I tried for years to get people up and running on Debian 'cause it works well for me, but it never seemed to cut it for the Windows converts. Ever since Kubuntu and it's Automatix scripts have come to my attention, I've had nothing but luck getting people to ditch Windows. It's still not for everyone, as most gamers still "need" windows, and Wine still has a way to go before it's ready for the masses.
I hate to sound like a fanboi, but have you tried loading Ubuntu/Kubuntu on your brother's machine? I don't know Gentoo firsthand, having never used it myself, but I've read enough about it that I get the impression that it's a Linux distro modeled as something of a mix between Debian and FreeBSD (please correct me if I'm mistaken). I've got a little experience with FreeBSD and I've used Debian as my primary OS for years. I'd guess that a complete Gentoo setup is not much different from a complete Debian set up, and while it works wonders for you and I, a fresh install of Ubuntu with Automatix is really lightyears ahead of either Gentoo or Debian for your typical home user.
I wouldn't be able to stand using Ubuntu myself, and I'd certainly never use it on a server, but for people who don't want or need to know as many technical details as you or I, it "just works". It's not even Ubuntu that I give credit to, so much as the Automatix script. Whatever, give it a shot, you might be suprised.
Well, you could put a link to it in your 'startup' folder and modify the properties of the link to start Firefox minimized. I'm not sure how you could keep a constant copy loaded in the background as I'm assuming IE does.
As for the interface, you can get skins for Firefox that look almost exactly like IE.
They've definately got the downtown core covered. Besides, it's my understanding that this is just the first phase of the network, and that the coverage will expand to include the entire Greater Toronto Area, suburbs and all. The Ontario provincial governement has legislated that all homes be equiped with "smart metres" that bill the consumer for elictricity at different rates based on the time of day. Smart metres require two-way communication with the power company, and the wifi network is being put up to facilitate that communication. Being able to sell internet access to people is just an added bonus. Heck, I was hoping that because the network was being put up to satisfy a legal requirement on the part of the hydro company, and it is technically paid for already through my electricity bill, that it would be free. Oh well. It ain't free, but it's advertised to be much faster than I had though and I'm keen to try it.
Here's a link that talks about the legislation. It's from Hamilton, not Toronto, but whatever. The legislation regarding the smart metres is the same.
http://www.bbwexchange.com/publications/page1263-2 065753.asp
Yeah, I'been bit a few times with a broken laptop at a critical time. I've learned to uprade only when I have a bit of time, to upgrade on a non-crital desktop first, and to read the list of upgrades carefully before proceeding. A major upgrade of KDE when I have a big project due in the morning is a no-no.
I run Debian unstable on my home computers and Debian stable on my servers. That way I get lots of experience reparing debian, while having very reliable servers. It works quite well, in that every time another stable release is made, I already know the ins and outs of it and I'm ready to fix it in the freak chance that it would break.
This isn't about everyone getting a fair price, it's about concerts becoming something that only the wealthy will be able to afford. How can a college student with a part-time job compete with some yuppie investment-banker for tickets to see their favourite band? It's not fair at all.
For me it's just one more reason to stick with smaller shows, where $10 gets you in the door, albums are for sale/directly/ from the band, and you can have a beer with the band after the show.
I'm sorry, but I really hate it when people make the arguement that you should give up all uplifting things you have "like in real life." When does this "real life" begin? What is "real life?" Should you abstain from fun once you begin "real life?" Is it even possible to live a responsable "real life" and still find some time to play? Careful not to smile, 'cause people don't really have anything to smile about in "real life"."
I believe that the harder the work, the more important it is that you make time to relax. I've been through my share of rough times, don't think that I'm some rich, altruistic brat typing this on my Powerbook from my parent-funded dorm room or any nonsense like that. I've paid my own rent (and my little brother's) since I was 18. I know what it is to work, and I can tell you that I'm not happy if I allow this concept of "real life" let my work consume my life. As far as I can tell, "real life" requires balance.
If a student is working hard to put themselves through school, they frickin' deserve a little fun! Heck man, school should be some of the best years of your life. Make some friends, spend at least a few evenings staying up late doing foolish things just for the fun of it. In the morning, get up and drag yourself to class. Or work, or whatever it is that you have at your point in life. You're alive, take advantage of that and live a little!! Don't get me wrong. Working hard and earning your own way is important. I enjoy having a warm place to live, and good food to eat, and I work long hours to be able to have these things. I enjoy being able to take my girlfriend out somewhere nice, and I don't want my (future, none yet) kids to have holes in their shoes. At the same time, my friends are more important to me than my job, and I will want to be able to spend lots of time with my family. Jobs can be replaced. Friends and family, not so much.
I don't understand people who are obsessed with getting the absolute highest grades, just so they can get the highest paid jobs, and work the longest hours, just so they can get the biggest house, just so they can get the biggest mortgages. You know, like in "real life."
Have you tried implementing some sort of traffic shaping on your internet connection? I used to have all sort of speed issues with my Sympatico line until I set up Wondershaper on my firewall. I think I'm using the HTB version, and it makes such a difference. I can have 15 torrents going, a couple of people logged in to my system over NX, my brother surfing the web, and I can still stream music to my desk at work without any troubles. SSH stays snappy too.
The way I understand it, there are two things that really kill your speed. The first problem is with the huge buffers at the ISP, and the second is delayed TCP ACK packets. Traffic shaping allows you to throttle your connection down a bit so as to keep those buffers empty (well, the outbound one at least) and it also allows you to give priority to ACK packets.
It takes some tuning to get it running properly, and I've had much better luck with it over DSL than with Cable, but you might want to give it a try.
Sounds like a great way to prank-call someone at all hours of the day. Heck, you could even prank-call people from your desk at work all without picking up the phone.
Good god man! What version of Debian is that running? How the hell did you get that installed? My firewall right now is a Compaq Deskpro 486DX/33 with 20 megs of RAM and a 420 meg hard drive, and I haven't got enough space to upgrade from Woody to Sarge.
Huh, that 's interesting. I'll see what I can find. I've still got my Mormon scripture set. I'll dig through it a bit when I get home from work.
They do believe in the Bible, so they've got the whole genesis bit, however the Bible is considered less acurate than their other scriptures due to it's having been translated many times. Off the top of my head I can't recall any more specific writings regarding the creation, however the Mormons do not take the scriptures litteraly. Jesus was constantly teaching through parables, why should the bible be any different?
The most interesting Mormon writings, however, are the early church publications out of Salt Lake City just after they settled and earlier. I'm talking about stuff that's well over 100 years old. The Mormon church itself is only about 170 years old, so age is relative. Anyhow, the early stuff is very weird, but it doesn't really apply anymore. Perhapse I'll stop at the library and see if they have anything regarding early Mormon history just for kicks.
As for modern "statements" regarding the Mormon's position regarding evolution, like the Vatican's recent statement, I'm sure nothing like that exists. If the leaders of the chrch put out statements, they are about paying more attention to your family or storing more food in preparation for the apocalypse. They don't really pay attention to what science or the media is excited about. That's for scientists and the press to fuss about.
I'm not sure that this situation in Kansas is at all like the Mormon influence in Utah. I think I may be in a position to offer some informed but unbiased insight about the Mormons. I was born and raised as a Mormon for nearly 20 years, and I was really loved it. I've since left the church, and I will admit that they have some rather strange beliefs, but they don't deserve the bad reputaion they have.
Although the Mormons are extremely religeous, and their core faith is very restrictive, they are very open-minded people. They have no problem with things like the theory of evolution, and infact have a great regard for science and technology. Their Brigham Young University ("The Mormon University") Is a fantastic academic institution.
Most importantly, they believe in a separation between Church and school (and government). I attended a public school like everyone else, but I also attended the Mormon "seminary" every weekday morning at 5am (Ugh! That really sucked. I had to wake up at 4:15am!! No wonder I slept through highschool). The Mormon seminary is like a Sunday school; it is for highschool students, and everyone attends. It is not a place to train their clurgy or anything, and it definately not a place that even attempts to explain any sort of scientific phenomenon.
There's no way that you can compare the Mormons in Utah to the backwards conservative freaks that are making all of this noise in Kansas. For that matter, I'm sure most of the Christians on Kansas are no more "backwards" than the Mormons. This whole fuss is happening because of a very vocal minority. I've heard that often the people in charge of the schoolboard are failed local politicians. Folks who have run for County or Municipal offices, but have failed and slowly lower their target until they came to rest in the school board, where a Monkey with braindamage could get elected.
Oh, and one more thing. I know this has nothing to do with Kansas, but while I'm ranting about Mormons, let me say for the record that they do not practice poligamy (multiple wives). They did briefly a log time ago for complicated reasons that I won't get in to right now, but they don't any more and havent for a very long time. I actually find it funny how many people used to meet me and ask "So, how many wives does your Dad have?" Weird.
1) Buy directly from the artist at a show. I've been doing this more and more lately, but I live in Toronto and there's no shortage of excellent live music.
2) Download directly from the artists website. This is still a fairly new option. The Offspring and Rage Against The Machine are both on the right track, buyt not quite there. Harvey Danger, on the other hadn, have it figured out. I've never listened to them much before, but I downloaded the new album (after sending them a donation, I want them to succeed in their attempt to bypass the labels!) and I love it!
Mind you, neither of these options will score you the latest-greatest Ricky Martin or Britney Spears albums, but I suppose it's a resonable sacrifice:P
My first tech job was as the sole helpdesk technician of a small/medium-sized hospital in Canada. When I was hired, they were in the middle of transitioning their main servers from Netware to NT4. The plan had been simple:
1. Migrate client authentication over to NT
2. Create trust relationship between Netware and NT, allwing clients to access old Netware resources.
3. Migrate file/print/email and whatever else over to NT as it suited them.
I don't know enough about Netware to say whether the migration plan should have worked or not, but something definately mucked up. They couldn't get Netware to trust the NT logons. The solution?
They simply removed ALL access restrictions from ALL Netware resources!!!!! The hospital ran for months with no no access controls on ANYTHING!! Sure, people were to enter a valid password, but once you were logged in, you could open up anyone's network shares and do as you pleased. Patient information was freely available, even from the virtually unsupervised computers at mostly abandoned reception desks.
The network admins did their best to keep it a secret. After watching these admins hiding a security hole this large, I have almost no faith that security in large networks is ever implemented properly.
I though that carbon nanotube technology was still in it's infancy, and that they would not be able to product suitable ones for at least another 5 or 10 years. Sure we can grow a few small ones in a lab, sure they're strong, but we're not talking about a small amount of tubing here.
By the same logic, my computer should be running off of a fuel cell right now, cars should be driving them selves, and world hunger should be solved. I mean really pleople, we have the technology, right?
I really think your best bet would be to use an old P3 or Athlom running software RAID on Linux or BSD. You can add several PATA/SATA cards to your machine and stack it full of drives and fans, and I think you'll find the performace to be acceptable. Of course, no software RAID can compete with an expensive SCSI RAID card with a dedicated XScale chip or whatever, but it's a heck of a lot cheaper.
It also depends what you want to be doing with it. I've played with both hardware and software RAID5 and home and at work. Software RAID offers excellend bandwidth, and seems to use very little CPU time. This is why I think a P3 should work. However, the seek time is terrible. Perhapse it has something to do with the RAID intelligence being located so much farther away from the drives than it would be with a dedicated RAID card. I've tried running an SQL server on soft IDE RAID on a dual Xeon 3.2, and it had the snot kicked out of it by a dual P3 700 with an ancient MegaRAID driven SCSI array.
As for running it as a home directory for Win/Mac/Linux, between Samba and NFS you should be just fine. You may even be able to go the fancy route and set up a few logical volumes as iSCSI targets and run your own SAN.
A new processor was required for the shift from 16-bits to 32-bits, but you may not have noticed because the processors came out well before the microsoft software that was available to support them.
The first x86 processor to feature 32-bit registers and addressing was the i386 released in 1985. Support for the new 32-bit features of the chip was added to Windows slowly starting with Windows 2.1 in 1987(also known as Windows/386), and provided support for virtual memory and somewhat improved multitasking. The 32-bit features in Windows were optional right through to Windows 3.1 in 1992, infact Win3.1 runs fairly well on a 286/AT with 2MB of memory. Although Windows included some 32-bit code as early as 1987, it did not provide a 32-bit API for applications until the introduction of the Win32 API with Windows NT 3.1 (1993) and Windows 95. There was also a free update released for Windows 3.1 called Win32s that provided a subset of the Win32 API for Windows 3.1 amd Windows for Workgroups 3.11, though it provided rather poor compatibility; major features like comctl32.dll and a real registry were not provided.
The first version of Windows to offer a complete 32-bit kernel and drivers was Windows NT 3.1. It provided proper support for the 32-bit funtionality as early as 1993, but it was not used much outside of a corporate environment. Home users had to wait for Windows 95, 10 frickin' years after the release of the 386!!! Even then, Windows 95 still contained a large ammount of 16-bit code!
Anyhow, I find it funny that people With Athlon64's are complaining about having to wait a year or two for a version of Windows that can make proper use of the processors. At least users now have the option of running 64-bit Linux or BSD, but alternative operating systems for the 386 didn't become available until 1993 with the release of BSD/386 and OS/2 2.0, neither of which were free.
Well, enough of my rambling. Hope that answers your question:)
And you use the linux NTFS tools and TestDisk to undelete/unformat/rebuild lost or damaged files and partitions. I use these all the time, they work REALLY well.
I carry around a copy of Damn Small Linux on my USB key, customized with above tools and including an image of the registry editing floppy and endless other utilities. Not to mention, DSL Linux gives me full access to the Debian APT repository! It serves me very well, especially since it can boot entirely into RAM, so I can take my key out and boot additional system.
I manage the computer network for a small financial services company, and I'm about to mandate use of FireFox. A small percentage of my users have a recurring problem with spyware, and so far all I've done is quietly recommend use of FireFox over IE. Last week a virus nearly destroyed a 300-page document that someone had been working on (yikes!), and so I repeated my sudgestion that IE be avoided except for those few sites that require it. Everyone within earshot became quite angry that IE is even available on their computers if it's that dangerous, "oh! Please protect us from ourselves!!!" Sheesh, should I also remove all the knives and forks from the lunchroom?
Anyhow, FireFox will be properly deployed company-wide next week, and IE will be limited to a whitelist of required sites.
The Pentium M wasn't really a huge design leap. It is more of a fusion between the P6 and NetBurst achitectures. My understanding is that it is basically a P6 core built on an updated process technology, with a quad-data-rate FSB, NetBurst-developed branch prediction, and crazy good power management.
Slashdot Mirror
I hate to sound like a fanboi, but have you tried loading Ubuntu/Kubuntu on your brother's machine? I don't know Gentoo firsthand, having never used it myself, but I've read enough about it that I get the impression that it's a Linux distro modeled as something of a mix between Debian and FreeBSD (please correct me if I'm mistaken). I've got a little experience with FreeBSD and I've used Debian as my primary OS for years. I'd guess that a complete Gentoo setup is not much different from a complete Debian set up, and while it works wonders for you and I, a fresh install of Ubuntu with Automatix is really lightyears ahead of either Gentoo or Debian for your typical home user.
I wouldn't be able to stand using Ubuntu myself, and I'd certainly never use it on a server, but for people who don't want or need to know as many technical details as you or I, it "just works". It's not even Ubuntu that I give credit to, so much as the Automatix script. Whatever, give it a shot, you might be suprised.
Well, you could put a link to it in your 'startup' folder and modify the properties of the link to start Firefox minimized. I'm not sure how you could keep a constant copy loaded in the background as I'm assuming IE does. As for the interface, you can get skins for Firefox that look almost exactly like IE.
You don't like to pedantic? On Slashdot? C'mon man, sure you do! It's fun!
They've definately got the downtown core covered. Besides, it's my understanding that this is just the first phase of the network, and that the coverage will expand to include the entire Greater Toronto Area, suburbs and all. The Ontario provincial governement has legislated that all homes be equiped with "smart metres" that bill the consumer for elictricity at different rates based on the time of day. Smart metres require two-way communication with the power company, and the wifi network is being put up to facilitate that communication. Being able to sell internet access to people is just an added bonus. Heck, I was hoping that because the network was being put up to satisfy a legal requirement on the part of the hydro company, and it is technically paid for already through my electricity bill, that it would be free. Oh well. It ain't free, but it's advertised to be much faster than I had though and I'm keen to try it. Here's a link that talks about the legislation. It's from Hamilton, not Toronto, but whatever. The legislation regarding the smart metres is the same. http://www.bbwexchange.com/publications/page1263-2 065753.asp
Yeah, I'been bit a few times with a broken laptop at a critical time. I've learned to uprade only when I have a bit of time, to upgrade on a non-crital desktop first, and to read the list of upgrades carefully before proceeding. A major upgrade of KDE when I have a big project due in the morning is a no-no.
I run Debian unstable on my home computers and Debian stable on my servers. That way I get lots of experience reparing debian, while having very reliable servers. It works quite well, in that every time another stable release is made, I already know the ins and outs of it and I'm ready to fix it in the freak chance that it would break.
For me it's just one more reason to stick with smaller shows, where $10 gets you in the door, albums are for sale /directly/ from the band, and you can have a beer with the band after the show.
I believe that the harder the work, the more important it is that you make time to relax. I've been through my share of rough times, don't think that I'm some rich, altruistic brat typing this on my Powerbook from my parent-funded dorm room or any nonsense like that. I've paid my own rent (and my little brother's) since I was 18. I know what it is to work, and I can tell you that I'm not happy if I allow this concept of "real life" let my work consume my life. As far as I can tell, "real life" requires balance.
If a student is working hard to put themselves through school, they frickin' deserve a little fun! Heck man, school should be some of the best years of your life. Make some friends, spend at least a few evenings staying up late doing foolish things just for the fun of it. In the morning, get up and drag yourself to class. Or work, or whatever it is that you have at your point in life. You're alive, take advantage of that and live a little!! Don't get me wrong. Working hard and earning your own way is important. I enjoy having a warm place to live, and good food to eat, and I work long hours to be able to have these things. I enjoy being able to take my girlfriend out somewhere nice, and I don't want my (future, none yet) kids to have holes in their shoes. At the same time, my friends are more important to me than my job, and I will want to be able to spend lots of time with my family. Jobs can be replaced. Friends and family, not so much.
I don't understand people who are obsessed with getting the absolute highest grades, just so they can get the highest paid jobs, and work the longest hours, just so they can get the biggest house, just so they can get the biggest mortgages. You know, like in "real life."
That 'intercom' idea is absolutely brilliant!
The way I understand it, there are two things that really kill your speed. The first problem is with the huge buffers at the ISP, and the second is delayed TCP ACK packets. Traffic shaping allows you to throttle your connection down a bit so as to keep those buffers empty (well, the outbound one at least) and it also allows you to give priority to ACK packets.
It takes some tuning to get it running properly, and I've had much better luck with it over DSL than with Cable, but you might want to give it a try.
Sounds like a great way to prank-call someone at all hours of the day. Heck, you could even prank-call people from your desk at work all without picking up the phone.
Maybe so, but "google" has become a verb, while "eBay" has not.
They do believe in the Bible, so they've got the whole genesis bit, however the Bible is considered less acurate than their other scriptures due to it's having been translated many times. Off the top of my head I can't recall any more specific writings regarding the creation, however the Mormons do not take the scriptures litteraly. Jesus was constantly teaching through parables, why should the bible be any different?
The most interesting Mormon writings, however, are the early church publications out of Salt Lake City just after they settled and earlier. I'm talking about stuff that's well over 100 years old. The Mormon church itself is only about 170 years old, so age is relative. Anyhow, the early stuff is very weird, but it doesn't really apply anymore. Perhapse I'll stop at the library and see if they have anything regarding early Mormon history just for kicks.
As for modern "statements" regarding the Mormon's position regarding evolution, like the Vatican's recent statement, I'm sure nothing like that exists. If the leaders of the chrch put out statements, they are about paying more attention to your family or storing more food in preparation for the apocalypse. They don't really pay attention to what science or the media is excited about. That's for scientists and the press to fuss about.
Although the Mormons are extremely religeous, and their core faith is very restrictive, they are very open-minded people. They have no problem with things like the theory of evolution, and infact have a great regard for science and technology. Their Brigham Young University ("The Mormon University") Is a fantastic academic institution.
Most importantly, they believe in a separation between Church and school (and government). I attended a public school like everyone else, but I also attended the Mormon "seminary" every weekday morning at 5am (Ugh! That really sucked. I had to wake up at 4:15am!! No wonder I slept through highschool). The Mormon seminary is like a Sunday school; it is for highschool students, and everyone attends. It is not a place to train their clurgy or anything, and it definately not a place that even attempts to explain any sort of scientific phenomenon.
There's no way that you can compare the Mormons in Utah to the backwards conservative freaks that are making all of this noise in Kansas. For that matter, I'm sure most of the Christians on Kansas are no more "backwards" than the Mormons. This whole fuss is happening because of a very vocal minority. I've heard that often the people in charge of the schoolboard are failed local politicians. Folks who have run for County or Municipal offices, but have failed and slowly lower their target until they came to rest in the school board, where a Monkey with braindamage could get elected.
Oh, and one more thing. I know this has nothing to do with Kansas, but while I'm ranting about Mormons, let me say for the record that they do not practice poligamy (multiple wives). They did briefly a log time ago for complicated reasons that I won't get in to right now, but they don't any more and havent for a very long time. I actually find it funny how many people used to meet me and ask "So, how many wives does your Dad have?" Weird.
1) Buy directly from the artist at a show. I've been doing this more and more lately, but I live in Toronto and there's no shortage of excellent live music.
2) Download directly from the artists website. This is still a fairly new option. The Offspring and Rage Against The Machine are both on the right track, buyt not quite there. Harvey Danger, on the other hadn, have it figured out. I've never listened to them much before, but I downloaded the new album (after sending them a donation, I want them to succeed in their attempt to bypass the labels!) and I love it!
Mind you, neither of these options will score you the latest-greatest Ricky Martin or Britney Spears albums, but I suppose it's a resonable sacrifice :P
1. Migrate client authentication over to NT
2. Create trust relationship between Netware and NT, allwing clients to access old Netware resources.
3. Migrate file/print/email and whatever else over to NT as it suited them.
I don't know enough about Netware to say whether the migration plan should have worked or not, but something definately mucked up. They couldn't get Netware to trust the NT logons. The solution?
They simply removed ALL access restrictions from ALL Netware resources!!!!! The hospital ran for months with no no access controls on ANYTHING!! Sure, people were to enter a valid password, but once you were logged in, you could open up anyone's network shares and do as you pleased. Patient information was freely available, even from the virtually unsupervised computers at mostly abandoned reception desks.
The network admins did their best to keep it a secret. After watching these admins hiding a security hole this large, I have almost no faith that security in large networks is ever implemented properly.
By the same logic, my computer should be running off of a fuel cell right now, cars should be driving them selves, and world hunger should be solved. I mean really pleople, we have the technology, right?
It also depends what you want to be doing with it. I've played with both hardware and software RAID5 and home and at work. Software RAID offers excellend bandwidth, and seems to use very little CPU time. This is why I think a P3 should work. However, the seek time is terrible. Perhapse it has something to do with the RAID intelligence being located so much farther away from the drives than it would be with a dedicated RAID card. I've tried running an SQL server on soft IDE RAID on a dual Xeon 3.2, and it had the snot kicked out of it by a dual P3 700 with an ancient MegaRAID driven SCSI array.
As for running it as a home directory for Win/Mac/Linux, between Samba and NFS you should be just fine. You may even be able to go the fancy route and set up a few logical volumes as iSCSI targets and run your own SAN.
I guess I'm ready to have my Geek card revoked. Bummer.
Damn!! I can't believe I missed that! Must remember to stop drinking at work!
The first x86 processor to feature 32-bit registers and addressing was the i386 released in 1985. Support for the new 32-bit features of the chip was added to Windows slowly starting with Windows 2.1 in 1987(also known as Windows/386), and provided support for virtual memory and somewhat improved multitasking. The 32-bit features in Windows were optional right through to Windows 3.1 in 1992, infact Win3.1 runs fairly well on a 286/AT with 2MB of memory. Although Windows included some 32-bit code as early as 1987, it did not provide a 32-bit API for applications until the introduction of the Win32 API with Windows NT 3.1 (1993) and Windows 95. There was also a free update released for Windows 3.1 called Win32s that provided a subset of the Win32 API for Windows 3.1 amd Windows for Workgroups 3.11, though it provided rather poor compatibility; major features like comctl32.dll and a real registry were not provided.
The first version of Windows to offer a complete 32-bit kernel and drivers was Windows NT 3.1. It provided proper support for the 32-bit funtionality as early as 1993, but it was not used much outside of a corporate environment. Home users had to wait for Windows 95, 10 frickin' years after the release of the 386!!! Even then, Windows 95 still contained a large ammount of 16-bit code!
Anyhow, I find it funny that people With Athlon64's are complaining about having to wait a year or two for a version of Windows that can make proper use of the processors. At least users now have the option of running 64-bit Linux or BSD, but alternative operating systems for the 386 didn't become available until 1993 with the release of BSD/386 and OS/2 2.0, neither of which were free.
Well, enough of my rambling. Hope that answers your question :)
You use this nifty registry editing boot disk to fix the registry
And you use the linux NTFS tools and TestDisk to undelete/unformat/rebuild lost or damaged files and partitions. I use these all the time, they work REALLY well.
I carry around a copy of Damn Small Linux on my USB key, customized with above tools and including an image of the registry editing floppy and endless other utilities. Not to mention, DSL Linux gives me full access to the Debian APT repository! It serves me very well, especially since it can boot entirely into RAM, so I can take my key out and boot additional system.
Anyhow, FireFox will be properly deployed company-wide next week, and IE will be limited to a whitelist of required sites.
Long live the P6!!!