I know I had USB devices which I couldn't use under NT 4, though to be honest I can't recall now if that was because USB support was unavailable at all or just not available for my devices.
NT 4.0 had no USB implementation. Some devices came with limited drivers, I think Iomega was one of them. I agree with you: W2K added true Plug 'n Play on the NT 4.0 platform, it has a more modern interface, it was not all that hard on the hardware, it came with backward compatibility for games (you just had to know what you did and there was a patch from MS to fix a lot of games), full USB support, stability was nearly on par with NT 4.0, and I'm skipping...
Windows XP introduced a nightmare of worms in SP0 qnd SP1 times. The only thing I really liked about Windows XP was the welcome screen. Not because it was pretty, but because it's useful to switch to another user if he just wants to check mail without that you have to close down and log off. I'm sure this could have been done easily as a patch on Windows 2000. Remote desktop is another one, but that doesn't concern the average user.
Exactly! If one OS had to win on merits back then it was OS/2! I used Windows 95 and it wasn't all that hot. Back then I didn't use Macs, but when I got my first (and last) iBook in 2001, it was preinstalled with Mac OS 9. What a piece of shit was that! Especially that I was used to Windows 2000. The Mac OS X disks were included and that OS is good though, very good.
That said, I will fondly remember OS/2.... Multiple DOS sessions, native office suite (IBM Works?!? Nah, it was called something else.), all the Win32S programs I wanted to run. I played Terror from the Deep for months on OS/2. Sure, it was a DOS game, but boy, did OS/2 run them well! Neko, ah, Neko... I have Neko on my Palm;-)
Also, if only devices were patentable, what's to stop a competitor from changing some unimportant aspect of the device and selling or patenting that?
Oh, but that is exactly what did and does happen with real-world devices. Patents are all about implementations of a certain device. That's why you find "knock-off" products.
Oh, I would hope so too that they are all rejected based on prior art. I used widely known algorithms to illustrate my point.
If someone spends a year doing research and development on something like a compression algorithm that is superior
Stop right there... You do realise that the this R&D is going to be entirely mathematical. It's all maths: compression is maths: they'll be doing statistical analysis, proofs on the methods being lossless, worst-case and best-case analysis, etc.... That's math and thus, if you want this to be patentable, then you need maths to be patentable. Many people do not seem to understand that computer science is just a subsection of maths.
So, yes, I'm all in favour that the person that made the new algorithm, goes to the patent office and deposits his source code (a.k.a. implementation) That implementation may not be used by anyone else, but if anybody else can come up with another implementation that accomplishes exactly the same, then by all means he should be able to do it. With physical things you need to deposit your blueprints after all...
So, you are in favour of allowing to patent things like, uhm, let's say QuickSort? Or Breath-First Tree traversal? Or let's be bold: Sieve of Eratosthenes?. You'll probably say: "but, but the Sieve of Eratosthenes is maths, you cannot patent maths". You know what, QuickSort, a Breath-First Tree Traversal and, yes, even an MP3 decoder *are* math. Algorithms are Math!
So essentially, you allow patents exactly of the kind you despise: "do $MATHEMATICAL_PROBLEM with computer". You understand now why software patents are bad?
Actually, with the release of Vista, I predicted golden times for us dumpster divers. I've been a bit disappointed, because it stays at the same level as before the release of Vista.
As for your comment: yes, I personally know a kid that has a P-IV 2.6GHz/1Gig RAM and he *needed* absolutely to have a Core 2 Duo. That said, he does play computer games.... I guess.... Probably, if he didn't know me, it would end up in the dumpster. I'll refurbish it for his mom or so.... Actually, his mom has a P-III 550MHz/512Meg RAM that I saved from the dumpster.
Does that even work on a stock Debian install? I don't think so.... You first need to change your/etc/apt/sources.list to include "non-free" repositories.
It is used in The Netherlands too. It also is occasionally used in Flanders (="Dutch part of Belgium"). For some reason, I just assumed the guy was Dutch;-) I'm also guilty of generalizing "Europe" and actually disregarding anything except the Benelux, Germany and France... which are the countries I'm most familiar with...
Alternatively, watch the dumpsters... There are gems to be found in there. Usually spyware infected and thrown away by the user because it's "become too slow". No, I'm not kidding, I have personally found such gems. It's up to the level that I don't even take machines below AMD Athlon and P-IV. I used to have "must have an USB port" as criteria for taking the machine with me, but I'd need a whole warehouse to store those computers.
And you're somehow proud of doing that? Using no protection while you didn't really have the financial means to found a family. Okay, so if this was planned, I retract my critisism....
I do not say that you may not be proud of your offspring, though. You should, even if they were "accidents".
Sure... I still have a K6-II 333MHz that was used by my sister for years... Never a problem. My own P-I 166MHz server had uptimes of 200 days and up. Downtimes were usually due to the odd power-cut or an upgrade. I find *nice* machines in the dumpster that, after rebuilding, work without a hitch: I already have 2 AMD Athlons in the 1.xGHz range, and one P-IV 1.9GHz that was fully functional (no rebuilding needed, disks were in there, a Intel motherboard, a AGP dual-head graphics card from Matrox, additional 3Com 100Mbps NIC, 80Gig harddisk, 512Meg RAM, nice case too!)
So, yes, there is no reason why a 5 year old motherboard won't run stable. If the powersupply is still good of course.
I wrote all papers and reports the first year using Amstrad CPC 6128, Arnor Protext on ROM and a 9-pin printer. Later I used a 486 and WP 5.1 (Now with Graphics..).
Yes so did I, even though for me it was a 286, but we had a HP Deskjet 500. In my class I was the only one handing in homework/papers typed. Everyone else just handed in a handwritten version... That was perfectly well accepted by the teachers.
These days, I heard that it must be typed... I think that is insanity.
there is still a 2400+ with 1G of ram and a fx5700 churning packets in the corner running MONOWall (freeBSD) ^_^
Which is severe overkill for a firewall. I've ran my server (which does more than just routing packets) for years on a P-I 166/32Meg RAM. The only thing that it wasn't powerful enough for was IMAP, but that's somehow excusable. My parents run my old desktop (bought in 1999, I think...) as a server: it's a P-III 800MHz/768Meg RAM, full SCSI. Essentially, it doesn't do much all day.
My own server is now a AMD64 2800+/2Gig RAM. I replaced the P-I because it began hard to get parts for it and in case of a failure, I'd be in trouble. That, and I wanted to try OpenBSD/amd64 and hoped that Cool 'n Quiet would make it very quiet. Alas, that last one turned out to be a mistake.
Home server? My best guess is that any PC running ~500MHz will do the job just fine for anything you throw at it. Heck, my last laptop was a P-III 600MHz/512Meg RAM and it ran everything I needed just fine. It just started to fall physically apart and thus had to be replaced.
The problem here is that I know people that throw away their P-IV 2.6GHz/1Gig RAM because they consider it "crap hardware". That's what sad in this world. People consider my 2003 AMD MP 2400+/4Gig RAM "crap" because it isn't the latest Intel Core Duo. Well with Debian on it, it flies... Thank you very much...
Heck with a price like that and a sane operating system, this is really nice hardware. I began computing on a "state of the art IBM PS/2 Model 50", so really, this system is nice compared to what we had.
I also think the user was careless and infected himself.
Now, it IS possible to reverse Windows.
I however, I have no idea what you are talking about in the whole section you dedicate on "reversing Windows". Do you mean "reverse engineer", if so, please say that instead of saying weird things.
True, but consider the following: if optical drives were SATA, one could ditch the whole PATA interface and save space on the motherboard. As for floppy drives: I have yet to see a modern computer coming with one.
Just assuming that you're Dutch, please write the name of my country correctly please: it's "Luxembourg" or "Luxemburg" (depending on the language you write, I think you can use both in English.)
As for those TV stations, I assume you talk about RTL which stands for Radio Television Luxembourg. They are part of the RTL Group that has a whole bunch of channels called "RTL", on the top of my head: RTL Television, SuperRTL, RTL2, RTL9, RTL TVI, RTL4, RTL5,.... etc... While they share the name, they do not share the language the programmes are spoken in.
Not to mention I once played a tic-tac-toe game written in 1949 thanks to a ENIAC emulator.
I was going to say "Bullshit, nobody ever wrote an ENIAC emulator". Luckily I did a google before posting, and incredibly it exists!. Now, I just need to program tic-tac-toe on it;-)
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I know I had USB devices which I couldn't use under NT 4, though to be honest I can't recall now if that was because USB support was unavailable at all or just not available for my devices.
NT 4.0 had no USB implementation. Some devices came with limited drivers, I think Iomega was one of them. I agree with you: W2K added true Plug 'n Play on the NT 4.0 platform, it has a more modern interface, it was not all that hard on the hardware, it came with backward compatibility for games (you just had to know what you did and there was a patch from MS to fix a lot of games), full USB support, stability was nearly on par with NT 4.0, and I'm skipping...
Windows XP introduced a nightmare of worms in SP0 qnd SP1 times. The only thing I really liked about Windows XP was the welcome screen. Not because it was pretty, but because it's useful to switch to another user if he just wants to check mail without that you have to close down and log off. I'm sure this could have been done easily as a patch on Windows 2000. Remote desktop is another one, but that doesn't concern the average user.
Exactly! If one OS had to win on merits back then it was OS/2! I used Windows 95 and it wasn't all that hot. Back then I didn't use Macs, but when I got my first (and last) iBook in 2001, it was preinstalled with Mac OS 9. What a piece of shit was that! Especially that I was used to Windows 2000. The Mac OS X disks were included and that OS is good though, very good.
That said, I will fondly remember OS/2.... Multiple DOS sessions, native office suite (IBM Works?!? Nah, it was called something else.), all the Win32S programs I wanted to run. I played Terror from the Deep for months on OS/2. Sure, it was a DOS game, but boy, did OS/2 run them well! Neko, ah, Neko... I have Neko on my Palm ;-)
Yes, but she also is my mother in law.... So I already sleep with his sister, which is a much better deal.
They are called astrologist's and physicists.
*cough* *cough* Astrology vs. Astronomy... *cough*
Also, if only devices were patentable, what's to stop a competitor from changing some unimportant aspect of the device and selling or patenting that?
Oh, but that is exactly what did and does happen with real-world devices. Patents are all about implementations of a certain device. That's why you find "knock-off" products.
Oh, I would hope so too that they are all rejected based on prior art. I used widely known algorithms to illustrate my point.
If someone spends a year doing research and development on something like a compression algorithm that is superior
Stop right there... You do realise that the this R&D is going to be entirely mathematical. It's all maths: compression is maths: they'll be doing statistical analysis, proofs on the methods being lossless, worst-case and best-case analysis, etc.... That's math and thus, if you want this to be patentable, then you need maths to be patentable. Many people do not seem to understand that computer science is just a subsection of maths.
So, yes, I'm all in favour that the person that made the new algorithm, goes to the patent office and deposits his source code (a.k.a. implementation) That implementation may not be used by anyone else, but if anybody else can come up with another implementation that accomplishes exactly the same, then by all means he should be able to do it. With physical things you need to deposit your blueprints after all...
I don't see how patenting algorithms is absurd.
So, you are in favour of allowing to patent things like, uhm, let's say QuickSort? Or Breath-First Tree traversal? Or let's be bold: Sieve of Eratosthenes?. You'll probably say: "but, but the Sieve of Eratosthenes is maths, you cannot patent maths". You know what, QuickSort, a Breath-First Tree Traversal and, yes, even an MP3 decoder *are* math. Algorithms are Math!
So essentially, you allow patents exactly of the kind you despise: "do $MATHEMATICAL_PROBLEM with computer". You understand now why software patents are bad?
Actually, with the release of Vista, I predicted golden times for us dumpster divers. I've been a bit disappointed, because it stays at the same level as before the release of Vista.
As for your comment: yes, I personally know a kid that has a P-IV 2.6GHz/1Gig RAM and he *needed* absolutely to have a Core 2 Duo. That said, he does play computer games.... I guess.... Probably, if he didn't know me, it would end up in the dumpster. I'll refurbish it for his mom or so.... Actually, his mom has a P-III 550MHz/512Meg RAM that I saved from the dumpster.
Does that even work on a stock Debian install? I don't think so.... You first need to change your /etc/apt/sources.list to include "non-free" repositories.
It is used in The Netherlands too. It also is occasionally used in Flanders (="Dutch part of Belgium"). For some reason, I just assumed the guy was Dutch ;-) I'm also guilty of generalizing "Europe" and actually disregarding anything except the Benelux, Germany and France... which are the countries I'm most familiar with...
Alternatively, watch the dumpsters... There are gems to be found in there. Usually spyware infected and thrown away by the user because it's "become too slow". No, I'm not kidding, I have personally found such gems. It's up to the level that I don't even take machines below AMD Athlon and P-IV. I used to have "must have an USB port" as criteria for taking the machine with me, but I'd need a whole warehouse to store those computers.
became a father half way through third year
And you're somehow proud of doing that? Using no protection while you didn't really have the financial means to found a family. Okay, so if this was planned, I retract my critisism....
I do not say that you may not be proud of your offspring, though. You should, even if they were "accidents".
Sure... I still have a K6-II 333MHz that was used by my sister for years... Never a problem. My own P-I 166MHz server had uptimes of 200 days and up. Downtimes were usually due to the odd power-cut or an upgrade. I find *nice* machines in the dumpster that, after rebuilding, work without a hitch: I already have 2 AMD Athlons in the 1.xGHz range, and one P-IV 1.9GHz that was fully functional (no rebuilding needed, disks were in there, a Intel motherboard, a AGP dual-head graphics card from Matrox, additional 3Com 100Mbps NIC, 80Gig harddisk, 512Meg RAM, nice case too!)
So, yes, there is no reason why a 5 year old motherboard won't run stable. If the powersupply is still good of course.
I wrote all papers and reports the first year using Amstrad CPC 6128, Arnor Protext on ROM and a 9-pin printer. Later I used a 486 and WP 5.1 (Now with Graphics..).
Yes so did I, even though for me it was a 286, but we had a HP Deskjet 500. In my class I was the only one handing in homework/papers typed. Everyone else just handed in a handwritten version... That was perfectly well accepted by the teachers.
These days, I heard that it must be typed... I think that is insanity.
there is still a 2400+ with 1G of ram and a fx5700 churning packets in the corner running MONOWall (freeBSD) ^_^
Which is severe overkill for a firewall. I've ran my server (which does more than just routing packets) for years on a P-I 166/32Meg RAM. The only thing that it wasn't powerful enough for was IMAP, but that's somehow excusable. My parents run my old desktop (bought in 1999, I think...) as a server: it's a P-III 800MHz/768Meg RAM, full SCSI. Essentially, it doesn't do much all day.
My own server is now a AMD64 2800+/2Gig RAM. I replaced the P-I because it began hard to get parts for it and in case of a failure, I'd be in trouble. That, and I wanted to try OpenBSD/amd64 and hoped that Cool 'n Quiet would make it very quiet. Alas, that last one turned out to be a mistake.
Home server? My best guess is that any PC running ~500MHz will do the job just fine for anything you throw at it. Heck, my last laptop was a P-III 600MHz/512Meg RAM and it ran everything I needed just fine. It just started to fall physically apart and thus had to be replaced.
I also wonder if you can build your own for that price including a legal copy of Vista. I highly doubt it.
The problem here is that I know people that throw away their P-IV 2.6GHz/1Gig RAM because they consider it "crap hardware". That's what sad in this world. People consider my 2003 AMD MP 2400+/4Gig RAM "crap" because it isn't the latest Intel Core Duo. Well with Debian on it, it flies... Thank you very much...
Heck with a price like that and a sane operating system, this is really nice hardware. I began computing on a "state of the art IBM PS/2 Model 50", so really, this system is nice compared to what we had.
Exactly... With a bit luck it might even be very low noise. I'd buy one...
Mod parent insightful...
I also think the user was careless and infected himself.
Now, it IS possible to reverse Windows.
I however, I have no idea what you are talking about in the whole section you dedicate on "reversing Windows". Do you mean "reverse engineer", if so, please say that instead of saying weird things.
True, but consider the following: if optical drives were SATA, one could ditch the whole PATA interface and save space on the motherboard. As for floppy drives: I have yet to see a modern computer coming with one.
No worries, I just wanted to point it out. Ik ben zelf nederlandstalig hoor....
I don't remember RTL9 doing the Luxembourgish broadcasts. May have been the case, but if it was the case, it was a very very long time ago.
Just assuming that you're Dutch, please write the name of my country correctly please: it's "Luxembourg" or "Luxemburg" (depending on the language you write, I think you can use both in English.)
As for those TV stations, I assume you talk about RTL which stands for Radio Television Luxembourg. They are part of the RTL Group that has a whole bunch of channels called "RTL", on the top of my head: RTL Television, SuperRTL, RTL2, RTL9, RTL TVI, RTL4, RTL5,.... etc... While they share the name, they do not share the language the programmes are spoken in.
Not to mention I once played a tic-tac-toe game written in 1949 thanks to a ENIAC emulator.
I was going to say "Bullshit, nobody ever wrote an ENIAC emulator". Luckily I did a google before posting, and incredibly it exists!. Now, I just need to program tic-tac-toe on it ;-)
Uncanny Valley