Sure, I'll miss going Start->All Programs-> Accessories->System Tools->Character Map But I think I'll get used to it...
Win+R, charmap,
Faster than faffing around with the mouse!
It's one of those cheap tricks that makes non computer literate people say "wow", when you launch stuff in a flurry of keypresses.
1996 was when I got my first modem, a blisteringly fast 14.4K Hayes Accura external model, with lots of flashing lights. CompuServe was the ISP I used back then, $10 a month for 10 hours access and then $1.80 per hour after that (at 9.6kbps, to get 14.4 I'd have had to dial a London number at great expense). Of course, being in the UK there were local phone charges to contend with as well, with any time from 8AM to 6PM on weekdays being strictly off-limits (£2.40 an hour, $3.50 in US terms, 4 times the "offpeak" rates). Once the paltry 10 hours were up it was eyewateringly expensive to be online.
That said, a couple of years before I went online it was ten bucks an hour to connect at 9.6kbps - I guess I was lucky!
Back then the Web was much, much simpler - it didn't take me long at all to find a site called Lord Soth (which was part of HappyPuppy.com), which had all sorts of Shareware games and game demos to download. Score! No more paying 1.50 a disk for Shareware, I could just download it myself. Yeah, it took half an hour to download a meg but it was better than waiting a week for the same thing by post.
The main thing with the Web back then was its straightforwardness. Yes, Javascript existed but it hadn't been used to annoy, merely to enhance. No banner adverts, no annoying popups, just forests of links - which usually worked, rather than being dead. Altavista (.digital.com) and HotBot were the two search engines we all used. Music downloading consisted of grabbing MIDI files, and if you were really lucky a wavetable emulator program so you could listen to them on something other than the OPL3 chips on your soundcard!
Although there was piracy even then on the Web (albeit on a much, much smaller scale) the majority of stuff was found on Usenet. CompuServe was famous for its Usenet feeds, with Forte Agent being the program I used back then.
In the end CompuServe's 10 hours was just too painful and I signed up with Demon in 1998, who had a "tenner a month" offer (they still do, in fact). I'm still using that email address 11 years later - and no, it doesn't receive much spam!
Once Netscape 4 came out it all seemed to go downhill, until we've ended up with today's bandwidth-hogging, browser-scripting mass of content. Although modern things like YouTube etc are great, I admit I sometimes yearn for the day when the Web was so much more compact...
Not to worry - this will end up just like the "N" version of Windows.
MS will doubtless issue a special version of Windows which offers the option to install Firefox or whatever during first run, but I wouldn't mind betting that the "normal" version of Windows will come with IE (and only IE) just as at present.
We've seen all this before with the aforementioned "N" version of Windows, which comes with no media player. You'd have to bust a gut to find a copy of that, as all retail versions in stores are the regular version, OEMs use the regular version (customised for their PCs), small OEMs use a generic OEM copy etc. The sole reason for the "N" version was that it let Microsoft fulfil their obligations to the EU to offer a version of Windows without a media player - the deal didn't say it had to be the only version of Windows on offer! Needless to say the Great British Public at least don't want crippled Windows, I can only imagine the hue and cry from the man on the street if their new version of Windows couldn't play MP3s out of the box.
Anyway, if MS have any sense they'll do the same again this time. That way none of us will have to bother faffing around on less-techy friends / family members' PCs and those of us that are techy can just carry on using Firefox etc as we presently do.
The Psion netBook was a wonderful piece of kit. I sorely wanted one ten years ago but could never afford one, I made do with a 5MX instead. Indeed, I made a nice wodge of cash when I was at Uni by writing Shareware games for Psions - the platform was such that if you wrote a game for the smallest machine in the range (Revo / Mako) it would work on the biggest (netBook).
Psion then lost it IMO, they pulled out of the consumer market and the successor to the netBook, the netBook Pro, ran WinCE rather than EPOC - yuck.
Anyway, they still sell netBook related kit, if not the machines themselves.
Blimey, XP should fly on all of those, assuming you've not got loads of junk running in the background.
I've got a 10-year-old P3-450 in the other room, running XP with 384MB of RAM. And you know what? It flies! It boots in less than a minute (58 seconds from turn on to hourglass disappearing last time I checked), Firefox and Openoffice are subjectively the same as on this Windows 7 P4 machine. The only things it can't do in a timely fashion are a) play anything remotely modern games wise and b) play MPEG-4 video, such as found on YouTube - it gets juddery and out of sync. Commit charge is 102MB after first boot.
Note that this is a stock install of XP, with SP3 applied and no third party apps sucking up RAM in the background.
It was internally reported as MS-DOS 7.00. There was even a screenshot of it in the November 1993 edition of PC Plus, in their "Chicago" preview (which subsequently got them a roasting from Microsoft).
Win95 OSR2 introduced MS-DOS 7.10 (with FAT32 support) and DOS 7.1 stayed around until Windows ME.
Windows ME used MS-DOS 8.00 and MS-DOS 8.00 is included with Windows XP, Vista and 7 (32-bit versions only).
There's a great article about how MS butchered MS-DOS 8, sliced and diced it then stuck it in a DLL file for Windows here:
http://mirror.href.com/thestarman/winxp/winxpsd.htm
It says here that Microsoft released ActiveMovie in 1996 and Quicktime came out in 1991.
Windows 3.1 came with Media Player, as did Windows 3.0 with Multimedia Extensions in 1991. (The latter was vanishingly rare though, as sound cards and CD-ROM drives cost a fortune back then!) Windows 3.1 was the first release that let everyone join in with multimedia, thanks to a widely circulated PC speaker driver that allowed the playing of WAV files.
Bear in mind Media Player was right from the start a, well, media player. Quicktime was more like Video for Windows, ie something angled more towards playing video rather than everything under the sun.
There's already an "N" version of Windows available in the EU that comes without Media Player for some reason (notwithstanding the fact that Windows has had a media player since 1992, long before Real and the other moaners came along!)
Now, I've yet to see a copy of this "N" version for sale anywhere. OEM copies of Windows are invariably the normal version, as are the retail copies you see in retailers etc. Evem the customised pre-installed versions of Windows on say HP PCs are the normal version too. In short, nobody actually wants a deliberately-crippled version of Windows.
I bet the same would happen with an IE-less version of Windows. As long as a normal version is available then people will buy that by default. I've got a horrible mental image of loads of setup EXEs being bundled with Windows regardless, much like the junk installers for Compuserve and AOL that came with Windows 98 (or was it 95 OSR2?)
I'm more interested in the way it's only ever Microsoft that's targetted too. I wonder if the same will happen with Apple when and if their market share gets to a larger level?
I had a fun test for my current position (IT technician).
There were 9 questions, asking things such as how would you find a MAC address, how would you map a drive letter that's already in use, remove MS Messenger and so on. Pretty basic stuff, really, but the sort of thing that's used daily in the job. The paper said to read all the questions before you started and the tester (who's now my boss) reiterated that before I started.
Anyway, the last question wasn't a question at all. It simply said "to prove you've read all the questions before starting, start with question 3 and work down from there."
As it happens, a couple of the bits couldn't be done (due to permissions issues with the virtual machine that was used) and I'm damned if I can remember the exect parameters to use with rundll32 to get rid of Messanger. However, I did my chances no harm by explaining what I would have done had I had permissions and saying that by Googling "msmsgs rundll32 remove" you'd find the command to remove Messenger.
It turns out there were over 30 applicants for the job. Apparently I was the only one who got all 9 questions right.
Needless to say I see tests for IT jobs as a good thing, I can only imagine how much chaff you'd get otherwise!
Sidenote: the only concern was that I was "overqualified". I hate that term, having seen it more often than I care to remember. The sad thing is in this part of the world experience counts for far more than academic / professional qualifications and without the former you're very unlikely to get any sort of IT job.
Well, the protestors had said in advance that they planned to attack the power station "by land, water and air" - thus the police were more than justified in breaking up the hippie convention IMO.
(NB, there was a flotilla of protestor's rafts that was trying to get up the River Medway, but the police blocked them too).
Although I'm no fan of coal-powered power stations, there's not much else we can do right at the moment (other than nuclear). Gas supplies are uncertain, wind power gets loads of NIMBYS moaning about turbines spoling the view - and tidal's largely a pipe dream at the moment.
Personally, I find that volunteering at a wolf centre each Sunday does the trick for me. A couple of hours spent walking the wolves through woodland seems to keep the weight off!
I regularly drive a Vauxhall Corsa which gets over 40 mpg
My little Corsa gets a tad over 40MPG too - but remember, Americans use small gallons rather than our Imperial gallons.
American gallon = 3.79 litres
Imperial gallon = 4.55 litres
Thus an American car which gets 25mpg is actually getting 30mpg as far as we Brits are concerned.
Nonetheless, I did have to grin last week when I saw an advert in USA Today for a car dealership where every car did at least 25mpg (30 for us Brits) - that's pants compared to what we're used to here!
(I never could figure that out, TBH. Why don't American car makers just shove Euro engines in their cars instead? I've never been blown away by the performance of the automatics out there, indeed my Corsa can really shoot if needs be, and that's only a 1.2 litre engine! It's not as if speed limits are much higher in the States after all, indeed 70mph seems common enough out there, the same limit as here.)
NB, as petrol was around $4.19 a US gallon in Seattle last week, that works out as around 57p/litre. Compared to the 115p/lire I paid earlier today here, it's still a fair bit cheaper even with lower fuel effici1ency.
Prior to going back, I took a temporary clerical job with the police which paid the equivalent of £14,000 a year, and it was the highest paid job I ever had. I was a CS graduate with web design experience, and I was better off rubber stamping magistrates court files than actually doing computer science.
That's ironic - I've been doing clerical work for a similar salary for the past few years too!
It's silly when shuffling paper around gets you more pay than doing IT work, it really is.
I was advised by a career centre that it I was better off claiming benefits (reasonably generous in the UK; you won't be homeless but you won't be partying either) than taking most entry level jobs.
Quite a timely post! After graduating from Uni 7 years ago, I've finally - finally! - landed my first "proper" IT job. (That's after literally hundreds of applications, the few responses I had were along the lines of "no experience", to which I felt like replying "duh". I didn't though.)
Anyway, this job's an ICT technician, sorting out mundane things such as broken computers, lost passwords, Internet access restrictions and monitoring, etc. Windows Server 2003 experience was a must and the entrance exam was brief but sneaky. Thankfully my years of using Windows meant I was the only applicant to score full marks on it. Luckily I've been doing voluntary work at a place which uses Windows 2003 Small Business Server, so I passed that part too.
The salary? Around £12000 a year, less than half the average wage in the UK. Despite the low salary on offer, they had 33 applicants for the job! Now, after the obligatory taxes, that leaves me with around £840 a month. That compares very favourably with around £240 a month from the Dole, but...
A 1-bedroom flat is around £600 a month to rent in this part of the world (and rents are rising as house prices fall). If I was on the Dole, I'd actually have the same amount of spare cash per month (£240 or so) as I'd get rent paid for me, or housing provided. I'd also get free dentistry and other benefits, so yes - I can see why people would say you're better off on the Dole than in an entry-level job.
In hindsight, I should have skipped Uni and gone into the programming job that was on offer when I was at school, for £28000 a year! But everyone told me that Uni was a better option and it was right at the height of the dot-com bubble. Pah.
Good grief, that article makes it sound like the author expected 512MB of RAM on a 600ish MHz processor to be completely unuseable for XP.
Goodness knows why, as that would have been a reasonable spec machine back in 2001, when XP came out! XP != Vista, it seems the guy took a while to realise that.
For what it's worth an old P3 machine I built 9 years ago is still going strong. It runs XP Pro on 320MB RAM (and a 450MHz Katmai P3), with Office 2007 and Firefox. And because I don't have any junk running on there, it idles at just under 100MB at the desktop and you really have to go some (ie load games) to make it use any more than 256MB or so of its RAM. Embarrasingly, it boots into Windows faster than this Core2 Duo machine running Vista (pared back as best as I was able)....
I'd expect XP to pretty much fly on the Eee PC, it's just the small screen size that'll be a ptoblem (as XP was the first Windows OS to assume you're using 800x600 or higher right from the off).
Or alternatively, if you're in the UK, it can go like this:
Buy a box, plug it into your 20-year-old, roughly pointing in the right direction aerial and get perfect reception, despite being 20 miles away from the transmitter and using a weedy non-amplified non-high-gain aerial.
For some of us, it just works!
Looks like something similar to what's happened here in the UK, albeit with normal 576-line TV rather than HDTV.
When digital terrestrial launched in 98, it was absolutely stunning on a decent TV, as it was in 2000 when I obtained a set-top box. Pin-sharp and nary an MPEG artifact to be seen for much of the time. In football matches, when the camera panned, you could still see the grass relatively clearly although it did get slightly fuzzier.
That was in the days when they only had 4 or 5 channels per "multiplex".
Then came the cost-saving, extra channels were crammed in and the bitrates went down. The main channels (BBC One, BBC Two, ITV1) are still broadcast at a decent bitrate but even they now show MPEG artifacts more often than they did 8 years ago, and no - I'm referring to old-fashioned Trinitron displays, so it's not a switch from CRT to LCD that's caused it. It's also using the same old box, absolutely nothing has changed in the equipment I'm using since then.
If you watch football on some of the lesser channels now the grass just turns to a green mush when the camera pans, all detail is lost in a load of MPEG blocks. Even the DOGs (channel logos) in the corner are pixellated if you look at them on some channels!
The Great British public generally hasn't noticed, though, which is why it's continued apace. It's very disappointing if it's happening to HDTV though, as it negates the whole point of HDTV in the first place!
I'm using a whopping behemoth of a TV still, an 8 year old 28" widescreen Wega which weighs a ton (or at least a 20th of a ton). It's still got absolutely superb picture quality though, with an RGB feed from a DVD player / DTT box looking pin-sharp. Ironically it's not really pin sharp, as the same material played on an LCD monitor shows up MPEG artifacts if you look closely.
I still have an old 17" Trinitron monitor which I use for an elderly PC hooked up to a weather station. Just for fun a few weeks back I hooked it up to this PC, alongside the LCD monitor: I was amazed at how vibrant the whole thing was, the reds in particular were really vivid. I just has to fire up Doom for some old-school action - it's just not the same on an LCD panel.
It'll all become irrelevant in the next decade or so anyway, as people will forget what a CRT monitor could offer. I don't plan to throw that Trinitron monitor away though, not as long as it still works anyway! Maybe in 2018 I'll be able to wow people by showing them what we used in the dark ages...
Interesting, so much for the "permanant damage" bit then that Apple was spouting!
It reminds me very much of the hacks that went on with the PSP a while back, whereby you could "brick" your shiny new console if you didn't know what you were doing with firmware updates. That one was finally solves by a hack involving accessing the service mode via a modified battery of all things!
Win+R, \windows\system32, find winver.exe, right click, properties, details.
Language: English (United States).
I'd bet my bottom dollar the UK DVD is essentially the same as the US version. Certainly the Control Panel offers the chance to "customize colors", IE has a "favorites" option and so on.
When I was at school I was given an old Windows 1.0 manual (saw it on a shelf, asked if I could look at it (as we were running Win3.1) and to my surprise the head of IT gave it to me). And you know what? The ring-bound manual also had US spellings, with screengrabs of Notepad and Write showing American stuff. It's nothing new.
I just can't understand this. A few years back RealNetworks was whinging like fun, going on about MS being anticompetitive, etc.
Thing is...
In 1991 MS released Windows with Multimedia Extensions, which was Win 3.0 with a few multimedia apps bundled.
In 1992 Media Player became part of Windows 3.1 and has remained there every since. Back in 1991, of course, there were no other media players out there.
Then 3 years later RealNetworks pops up and before long starts whinging. Considering MS had been "bundling" a media player since before RN was even thought of, how on Earth did RN have a leg to stand on? It just reeks of sour grapes to me.
And guess what members of Joe Public enough to get hold of Windows xxx N do? Yup, that's right, install WMP anyway as IE will prompt for it. Those who are tech-savvy enough to install an alternative browser/media player anyway will continue to do the same, so I really can't see what this achieves - apart from making some lawyers rich!
Goodness, I can just see it now - people moaning because Windows comes with a calculator, text editor and screensavers. Not to mention some games, I mean how unfair is that to those who write Solitaire clones for a living?!
You do? From your post it sounds like you stopped checking about this time last year...
The current "in thing" is to run a hacked version of the latest firmware, rather than last year's emulation of firmware on 1.5. Get a SNES emulator which uses the Media Engine for sound and you'll find most things run just fine, as does Sonic on the Mega Drive emulator that I tried last year.
The release of emulators has slowed a fair bit recently, granted, but that's because there's an emulator for pretty much everything out there already. Having said that, just two weeks ago a Commodore Plus/4 emulator was ported, much to my delight - that means I can play games from all of the previous consoles and home computers I've owned all on the PSP.
The latest firmwares come with a Playstation emulator which runs many NTSC games at full speed - originally it was locked to games downloaded from Sony's online store, but it's been hacked and with custom firmware you can run a heck of a lot on it.
As for the MP3 comment, I use my PSP in the car for a weekly journey that takes around 4 and a half hours. And you know what? With the screen turned off and the power switch set to "hold" I still have 70% or so battery life left when I get home. I've not yet tested to see how much I can squeeze out of it, but it should be at least 12 hours of MP3s on a full charge.
The wind farm will be built just a few miles away from where I live - a fair way from London, initially I thought it'd be pretty galling if all that power went to the capital rather than the households of Kent!
However, the way the UK works is that we have a "national grid" set up for power. If the system's reaching capacity, older "mothballed" power stations can be brought online, to pump extra power into the grid. I believe there are trans-Channel connections too, so that we can import power if the worst comes to the worst. There are even "green" suppliers that promise to pump as much energy into the grid as you consume, from renewable sources. Of course the cost is higher and it's likely the actual power you're using came from coal/oil/gas/nuclear, but the option's there.
Amusingly most of the locals are against the plans, citing how ugly those turbines will look. Apart from the fact they'll be pretty small to the naked eye (they're not exactly putting them 100 yards out to sea), there are far more ugly things out there - traffic along the sea front roads, for example. There was also a concern about noise, but considering that a) they're a fair way out to sea, b) there's an airport nearby as well as a dual carriageway and c) there are frequent explosions from Shoeburyness, the other side of the Thames, I can't see that being an issue either.
Here's hoping they go ahead, it'd be a nice "trophy" for this deprived area to have.
Slashdot Mirror
Win+R, charmap,
Faster than faffing around with the mouse!
It's one of those cheap tricks that makes non computer literate people say "wow", when you launch stuff in a flurry of keypresses.
1996 was when I got my first modem, a blisteringly fast 14.4K Hayes Accura external model, with lots of flashing lights. CompuServe was the ISP I used back then, $10 a month for 10 hours access and then $1.80 per hour after that (at 9.6kbps, to get 14.4 I'd have had to dial a London number at great expense). Of course, being in the UK there were local phone charges to contend with as well, with any time from 8AM to 6PM on weekdays being strictly off-limits (£2.40 an hour, $3.50 in US terms, 4 times the "offpeak" rates). Once the paltry 10 hours were up it was eyewateringly expensive to be online.
That said, a couple of years before I went online it was ten bucks an hour to connect at 9.6kbps - I guess I was lucky!
Back then the Web was much, much simpler - it didn't take me long at all to find a site called Lord Soth (which was part of HappyPuppy.com), which had all sorts of Shareware games and game demos to download. Score! No more paying 1.50 a disk for Shareware, I could just download it myself. Yeah, it took half an hour to download a meg but it was better than waiting a week for the same thing by post.
The main thing with the Web back then was its straightforwardness. Yes, Javascript existed but it hadn't been used to annoy, merely to enhance. No banner adverts, no annoying popups, just forests of links - which usually worked, rather than being dead. Altavista (.digital.com) and HotBot were the two search engines we all used. Music downloading consisted of grabbing MIDI files, and if you were really lucky a wavetable emulator program so you could listen to them on something other than the OPL3 chips on your soundcard!
Although there was piracy even then on the Web (albeit on a much, much smaller scale) the majority of stuff was found on Usenet. CompuServe was famous for its Usenet feeds, with Forte Agent being the program I used back then.
In the end CompuServe's 10 hours was just too painful and I signed up with Demon in 1998, who had a "tenner a month" offer (they still do, in fact). I'm still using that email address 11 years later - and no, it doesn't receive much spam!
Once Netscape 4 came out it all seemed to go downhill, until we've ended up with today's bandwidth-hogging, browser-scripting mass of content. Although modern things like YouTube etc are great, I admit I sometimes yearn for the day when the Web was so much more compact...
Not to worry - this will end up just like the "N" version of Windows.
MS will doubtless issue a special version of Windows which offers the option to install Firefox or whatever during first run, but I wouldn't mind betting that the "normal" version of Windows will come with IE (and only IE) just as at present.
We've seen all this before with the aforementioned "N" version of Windows, which comes with no media player. You'd have to bust a gut to find a copy of that, as all retail versions in stores are the regular version, OEMs use the regular version (customised for their PCs), small OEMs use a generic OEM copy etc. The sole reason for the "N" version was that it let Microsoft fulfil their obligations to the EU to offer a version of Windows without a media player - the deal didn't say it had to be the only version of Windows on offer! Needless to say the Great British Public at least don't want crippled Windows, I can only imagine the hue and cry from the man on the street if their new version of Windows couldn't play MP3s out of the box.
Anyway, if MS have any sense they'll do the same again this time. That way none of us will have to bother faffing around on less-techy friends / family members' PCs and those of us that are techy can just carry on using Firefox etc as we presently do.
Psion then lost it IMO, they pulled out of the consumer market and the successor to the netBook, the netBook Pro, ran WinCE rather than EPOC - yuck.
Anyway, they still sell netBook related kit, if not the machines themselves.
http://www.psionteklogix.com/public.aspx?s=uk&p=AccessoryCatalogue&pMod=48&page=1&aCat=37&aID=1714
Blimey, XP should fly on all of those, assuming you've not got loads of junk running in the background.
I've got a 10-year-old P3-450 in the other room, running XP with 384MB of RAM. And you know what? It flies! It boots in less than a minute (58 seconds from turn on to hourglass disappearing last time I checked), Firefox and Openoffice are subjectively the same as on this Windows 7 P4 machine. The only things it can't do in a timely fashion are a) play anything remotely modern games wise and b) play MPEG-4 video, such as found on YouTube - it gets juddery and out of sync. Commit charge is 102MB after first boot.
Note that this is a stock install of XP, with SP3 applied and no third party apps sucking up RAM in the background.
It was internally reported as MS-DOS 7.00. There was even a screenshot of it in the November 1993 edition of PC Plus, in their "Chicago" preview (which subsequently got them a roasting from Microsoft).
Win95 OSR2 introduced MS-DOS 7.10 (with FAT32 support) and DOS 7.1 stayed around until Windows ME.
Windows ME used MS-DOS 8.00 and MS-DOS 8.00 is included with Windows XP, Vista and 7 (32-bit versions only).
There's a great article about how MS butchered MS-DOS 8, sliced and diced it then stuck it in a DLL file for Windows here:
http://mirror.href.com/thestarman/winxp/winxpsd.htm
Windows 3.1 came with Media Player, as did Windows 3.0 with Multimedia Extensions in 1991. (The latter was vanishingly rare though, as sound cards and CD-ROM drives cost a fortune back then!) Windows 3.1 was the first release that let everyone join in with multimedia, thanks to a widely circulated PC speaker driver that allowed the playing of WAV files.
Bear in mind Media Player was right from the start a, well, media player. Quicktime was more like Video for Windows, ie something angled more towards playing video rather than everything under the sun.
There's already an "N" version of Windows available in the EU that comes without Media Player for some reason (notwithstanding the fact that Windows has had a media player since 1992, long before Real and the other moaners came along!)
Now, I've yet to see a copy of this "N" version for sale anywhere. OEM copies of Windows are invariably the normal version, as are the retail copies you see in retailers etc. Evem the customised pre-installed versions of Windows on say HP PCs are the normal version too. In short, nobody actually wants a deliberately-crippled version of Windows.
I bet the same would happen with an IE-less version of Windows. As long as a normal version is available then people will buy that by default. I've got a horrible mental image of loads of setup EXEs being bundled with Windows regardless, much like the junk installers for Compuserve and AOL that came with Windows 98 (or was it 95 OSR2?)
I'm more interested in the way it's only ever Microsoft that's targetted too. I wonder if the same will happen with Apple when and if their market share gets to a larger level?
There were 9 questions, asking things such as how would you find a MAC address, how would you map a drive letter that's already in use, remove MS Messenger and so on. Pretty basic stuff, really, but the sort of thing that's used daily in the job. The paper said to read all the questions before you started and the tester (who's now my boss) reiterated that before I started.
Anyway, the last question wasn't a question at all. It simply said "to prove you've read all the questions before starting, start with question 3 and work down from there."
As it happens, a couple of the bits couldn't be done (due to permissions issues with the virtual machine that was used) and I'm damned if I can remember the exect parameters to use with rundll32 to get rid of Messanger. However, I did my chances no harm by explaining what I would have done had I had permissions and saying that by Googling "msmsgs rundll32 remove" you'd find the command to remove Messenger.
It turns out there were over 30 applicants for the job. Apparently I was the only one who got all 9 questions right.
Needless to say I see tests for IT jobs as a good thing, I can only imagine how much chaff you'd get otherwise!
Sidenote: the only concern was that I was "overqualified". I hate that term, having seen it more often than I care to remember. The sad thing is in this part of the world experience counts for far more than academic / professional qualifications and without the former you're very unlikely to get any sort of IT job.
(NB, there was a flotilla of protestor's rafts that was trying to get up the River Medway, but the police blocked them too).
Although I'm no fan of coal-powered power stations, there's not much else we can do right at the moment (other than nuclear). Gas supplies are uncertain, wind power gets loads of NIMBYS moaning about turbines spoling the view - and tidal's largely a pipe dream at the moment.
Personally, I find that volunteering at a wolf centre each Sunday does the trick for me. A couple of hours spent walking the wolves through woodland seems to keep the weight off!
American gallon = 3.79 litres
Imperial gallon = 4.55 litres
Thus an American car which gets 25mpg is actually getting 30mpg as far as we Brits are concerned.
Nonetheless, I did have to grin last week when I saw an advert in USA Today for a car dealership where every car did at least 25mpg (30 for us Brits) - that's pants compared to what we're used to here!
(I never could figure that out, TBH. Why don't American car makers just shove Euro engines in their cars instead? I've never been blown away by the performance of the automatics out there, indeed my Corsa can really shoot if needs be, and that's only a 1.2 litre engine! It's not as if speed limits are much higher in the States after all, indeed 70mph seems common enough out there, the same limit as here.)
NB, as petrol was around $4.19 a US gallon in Seattle last week, that works out as around 57p/litre. Compared to the 115p/lire I paid earlier today here, it's still a fair bit cheaper even with lower fuel effici1ency.
It's silly when shuffling paper around gets you more pay than doing IT work, it really is.
Anyway, this job's an ICT technician, sorting out mundane things such as broken computers, lost passwords, Internet access restrictions and monitoring, etc. Windows Server 2003 experience was a must and the entrance exam was brief but sneaky. Thankfully my years of using Windows meant I was the only applicant to score full marks on it. Luckily I've been doing voluntary work at a place which uses Windows 2003 Small Business Server, so I passed that part too.
The salary? Around £12000 a year, less than half the average wage in the UK. Despite the low salary on offer, they had 33 applicants for the job! Now, after the obligatory taxes, that leaves me with around £840 a month. That compares very favourably with around £240 a month from the Dole, but... A 1-bedroom flat is around £600 a month to rent in this part of the world (and rents are rising as house prices fall). If I was on the Dole, I'd actually have the same amount of spare cash per month (£240 or so) as I'd get rent paid for me, or housing provided. I'd also get free dentistry and other benefits, so yes - I can see why people would say you're better off on the Dole than in an entry-level job.
In hindsight, I should have skipped Uni and gone into the programming job that was on offer when I was at school, for £28000 a year! But everyone told me that Uni was a better option and it was right at the height of the dot-com bubble. Pah.
Goodness knows why, as that would have been a reasonable spec machine back in 2001, when XP came out! XP != Vista, it seems the guy took a while to realise that.
For what it's worth an old P3 machine I built 9 years ago is still going strong. It runs XP Pro on 320MB RAM (and a 450MHz Katmai P3), with Office 2007 and Firefox. And because I don't have any junk running on there, it idles at just under 100MB at the desktop and you really have to go some (ie load games) to make it use any more than 256MB or so of its RAM. Embarrasingly, it boots into Windows faster than this Core2 Duo machine running Vista (pared back as best as I was able)....
I'd expect XP to pretty much fly on the Eee PC, it's just the small screen size that'll be a ptoblem (as XP was the first Windows OS to assume you're using 800x600 or higher right from the off).
Buy a box, plug it into your 20-year-old, roughly pointing in the right direction aerial and get perfect reception, despite being 20 miles away from the transmitter and using a weedy non-amplified non-high-gain aerial. For some of us, it just works!
When digital terrestrial launched in 98, it was absolutely stunning on a decent TV, as it was in 2000 when I obtained a set-top box. Pin-sharp and nary an MPEG artifact to be seen for much of the time. In football matches, when the camera panned, you could still see the grass relatively clearly although it did get slightly fuzzier.
That was in the days when they only had 4 or 5 channels per "multiplex".
Then came the cost-saving, extra channels were crammed in and the bitrates went down. The main channels (BBC One, BBC Two, ITV1) are still broadcast at a decent bitrate but even they now show MPEG artifacts more often than they did 8 years ago, and no - I'm referring to old-fashioned Trinitron displays, so it's not a switch from CRT to LCD that's caused it. It's also using the same old box, absolutely nothing has changed in the equipment I'm using since then.
If you watch football on some of the lesser channels now the grass just turns to a green mush when the camera pans, all detail is lost in a load of MPEG blocks. Even the DOGs (channel logos) in the corner are pixellated if you look at them on some channels!
The Great British public generally hasn't noticed, though, which is why it's continued apace. It's very disappointing if it's happening to HDTV though, as it negates the whole point of HDTV in the first place!
I still have an old 17" Trinitron monitor which I use for an elderly PC hooked up to a weather station. Just for fun a few weeks back I hooked it up to this PC, alongside the LCD monitor: I was amazed at how vibrant the whole thing was, the reds in particular were really vivid. I just has to fire up Doom for some old-school action - it's just not the same on an LCD panel.
It'll all become irrelevant in the next decade or so anyway, as people will forget what a CRT monitor could offer. I don't plan to throw that Trinitron monitor away though, not as long as it still works anyway! Maybe in 2018 I'll be able to wow people by showing them what we used in the dark ages...
It reminds me very much of the hacks that went on with the PSP a while back, whereby you could "brick" your shiny new console if you didn't know what you were doing with firmware updates. That one was finally solves by a hack involving accessing the service mode via a modified battery of all things!
Win+R, \windows\system32, find winver.exe, right click, properties, details.
Language: English (United States).
I'd bet my bottom dollar the UK DVD is essentially the same as the US version. Certainly the Control Panel offers the chance to "customize colors", IE has a "favorites" option and so on.
When I was at school I was given an old Windows 1.0 manual (saw it on a shelf, asked if I could look at it (as we were running Win3.1) and to my surprise the head of IT gave it to me). And you know what? The ring-bound manual also had US spellings, with screengrabs of Notepad and Write showing American stuff. It's nothing new.
Thing is...
In 1991 MS released Windows with Multimedia Extensions, which was Win 3.0 with a few multimedia apps bundled. In 1992 Media Player became part of Windows 3.1 and has remained there every since. Back in 1991, of course, there were no other media players out there.
Then 3 years later RealNetworks pops up and before long starts whinging. Considering MS had been "bundling" a media player since before RN was even thought of, how on Earth did RN have a leg to stand on? It just reeks of sour grapes to me.
And guess what members of Joe Public enough to get hold of Windows xxx N do? Yup, that's right, install WMP anyway as IE will prompt for it. Those who are tech-savvy enough to install an alternative browser/media player anyway will continue to do the same, so I really can't see what this achieves - apart from making some lawyers rich!
Goodness, I can just see it now - people moaning because Windows comes with a calculator, text editor and screensavers. Not to mention some games, I mean how unfair is that to those who write Solitaire clones for a living?!
I bet MS didn't plan on it sticking around quite as long as that when they made that video!
Posted a couple of days ago, I thought. What solutions to DRM does open source software offer though?
You do? From your post it sounds like you stopped checking about this time last year...
The current "in thing" is to run a hacked version of the latest firmware, rather than last year's emulation of firmware on 1.5. Get a SNES emulator which uses the Media Engine for sound and you'll find most things run just fine, as does Sonic on the Mega Drive emulator that I tried last year.
The release of emulators has slowed a fair bit recently, granted, but that's because there's an emulator for pretty much everything out there already. Having said that, just two weeks ago a Commodore Plus/4 emulator was ported, much to my delight - that means I can play games from all of the previous consoles and home computers I've owned all on the PSP.
The latest firmwares come with a Playstation emulator which runs many NTSC games at full speed - originally it was locked to games downloaded from Sony's online store, but it's been hacked and with custom firmware you can run a heck of a lot on it.
As for the MP3 comment, I use my PSP in the car for a weekly journey that takes around 4 and a half hours. And you know what? With the screen turned off and the power switch set to "hold" I still have 70% or so battery life left when I get home. I've not yet tested to see how much I can squeeze out of it, but it should be at least 12 hours of MP3s on a full charge.
However, the way the UK works is that we have a "national grid" set up for power. If the system's reaching capacity, older "mothballed" power stations can be brought online, to pump extra power into the grid. I believe there are trans-Channel connections too, so that we can import power if the worst comes to the worst. There are even "green" suppliers that promise to pump as much energy into the grid as you consume, from renewable sources. Of course the cost is higher and it's likely the actual power you're using came from coal/oil/gas/nuclear, but the option's there.
Amusingly most of the locals are against the plans, citing how ugly those turbines will look. Apart from the fact they'll be pretty small to the naked eye (they're not exactly putting them 100 yards out to sea), there are far more ugly things out there - traffic along the sea front roads, for example. There was also a concern about noise, but considering that a) they're a fair way out to sea, b) there's an airport nearby as well as a dual carriageway and c) there are frequent explosions from Shoeburyness, the other side of the Thames, I can't see that being an issue either.
Here's hoping they go ahead, it'd be a nice "trophy" for this deprived area to have.