This is obviously intended to allow you to quickly make a phone call or look something up on the net. It is not supposed to be a replacement for your entire operating system. If you want to save files, watch DVDs or run your business software then boot your hard drive!
I couldn't count how many times I have booted up my computer just to look up a bus timetable, or the TV guide or just check my mail. And how handy would it be to be able to quickly look at the slashdot headlines while your wife goes back to try on another outfit before you head out.
If the boot time can be believed, you could go from off to reading the/. front page in around 20 seconds. How cool is that?
And I want to set up a temporary Internet cafe at conferences. This would be an ideal, non-hackable environment.
Why? What extra insight can you get from seeing that line of rubbish character as opposed to the human readable anchor text that the grandparent used? We could all see at a glance that the site was cnsnews.com. The few people who really need to know what the URL was could hover over the link and see the status bar, or right click and choose properties (or whatever is appropriate for their browser).
As for this discussion, knowing who paid for Media Matters unimportant. It would only interest people who wish to attack the source rather than actually address the issues that they mention. This is the same as assuming that some news item that Fox News reports must be wrong because of who reported it.
I saw a program on our local community TV station that was made by high school kids (I'm guessing they had an average age of 14 years old). This show had a voxpop style segment where kids spoke about issues arising from the Internet.
It was amazing to see how mature they were about the evils that they had found on the net. Sure, they said, they had come across some "creepy guys". Sometimes they string them along a bit, but mostly they just ignore them. They had seen porn, and they spoke of how it was a pain how much porn-spam they received. We can talk about this stuff without sniggering behind our hands - and kids can do that too.
I really wish that the hysterical parents and politicians would actually spend some time listening to the kids. They are not fools. Talk to them about the potential dangers that they may face before they start surfing by themselves so they know what to expect and how to avoid problems. Don't be sensationalist; just be straight forward and mature about it. Do this so they know they can come to you to get advice on more mature situations.
I stand corrected. The Ultimate edition should get to 11 before emitting smoke and self destructing.
It sounds like a bizarre crossover episode between Doctor Who and Spinal Tap. Come to think of it, some of the early Doctor Who sets looked like they were in danger of being crushed by a dwarf. Maybe they used the same set designer as Tap used for Stonehenge!
Play the latest games without turning details way down
Just a shame that was lowest on her list of requirements and likely added after a few rounds of, "Are you sure you wouldn't like to play games? I know they're not your main focus. But surely you'd like the option, right?"
Wow! You wrote all that based on the order of "playing games" on the list, and completely ignored the part in the text that you quoted about not wanting to turn the detail level down. You must have also missed the introduction where he said that "She loves video games--PC or console--and wants some fairly beefy hardware".
And in her own words: "I'm an avid gamer and addicted to Civ IV, so I definitely wanted a fast processor and a top-of-the-line graphics card in my new computer so that I don't have to run games at their lower settings."
Here's another quote: Glenda is rare (but not as rare as you may think) among adult women, in that she loves playing PC games. "Real" PC games, that comes in boxes in stores and feature fancy graphics and sometimes complex controls, and not just World of Warcraft (though we were both very heavily into that for quite a long time). She'll play the occasional shooter, and loves strategy games and RPGs. Think Civilization IV and Oblivion.
I don't know how you read that article without getting a sense of the passion that she has for gaming. Gaming was definitely NOT an afterthought.
Having said all this, there is no way that I would ever spend that much on a video card. The 8600 GTS is about as high as I would go right now. But I'm not into games as much as Glenda is.
If this is how broken the business rules of their software are, I can only imagine how broken the implementation must be.
Microsoft, you're a disgrace.
I agree completely. This shows how vile Microsoft is as a company, by choosing this absurd scale without a nice round number as a maximum. Seriously, decisions like this show how the company should be broken up and have the workers sold into slavery - brothels for the women, while the men can be sent down mines in third world countries.
Forget DRM, this arbitary scale of the Windows Experience Index is what will really kill off the operating system.
It is so obvious that the scale should have had a maximum of 10, with the current level of computers sitting at around 1.5. And in many years to come when computer hardware has progressed enough to surpass 10, they should make it constantly play a looped voice saying "DOES NOT COMPUTE" while emitting smoke from the hard drive. This is the only sensible solution.
Re:how connected do we have to be?
on
Smartphone Shootout
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Do people really need to be that connected? Probably not.
And do those same people really need to be contactable 24 hours a day? If not, then they do not even need a mobile phone in the first place.
Seriously, this is the same argument that people use against mobile/cell phones before they actually own one. But once they get used to having one (and to leaving it turned on all the time - yes Mum, I'm talking to you) then most people get dependant on the technology. I find now that I feel terribly isolated if I ever go out without my phone - especially if I am meeting friends somewhere and have no way of letting them know if I am running late.
I started using the internet on mobile phones years ago when I was into auction sites. I find that it puts you into a different mindset to be permanently connected to the net. It seems natural to always have access to the phonebook, or street map, or to look up a movie review while browsing in the DVD shop, or read the newspaper on the train, or grab the train timetable, or fill in a spare 5 minutes by checking out slashdot. Yes, it is all stuff that you can live without; at least, until you get used to having it.
There are ways around the screen resolution issues. I have a Nokia 9300 with a screen resolution of 640x200 which, when combined with Opera's Fit to Screen mode, does a really impressive job. However, if I find a site that still doesn't fit well - or is too slow to download - then I use Skweezer to reduce the amount of clutter in the HTML source code. Have a look at the original article when skweezed. Not quite as good as the print page version as linked by _PimpDaddy7_ below, but still a great improvement. There are some sites that I skweeze when browsing them on the desktop just to clean up the crap. I imagine even MySpace pages might look almost viewable using this site.
But you really should not get too hung up on the screen size issue. They are not intended to be desktop replacements. But if you need to make a last minute bid on eBay, then you can live with the slight inconvenience of having to scroll a bit more. It is more about connecting the internet with your life away from the computer, rather than reproducing the experience of sitting at your desk.
Wants to go back to the 'good old days' where you'd have to tab 20 times to get to the text box you want
Everyone has pointed out the Shift-Tab option, but it is amazing that nobody has mentioned that Windows (possibly others too) do have direct keyboard access to fields on a form for well written software. Anytime you see an underlined letter or number on a field prompt or button label, you can press Alt and that letter/digit to move to the field or click the button.
Unfortunately, the rise of skinnable applications resulted in the loss of these sorts of usabiliy features. The article used the wrong example - it should have used one of the crappy music players that has no keyboard interface at all.
PS. How annoying is it that <u> does not work in/.
I just tried it out, and you certainly can right click in the background of a folder window and get the context menu for the current folder. Shift-right click allowed "Open Command Window Here" option, and it worked fine. In addition to this, if you have the status bar showing (sorry, now called the details pane), then you can right click on the folder icon to access the current folder.
Under Windows XP, you have to right click on the system menu (the little folder graphic on the left side of the title bar). The same goes for Windows 9X.
Under Windows 3.1, you can right click anywhere on screen and get the usual lack of context menu.
Pretty much all that you have stated here could also refer to MS Windows.
You can listen for notifications of file updates on Windows.
If you didn't mind Microsoft's indexing service (which is quite serviceable) but wanted to write your front end, you can write your own GUI to do customized searches. There are many different ways that you can do this depending on how high level the language is that you use.
If you develop a file format that Microsoft's content indexer can't recognize, you can implemented your own IFilter. These are used by many Microsoft Search programs, including the Indexing Service (dating back to Windows NT 4.0), Desktop Search, IIS, Sharepoint, Exchange and SQL Server. Here are some IFilters to download and try.
Like most people here, I really can't see what Google are on about. What can Google offer that can't be achieved with Microsoft's solution? Would Google Desktop Search also allow the Windows standard IFilter interface, or would all the third party solutions that use this interface suddenly stop working once Google's service is switched on?
I always thought that the search has got more useless with every version of Windows. In XP, I have copied a variable name from some source code and then pasted it into the search only to find no matches. It should have at least found the file that I copied the text from!
However, I have always switched off the Indexing Service so I didn't slow the system down for those fairly rare occasions that I need to search. Maybe this would solve my problem. After this discussion, I have been inspired to give the Indexing Service a try again. And I am certainly looking forward to trying the search in Vista. Thanks, Google!
Readers dont care about reliable reporting or credibility. Look at Fox news or CNN?
Or better yet, look at the editor of PC world resigning causing in a reader backlash that results in the CEO being reassigned and the editor staying at his job. It seems to me that people do care about reliable reporting.
I see the use in databases, but not in general filesystem usage. There is a big difference between a single database value and an entire file, which could be a database itself.
You have given the answer yourself. Your own example (a database file) illustrates the usage perfectly. You want to grant modify access to the file so that they can modify or delete records, and even drop tables. But you do not want to allow someone to delete the entire database itself. It makes a mockery of the permission system within the database if you have the god-like powers to wipe every single thing in it.
Did I miss something or did the "Calculate your Costs" table get something wrong when converting KWH to WH. It says to multiply KWH*1000 to get WH, but shouldn't it be divide by 1000? Am I misunderstanding the kWH measurement used in my electricity bill?
No, the table is correct. 1kWh = 1000Wh. See the conversion chart this page.
The way that this is actually implemented is that the
movie is on there twice. Once in letterbox or anamorphic format, once in 4:3 format.
That is completely wrong. I burn my own DVDs, and I have successfully made discs that autodetect the aspect ratio and display the appropriate version. I do not need to encode the video twice. I just set two flags that tell the player how the video is encoded.
As yet I don't know if you can encode the offsets into the MPEG stream, so I am stuck with center cut mode. It should be noted that my DVD player does not have a zoom mode, so I can't zoom in on discs that have not been coded this way.
So why are there still Pan 'n' Scan DVDs made? The system that I described still loses resolution compared to a true 4x3 disc, so the quality is reduced. Also, if the widescreen version has a higher aspect ratio that 16x9, then you would still end up with black borders at the top & bottom.
Finally, fullscreen versions are often made by showing more vertical image than by cutting off the sides. It is the widescreen version that has been cropped. Have a look at this random comparison site for examples.
So which version is better for you? Whichever one you like; I don't care. If a director makes both versions then you can't whine about only watching what the director intended.
It also can't iterate over files easily, because the For loop can only execute a single command, so I have a wrapper script that looks like "for %1 in (blah) call dosomething.bat".
You can run multiple commands in a for loop by using brackets after the do. Here is a stupid example. It will rename each file to "hi" and then rename it back again. See footnote 1 for information on the && and || operators.
C:\> for %i in (*.txt) do (ren "%i" hi && ren hi "%i")
You are not limited to doing it on a single line either. Try the following: (do not type in the "More?")
C:\> for %i in (*.txt) do ( More? ren "%i" hi More? if not exist "%i" echo it worked More? ren hi "%i" More? )
To make things less messy, you can add a @ before the ( to turn echo off. This will prevent each line of script from displaying while running.
C:\> for %i in (*.txt) do @(ren "%i" hi && ren hi "%i")
The bracket blocks can also be used with if statements, can be embedded and can have the output piped to another program. For example:
C:\> if exist file.txt @(
More? for %i in (*.txt) do @(
More? echo hi
More? echo %i
More? )
More? echo Done
More? ) | sort
It is well worth having a look at the help of the for command using "for/?". It is amazing what it can do, even if the interface is a bit clunky. It would even help with your problem of parsing of the output of other programs. In this example, the for command iterates over the output of at, and if it finds an entry that will run today, then it stores the ID of the entry into the environment variable TODAYID. You can then use this to delete the entry.
C:\> for/F "skip=2 tokens=1,2" %i in ('at') do @if "%j"=="Today" set TODAYID=%i
C:\> at %TODAYID%/delete
Of course, in this situation the variable in not required to delete the at entry. You would normally just do it on the for line itself.
Finally, have a look at the help for the set command with "set/?". There is some interesting stuff there, including text substitution of variables with %MYVAR:oldtext=newtext%. More importantly, it talks about the limitations of using variables inside blocks. Variables are processed at the parsing stage, so a command line of: set myvar=fish && echo %myvar% will display the old value of myvar because the substitution happens before the set command is run. The help text tells you how to get around this.
** Footnotes **
Footnote 1.The && and || operators work the same as they do in bash. && will call the next command if the previous one succeeded while || calls the next command if the previous one failed. They are shortcuts for doing "if errorlevel" statements. EG. Assume that you have a file called file.txt
C:\> ren file.txt file.txt.bak && echo It worked || echo It failed
It worked
Now do it again, but now file.txt no longer exists:
C:\> ren file.txt file.txt.bak && echo It worked || echo It failed
It failed
Footnote 2.If you want to rename all the files in the current directory to another name and then immediately rename them back again to exactly as they were (as my example code does), you can use the special "rename multiple" command, or REM command. Once again it uses some magic operators, but the usage would be:
C:\> REM (*.txt;-)
Run this, and you will be amazed to find that your files are exactly as they were to begin with.
What happens as their tech support leaves for other jobs?
I know that this story is getting a little old, but I do have to ask: If your main talent is being able to support Windows 3.1, what other job are you going to be able go for?
As for using unsupported by Microsoft, I don't know why people make such a big deal out of it. If Windows 3.1 ran the software that you wanted without crashing, what else would you need from Microsoft at this point? Plus you can hack it to get long filename support and a Win95 desktop look-alike. Throw a copy of Word 6 onto that and see how many people can really notice a functional difference!
I got my start during a time when 64K RAM was adequate for most things....but it just seems to me that we've really fallen far in the last decade or so, when someone can use a phrase like "only 512MB of RAM" in a sentence, as if that's really such a tiny amount.
It helps if you do not refer to memory in terms of KB and MB, but instead in terms of dollars and cents. That way 512MB looks smaller than 64KB.
Prediction: The cost for 128 kilobytes of memory will fall below U$100 in the near future.
Creative Computing magazine, December 1981, page 6
Slashdot Mirror
This is obviously intended to allow you to quickly make a phone call or look something up on the net. It is not supposed to be a replacement for your entire operating system. If you want to save files, watch DVDs or run your business software then boot your hard drive!
I couldn't count how many times I have booted up my computer just to look up a bus timetable, or the TV guide or just check my mail. And how handy would it be to be able to quickly look at the slashdot headlines while your wife goes back to try on another outfit before you head out.
If the boot time can be believed, you could go from off to reading the /. front page in around 20 seconds. How cool is that?
And I want to set up a temporary Internet cafe at conferences. This would be an ideal, non-hackable environment.
Why? What extra insight can you get from seeing that line of rubbish character as opposed to the human readable anchor text that the grandparent used? We could all see at a glance that the site was cnsnews.com. The few people who really need to know what the URL was could hover over the link and see the status bar, or right click and choose properties (or whatever is appropriate for their browser).
As for this discussion, knowing who paid for Media Matters unimportant. It would only interest people who wish to attack the source rather than actually address the issues that they mention. This is the same as assuming that some news item that Fox News reports must be wrong because of who reported it.
I saw a program on our local community TV station that was made by high school kids (I'm guessing they had an average age of 14 years old). This show had a voxpop style segment where kids spoke about issues arising from the Internet.
It was amazing to see how mature they were about the evils that they had found on the net. Sure, they said, they had come across some "creepy guys". Sometimes they string them along a bit, but mostly they just ignore them. They had seen porn, and they spoke of how it was a pain how much porn-spam they received. We can talk about this stuff without sniggering behind our hands - and kids can do that too.
I really wish that the hysterical parents and politicians would actually spend some time listening to the kids. They are not fools. Talk to them about the potential dangers that they may face before they start surfing by themselves so they know what to expect and how to avoid problems. Don't be sensationalist; just be straight forward and mature about it. Do this so they know they can come to you to get advice on more mature situations.
That's absolutely correct. Except that it was 11 years ago. And he killed 35 people. And he is still alive and in a secure nuthouse.
His name is Martin Bryant
I stand corrected. The Ultimate edition should get to 11 before emitting smoke and self destructing.
It sounds like a bizarre crossover episode between Doctor Who and Spinal Tap. Come to think of it, some of the early Doctor Who sets looked like they were in danger of being crushed by a dwarf. Maybe they used the same set designer as Tap used for Stonehenge!
Wow! You wrote all that based on the order of "playing games" on the list, and completely ignored the part in the text that you quoted about not wanting to turn the detail level down. You must have also missed the introduction where he said that "She loves video games--PC or console--and wants some fairly beefy hardware".
And in her own words: "I'm an avid gamer and addicted to Civ IV, so I definitely wanted a fast processor and a top-of-the-line graphics card in my new computer so that I don't have to run games at their lower settings."
Here's another quote: Glenda is rare (but not as rare as you may think) among adult women, in that she loves playing PC games. "Real" PC games, that comes in boxes in stores and feature fancy graphics and sometimes complex controls, and not just World of Warcraft (though we were both very heavily into that for quite a long time). She'll play the occasional shooter, and loves strategy games and RPGs. Think Civilization IV and Oblivion.
I don't know how you read that article without getting a sense of the passion that she has for gaming. Gaming was definitely NOT an afterthought.
Having said all this, there is no way that I would ever spend that much on a video card. The 8600 GTS is about as high as I would go right now. But I'm not into games as much as Glenda is.
I agree completely. This shows how vile Microsoft is as a company, by choosing this absurd scale without a nice round number as a maximum. Seriously, decisions like this show how the company should be broken up and have the workers sold into slavery - brothels for the women, while the men can be sent down mines in third world countries.
Forget DRM, this arbitary scale of the Windows Experience Index is what will really kill off the operating system.
It is so obvious that the scale should have had a maximum of 10, with the current level of computers sitting at around 1.5. And in many years to come when computer hardware has progressed enough to surpass 10, they should make it constantly play a looped voice saying "DOES NOT COMPUTE" while emitting smoke from the hard drive. This is the only sensible solution.
And do those same people really need to be contactable 24 hours a day? If not, then they do not even need a mobile phone in the first place.
Seriously, this is the same argument that people use against mobile/cell phones before they actually own one. But once they get used to having one (and to leaving it turned on all the time - yes Mum, I'm talking to you) then most people get dependant on the technology. I find now that I feel terribly isolated if I ever go out without my phone - especially if I am meeting friends somewhere and have no way of letting them know if I am running late.
I started using the internet on mobile phones years ago when I was into auction sites. I find that it puts you into a different mindset to be permanently connected to the net. It seems natural to always have access to the phonebook, or street map, or to look up a movie review while browsing in the DVD shop, or read the newspaper on the train, or grab the train timetable, or fill in a spare 5 minutes by checking out slashdot. Yes, it is all stuff that you can live without; at least, until you get used to having it.
There are ways around the screen resolution issues. I have a Nokia 9300 with a screen resolution of 640x200 which, when combined with Opera's Fit to Screen mode, does a really impressive job. However, if I find a site that still doesn't fit well - or is too slow to download - then I use Skweezer to reduce the amount of clutter in the HTML source code. Have a look at the original article when skweezed. Not quite as good as the print page version as linked by _PimpDaddy7_ below, but still a great improvement. There are some sites that I skweeze when browsing them on the desktop just to clean up the crap. I imagine even MySpace pages might look almost viewable using this site.
But you really should not get too hung up on the screen size issue. They are not intended to be desktop replacements. But if you need to make a last minute bid on eBay, then you can live with the slight inconvenience of having to scroll a bit more. It is more about connecting the internet with your life away from the computer, rather than reproducing the experience of sitting at your desk.
One of these days I am going to learn C#.
But after reading your post through twice, I realise that today was not that day.
You may have also heard of the other remake: Star Wars. Search for "Dam Busters" on the wikipedia page.
Everyone has pointed out the Shift-Tab option, but it is amazing that nobody has mentioned that Windows (possibly others too) do have direct keyboard access to fields on a form for well written software. Anytime you see an underlined letter or number on a field prompt or button label, you can press Alt and that letter/digit to move to the field or click the button.
Unfortunately, the rise of skinnable applications resulted in the loss of these sorts of usabiliy features. The article used the wrong example - it should have used one of the crappy music players that has no keyboard interface at all.
PS. How annoying is it that <u> does not work in /.
I just tried it out, and you certainly can right click in the background of a folder window and get the context menu for the current folder. Shift-right click allowed "Open Command Window Here" option, and it worked fine. In addition to this, if you have the status bar showing (sorry, now called the details pane), then you can right click on the folder icon to access the current folder.
Under Windows XP, you have to right click on the system menu (the little folder graphic on the left side of the title bar). The same goes for Windows 9X.
Under Windows 3.1, you can right click anywhere on screen and get the usual lack of context menu.
Pretty much all that you have stated here could also refer to MS Windows.
Like most people here, I really can't see what Google are on about. What can Google offer that can't be achieved with Microsoft's solution? Would Google Desktop Search also allow the Windows standard IFilter interface, or would all the third party solutions that use this interface suddenly stop working once Google's service is switched on?
I always thought that the search has got more useless with every version of Windows. In XP, I have copied a variable name from some source code and then pasted it into the search only to find no matches. It should have at least found the file that I copied the text from!
However, I have always switched off the Indexing Service so I didn't slow the system down for those fairly rare occasions that I need to search. Maybe this would solve my problem. After this discussion, I have been inspired to give the Indexing Service a try again. And I am certainly looking forward to trying the search in Vista. Thanks, Google!
But why do you have to push the world to the brink before you do the right thing?
Ooh, poor old BSD sounds really sick there. I hope that it doesn't die!
Or better yet, look at the editor of PC world resigning causing in a reader backlash that results in the CEO being reassigned and the editor staying at his job. It seems to me that people do care about reliable reporting.
You have given the answer yourself. Your own example (a database file) illustrates the usage perfectly. You want to grant modify access to the file so that they can modify or delete records, and even drop tables. But you do not want to allow someone to delete the entire database itself. It makes a mockery of the permission system within the database if you have the god-like powers to wipe every single thing in it.
No, but it's a great opening line to your message!
No, the table is correct. 1kWh = 1000Wh. See the conversion chart this page.
You guys would be really impressed with the insightful comment that I made about this in my desktop version of /.
I would tell you about it, but I would just be repeating myself.
+5 Insightful
-5 Lonely bastard
That is completely wrong. I burn my own DVDs, and I have successfully made discs that autodetect the aspect ratio and display the appropriate version. I do not need to encode the video twice. I just set two flags that tell the player how the video is encoded.
As yet I don't know if you can encode the offsets into the MPEG stream, so I am stuck with center cut mode. It should be noted that my DVD player does not have a zoom mode, so I can't zoom in on discs that have not been coded this way.
So why are there still Pan 'n' Scan DVDs made? The system that I described still loses resolution compared to a true 4x3 disc, so the quality is reduced. Also, if the widescreen version has a higher aspect ratio that 16x9, then you would still end up with black borders at the top & bottom.
Finally, fullscreen versions are often made by showing more vertical image than by cutting off the sides. It is the widescreen version that has been cropped. Have a look at this random comparison site for examples.
So which version is better for you? Whichever one you like; I don't care. If a director makes both versions then you can't whine about only watching what the director intended.
Don't get your hopes up. The movie Firefox is ranked at #14,185 for DVD sales on Amazon.com. Having a browser of the same name didn't help it one bit!
You can run multiple commands in a for loop by using brackets after the do. Here is a stupid example. It will rename each file to "hi" and then rename it back again. See footnote 1 for information on the && and || operators.
C:\> for %i in (*.txt) do (ren "%i" hi && ren hi "%i")
You are not limited to doing it on a single line either. Try the following: (do not type in the "More?")
C:\> for %i in (*.txt) do (
More? ren "%i" hi
More? if not exist "%i" echo it worked
More? ren hi "%i"
More? )
To make things less messy, you can add a @ before the ( to turn echo off. This will prevent each line of script from displaying while running.
C:\> for %i in (*.txt) do @(ren "%i" hi && ren hi "%i")
The bracket blocks can also be used with if statements, can be embedded and can have the output piped to another program. For example:
C:\> if exist file.txt @(
More? for %i in (*.txt) do @(
More? echo hi
More? echo %i
More? )
More? echo Done
More? ) | sort
It is well worth having a look at the help of the for command using "for /?". It is amazing what it can do, even if the interface is a bit clunky. It would even help with your problem of parsing of the output of other programs. In this example, the for command iterates over the output of at, and if it finds an entry that will run today, then it stores the ID of the entry into the environment variable TODAYID. You can then use this to delete the entry.
C:\> for /F "skip=2 tokens=1,2" %i in ('at') do @if "%j"=="Today" set TODAYID=%i
/delete
C:\> at %TODAYID%
Of course, in this situation the variable in not required to delete the at entry. You would normally just do it on the for line itself.
Finally, have a look at the help for the set command with "set /?". There is some interesting stuff there, including text substitution of variables with %MYVAR:oldtext=newtext%. More importantly, it talks about the limitations of using variables inside blocks. Variables are processed at the parsing stage, so a command line of: set myvar=fish && echo %myvar% will display the old value of myvar because the substitution happens before the set command is run. The help text tells you how to get around this.
** Footnotes **
Footnote 1. The && and || operators work the same as they do in bash. && will call the next command if the previous one succeeded while || calls the next command if the previous one failed. They are shortcuts for doing "if errorlevel" statements. EG. Assume that you have a file called file.txt
C:\> ren file.txt file.txt.bak && echo It worked || echo It failed
It worked
Now do it again, but now file.txt no longer exists:
C:\> ren file.txt file.txt.bak && echo It worked || echo It failed
It failed
Footnote 2. If you want to rename all the files in the current directory to another name and then immediately rename them back again to exactly as they were (as my example code does), you can use the special "rename multiple" command, or REM command. Once again it uses some magic operators, but the usage would be:
C:\> REM (*.txt ;-)
Run this, and you will be amazed to find that your files are exactly as they were to begin with.
I know that this story is getting a little old, but I do have to ask: If your main talent is being able to support Windows 3.1, what other job are you going to be able go for?
As for using unsupported by Microsoft, I don't know why people make such a big deal out of it. If Windows 3.1 ran the software that you wanted without crashing, what else would you need from Microsoft at this point? Plus you can hack it to get long filename support and a Win95 desktop look-alike. Throw a copy of Word 6 onto that and see how many people can really notice a functional difference!
It helps if you do not refer to memory in terms of KB and MB, but instead in terms of dollars and cents. That way 512MB looks smaller than 64KB.
Prediction: The cost for 128 kilobytes of memory will fall below U$100 in the near future.
Creative Computing magazine, December 1981, page 6
Today, you can buy 1GB for $70.