---snip Not being able to get into the BIOS or updating the BIOS has nothing to do with the OS installed. ---snip
Actually, in this case it does. The BIOS in many modern laptops (and in some desktops) has a built in suspend-to-disk routine. When being powered up, they check the harddrive for the image they saved last time they shutdown. The FreeBSD partition happens to look like a suspend image to the ThinkPad BIOS.
the Cox Teedee.010 is indeed a small internal combustion engine (the smallest ever mass-produced according to a quick google search) and appears to no longer be in production.
The ThinkGeek cars are 5cm long, and the tee dee looks at least that long from your picture. The thinkgeek cars, in addition, are larger than the remote control cars the article is about. That engine wouldn't fit, even without the gas tank.
I doubt you are going to be able to find any 30,000rpm piston engines that would fit in these cars.
---snip Of course, most of them are posers ---snip
that is a tremendous understatement. Hundreds of cars with stickers and destroyed interiors for every 5 to 10 cars that have actually had any effort put into them (unless you count incorrect springs as being "worked on", then the ratio is slightly better). Of those 5 to 10 cars, maybe one of them is actually significantly faster than a higher end plain-vanilla stock car.
I respect people who do work that hard on their imports, not so much just because they put effort into doing something well, but there are so many lame imitations all around, that they probably do not get the appreciation they deserve.
I suspect that makes shutting down another car even more enjoyable, though.
Not at all, Netware is it's own OS, long before the only "windows" OS, NT (later called 2000, then called XP...) was available (and no, windows 95, 98, ME are not "windows" OS's, they still use the same model as Win 3.11 (and win 2.x, win 2.x 386, etc, etc.) before, boot a basic DOS, then load the graphical shell).
The old bindery netware (3.x generation) _has_ been ported to run as a process under a host operating system; OS/2, Linux come to mind (but never windows; perhaps you are thinking of Banyan Vines). To further confuse the issue, it was possible to have a DOS FAT partition on your server marked as primary, boot into a DOS, then run a utility (usually named "server.exe" to boot into netware. This was a popular option as it gave you an MS/PC/DR-DOS partition to run external recovery tools if something "bad" happened your Netware server. However, Netware never ran _under_ DOS. Netware 2 and higher could boot with no DOS partition whatsoever, if desired.
---snip If this is the case, I assume that it is using the IPX protocol instead of TCP/IP ---snip
Nope, Apache uses TCP/IP under netware, just like other modern netware apps.
---snip What makes Apache on NetWare different than Apache on Windows? ---snip
Uptime and speed (better asked as "What makes Apache on Windows different from Apache on any other OS?"):)
Netware is an ultra-simple, text-mode only (for years anyway, somewhere along the line they added the rarely used option to run a stripped clone of X with a very simple window manager; I don't think anyone actually uses it though), quite peppy file server (with mature directory services, to boot). Netware 3.2 (the free, y2k compliant, bindery only version) for example, runs fine quite adequately on a 386 (although if anyone were to use this, I would recommend at least a 486, as then VLB/PCI becomes available for disk and network subsystems). With a small foot print, simple design, it gives great uptimes, and great speed.
That said, I personally have not deployed Netware in years, and probably never will again.
* Stripped down Linux * FVWM or BlackBox or Aewm spawn of your choice ---snip
add (from the evil dark side)
* Win95 * Win98 * NT 3.5x * NT 4
All will run fine on this hardware.
At my parents house I have a 486dx4/75 with 16MB of RAM running windows nt server, working as a dial on demand router between a wireless "symphony" (product made by Proxim) LAN to a dialup ISP (as well as hosting a small local postoffice). It's been in place and running for over 3 years now. Slak would/could not install on that proprietary POS Compaq Presario (known problem, some older compaq's of that era had a known incompatibility I found out about later), so out of desperation, I installed NT. Squeezing it onto the 180-something MB system partition was a challenge, and using the remaining space on the 210MB drive for the postoffice did not leave them with much room for large messages, but it works. Your P-100 with 40MB of RAM and 3GB (geez, what will you do with all of that?) of disk space is spacious in comparison.
Why bother with QNX and work to support the odd video card/printer, when you could just install windows 98 and be done with it? Or for that matter, plenty of Linux distros will work fine (Mandrake for one will not; just the graphical _installer_ on 8.0 complains about resources at the slightest nudge; but there is always the text-mode installer).
Otoh, if what you really looking for for your aunt and uncle is an oddball OS that will shutup any of their annoying friends silly enough to come over to help them with their computer, install OS/2 Warp 3. It will _fly_ on that machine, in fact you have a little too much RAM for that version of OS/2 to use optimally, (some RAM will be forced into disk cache duty only) and I have yet to see any equivalent (in functionality) to the presentation manager/object desktop combo anywhere else (Evolution may be much prettier, but not nearly as elegant IMO). Plus, OS/2 always has had great support for Lexmark printers.
And you maintain the goal of using something which is definitely no longer mainstream.
---snip First, you're going to instantly forget to close your bold tags. ---snip
Heh, I was so disgusted coming back to the machine to find that everyone else had now posted about LCD's being perfectly reliable that I didn't bother previewing. Doh!
In any case, I do not think the weight of the LCD remote will be that significant in the overall scheme if this car will be carrying a 150lb driver, and especially if it will be carrying any batteries intended for the drivesystem. The camera/LCD/cabling/separate battery pack could easily be done under 10lbs. Get a 10lb lighter driver if you are concerned about the weight.
It's already been stated that using a conventional mirror will not work; there goes the simplest solution. Something used on some limousines before closed circuit TV was practical was a periscope arrangement...it would probably still weigh as much as the LCD/camera combo, and then you would not have the absolute flexibility of placement that the LCD/camera route would give you.
Ugghh, almost finished this post, got distracted by other things, come back, and find someone else has already gotten to this:
anyhow:
First, you're not going to instantly DIE if your rear view mirrors suddenly vanished. Secondly, although the article does not absolutely say where this vehicle will run, I doubt it will be on a busy interstate. Deducing that this car is a university design project, and that he only needs it to run off of batteries for a couple of hours, I suspect this solar car will be used on a closed track.
Also, LCD rear view cameras are already in use. My favorite motorcycle uses them.
http://popularmechanics.com/automotive/sub_coll_ le no/2001/8/recycled_jet_setter/index2.phtml
They are also used on some larger vehicles where a well placed camera is much more useful that any mirror.
---snipHeavy users of the water supply (domestic and commercial) are metered and charged appropiately for what they use so why should a resource like bandwidth be any different? ---snip
Because uses for water do not grow nearly as fast as uses for bandwidth. In enough time, _everyone_ will become a heavy user, so the flat rate model will quickly cease to be used.
Bandwidth: Once upon a time, my 300 baud applecat modem was more than adequate for my needs and excellent for many phreaking tasks, if I ever needed to "borrow" some wired service from someone, or if I needed to wardial a prefix for carriers (change wired to wireless, change phreaking to launching netstumbler, change wardialing a prefix to wardriving/network discovery...alas, the words change, but...).
That modem could keep up with my typing. Having the results outputted to me at 30 cps (10 bits per byte in my typical config) was annoying but was still more than adequate for most any use; many people stuck behind teletypes were running at 150 bps or slower.
Fast forward 20 years. Where I am sitting now I have two 1.5Mb/s connections bonded together, giving me a 3Mb link, both ways. At my office, we have a fractional T3 running at twice that speed (and we utilize it, as well as a comparable connection at a remote location).
Nowadays the average user complains about their "slow" 44,000 bps connection they get with their dialup modem.
Water: 20 years ago I was a little smaller. But I had the same habits; I drink when I am thirsty etc. etc. My water consumption has remained mostly the same. I drink about 8 glasses of water a day (yeah for me!), before, just for comparison, then I would probably drink 6.
Over almost 20 years my burstable bandwidth needs have increased 10,000 fold. The difference in sustained needs is even larger, as nowadays I've always got some type of data going over that pipe (gnutella, newsfeed, mail, what have you) vs. back in the day that 300 baud modem was actually in use for small parts of the day. I bet in another 20 years this 3Mb connection could very well seem as quaint as the 300 baud modem seems today.
My water needs on the other hand went up 33%. My individual water needs are not likely to ever grow much larger.
---snip Access doesn't have any equivalent in OSS, which is generally a good thing... ---snip
I couldn't agree with you more there. "Access" has a problem merely "accessing" it's own databases when they grow past a certain size, not to mention basic functionality lacking (well, for a flat file database I believe it is pretty competent, but then so is excel).
---snip I actually have decent hardware, and all pretty generic stuff. There should be no issues with detecting it. And so why should I not blame the installer? ---snip
I'm just really, really surprised you are having this symptom (the cyclical booting off of the CD). There are two countermeasures taken to keep this from happening; one, the bootloader on a windows 2000 installation cd will abort after 3 seconds if don't press a key when prompted to start installation, and two, even if the user is dumb enough to press the key (or something makes the system think you pressed a key, like something resting on the keyboard), the first thing the installer does is check to see if there is an installation in progress already. If so, it transfers over to stage two of the installation process and does not repeat stage one.
But you say it happened, so I guess I'll take your word for it.
---snip But I wasn't even able to do more than stick the CD in, switch on, and go. I set the timezone, removed the CD as it rebooted, and that was it until I had finished. No prompts, no options, nothing. ---snip
You actually had the opportunity to do more than that at a few stages of the install; I suspect you just clicked through the "typical" settings for the networking, for example, and it went right through.
The default applets are tiny, and would be wanted in just about _any_ windows installation. If you are in the less than 5% in a special environment that is better off without them, then yes, you should write a script. If you don't know how to remove them from the default installation process, then you probably should be keeping them in there anyway. If you are in the less than 5% of the less than 5% who will not be using them _and_ not planning on doing any more machines in the future, then alas, you will have to uncheck those tiny little applets after the install has been completed (but yes, I agree, this small target audience of single-install, oddball requirements people are not being catered to by micro$oft. Somehow I do not think Bill is losing any sleep (or marketshare, or money) due to this).
Also, what you are complaining about is desirable to most people. If the guy who wrote the article had his install go this smoothly, he probably would have had to rate Redhat as second. (otoh, he wasn't really installing "windows" but rather some evil OEM's crazed, bloated setup).
---snip And if you read my comment, you would have seen that I needed Office as well, which comes to 2 CD's. Uncompressed, that can come to ~1.6GBs of usable data. I had to install the full Office suite, because I don't know exactly what I will be needing, including the help files. Open Office can only do so much, and we had been given documents which pushed the bounderies of what the suite would do. Therefore, OO tended to break with all the unportable "features". Like for a.ppt I did up, I lost the animations from my.gif's when I ported it. My.xls ---snip
Sorry, I assumed we were just talking about the OS install. I won't argue that the "office" apps are tremendously bloated, with features that few people would ever use.
But...
When Open Office _can_ do everything MS Office does, has the same amount of clipart, dictionary/thesaurus of the same size, same level of help documentation including code examples for it's built in scripting language, etc. etc., how big do you think an "everything" install of OO will have become?
I do agree, however, that office is a pretty ugly set of apps, even if you do not count the proprietary file formats and just look at sheer bloat.
---snip I had to install the full Office suite, because I don't know exactly what I will be needing, including the help files. ---snip
Just a suggestion, you might want to redo this install and choose "install on 1st use" for everything instead.
Last night while I posted this I was installing Windows 2000 on three seperate machines. I've probably ran the installer literally hundreds of times, for hundreds of different machines. I have _never_ seen it get stuck in a loop. Perhaps you have a bad keyboard that makes the installer think a key is being pressed? If this is the case, do not blame the installer for your faulty hardware.
---snip I recently had to do an install of 2k, and I was disappointed by the lack of input. I kind of like to choose what goes into my system. Win9x allowed me to choose items, like which games, accessibility options, etc. Win2k just asks for the timezone. ---snip
You most certainly are allowed to choose what goes into the system, as long as you tell the installer you want to choose rather than go with defaults. Or you can create a custom installation script (I use one frequently) to stop and prompt you for _everything_ so you can have total control over what goes into the system. But I bet for 95% of the users, the default options for a win2k install work perfectly.
---snip Having no user input is great, if you are ghosting a PC or want 300 identical systems. As a single user, I like choice. I own a 3.2GB hdd, and had to borrow another 2GB for the M$ install. 1.6Gigs later, there's not much space on that sucker. My primary drive runs fine, with ---snip
Your install off of a single ~650MB CD used up 1.6GB?
---snip Funny thing about Win2K install, if you aren't careful, it'll keep on booting from the CD again and again and again and unless you go into the BIOS and manualy change the boot order you could spend awhile wondering why windows isn't completing setup. (especialy if the person doing the install is of the type who doesn't read the screens and just keeps on clicking OK, they might not realize that they are going in circles!) ---snip
Either you do not know what you are talking about, or you are trying to spread fud. If the CD is left in the drive, Windows 2000 puts a prompt on the screen that says "press any key to boot off the cd". If no one presses a key after a few seconds, the windows installer exits and allows the machine to boot off the hard drive as usual. No loops.
Re:PC Weasels are often better than KVM switches.
on
USB KVMs Compared
·
· Score: 2
---snip All of which are below the OS level. With no os, you must have console (or remote console) ---snip
this is exactly what the weasel is for...assuming some of your intel-based servers come from one of the big players, you have probably used the Compaq lights out boards, or the built-in capabilties in the newer generations of Dell servers (older Dell servers used an add-in card like Compaq).
Basically, that is what the Weasel does, only not tied down to any specific manufacturers equipment, and it will not work over an IP network like the lights-out board will (only via an async terminal server. As a nifty bonus, the weasel plugged into the machine also watches and report standard post scan codes, to help quickly narrow down what exactly is dead on your dead machine, if necessary.
---snip A good KVM system gives you the win of "few monitors, many servers", and also provides remote access to the console for when you don't need to replace something (say, you need to debug a Sun at the eeprom level)
---snip
Why would you should you need a framebuffer card and KVM to do this? I am not a Sun guy, but isn't that what port A and a 1u terminal server is for?
---snip You seem to be sugegsting that bombs are supposed to be surgical weapons designed to disable fortifications or ---snip
No, he did not say that at all. He specifically said the battlefield is a dangerous place, and this laser is certainly not any more dangerous than a bomb filled with shrapnel.
---snip I just love writing free software, it is so appreciated. ---snip
Considering his choice of subject line, I would suspect he appreciates what you did quite a bit.
Critiquing(sp?) from a user perspective, I think both his points (cut and paste not integrated, limits on window sizes in certain situations) would be useful to know for someone comparing this to one of the commercial options.
I really hope you do not consider it "lack of appreciation" any time someone provides positive feedback on the state of one of your apps.
Slashdot Mirror
---snip
Am very curious as to what might be causing your problem.
---snip
You probably did not use "dangerously dedicated" for your partitioning scheme; the guy who submitted the story probably did.
---snip
Not being able to get into the BIOS or updating the BIOS has nothing to do with the OS installed.
---snip
Actually, in this case it does. The BIOS in many modern laptops (and in some desktops) has a built in suspend-to-disk routine. When being powered up, they check the harddrive for the image they saved last time they shutdown. The FreeBSD partition happens to look like a suspend image to the ThinkPad BIOS.
the Cox Teedee .010 is indeed a small internal combustion engine (the smallest ever mass-produced according to a quick google search) and appears to no longer be in production.
The ThinkGeek cars are 5cm long, and the tee dee looks at least that long from your picture. The thinkgeek cars, in addition, are larger than the remote control cars the article is about. That engine wouldn't fit, even without the gas tank.
I doubt you are going to be able to find any 30,000rpm piston engines that would fit in these cars.
---snip
Of course, most of them are posers
---snip
that is a tremendous understatement. Hundreds of cars with stickers and destroyed interiors for every 5 to 10 cars that have actually had any effort put into them (unless you count incorrect springs as being "worked on", then the ratio is slightly better). Of those 5 to 10 cars, maybe one of them is actually significantly faster than a higher end plain-vanilla stock car.
I respect people who do work that hard on their imports, not so much just because they put effort into doing something well, but there are so many lame imitations all around, that they probably do not get the appreciation they deserve.
I suspect that makes shutting down another car even more enjoyable, though.
---snip
years ago. I'm sure they're over 30k these days. In addition, there are plenty of gas powered engines that go well over 16k.
---snip
Not many of gas powered engines of any RPM this small...even most model airplane engines would be nearly the size of the entire car.
from the article
The high octane NOS® Nitrous motor zooms along at 23,500 RPM and is only available in The Fast And The Furious Street Tuner Upgrade Kit
I've always wondered where those civic lx "racers" have been getting their parts from...
My apologies in advance for those few people out there who enjoy imports AND actually go to the work to make them go fast.
Not at all, Netware is it's own OS, long before the only "windows" OS, NT (later called 2000, then called XP...) was available (and no, windows 95, 98, ME are not "windows" OS's, they still use the same model as Win 3.11 (and win 2.x, win 2.x 386, etc, etc.) before, boot a basic DOS, then load the graphical shell).
:)
The old bindery netware (3.x generation) _has_ been ported to run as a process under a host operating system; OS/2, Linux come to mind (but never windows; perhaps you are thinking of Banyan Vines). To further confuse the issue, it was possible to have a DOS FAT partition on your server marked as primary, boot into a DOS, then run a utility (usually named "server.exe" to boot into netware. This was a popular option as it gave you an MS/PC/DR-DOS partition to run external recovery tools if something "bad" happened your Netware server. However, Netware never ran _under_ DOS. Netware 2 and higher could boot with no DOS partition whatsoever, if desired.
---snip
If this is the case, I assume that it is using the IPX protocol instead of TCP/IP
---snip
Nope, Apache uses TCP/IP under netware, just like other modern netware apps.
---snip
What makes Apache on NetWare different than Apache on Windows?
---snip
Uptime and speed (better asked as "What makes Apache on Windows different from Apache on any other OS?")
Netware is an ultra-simple, text-mode only (for years anyway, somewhere along the line they added the rarely used option to run a stripped clone of X with a very simple window manager; I don't think anyone actually uses it though), quite peppy file server (with mature directory services, to boot). Netware 3.2 (the free, y2k compliant, bindery only version) for example, runs fine quite adequately on a 386 (although if anyone were to use this, I would recommend at least a 486, as then VLB/PCI becomes available for disk and network subsystems). With a small foot print, simple design, it gives great uptimes, and great speed.
That said, I personally have not deployed Netware in years, and probably never will again.
---snip
Back then, we flew kites while listening to transistor radios. Isn't FM cool? You don't get static during thunderstormns!
---snip
I just hope for your sake you were not noticing FM's immunity to thunderstorms/spark gap transmissions _while_ you were flying kites. )
and I felt young with my IIe when I hear other people around here chatting about their PDP-8's...
---snip
Practical advice:
* Stripped down Linux
* FVWM or BlackBox or Aewm spawn of your choice
---snip
add (from the evil dark side)
* Win95
* Win98
* NT 3.5x
* NT 4
All will run fine on this hardware.
At my parents house I have a 486dx4/75 with 16MB of RAM running windows nt server, working as a dial on demand router between a wireless "symphony" (product made by Proxim) LAN to a dialup ISP (as well as hosting a small local postoffice). It's been in place and running for over 3 years now. Slak would/could not install on that proprietary POS Compaq Presario (known problem, some older compaq's of that era had a known incompatibility I found out about later), so out of desperation, I installed NT. Squeezing it onto the 180-something MB system partition was a challenge, and using the remaining space on the 210MB drive for the postoffice did not leave them with much room for large messages, but it works. Your P-100 with 40MB of RAM and 3GB (geez, what will you do with all of that?) of disk space is spacious in comparison.
Why bother with QNX and work to support the odd video card/printer, when you could just install windows 98 and be done with it? Or for that matter, plenty of Linux distros will work fine (Mandrake for one will not; just the graphical _installer_ on 8.0 complains about resources at the slightest nudge; but there is always the text-mode installer).
Otoh, if what you really looking for for your aunt and uncle is an oddball OS that will shutup any of their annoying friends silly enough to come over to help them with their computer, install OS/2 Warp 3. It will _fly_ on that machine, in fact you have a little too much RAM for that version of OS/2 to use optimally, (some RAM will be forced into disk cache duty only) and I have yet to see any equivalent (in functionality) to the presentation manager/object desktop combo anywhere else (Evolution may be much prettier, but not nearly as elegant IMO). Plus, OS/2 always has had great support for Lexmark printers.
And you maintain the goal of using something which is definitely no longer mainstream.
---snip
First, you're going to instantly forget to close your bold tags.
---snip
Heh, I was so disgusted coming back to the machine to find that everyone else had now posted about LCD's being perfectly reliable that I didn't bother previewing. Doh!
In any case, I do not think the weight of the LCD remote will be that significant in the overall scheme if this car will be carrying a 150lb driver, and especially if it will be carrying any batteries intended for the drivesystem. The camera/LCD/cabling/separate battery pack could easily be done under 10lbs. Get a 10lb lighter driver if you are concerned about the weight.
It's already been stated that using a conventional mirror will not work; there goes the simplest solution. Something used on some limousines before closed circuit TV was practical was a periscope arrangement...it would probably still weigh as much as the LCD/camera combo, and then you would not have the absolute flexibility of placement that the LCD/camera route would give you.
Ugghh, almost finished this post, got distracted by other things, come back, and find someone else has already gotten to this:
_ le no/2001/8/recycled_jet_setter/index2.phtml
anyhow:
First, you're not going to instantly DIE if your rear view mirrors suddenly vanished. Secondly, although the article does not absolutely say where this vehicle will run, I doubt it will be on a busy interstate. Deducing that this car is a university design project, and that he only needs it to run off of batteries for a couple of hours, I suspect this solar car will be used on a closed track.
Also, LCD rear view cameras are already in use. My favorite motorcycle uses them.
http://popularmechanics.com/automotive/sub_coll
They are also used on some larger vehicles where a well placed camera is much more useful that any mirror.
Ummm, as I understand rockets launch from this lauch site all the time...why would the U.S. be "jumpy"?
---snipHeavy users of the water supply (domestic and commercial) are metered and charged appropiately for what they use so why should a resource like bandwidth be any different?
---snip
Because uses for water do not grow nearly as fast as uses for bandwidth. In enough time, _everyone_ will become a heavy user, so the flat rate model will quickly cease to be used.
Bandwidth:
Once upon a time, my 300 baud applecat modem was more than adequate for my needs and excellent for many phreaking tasks, if I ever needed to "borrow" some wired service from someone, or if I needed to wardial a prefix for carriers (change wired to wireless, change phreaking to launching netstumbler, change wardialing a prefix to wardriving/network discovery...alas, the words change, but...).
That modem could keep up with my typing. Having the results outputted to me at 30 cps (10 bits per byte in my typical config) was annoying but was still more than adequate for most any use; many people stuck behind teletypes were running at 150 bps or slower.
Fast forward 20 years. Where I am sitting now I have two 1.5Mb/s connections bonded together, giving me a 3Mb link, both ways. At my office, we have a fractional T3 running at twice that speed (and we utilize it, as well as a comparable connection at a remote location).
Nowadays the average user complains about their "slow" 44,000 bps connection they get with their dialup modem.
Water:
20 years ago I was a little smaller. But I had the same habits; I drink when I am thirsty etc. etc. My water consumption has remained mostly the same. I drink about 8 glasses of water a day (yeah for me!), before, just for comparison, then I would probably drink 6.
Over almost 20 years my burstable bandwidth needs have increased 10,000 fold. The difference in sustained needs is even larger, as nowadays I've always got some type of data going over that pipe (gnutella, newsfeed, mail, what have you) vs. back in the day that 300 baud modem was actually in use for small parts of the day. I bet in another 20 years this 3Mb connection could very well seem as quaint as the 300 baud modem seems today.
My water needs on the other hand went up 33%. My individual water needs are not likely to ever grow much larger.
---snip
.ppt I did up, I lost the animations from my .gif's when I ported it. My .xls
Access doesn't have any equivalent in OSS, which is generally a good thing...
---snip
I couldn't agree with you more there. "Access" has a problem merely "accessing" it's own databases when they grow past a certain size, not to mention basic functionality lacking (well, for a flat file database I believe it is pretty competent, but then so is excel).
---snip
I actually have decent hardware, and all pretty generic stuff. There should be no issues with detecting it. And so why should I not blame the installer?
---snip
I'm just really, really surprised you are having this symptom (the cyclical booting off of the CD). There are two countermeasures taken to keep this from happening; one, the bootloader on a windows 2000 installation cd will abort after 3 seconds if don't press a key when prompted to start installation, and two, even if the user is dumb enough to press the key (or something makes the system think you pressed a key, like something resting on the keyboard), the first thing the installer does is check to see if there is an installation in progress already. If so, it transfers over to stage two of the installation process and does not repeat stage one.
But you say it happened, so I guess I'll take your word for it.
---snip
But I wasn't even able to do more than stick the CD in, switch on, and go. I set the timezone, removed the CD as it rebooted, and that was it until I had finished. No prompts, no options, nothing.
---snip
You actually had the opportunity to do more than that at a few stages of the install; I suspect you just clicked through the "typical" settings for the networking, for example, and it went right through.
The default applets are tiny, and would be wanted in just about _any_ windows installation. If you are in the less than 5% in a special environment that is better off without them, then yes, you should write a script. If you don't know how to remove them from the default installation process, then you probably should be keeping them in there anyway. If you are in the less than 5% of the less than 5% who will not be using them _and_ not planning on doing any more machines in the future, then alas, you will have to uncheck those tiny little applets after the install has been completed (but yes, I agree, this small target audience of single-install, oddball requirements people are not being catered to by micro$oft. Somehow I do not think Bill is losing any sleep (or marketshare, or money) due to this).
Also, what you are complaining about is desirable to most people. If the guy who wrote the article had his install go this smoothly, he probably would have had to rate Redhat as second. (otoh, he wasn't really installing "windows" but rather some evil OEM's crazed, bloated setup).
---snip
And if you read my comment, you would have seen that I needed Office as well, which comes to 2 CD's. Uncompressed, that can come to ~1.6GBs of usable data. I had to install the full Office suite, because I don't know exactly what I will be needing, including the help files. Open Office can only do so much, and we had been given documents which pushed the bounderies of what the suite would do. Therefore, OO tended to break with all the unportable "features". Like for a
---snip
Sorry, I assumed we were just talking about the OS install. I won't argue that the "office" apps are tremendously bloated, with features that few people would ever use.
But...
When Open Office _can_ do everything MS Office does, has the same amount of clipart, dictionary/thesaurus of the same size, same level of help documentation including code examples for it's built in scripting language, etc. etc., how big do you think an "everything" install of OO will have become?
I do agree, however, that office is a pretty ugly set of apps, even if you do not count the proprietary file formats and just look at sheer bloat.
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I had to install the full Office suite, because I don't know exactly what I will be needing, including the help files.
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Just a suggestion, you might want to redo this install and choose "install on 1st use" for everything instead.
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Shoulder mount gun thing (made by Nintendo)
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This is one input device most windows users would love.
Because you have the bootsector for that floppy loaded, but you are missing a few other system files, such as boot.ini, ntdetect, and (gasp) ntldr.
Try copying those files over. Windows NT 3.5-5.1 will boot just fine off of a floppy.
Last night while I posted this I was installing Windows 2000 on three seperate machines. I've probably ran the installer literally hundreds of times, for hundreds of different machines. I have _never_ seen it get stuck in a loop. Perhaps you have a bad keyboard that makes the installer think a key is being pressed? If this is the case, do not blame the installer for your faulty hardware.
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I recently had to do an install of 2k, and I was disappointed by the lack of input. I kind of like to choose what goes into my system. Win9x allowed me to choose items, like which games, accessibility options, etc. Win2k just asks for the timezone.
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You most certainly are allowed to choose what goes into the system, as long as you tell the installer you want to choose rather than go with defaults. Or you can create a custom installation script (I use one frequently) to stop and prompt you for _everything_ so you can have total control over what goes into the system. But I bet for 95% of the users, the default options for a win2k install work perfectly.
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Having no user input is great, if you are ghosting a PC or want 300 identical systems. As a single user, I like choice. I own a 3.2GB hdd, and had to borrow another 2GB for the M$ install. 1.6Gigs later, there's not much space on that sucker. My primary drive runs fine, with
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Your install off of a single ~650MB CD used up 1.6GB?
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Funny thing about Win2K install, if you aren't careful, it'll keep on booting from the CD again and again and again and unless you go into the BIOS and manualy change the boot order you could spend awhile wondering why windows isn't completing setup. (especialy if the person doing the install is of the type who doesn't read the screens and just keeps on clicking OK, they might not realize that they are going in circles!)
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Either you do not know what you are talking about, or you are trying to spread fud. If the CD is left in the drive, Windows 2000 puts a prompt on the screen that says "press any key to boot off the cd". If no one presses a key after a few seconds, the windows installer exits and allows the machine to boot off the hard drive as usual. No loops.
Usually :)
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All of which are below the OS level. With no os, you must have console (or remote console)
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this is exactly what the weasel is for...assuming some of your intel-based servers come from one of the big players, you have probably used the Compaq lights out boards, or the built-in capabilties in the newer generations of Dell servers (older Dell servers used an add-in card like Compaq).
Basically, that is what the Weasel does, only not tied down to any specific manufacturers equipment, and it will not work over an IP network like the lights-out board will (only via an async terminal server. As a nifty bonus, the weasel plugged into the machine also watches and report standard post scan codes, to help quickly narrow down what exactly is dead on your dead machine, if necessary.
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A good KVM system gives you the win of "few monitors, many servers", and also provides remote access to the console for when you don't need to replace something (say, you need to debug a Sun at the eeprom level)
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Why would you should you need a framebuffer card and KVM to do this? I am not a Sun guy, but isn't that what port A and a 1u terminal server is for?
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I for one had an ancestor that killed three of his playmates with his first sword, on his 10th b-day no less.
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ok, I'll bite...his _first_ sword? You mean he was given another one after this?
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You seem to be sugegsting that bombs are supposed to be surgical weapons designed to disable fortifications or
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No, he did not say that at all. He specifically said the battlefield is a dangerous place, and this laser is certainly not any more dangerous than a bomb filled with shrapnel.
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:)
What will you lose?
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the chess match, unless there are no time limits
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I just love writing free software, it is so appreciated.
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Considering his choice of subject line, I would suspect he appreciates what you did quite a bit.
Critiquing(sp?) from a user perspective, I think both his points (cut and paste not integrated, limits on window sizes in certain situations) would be useful to know for someone comparing this to one of the commercial options.
I really hope you do not consider it "lack of appreciation" any time someone provides positive feedback on the state of one of your apps.