate ordinary users to, and with all the apps they need (yes, including the ability to *seamlessly* install and run every Win/DOS app anyone might ever use). Remember, MOST people are not coders, and cannot reasonably use or configure a system at that level.
It's been getting better -- Ubuntu and Mandrake are to where they'll do for average users who have minimal expectations, and who won't need to add much beyond what comes with the system. SuSE likely will be soon, cuz Novell is pretty good at getting stuff to where Real Users want it. But linux still has a ways to go before it's to where it's suitable for the *critical mass* of users that will be needed to get all the commercial vendors to *routinely* release *NIX versions of their drivers and apps.
And THAT is what's really needed to balance out the power of M$. But a volunteer rabble who can't even agree on how to implement copy-and-paste are not going to take over the OS world, no matter how many their eyes nor how strong their FOSS religion.
Question: how big was the "failed" hard disk, and was the filesystem FAT32 or NTFS?
I ask, because turns out the FDISK "32gb limit" was there for a *reason* -- FAT32 partitions larger than 32GB can experience data wrapping that exactly mimics a HD failure. (There was even a M$ knowledge base article about the problem, tho I've been unable to relocate it.)
Funny how there was a rash of HD "failures" after the advent of 40GB HDs, concurrent with an FDISK update that would do FAT32 partitions larger than 32GB...
NTFS does not have the bug.
Yes, I ran into this bug personally, and it does indeed *look* exactly like a failing HD (files just vanish). And that was why I had to reinstall XP... first time I've *ever* had to reinstall Windows of any species on any of my machines.
Same here -- tho I found it also applied to Win9x: on good hardware, with stable drivers, and with even a modicum of maintenance**, it crashes seldom to never, and uptime can easily be measured in weeks (or even months. 49 days right now on this Win98 box.)
Of course Win2K/XP is better at coping with the *effects* of shit hardware and bad drivers, and at killing and restarting processes at need -- it's amazing how often XP restarts the desktop without the user noticing a thing. I only notice because the keyboard repeat rate gets reset to default, and I have to reset it after the desktop has restarted itself.
** I found that it takes about 3 years of total neglect to get Win9x to an unusable state. Even an annual "tune-up" sufficed to prevent major issues. (Cripes, people, you change the oil and air filter in your car, don't you??)
As to the beta process -- even late RCs aren't necessarily great. I remember testing Win2K RC2... it pissed away 128mb of RAM in an hour, and got to where it took 15 seconds to respond to a mouse click. You'd never know the RTM version was related, it improved THAT much between 'em.
I'm reminded that one of the annoyances in Ubuntu 5 was that it had a broken version of SameGnome. Booo!! But SameGnome was not only fixed, but made better in Ubuntu 6. Yaaay!
It might seem trivial, but that sort of thing affects the "user experience" by helping set the user's opinion of the OS as a whole.
On XP, sometimes a program will appear to not start when clicked, but what's really happened is that the app has done a background crash, and the OS didn't bother notifying you.
WordXP does this 100% of the time (at least if the "Office always in memory" thing is turned off) -- click icon, Word seems to not start, click again, it starts. In fact it's done a background crash and restart, as is evident from the system event log.
Nero does this a lot too.
BTW rebooting is against my religion [g]. My XP box regularly goes months between restarts -- record so far is 11.5 months.
Twitter, foe to all things Microsoft, says, "Let me know when your little XP box can do something like this:
twitter@gift:~$ uptime
08:37:14 up 71 days, 16:53, 6 users, load average: 0.28, 0.50, 0.38 "
Okay... my little XP box, a lowly P3-500 built mostly from salvage, has an uptime record of 350 days (which only ended when it did because of being powered down during a lightning storm). It thinks this is normal. What am I doing wrong??
Oh, and it spent most of the past month doing work that had CPU usage pegged at a continuous 100%.
BTW, the Win98 box I'm using right now is on day 49 since last restart (no, it doesn't suffer from the rollover bug... that needs a hardware bug to manifest), and yeah, it is getting to where I probably should restart it, if only to clear out the resource heap.
(All small potatoes next to my old DOS6 machine, which got restarted just twice -- in a span of 5 YEARS.)
That's Twitter for ya... he can't believe anyone could possibly have a stable Windows box. He'd probably blow a gasket at my XP box with its 11.5 month uptime record (only ended due to a lightning storm), or even at this Win98 box that right now has been up since [checking] July 20th.
Here's a tip, fanboyz... if you can't get something stable, seek advice from someone who can. Maybe the problem isn't the OS, but shitty hardware, or [gasp] your own ignorance. After all, if us WinDLLs users can't get linux to run stable, you claim it's because we're too stupid to set it up right... well, it works both ways!!
(Oh, and I have a couple linux systems and a Mac in the house too, so don't go accusing me of being a Windoze bigot. I'll try any of 'em.)
Besides, if you want to get into an uptime peeing contest, Netware regularly measures it in years, not mere days or months.
An AC complains, "Then label me a troll because my PC becomes sluggish after being on for 24 hours. I only use Commercial software (MS Office, MS Visual Studio, Dreamweaver, Norton's AntiVirus). [...] The slow downs gets real bad after 24 hours without a reboot. If I right-click on the desktop and got New... it will take over 30 seconds before the next menu appears. This is on a 1 year old P4 2.8GHz"
That's all very typical of a system infected with a recent version of Norton Antivirus. I've seen NAV slow down a P4-3.5GHz/512mb RAM system to literally XT speeds -- it took up to 30 seconds for a simple dialog box to finish drawing, and as long as FOUR MINUTES (I timed it) for it to respond to a mouse click.
I uninstalled NAV, and the problem went away.