Really you have to let it go. You can spend days and weeks setting up antiviruses, wasting your time scanning disks, reinstalling Windows XP from scratch to get rid of infections etc. and by April all your work will have gone to waste. It's hopeless. You may consider an upgrade to Windows 7 32bit for computer that have 1GB memory or more (that people will have to pay of their own pockets), maybe upgrading the memory is an option in some case, as well as a new HDD or even (better) an SSD. I'd say a old P4 based computer with 1.5GB ram and SSD makes a capable Windows 7 machine. But you might miss a SATA connector..
Instead, I think you should standardize on e.g. Linux Mint 13 Xfce. It's a LTS version, so supported till 2017 (based on Ubuntu 12.04). It's the lighter and easier to use, Windows 98/XP like variant though the discontinued LXDE edition was lighter. There are slightly boring aspects, Duck Duck Go search by default in the browser rather than Google, and an outdated flash version. If you feel it's important, learn to change it and reproduce the changes in a few minutes after a new installation. Mint 15 Xfce is an option too but support will run out soon (stupid 9 month Ubuntu). Use it for brand new hardware, like a new rig with Ivy Bridge Celeron maybe?, or new printers/scanners.
Mint 13 is pretty nice and has about everything needed out of the box, you can add Google Earth to have something fun, impressive and useful.
I agree, it's a great solution though you have to find an OS (linux based?) to act as the RDP thin client - with those USB, storage, printer features which aren't that trivial. You also need to pay some big $$ for the Server 2012 license, plus CAL, plus special remote use licenses which usually aren't even listed - but we can expect about $100 per thin client. So it ain't cheap. And it's useful for a retirement establishment, not for retired people living in their own homes.
I did start Win95 by typing "win", actually. At home we had a habit of booting into DOS for playing games anyway and Windows was used to play solitaire and make drawings. That changed when games began requiring Windows 95.
Incidentally, buggy and incomplete drivers make a linux desktop more unstable and buggy than a Windows desktop on the same machine (unless you only have Intel CPU/chipset/graphics and realtek sound/network, I guess). For instance I've lived with crappy drivers for my Xonar DX sound card (haven't tried Ubuntu 13.04 / Mint 15 yet on that computer), which can give me little cracks sometimes, and the sound is always garbled in Wine (so I can't run that one Windows game that always worked on multiple wine versions since I first played it in 2007) and I have an intermittent sound bug in zsnes (so I don't play SNES games which used to be about the only other gaming venue for linux)
Well it's a bit of a pain in the ass to type something like "mode 120,60" rather than just resize the window with the mouse, and applications you run are likely to only use 80 columns anyway. I know about the "right click on title bar" thing, I would use it to set green on black text and the default size at 80x43 (and check the "quickedit" thing is enabled).
Another pain is you can't full screen a command prompt in Vista/7, that was useful to not be distracted, and to look at bigger letters in the familiar IBM text font. In linux, I often use a maximized terminal instead (with tabs if needed) ; there's no way to really maximize a terminal in Windows.
You missed the firing of 130 cruise missiles into Libya, then. It was followed by an attitude of backpedaling and not having anything to do with the war, which appears to have worked.
Syria might count as another war if it was provoked (like the libyan one) by the Qatar, Saudis etc. with the approval of the US, France and GB.
..and also, the telegram was pretty much just the name for a messaging service that transferred the messages electronically for some amount of distance and got delivered at the other end..
..which is what telegram has always been about?, unless you're a stock exchange or government or military headquarter etc. and have a telegraph line running to your building.
If you want the plastic keyboard shown in ads, that's $100 and if you want 64GB flash instead of 32GB that's another $100 (dunno if the tablet has micro SD?)
That can be serious desktop or laptop money. For instance here's a 11.6" laptop with ivy bridge Celeron, 240GB flash, bluetooth 4.0 for about what a keyboard + 64GB Surface costs.
Well, I want coke to cost 1 euro per gram, also retail Windows 8 should cost 10 euros and Windows Server 2012 Datacenter would cost 80 euros at most (granting you a license to install on 15 physical machines). That's not possible yet, so an option is to get drunk with red wine and use linux.
Thanks. I never knew those physical layouts even had a name.
Azerty really relies on that additional key, next to left shift. We have "lower than" and "greater than" there. Lower left to the Enter key we have a dedicated star key, "*", which gives "greek letter mu" with shift. I guess that makes up for the lack of the backslash/pipe key, though that one is nifty and it would be great to do pipes and escaping characters from there. Another feature is we have direct access to parenthesises where you have 5/% and -/_. But the one reason only the ISO layout can work is a key is wasted on "ù", a letter that exists in only one word in the whole french language ("où", the word for "where").
(damn slashdot doesn't like three of my characters)
I'd like my tty1-6 to be in 80x50 text mode. I've never managed to do it, for six years and counting! Right now they are in 80x25, and I don't remember doing anything for that, not long ago I had the text console in high res graphical mode. And before that, graphical corruption. Before that, black screen. It's like it's totally random, though I once fixed it from black screen to high res text or 80x25 text with a grub parameter (I don't remember well which I got).
I also killed my high end and great 22" CRT monitor by switching from corrupt text console to graphical X11 too much, when reinstalling the nvidia driver. Shit, why not a file like/etc/fix_the_damn_console.conf or some easy solution?
Sure, I should investigate fvwm2, starting with a simple mwm clone configuration. I know it would give me support for things like maximized windows not covering a border area, or workspaces.
As for mwm, when installing and running it under ubuntu (here linux mint 13) it doesn't have that braindead login shell, instead it has a menu when right-clicking on the root window (wow!) with "New window" (launching a terminal), "Shuffle up", "Shuffle down", "Restart" and "Quit". Thanks a lot for the suggestion still. xsm is awesome in a hilarious bad way, what do these buttons mean? LOL! It seems to do useful things, even. Nice piece of history.
What I couldn't figure out is how to automatically run stuff on startup (at least something like xsetroot -gray), the first times I ran it it seemed to do one "New window" action by default. It doesn't do it anymore. On the stupid Solaris session, we would put things in ~/.login (and it was one of the first things the teachers told us, along with.cshrc)
I guess I suck at X11 sessions lol, I only want to modify the session listed as "Motif Window Manager" in my display manager (mdm) as long with lxde, xfce, mate, openbox, gnome/openbox (wtf?) and unused crap. I tried to look where I could (/etc/mdm,/etc/xdg,/etc/X11, and I have a ~/.mwmrc). I may hijack the lxde session, this one is easy : you have lxsession and a dead easy "autostart" file which just launches openbox, lxpanel and pcmanfm (and some gnome-polkit-shmoo crap ; if line starts with "@", lxsession keeps it alive). No idea where are stored my 10 to 15 "sessions" I have a choice to log in to, yet.
On a PS/2 mouse at least, changing the polling time is useful. It defaulted to 40Hz on Windows 9x which was terrible, though the worst of it was making your mouse look choppy in games. So you could change it to 100Hz (Windows XP default) or 200Hz.
Apart of that I'd say shaving a bit of latency is useful, one main application would be playing Counterstrike 1.6 on the net. Network latency is the big offender here and you can always find how playing is easier when you have 60 or 80ms ping instead of 100 or 120ms, and very low ping (lucky WAN, or LAN) is easier still. You get to hit the opponent more often (and vice versa perhaps). The thing is I doubt high latency keyboards actually exist - unless there are some unfavorable wireless ones, like a bluetooth one where something might go wrong with the keyboard itself, bluetooth adapater or bluetooth stack.
If gaming you should worry about the display anyway : have low or zero input lag, so you need a suitable LCD or CRT ; higher than 60Hz refresh is nice too (but 75Hz LCD fake it, they just drop frames and support the refresh for compatibility only I think). But it's maybe to get a smoother and faster output, and to see more frames showing a bad guy or a rocket rather than strictly about latency.
You're off by a factor of one thousand. What you're quoting says:
Data sent from the device to the host is read on the falling edge of the clock signal; data sent from the host to the device is read on the rising edge. The clock frequency must be in the range 10 - 16.7 kHz. This means clock must be high for 30 - 50 microseconds and low for 30 - 50 microseconds.. If you're designing a keyboard, mouse, or host emulator, you should modify/sample the Data line in the middle of each cell. I.e. 15 - 25 microseconds after the appropriate clock transition. Again, the keyboard/mouse always generates the clock signal, but the host always has ultimate control over communication.
Here's a stupid question. Why not put all data into the ldap, next to all the login information etc. Then you can learn to be a bad ass sysadmin who allows you to login from everywhere AND learn a database at the same time! Many apps like mail clients, server daemons can integrate with ldap! You can do cloud computing : sync your phone contacts to it. If you're working in a company, tell the boss you now only need the Windows AD domain controller. It's awesome consolidation and cost savings. Also, it's a mature, market leading NoSQL implementation.
Wow you're right, it's already in there! It was in the 'motif-clients' package, on ubuntu 12.04. I had read Open Motif was open, but not quite open enough.
I'm now running it but it's not that good with too many firefox windows open. For some reason firefox is "maximized" at 2048x1536 (my res is 1024x768 currently) while every other stuff I've tried maximizes fine. Funny non-sense bug.
Getting the menu to launch a terminal other than xterm was simple enough. Now I need to find a user to martyrize by changing his session to this.
I remember learning Unix shell, compilation, basic C programming on X11 terminals (there were a couple hundreds of them) and something like Solaris 7. We were given an ugly login shell (black on white xterm), the motif window manager (mwm) and that's all.
It was funny as it really looked and acted like Windows 3.1, only without the program manager, file manager or control panel. It also had alt-f9 to minimize, alt-f10 to maximize, alt-f7 to move etc. which is really cool and still found on Gnome2/Mate and Xfce at least. It was really fun trying to fo something useful in that environment, some guy had made a crude launcher (we had to walk into his home directory), I used aliases for e.g. launching a green on black xterm rxvt with nice font size and much bigger scroll buffer, we figured out how to have a background image on the "desktop".
I looked for it in vain on linux, tried to download Lesstif but it's only libraries and nothing else. Now maybe we'll be able to use it at last?, lol. I hope they open source mwm, along Motif and CDE.
It was also both minimalist (more so than say Fluxbox or jwm) and easy to use, unlike twm and myriads of "worse than Windows 3.1" window managers. One little issue was you lost everything when closing the login shell by accident (but you thus never get into a situation where all shell windows or all windows all closed and you can't open a new terminal)
You sound like he should be burned at the stake, even. Why not. But death penalty is useless, and insanely expensive in the US (which doesn't even prevent innocent niggers from being executed regularly)
I don't know why it still exists in a handful of first world countries. Just abolish it : if anything this tends to prevent backwards comment like yours that call to murder in a legal way. I'd also rather have war criminals, dictators etc. not face execution when tried. E.g. the likes of Dick Cheney, Tony Blair, Richard Perle et al. should face trial by a international court and imprisonment in my book, but I don't want to kill them. ICC doesn't do it for instance. Killing prime ministers etc. is hairy, this can even give them an exit way like Goering who managed to commit suicide before getting executed. Life imprisonment is a good enough sentence and even then the maximum sentence could be life imprisonment with no possibility to be freed before 30 years.
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Really you have to let it go. You can spend days and weeks setting up antiviruses, wasting your time scanning disks, reinstalling Windows XP from scratch to get rid of infections etc. and by April all your work will have gone to waste.
It's hopeless. You may consider an upgrade to Windows 7 32bit for computer that have 1GB memory or more (that people will have to pay of their own pockets), maybe upgrading the memory is an option in some case, as well as a new HDD or even (better) an SSD. I'd say a old P4 based computer with 1.5GB ram and SSD makes a capable Windows 7 machine. But you might miss a SATA connector..
Instead, I think you should standardize on e.g. Linux Mint 13 Xfce. It's a LTS version, so supported till 2017 (based on Ubuntu 12.04). It's the lighter and easier to use, Windows 98/XP like variant though the discontinued LXDE edition was lighter.
There are slightly boring aspects, Duck Duck Go search by default in the browser rather than Google, and an outdated flash version. If you feel it's important, learn to change it and reproduce the changes in a few minutes after a new installation. Mint 15 Xfce is an option too but support will run out soon (stupid 9 month Ubuntu). Use it for brand new hardware, like a new rig with Ivy Bridge Celeron maybe?, or new printers/scanners.
Mint 13 is pretty nice and has about everything needed out of the box, you can add Google Earth to have something fun, impressive and useful.
I agree, it's a great solution though you have to find an OS (linux based?) to act as the RDP thin client - with those USB, storage, printer features which aren't that trivial. You also need to pay some big $$ for the Server 2012 license, plus CAL, plus special remote use licenses which usually aren't even listed - but we can expect about $100 per thin client.
So it ain't cheap. And it's useful for a retirement establishment, not for retired people living in their own homes.
A similar argument can be made about Windows 3.x, which was more than a GUI as well.
I did start Win95 by typing "win", actually. At home we had a habit of booting into DOS for playing games anyway and Windows was used to play solitaire and make drawings. That changed when games began requiring Windows 95.
Incidentally, buggy and incomplete drivers make a linux desktop more unstable and buggy than a Windows desktop on the same machine (unless you only have Intel CPU/chipset/graphics and realtek sound/network, I guess).
For instance I've lived with crappy drivers for my Xonar DX sound card (haven't tried Ubuntu 13.04 / Mint 15 yet on that computer), which can give me little cracks sometimes, and the sound is always garbled in Wine (so I can't run that one Windows game that always worked on multiple wine versions since I first played it in 2007) and I have an intermittent sound bug in zsnes (so I don't play SNES games which used to be about the only other gaming venue for linux)
Well it's a bit of a pain in the ass to type something like "mode 120,60" rather than just resize the window with the mouse, and applications you run are likely to only use 80 columns anyway.
I know about the "right click on title bar" thing, I would use it to set green on black text and the default size at 80x43 (and check the "quickedit" thing is enabled).
Another pain is you can't full screen a command prompt in Vista/7, that was useful to not be distracted, and to look at bigger letters in the familiar IBM text font. In linux, I often use a maximized terminal instead (with tabs if needed) ; there's no way to really maximize a terminal in Windows.
You meant best case, and in reality there are hops and less than infinity amount of submarine cables etc.
You missed the firing of 130 cruise missiles into Libya, then. It was followed by an attitude of backpedaling and not having anything to do with the war, which appears to have worked.
Syria might count as another war if it was provoked (like the libyan one) by the Qatar, Saudis etc. with the approval of the US, France and GB.
..and also, the telegram was pretty much just the name for a messaging service that transferred the messages electronically for some amount of distance and got delivered at the other end..
..which is what telegram has always been about?, unless you're a stock exchange or government or military headquarter etc. and have a telegraph line running to your building.
Uh, I don't ever remember having to climb on the roof and twiddle the antenna to change channel.
If you want the plastic keyboard shown in ads, that's $100 and if you want 64GB flash instead of 32GB that's another $100 (dunno if the tablet has micro SD?)
That can be serious desktop or laptop money. For instance here's a 11.6" laptop with ivy bridge Celeron, 240GB flash, bluetooth 4.0 for about what a keyboard + 64GB Surface costs.
Well, I want coke to cost 1 euro per gram, also retail Windows 8 should cost 10 euros and Windows Server 2012 Datacenter would cost 80 euros at most (granting you a license to install on 15 physical machines).
That's not possible yet, so an option is to get drunk with red wine and use linux.
Thanks.
I never knew those physical layouts even had a name.
Azerty really relies on that additional key, next to left shift. We have "lower than" and "greater than" there. Lower left to the Enter key we have a dedicated star key, "*", which gives "greek letter mu" with shift. I guess that makes up for the lack of the backslash/pipe key, though that one is nifty and it would be great to do pipes and escaping characters from there.
Another feature is we have direct access to parenthesises where you have 5/% and -/_. But the one reason only the ISO layout can work is a key is wasted on "ù", a letter that exists in only one word in the whole french language ("où", the word for "where").
(damn slashdot doesn't like three of my characters)
What I fear then is the submitter guy will change keyboard, and find out the situation is entirely the same.
I'd like my tty1-6 to be in 80x50 text mode. I've never managed to do it, for six years and counting!
Right now they are in 80x25, and I don't remember doing anything for that, not long ago I had the text console in high res graphical mode. And before that, graphical corruption. Before that, black screen. It's like it's totally random, though I once fixed it from black screen to high res text or 80x25 text with a grub parameter (I don't remember well which I got).
I also killed my high end and great 22" CRT monitor by switching from corrupt text console to graphical X11 too much, when reinstalling the nvidia driver. /etc/fix_the_damn_console.conf or some easy solution?
Shit, why not a file like
Sure, I should investigate fvwm2, starting with a simple mwm clone configuration. I know it would give me support for things like maximized windows not covering a border area, or workspaces.
As for mwm, when installing and running it under ubuntu (here linux mint 13) it doesn't have that braindead login shell, instead it has a menu when right-clicking on the root window (wow!) with "New window" (launching a terminal), "Shuffle up", "Shuffle down", "Restart" and "Quit". Thanks a lot for the suggestion still.
xsm is awesome in a hilarious bad way, what do these buttons mean? LOL! It seems to do useful things, even. Nice piece of history.
What I couldn't figure out is how to automatically run stuff on startup (at least something like xsetroot -gray), the first times I ran it it seemed to do one "New window" action by default. It doesn't do it anymore. On the stupid Solaris session, we would put things in ~/.login (and it was one of the first things the teachers told us, along with .cshrc)
I guess I suck at X11 sessions lol, I only want to modify the session listed as "Motif Window Manager" in my display manager (mdm) as long with lxde, xfce, mate, openbox, gnome/openbox (wtf?) and unused crap. I tried to look where I could (/etc/mdm, /etc/xdg, /etc/X11, and I have a ~/.mwmrc). I may hijack the lxde session, this one is easy : you have lxsession and a dead easy "autostart" file which just launches openbox, lxpanel and pcmanfm (and some gnome-polkit-shmoo crap ; if line starts with "@", lxsession keeps it alive). No idea where are stored my 10 to 15 "sessions" I have a choice to log in to, yet.
On a PS/2 mouse at least, changing the polling time is useful. It defaulted to 40Hz on Windows 9x which was terrible, though the worst of it was making your mouse look choppy in games. So you could change it to 100Hz (Windows XP default) or 200Hz.
Apart of that I'd say shaving a bit of latency is useful, one main application would be playing Counterstrike 1.6 on the net. Network latency is the big offender here and you can always find how playing is easier when you have 60 or 80ms ping instead of 100 or 120ms, and very low ping (lucky WAN, or LAN) is easier still. You get to hit the opponent more often (and vice versa perhaps).
The thing is I doubt high latency keyboards actually exist - unless there are some unfavorable wireless ones, like a bluetooth one where something might go wrong with the keyboard itself, bluetooth adapater or bluetooth stack.
If gaming you should worry about the display anyway : have low or zero input lag, so you need a suitable LCD or CRT ; higher than 60Hz refresh is nice too (but 75Hz LCD fake it, they just drop frames and support the refresh for compatibility only I think). But it's maybe to get a smoother and faster output, and to see more frames showing a bad guy or a rocket rather than strictly about latency.
So, do the test again with MS-DOS human latency measuring software? ;), even if you have to write it yourself.
You're off by a factor of one thousand. What you're quoting says :
Data sent from the device to the host is read on the falling edge of the clock signal; data sent from the host to the device is read on the rising edge. The clock frequency must be in the range 10 - 16.7 kHz. This means clock must be high for 30 - 50 microseconds and low for 30 - 50 microseconds.. If you're designing a keyboard, mouse, or host emulator, you should modify/sample the Data line in the middle of each cell. I.e. 15 - 25 microseconds after the appropriate clock transition. Again, the keyboard/mouse always generates the clock signal, but the host always has ultimate control over communication.
Here's a stupid question.
Why not put all data into the ldap, next to all the login information etc.
Then you can learn to be a bad ass sysadmin who allows you to login from everywhere AND learn a database at the same time! Many apps like mail clients, server daemons can integrate with ldap! You can do cloud computing : sync your phone contacts to it.
If you're working in a company, tell the boss you now only need the Windows AD domain controller. It's awesome consolidation and cost savings. Also, it's a mature, market leading NoSQL implementation.
Wow you're right, it's already in there! It was in the 'motif-clients' package, on ubuntu 12.04.
I had read Open Motif was open, but not quite open enough.
I'm now running it but it's not that good with too many firefox windows open.
For some reason firefox is "maximized" at 2048x1536 (my res is 1024x768 currently) while every other stuff I've tried maximizes fine. Funny non-sense bug.
Getting the menu to launch a terminal other than xterm was simple enough.
Now I need to find a user to martyrize by changing his session to this.
I fucked up I guess.
I remember learning Unix shell, compilation, basic C programming on X11 terminals (there were a couple hundreds of them) and something like Solaris 7. We were given an ugly login shell (black on white xterm), the motif window manager (mwm) and that's all.
It was funny as it really looked and acted like Windows 3.1, only without the program manager, file manager or control panel. It also had alt-f9 to minimize, alt-f10 to maximize, alt-f7 to move etc. which is really cool and still found on Gnome2/Mate and Xfce at least.
It was really fun trying to fo something useful in that environment, some guy had made a crude launcher (we had to walk into his home directory), I used aliases for e.g. launching a green on black xterm rxvt with nice font size and much bigger scroll buffer, we figured out how to have a background image on the "desktop".
I looked for it in vain on linux, tried to download Lesstif but it's only libraries and nothing else. Now maybe we'll be able to use it at last?, lol. I hope they open source mwm, along Motif and CDE.
It was also both minimalist (more so than say Fluxbox or jwm) and easy to use, unlike twm and myriads of "worse than Windows 3.1" window managers. One little issue was you lost everything when closing the login shell by accident (but you thus never get into a situation where all shell windows or all windows all closed and you can't open a new terminal)
You sound like he should be burned at the stake, even. Why not. But death penalty is useless, and insanely expensive in the US (which doesn't even prevent innocent niggers from being executed regularly)
I don't know why it still exists in a handful of first world countries. Just abolish it : if anything this tends to prevent backwards comment like yours that call to murder in a legal way.
I'd also rather have war criminals, dictators etc. not face execution when tried. E.g. the likes of Dick Cheney, Tony Blair, Richard Perle et al. should face trial by a international court and imprisonment in my book, but I don't want to kill them. ICC doesn't do it for instance. Killing prime ministers etc. is hairy, this can even give them an exit way like Goering who managed to commit suicide before getting executed.
Life imprisonment is a good enough sentence and even then the maximum sentence could be life imprisonment with no possibility to be freed before 30 years.
It's also known as an "ice giant".