The current issue, to me, appears to not be so much a bug as it is leaving the back door unlocked. The article describes how the user can disable scripting, etc. Once you do that, it's no longer a problem. Once you lock the back door, the bad guys can't get in.
Security ultimately lies in the hands of the end user, whose responsibility it is to to know what each of the options are and what the impacts are of them. If checking a box makes your system more secure, then that's the user's responsibility, not the vendor's. The vendor has a responsibility to inform the user of the impact of various security settings, and to define a set of default settings that result in a secure system. If there is a vulnerability that can't be resolved by a checkbox, then it becomes the vendor's responsibility to issue a bug fix.
As a layman, I don't see it as anything that Microsoft can resolve, except a "patch" that changes the security settings. If it is indeed a flaw, then it should be exploitable with the appropriate security settings enabled. (I don't have a deep understanding of scripting in IE, so perhaps there is a flaw that I'm not seeing.)
I see a responsibility of users to inform other users of security lapses and inform them of an appropriate course of action. That is what the article mentioned in the parent post does. There is also a responsibilty to not disparage the software vendor unless it is a legitimate bug, that bug results (or could result) in a compromised system, AND the vendor refuses to acknowledge it or issue a patch for it in a timely manner. It is irresponsible to provide the public with details or code describing specifically how to exploit the flaw.
I've never used phone or power line networking equipment. At this phase of my life, I have absolutely no interest in using it. Therefore, I am more than qualified to comment on it.:-P
A couple of posts here have questioned the security of phone and power line networking. It's a valid concern -- what goes on the lines in your house goes on the lines out of your house, too.
With power line networking, the signal will (most likely) be blocked by the transformer (on the pole or by the curb). If your neighbors are on the same transformer, they could potentially tap in.
As far as phone line networking, I can see two ways to make it more secure. The first is DSL filters. These are used in ADSL, put in the line between the DMARC and the telephone set (but not between the DMARC and the DSL modem). You could put one of these at the DMARC where the lines come off, and maybe it will block the signal from going out to who-knows-where. I say "maybe", because I haven't researched it.
A more secure solution is rather than using your primary line, use an unused pair in the phone cabling for the networking. I don't think it has to be hooked to a working phone line; it just uses a different band than POTS service. Note that some buildings are wired with substandard 2-pair wire which isn't even twisted pair. In this case, you risk crosstalk to and from adjacent pairs, and increased EMF interference which can reduce your data rates. You might not even have an extra pair to play with.
If you are lucky enough to have a home where the phones are wired with CAT5 in a star configuration, you can use two of the pairs for ethernet and scrap the phone-line networking altogether. This isn't spec, but in most cases it works. Splices in ethernet are bad, bad, bad.
Everyone keeps suggesting text editors. Text editors are great, but they are NOT word processors!
Word processors give you functionality that text editors don't. With a word processor, you can define the paper size, the margins on the paper, as well as things like fonts (Arial, anyone?), kerning, justification, etc. ad nauseum. Even more, word processors generally have printer support, so you can submit a print job from the program instead of the command line, select the printer you want to use, even manage print jobs.
A word processor lets you put multiple columns on a page. A word processor lets you embed images in a document.
Show me a text editor that has all these features and I'll show you a word processor. Yes, there *were* console (read: non-graphical) word processors that could do this. As the parent says, like WordPerfect and Word for DOS.
So why doesn't the parent use WordPerfect or Word for DOS? For one thing, they are hard to find. For another thing, they cost money. For a third thing, it would be awfully nice to have an open source one.
Next time read the parent! If they say "word processor" don't suggest "text editor!"
"...they didn't stop Europe from dragging itself to prosperity after WW2."
To believe what I learned in high-school history, it was the United States, under the Marshall Plan, that drug Europe to prosperity after WW2.
World War II utterly devastated mainland Europe, mostly from Allied bombing. Europe was essentially blasted back into medeival times: roads, railroads, shipping, communications were all decimated. Manufacturing and agriculture were severely disabled.
Through the financial backing of the United States, Europe was prevented from falling into deep poverty and becoming a third-world society. It would be wrong to say that the Marshall Plan made Europe prosperous (who ever prospered on welfare?). No, European prosperity, as in any prosperous society, has come from hard work and innovation. Prosperity can not be given.
Europe might have become prosperous even without the Marshall Plan, but it certainly didn't hurt.
Well, not quite exactly what you've spec'd out, but a friend of mine has developed a java applet which is a telnet-over-http client. There is also a server-side component.
It's a little clunky, but what it does is provides shell access to a system by tunneling commands and output over HTTP. This allows you to log in to your boxen when you are stuck behind a firewall/proxy server that ONLY allows HTTP traffic to pass. Because it uses HTTP, you can also use HTTPS if you have a webserver running on that machine which has SSL enabled, giving you a secure connection.
Source code hasn't been released yet, sorry.
If you're just looking for a lightweight, well-written SSH/Telnet client for Win32, try PuTTY. It's a single executable (no installer required, no DLL's) which stores configuration info and keys in the registry. The executable can even be stuck on a floppy or CD if you so desire and run from there.
What I want is a dark PC. All the glowing, flashing, red, blue, green, yellow LEDs on my computer and assorted peripherals are becoming extremely annoying. Of course I'll tell you why.
My PC is in my bedroom. I don't have an office. I can't park it in the garage. That's because I'm renting a room and the guy whose house it is won't let me put it anywhere else. The problem arises when I lay down to bed at night. I turn off the light and the room doesn't get dark!
With nearly 50 LEDs, fluorescent displays, and neon lights between my computers, monitor, keyboards, KVM switch, printers, hub, switch, power strip, clock radio, ad nauseum, it's so bright you could grow plants. Since I sleep best in total darkness, well, you see the problem. (BTW, it's not the noise that bothers my sleep. I have a fan running all night long to mask out other noises.)
I've been resorting to just turning everything off at night. But this is a rather inconvenient solution: what if I wake up in the middle of the night (probably because all those LEDs are annoying me) and I just have to get up and log on to get that Slashdot First Post?
I've considered some solutions, but they have problems. Black electrical tape comes to mind, but that's just plain ugly, and you can't see the flashing lights when you want to see them without peeling the tape off. I could go in with wire cutters and snip! off the leads. Too permanant. I might actually want to use those LEDs some day.
My dream (it's a daydream, since I can't sleep) is a circuit which could be set to dim or darken the lights on command, at a preset time, or when the screensaver kicks in. What makes it a little more difficult is that it would have to be adapted to each peripheral. (I'm sure someone will provide a link to Google. Ha ha. Beat you to it.)
The speed of SCSI coupled with the unreliability of IDE. Sounds like a winner.
Seriously, you're not going to be using this in a five-nines server. But this device does have its place on desktops.
You can get a 60GB IDE drive for around a hundred bucks. Add this converter and you've got a 60GB SCSI drive for two hundred. True SCSI drives of that size are around $500.
Sure, you are losing reliability (and maybe some performance) over native SCSI drives, but what you gain is the ability to have more than three drives in a system (the fourth being your CD-ROM in an IDE system) and use cheaper drives on a decent hardware RAID array on a budget not backed by corporate pockets.
Some in this forum will bring up IDE raid adapters... they are almost all crap (Promise cards have given me nothing but trouble -- Adaptec's AAR-2400A is the best I've found).
Now it remains to be seen how reliable this controller is, but if it works well, I think it will be A Good Thing.
"Martinez-Frias said only around a fifth of the ice meteors are ever found."
Ermm... how do they count what they haven't seen?
"Martinez-Frias suggests that because global warming involves one level of the atmosphere getting colder while another gets hotter, some ice clouds now remain longer."
Logic dictates that if global warming causes one level to get colder while another gets warmer, that global cooling would cause one level to get warmer while another gets colder. Am I repeating myself? And besides, this is a suggestion, not a formulated hypothesis based on evidence. At least not yet.
Scientific fact is that water vapor and carbon dioxide are the most abundant greenhouse gas. As our combustible-fuel appliances become more efficient, there are less hydrocarbon emissions and more H20 and C02 emitted; the net effect on greenhouse gases is the same. Besides, it has been argued that a single volcanic eruption has a far greater effect (neg or pos, you decide) on the atmosphere than the entire history of mankind burning stuff.
One more thing: there's no such thing az a ZEV (Zero-Emission-Vehicle). Electric is displaced emissions -- unless your power is hydro (and "we all know how bad that is for the fishies"). The manufacture of solar cells and batteries/fuel cells require the use -- and disposal -- of tons of toxic chemicals. Nuke also involves toxic waste (nevermind it's the cleanest and safest form of electricity, it's gotten a bad rap by the actions of irresponsible people).
To say that man (woman too!!) is causing global warming is a crock. If we all went back to eating wooly mammoth cooked over teradactyl dung, I don't think we'd notice any difference in the rate of global climate change.
Every *nix administrator needs a solid understanding of basic shell commands. Probably the two most important to completely understand are rm and dd because they are the most dangerous.
Here's a couple of commands to NEVER issue (unless a complete reinstall is in order):
rm -rf/ dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/hda
Using either command willy-nilly without understanding what they are doing is a recipe for disaster.
Amazing! A post about goats that has nothing to do with goatse..... er, um, you didn't see that.
Seriously, goats and sheep have been used for centuries for maintaining lawns of castles and estates. Given the right type of grass, they will clip it very short (think golf course) but not to the nubbin like horses do. There's probably a way to fit them with diapers, but I think a sheep in diapers is a recipe for a mess.
StarOffice 5.x was integrated. To the point of being scary. StarOffice & OpenOffice 6.x aren't as tightly integrated, I hear.
In 5.x, if you wanted to draw a picture in StarWriter, it used the StarDraw program within writer to do it. If you wanted a table in your email, it used the spreadsheet program to do it.
M$ Office isn't that tightly integrated; you want a table in Word, it uses a tables module that has nothing the power of Excel. Drawing capabilities are rudimentary. OK, so you can use Word as the editor for Outlook, but Outlook has other problems (IMAP support sucks the big fire hose, for ex.).
IMHO, the best DOS wp ever written was WordPerfect 6.0 for DOS. The current Win versions are better than Word, I think.
So I put MS-DOS 6.2 on it, loaded up WordPerfect 6.0 for DOS. WP6 is WYSIWYG and has its own graphics, mouse, and printer drivers.
Set it up so when she turned it on, it would automatically go into WP.
Sweet thing about WP is it's incredibly customizable. I allowed my Grandma access to two shortcut keys: F2 printed, F3 quit. (Well, really what it did was to run a macro that would save and quit so I could recover the file if needed.) There were no menus, the alt key did nothing. Anything with the remote possibility of confusing her was removed. Of course, I did leave access to Shift+F1 (Setup) but I didn't tell her that.
You might have trouble getting a Lexmark Z11 to print from WP6, but you can try some of the drivers on Corel'ssupport site.
You know, WordPerfect gives you the power to do everything, including limit that power to do almost nothing. I use WP10 now, I hate M$ Word.
As for OS, I've successfully run WP6/DOS in graphical mode under dosemu in Linux on a 486DX2/66. It was slow, but it worked! I think it should run under just about any free dos version.
OK, I'll concede. That might be useful. But if all you watch is "I Love Lucy" reruns, who needs it?
My point was that technology has made it possible to design a gadget that does too many things, and make that gadget cheaper than its weight in salt.
When was the last time you saw a phone that would let you dial a number? I mean just dial a number, without redial, memory, flash, hold, speakerphone, caller ID, flashing lights or any of that peripheral junk? When was the last time you actually heard a telephone RING? With an actual brass bell that went "ding-a-ling-a-ling?"
I think that as technology progresses, people will yearn to have a few simple things: coffee makers that require you to turn them on when you want to make coffee, ovens that you have to crank a knob to turn it on (I still haven't figured out the stupid electronic panel on mine, and I'm a computer tech!), a thermostat on the wall you can turn (literally, turn) up when you're too cold and down when you're too warm.
A story on today's Slashdot discusses the art of human interaction on the telephone (dump the "Press 7 if you have a rotary phone"...). The gist of it is that companies are discovering that people don't want to deal with a computer for simple problems. This stems from the desire of humans wanting to have control over their environment. Electronic gizmos and gadgets are slowly wresting this direct control. We become nervous, worrying, wondering whether or not the timer will actually turn on the VCR to record Friends while we're out with our friends.
Conspiracists could theorize that technology is slowly weaning us away from having tight, tactile control over our environment, with the eventuality of some entity creeping in the back door and taking over without us even noticing. Yes, that's right, the EPA will set your thermostat, the MPAA will run your VCR, Starbucks will brew your coffee, and Martha Stewart will bake your cakes.
Just went to Casio's website. They've got a couple that will do computer math, but they also do a lot more. Not that you need more, but at least they aren't a big, honking graphing calc that you can't fit in your shirt pocket, and they aren't clunky software that you gotta lug a laptop around to use.
A specialized calc may be hard to come by, especially from the big boys (Sharp, TI, Casio).
I'm guessing that a combination of market forces and technology are forcing the calculator manufacturers to make fewer products that do more.
Rather than selling 10,000 each of ten different product lines, they can sell a million each of three different product lines. It doesn't make economic sense to make specialized products for niche markets when for the same cost you can make a single, generalized product that does everything for everybody.
At the same time, it would be awfully nice to get a VCR with just five buttons: Play, Record, FF, RW, and Stop. Dump the clock, dump the timer, dump the prgramming. (Maybe they should just include a piece of black tape for the blinking display?) But, alas, such a thing is a figment of history.
I will probably be modded "-1, Troll" for this, but here goes...
I set my Windows Calculator to "Scientific" mode and then I can easily do calculations in hex or binary, easy to convert between bases, etc. Probably doesn't do everything you want, but it's useful for me when I'm figuring out subnets and such.
Slashdot Mirror
A number of early distros can be found on Ibiblio's ftp site.
Or you could get this just for fun.
Exactly what constitutes a security hole?
The current issue, to me, appears to not be so much a bug as it is leaving the back door unlocked. The article describes how the user can disable scripting, etc. Once you do that, it's no longer a problem. Once you lock the back door, the bad guys can't get in.
Security ultimately lies in the hands of the end user, whose responsibility it is to to know what each of the options are and what the impacts are of them. If checking a box makes your system more secure, then that's the user's responsibility, not the vendor's. The vendor has a responsibility to inform the user of the impact of various security settings, and to define a set of default settings that result in a secure system. If there is a vulnerability that can't be resolved by a checkbox, then it becomes the vendor's responsibility to issue a bug fix.
As a layman, I don't see it as anything that Microsoft can resolve, except a "patch" that changes the security settings. If it is indeed a flaw, then it should be exploitable with the appropriate security settings enabled. (I don't have a deep understanding of scripting in IE, so perhaps there is a flaw that I'm not seeing.)
I see a responsibility of users to inform other users of security lapses and inform them of an appropriate course of action. That is what the article mentioned in the parent post does. There is also a responsibilty to not disparage the software vendor unless it is a legitimate bug, that bug results (or could result) in a compromised system, AND the vendor refuses to acknowledge it or issue a patch for it in a timely manner. It is irresponsible to provide the public with details or code describing specifically how to exploit the flaw.
I've never used phone or power line networking equipment. At this phase of my life, I have absolutely no interest in using it. Therefore, I am more than qualified to comment on it. :-P
A couple of posts here have questioned the security of phone and power line networking. It's a valid concern -- what goes on the lines in your house goes on the lines out of your house, too.
With power line networking, the signal will (most likely) be blocked by the transformer (on the pole or by the curb). If your neighbors are on the same transformer, they could potentially tap in.
As far as phone line networking, I can see two ways to make it more secure. The first is DSL filters. These are used in ADSL, put in the line between the DMARC and the telephone set (but not between the DMARC and the DSL modem). You could put one of these at the DMARC where the lines come off, and maybe it will block the signal from going out to who-knows-where. I say "maybe", because I haven't researched it.
A more secure solution is rather than using your primary line, use an unused pair in the phone cabling for the networking. I don't think it has to be hooked to a working phone line; it just uses a different band than POTS service. Note that some buildings are wired with substandard 2-pair wire which isn't even twisted pair. In this case, you risk crosstalk to and from adjacent pairs, and increased EMF interference which can reduce your data rates. You might not even have an extra pair to play with.
If you are lucky enough to have a home where the phones are wired with CAT5 in a star configuration, you can use two of the pairs for ethernet and scrap the phone-line networking altogether. This isn't spec, but in most cases it works. Splices in ethernet are bad, bad, bad.
Everyone keeps suggesting text editors. Text editors are great, but they are NOT word processors!
Word processors give you functionality that text editors don't. With a word processor, you can define the paper size, the margins on the paper, as well as things like fonts (Arial, anyone?), kerning, justification, etc. ad nauseum. Even more, word processors generally have printer support, so you can submit a print job from the program instead of the command line, select the printer you want to use, even manage print jobs.
A word processor lets you put multiple columns on a page. A word processor lets you embed images in a document.
Show me a text editor that has all these features and I'll show you a word processor. Yes, there *were* console (read: non-graphical) word processors that could do this. As the parent says, like WordPerfect and Word for DOS.
So why doesn't the parent use WordPerfect or Word for DOS? For one thing, they are hard to find. For another thing, they cost money. For a third thing, it would be awfully nice to have an open source one.
Next time read the parent! If they say "word processor" don't suggest "text editor!"
"...they didn't stop Europe from dragging itself to prosperity after WW2."
To believe what I learned in high-school history, it was the United States, under the Marshall Plan, that drug Europe to prosperity after WW2.
World War II utterly devastated mainland Europe, mostly from Allied bombing. Europe was essentially blasted back into medeival times: roads, railroads, shipping, communications were all decimated. Manufacturing and agriculture were severely disabled.
Through the financial backing of the United States, Europe was prevented from falling into deep poverty and becoming a third-world society. It would be wrong to say that the Marshall Plan made Europe prosperous (who ever prospered on welfare?). No, European prosperity, as in any prosperous society, has come from hard work and innovation. Prosperity can not be given.
Europe might have become prosperous even without the Marshall Plan, but it certainly didn't hurt.
Well, not quite exactly what you've spec'd out, but a friend of mine has developed a java applet which is a telnet-over-http client. There is also a server-side component.
It's a little clunky, but what it does is provides shell access to a system by tunneling commands and output over HTTP. This allows you to log in to your boxen when you are stuck behind a firewall/proxy server that ONLY allows HTTP traffic to pass. Because it uses HTTP, you can also use HTTPS if you have a webserver running on that machine which has SSL enabled, giving you a secure connection.
Source code hasn't been released yet, sorry.
If you're just looking for a lightweight, well-written SSH/Telnet client for Win32, try PuTTY. It's a single executable (no installer required, no DLL's) which stores configuration info and keys in the registry. The executable can even be stuck on a floppy or CD if you so desire and run from there.
Go check out Yamaha Papercraft for some neat origami, including a few motorcycles.
"...in general 10db is considered to sound like 'a doubling in volume'..."
Wrong again.
Mathematically, 10dB indicates a change by a factor of 10 (an order of magnitude) of the power. 3dB indicates a doubling. So 13dB is 20x.
A change of 13dB equates to a change in energy levels by a factor of 20.
That said, the human mind tends to comprehend a change of 10dB as a doubling (or halving) of loudness.
Yet another story about a quiet PC. Ho-hum.
What I want is a dark PC. All the glowing, flashing, red, blue, green, yellow LEDs on my computer and assorted peripherals are becoming extremely annoying. Of course I'll tell you why.
My PC is in my bedroom. I don't have an office. I can't park it in the garage. That's because I'm renting a room and the guy whose house it is won't let me put it anywhere else. The problem arises when I lay down to bed at night. I turn off the light and the room doesn't get dark!
With nearly 50 LEDs, fluorescent displays, and neon lights between my computers, monitor, keyboards, KVM switch, printers, hub, switch, power strip, clock radio, ad nauseum, it's so bright you could grow plants. Since I sleep best in total darkness, well, you see the problem. (BTW, it's not the noise that bothers my sleep. I have a fan running all night long to mask out other noises.)
I've been resorting to just turning everything off at night. But this is a rather inconvenient solution: what if I wake up in the middle of the night (probably because all those LEDs are annoying me) and I just have to get up and log on to get that Slashdot First Post?
I've considered some solutions, but they have problems. Black electrical tape comes to mind, but that's just plain ugly, and you can't see the flashing lights when you want to see them without peeling the tape off. I could go in with wire cutters and snip! off the leads. Too permanant. I might actually want to use those LEDs some day.
My dream (it's a daydream, since I can't sleep) is a circuit which could be set to dim or darken the lights on command, at a preset time, or when the screensaver kicks in. What makes it a little more difficult is that it would have to be adapted to each peripheral. (I'm sure someone will provide a link to Google. Ha ha. Beat you to it.)
Oh well, black tape it is.
The speed of SCSI coupled with the unreliability of IDE. Sounds like a winner.
Seriously, you're not going to be using this in a five-nines server. But this device does have its place on desktops.
You can get a 60GB IDE drive for around a hundred bucks. Add this converter and you've got a 60GB SCSI drive for two hundred. True SCSI drives of that size are around $500.
Sure, you are losing reliability (and maybe some performance) over native SCSI drives, but what you gain is the ability to have more than three drives in a system (the fourth being your CD-ROM in an IDE system) and use cheaper drives on a decent hardware RAID array on a budget not backed by corporate pockets.
Some in this forum will bring up IDE raid adapters... they are almost all crap (Promise cards have given me nothing but trouble -- Adaptec's AAR-2400A is the best I've found).
Now it remains to be seen how reliable this controller is, but if it works well, I think it will be A Good Thing.
"Martinez-Frias said only around a fifth of the ice meteors are ever found."
Ermm... how do they count what they haven't seen?
"Martinez-Frias suggests that because global warming involves one level of the atmosphere getting colder while another gets hotter, some ice clouds now remain longer."
Logic dictates that if global warming causes one level to get colder while another gets warmer, that global cooling would cause one level to get warmer while another gets colder. Am I repeating myself? And besides, this is a suggestion, not a formulated hypothesis based on evidence. At least not yet.
Scientific fact is that water vapor and carbon dioxide are the most abundant greenhouse gas. As our combustible-fuel appliances become more efficient, there are less hydrocarbon emissions and more H20 and C02 emitted; the net effect on greenhouse gases is the same. Besides, it has been argued that a single volcanic eruption has a far greater effect (neg or pos, you decide) on the atmosphere than the entire history of mankind burning stuff.
One more thing: there's no such thing az a ZEV (Zero-Emission-Vehicle). Electric is displaced emissions -- unless your power is hydro (and "we all know how bad that is for the fishies"). The manufacture of solar cells and batteries/fuel cells require the use -- and disposal -- of tons of toxic chemicals. Nuke also involves toxic waste (nevermind it's the cleanest and safest form of electricity, it's gotten a bad rap by the actions of irresponsible people).
To say that man (woman too!!) is causing global warming is a crock. If we all went back to eating wooly mammoth cooked over teradactyl dung, I don't think we'd notice any difference in the rate of global climate change.
The sky is falling! The sky is falling!
The above opinion has been created without basis or research into the referenced articles.
Every *nix administrator needs a solid understanding of basic shell commands. Probably the two most important to completely understand are rm and dd because they are the most dangerous.
/
Here's a couple of commands to NEVER issue (unless a complete reinstall is in order):
rm -rf
dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/hda
Using either command willy-nilly without understanding what they are doing is a recipe for disaster.
When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up? How has that vision for your own future impacted your present?
I'm just waiting for a tree-hugging environmentalist to come along and chain herself to a cell tower... :-P
Just don't post the link here... unless you want to get slashdotted!
Amazing! A post about goats that has nothing to do with goatse..... er, um, you didn't see that.
Seriously, goats and sheep have been used for centuries for maintaining lawns of castles and estates. Given the right type of grass, they will clip it very short (think golf course) but not to the nubbin like horses do. There's probably a way to fit them with diapers, but I think a sheep in diapers is a recipe for a mess.
StarOffice 5.x was integrated. To the point of being scary. StarOffice & OpenOffice 6.x aren't as tightly integrated, I hear.
In 5.x, if you wanted to draw a picture in StarWriter, it used the StarDraw program within writer to do it. If you wanted a table in your email, it used the spreadsheet program to do it.
M$ Office isn't that tightly integrated; you want a table in Word, it uses a tables module that has nothing the power of Excel. Drawing capabilities are rudimentary. OK, so you can use Word as the editor for Outlook, but Outlook has other problems (IMAP support sucks the big fire hose, for ex.).
IMHO, the best DOS wp ever written was WordPerfect 6.0 for DOS. The current Win versions are better than Word, I think.
My grandmother had a similar situation.
So I put MS-DOS 6.2 on it, loaded up WordPerfect 6.0 for DOS. WP6 is WYSIWYG and has its own graphics, mouse, and printer drivers.
Set it up so when she turned it on, it would automatically go into WP.
Sweet thing about WP is it's incredibly customizable. I allowed my Grandma access to two shortcut keys: F2 printed, F3 quit. (Well, really what it did was to run a macro that would save and quit so I could recover the file if needed.) There were no menus, the alt key did nothing. Anything with the remote possibility of confusing her was removed. Of course, I did leave access to Shift+F1 (Setup) but I didn't tell her that.
You might have trouble getting a Lexmark Z11 to print from WP6, but you can try some of the drivers on Corel's support site.
You know, WordPerfect gives you the power to do everything, including limit that power to do almost nothing. I use WP10 now, I hate M$ Word.
As for OS, I've successfully run WP6/DOS in graphical mode under dosemu in Linux on a 486DX2/66. It was slow, but it worked! I think it should run under just about any free dos version.
The scary thing is, this is how my Grandpa wired his house. I mean the 120V lines. And he never bothered cutting the power when he worked on it.
"I'd like an eject button, too :)"
OK, I'll concede. That might be useful. But if all you watch is "I Love Lucy" reruns, who needs it?
My point was that technology has made it possible to design a gadget that does too many things, and make that gadget cheaper than its weight in salt.
When was the last time you saw a phone that would let you dial a number? I mean just dial a number, without redial, memory, flash, hold, speakerphone, caller ID, flashing lights or any of that peripheral junk? When was the last time you actually heard a telephone RING? With an actual brass bell that went "ding-a-ling-a-ling?"
I think that as technology progresses, people will yearn to have a few simple things: coffee makers that require you to turn them on when you want to make coffee, ovens that you have to crank a knob to turn it on (I still haven't figured out the stupid electronic panel on mine, and I'm a computer tech!), a thermostat on the wall you can turn (literally, turn) up when you're too cold and down when you're too warm.
A story on today's Slashdot discusses the art of human interaction on the telephone (dump the "Press 7 if you have a rotary phone"...). The gist of it is that companies are discovering that people don't want to deal with a computer for simple problems. This stems from the desire of humans wanting to have control over their environment. Electronic gizmos and gadgets are slowly wresting this direct control. We become nervous, worrying, wondering whether or not the timer will actually turn on the VCR to record Friends while we're out with our friends.
Conspiracists could theorize that technology is slowly weaning us away from having tight, tactile control over our environment, with the eventuality of some entity creeping in the back door and taking over without us even noticing. Yes, that's right, the EPA will set your thermostat, the MPAA will run your VCR, Starbucks will brew your coffee, and Martha Stewart will bake your cakes.
"...while I have to cobble up what I want with a radio, a tape recorder, some patch cords, and a timer."
Um... I hope you're not planning on bringing this on an airplane anytime soon.
Just went to Casio's website. They've got a couple that will do computer math, but they also do a lot more. Not that you need more, but at least they aren't a big, honking graphing calc that you can't fit in your shirt pocket, and they aren't clunky software that you gotta lug a laptop around to use.
A specialized calc may be hard to come by, especially from the big boys (Sharp, TI, Casio).
I'm guessing that a combination of market forces and technology are forcing the calculator manufacturers to make fewer products that do more.
Rather than selling 10,000 each of ten different product lines, they can sell a million each of three different product lines. It doesn't make economic sense to make specialized products for niche markets when for the same cost you can make a single, generalized product that does everything for everybody.
At the same time, it would be awfully nice to get a VCR with just five buttons: Play, Record, FF, RW, and Stop. Dump the clock, dump the timer, dump the prgramming. (Maybe they should just include a piece of black tape for the blinking display?) But, alas, such a thing is a figment of history.
KISS.
I will probably be modded "-1, Troll" for this, but here goes...
I set my Windows Calculator to "Scientific" mode and then I can easily do calculations in hex or binary, easy to convert between bases, etc. Probably doesn't do everything you want, but it's useful for me when I'm figuring out subnets and such.