...and I certainly don't believe that now. The kit that you ACTUALLY needed to run Windows 95 (without going to make a cup of tea after trying to launch an application) was considerably more than this. I've just re-inherited a 9-year old W95 machine from a family member who's finally replaced it with an XP box. It's had nothing added over the years, not even any extra memory.
By the standards of 9 years ago, it was a reasonable spec machine (although by no means top of the range). It runs Debian Stable (2.4 kernel) fine - slow, but still usable.
As a former McAfee home user, I was rather surprised to see MS' "security center" replaced with McAfee's when I made the mistake of updating their AV software just over a year ago. What McAfee put in place instead was little more than an annoying attempt to sell me McAfee products that I didn't need (such as a software firewall; in addition to a hardware router controlling access in I also had a software firewall from another vendor in place to stop unwanted access out).
I rejected McAfee for home use because of this, and tried to make it is clear as I could to the company why (although I doubt that that got past the poor bloody infantry on the helpdesk). Like many people here I'm sure, I get landed with fixing people's Windows PCs. Recommendations count, and McAfee's home software certainly haven't had any from me over the last year.
...as I recall he's correct in saying that it's not "automatic" in VMS, but I'm not entirely sure how relevant that is. Maybe VMS just isn't ready for the desktop (yet).
OK, so I know it's a bit Captain Obvious, but think of the mechanical improvements (and miniaturisation) that happened between the 40s and the 60s. In another field, compare something like a Cosworth DFV with the engine in Farina's Maserati 4CL from 1948 (and think about the vast difference in the car around them, too). Compare the last mechanical calculators like the later Comptometers with early adding machines. It's only 20 years ago, but the first car that I bought actually had an option of mechanical (not electronic) ABS.
If integrated circuits hadn't been possible (and that's really the issue - once you can put that much electronics in a small space someone's bound to ask "what if we allow people to change what this can do?") then the other advances in materials would still have happened - so it's reasonable to assume that we'd still have had CD players (to take one example) but with miniaturised conventional electronics, and probably more analogue processing instead of the ubiquitous couple of chips on a board.
There's only so much that you can do, though - to go back to the car analogy, the first car that I bought had a choke that you had to use to get it to run from cold (ask your parents!). The one that I have now obviously sorts things like that out for itself, but cost less to buy in real terms and can not only calculate how much traction each wheel has in real time (and supply power only to which of the four wheels has grip) but also has over twice the power (on inferior petrol) but about the same fuel efficiency.
No - I've been around a few years and was never taught "billion = million million" at school (and I do remember changing from pounds, shillings and pence, so that should help you put a date on it).
...which is an excellent point (regardless of whether the ancestor post that this was a reply to, or even the original article, was a troll or not).
I use Windows 2000, XP and 2003 versions and various Linux systems in about equal measure, but never fail to be impressed by how stable and tolerant of external factors (e.g. power failures) ext3 is in comparison to NTFS. The "drive full / fragmented" slowdown affect with NTFS / FAT32 is also much more obvious than on ext3.
Part of the "general slowness" is no doubt due to using an on-access virus checker on Windows but not Linux, but the "drive full" thing certainly isn't.
That said, I don't think that "regular crashes" under normal use have been a feature of computer systems this century. It's about time that myth was recgnised for what it is.
I agree - I don't think that the current version tries to phone home repeatedly. On my work PC the original WGA version was prevented from doing so by a software firewall rule (which I haven't changed). I haven't seen any alerts from it for some time.
Obviously this isn't proof - any software running as part of the OS can do what it likes (including turning on and off third-party firewall rules) but it's a pretty good indication.
Not an insult - but a mechanism for helping to maintain topsoil.
Agriculture does not consume "topsoil which takes up to hundreds of years to build". Sure, you can bulldoze it out of the way or arrange for it to blow away, but that's stupidity rather than agriculture that's doing that. As an example, the part of England that I was born in was originally natural deciduous forest, and over the last 2000 years was farmed first for trees, then for a mixture of everything (with cows doing their bit to maintain the topsoil), and now mostly for barley. If your argument was correct we'd have had a dustbowl in the 1700s. It didn't happen - and in fact even where people have been growing wheat on chalk (with only a few inches of topsoil, and using mostly nitogen fertilizer in place of the aforementioned organic one) what soil there is is incredibly resilient.
There's a "when it's gone it's gone" argument for saying that the Brazilians should preserve their old-growth forest; but it's a bit rich coming from Europeans (in my case) who have already got rid of theirs.
Thomas Malthus was wrong when he said we'd run out of food in the 1800s, and you are too.
So the majority of people are voting with their feet in the opposite direction to the one that you said...
Personally, if people are paying income tax and VAT here I couldn't care less where they were born. I'm descended partially from economic migrants to the UK (19th century Irish), and if you've got a UK passport the chances are that (unless you're pure-bred Welsh or from the far West of Scotland) that you are too.
Nah - it's just someone " 'aving a larf " and trying to make their spam stand out for a split-second among all the other spam.
It worked though - even though the original article is slashdotted all of the images have been reproduced here. The spammers must be laughing all the way to the bank...
There is useful information out there though, and it's usually in independant sites for users-of-all-of-the-manufacturers-of-product-x. To pick just one example, http://www.adslguide.org.uk/ is very concerned with the quality of the various offerings.
There's also the likes of http://blagger.com/ and http://www.clik2complaints.co.uk/ for seeing how often things have gone wrong for other people. All of these are UK examples, but surely there are national equivalents in most places?
OK, so it could be worse - it's Bob Fripp writing it, not some herbert just making a "lame synth noise". I suppose he could let his missus have a bit of a screech in the middle of it as well to really wake us up (when she's finished narrating the tellytubbies).
Presumably the article is a joke to keep Windows Vista in the news, but even if it wasn't, how hard would it be to rename / replace / delete the offending sound file?
Create a big tar (or.bkf) file of everything that you want to back up. Split that into smaller tar files using tar and "-L" and the amount you want to write to each disk, and then write the individual files to individual disks. Then at least check that you can actually read what you've written and take it somewhere else (off site).
The downside of this is that you'll probably need to restore from all the disks to restore one file, but the advantage is that you don't need to do the maths beforehand.
I happened to be in Orlando at a conference when there was a launch on a few years ago. It was dead easy, even to do at the last minute - just drive in the general direction of Canaveral and park by the side of the road. You may not think you're close enough, but you probably are! Allow extra time because lots of other people will have the same idea. If you want a laugh, tune in to local radio, too.
And where do you insert this "device" between your PC and the wireless router in the coffee shop or hotel romm in which you're sitting? Wave it around in mid-air or something?
Besides that, the most useful purpose of these things isn't against trojans that someone's running because they're an idiot, it's software such as media players insisting on phoning home (for example, the "Microsoft Windows Media Configuration Utility" connection attempt that occurs when WM9 tries to update itself).
I don't think that it is a BAA problem, it's a Heathrow problem, even before the current "security issues".
Due to late customer requests, I've had to fly through Heathrow several times in the last year (the only other UK direct flight to where I was going was from Manchester, which gets booked up first). Roughly half the time BA's ground staff (who represented both of the airlines to the country that I was flying to) managed to screw something up - one one occasion keeping the passengers on a late-landing plane on board for an hour because of some lame excuse or other.
Manchester, Birmingham, etc. don't have these issues, and neither does Edinburgh (which is also BAA). Obviously Schipol and CDG don't either.
PS - If I were you I'd consider Brussels as well as Paris and Amsterdam. It's less busy most of the time, the Eurostar time's quicker and the beer's better when you get there!
That's because they're following the old "check luggage through to your destination" rules rather than the new Schengen ones. If you'd been flying to, say, Amsterdam, then you'd have had to clear customs in Copenhagen (and not in Amsterdam). I'm assuming that you stayed in the non-Schengen part of the airport in CPH and didn't really enter Denmark or the Schengen area of the EU at all.
Whether this is a good idea or a bad one is a different question, of course - a system like this is only as strong as the weakest link. Take Lockerbie for example (whoever you believe did it) - they didn't stick the explosives on at Heathrow.
As an ex-HP-support user, sometimes it wasn't obvious that their helpdesk people had ever used Windows. The front-line people had been given a script, and followed it with no comprehension. When (in the case of the laptop hardware problems that I was logging at the time) it was impossible to follow their instructions, the only solution was to box it up and send it back. With a laptop that's feasible; just swap for another one - but with a server it isn't.
I suppose that there are always the HP-UX and ex-Dec Unix people - they're already familiar with some of the software (see http://hpux.connect.org.uk/hppd/hpux/Gnu/) and the concept of a package manager shouldn't be too alien to them (HP.depot files).
You'll have to tell us what airlines you use, so the rest of us can avoid them! For the record, I've flown 20-80 times per year over the last 15 years or so. So far:
o checked-in luggage late - once (by 24 hours, delivered to hotel).
o checked-in luggage lost - never.
o checked-in luggage early (got placed in lost property because no-one collected it from the carousel) - once.
Buy a tube of toothpaste from the Supermarket in Schipol (out of the arrivals door, turn right and follow the corridor round). It'll cost you less than any fancy solution from a vending machine.
Or if you need a visa to get into Schengen, how about an apple?
Slashdot Mirror
...and I certainly don't believe that now. The kit that you ACTUALLY needed to run Windows 95 (without going to make a cup of tea after trying to launch an application) was considerably more than this. I've just re-inherited a 9-year old W95 machine from a family member who's finally replaced it with an XP box. It's had nothing added over the years, not even any extra memory.
By the standards of 9 years ago, it was a reasonable spec machine (although by no means top of the range). It runs Debian Stable (2.4 kernel) fine - slow, but still usable.
(no, really)
As a former McAfee home user, I was rather surprised to see MS' "security center" replaced with McAfee's when I made the mistake of updating their AV software just over a year ago. What McAfee put in place instead was little more than an annoying attempt to sell me McAfee products that I didn't need (such as a software firewall; in addition to a hardware router controlling access in I also had a software firewall from another vendor in place to stop unwanted access out).
I rejected McAfee for home use because of this, and tried to make it is clear as I could to the company why (although I doubt that that got past the poor bloody infantry on the helpdesk). Like many people here I'm sure, I get landed with fixing people's Windows PCs. Recommendations count, and McAfee's home software certainly haven't had any from me over the last year.
...as I recall he's correct in saying that it's not "automatic" in VMS, but I'm not entirely sure how relevant that is. Maybe VMS just isn't ready for the desktop (yet).
...we'd have had the 60s, only more so.
OK, so I know it's a bit Captain Obvious, but think of the mechanical improvements (and miniaturisation) that happened between the 40s and the 60s. In another field, compare something like a Cosworth DFV with the engine in Farina's Maserati 4CL from 1948 (and think about the vast difference in the car around them, too). Compare the last mechanical calculators like the later Comptometers with early adding machines. It's only 20 years ago, but the first car that I bought actually had an option of mechanical (not electronic) ABS.
If integrated circuits hadn't been possible (and that's really the issue - once you can put that much electronics in a small space someone's bound to ask "what if we allow people to change what this can do?") then the other advances in materials would still have happened - so it's reasonable to assume that we'd still have had CD players (to take one example) but with miniaturised conventional electronics, and probably more analogue processing instead of the ubiquitous couple of chips on a board.
There's only so much that you can do, though - to go back to the car analogy, the first car that I bought had a choke that you had to use to get it to run from cold (ask your parents!). The one that I have now obviously sorts things like that out for itself, but cost less to buy in real terms and can not only calculate how much traction each wheel has in real time (and supply power only to which of the four wheels has grip) but also has over twice the power (on inferior petrol) but about the same fuel efficiency.
No - I've been around a few years and was never taught "billion = million million" at school (and I do remember changing from pounds, shillings and pence, so that should help you put a date on it).
w ww.translatorscafe.com/cafe/MegaBBS/thread-view.as p%3Fthreadid%3D6977%26posts%3D18+billion+million+b ritish+treasury+%22million+million%22&hl=en&gl=uk& ct=clnk&cd=11&client=firefox-a
I think that the "official" changeover (as far as the treasury was concerned) was late 60s / early 70s. A quick google can't find a cite for it but a post here mentions "the official announcement some three decades ago":
http://66.249.93.104/search?q=cache:O4P5O5xh-6sJ:
...which is an excellent point (regardless of whether the ancestor post that this was a reply to, or even the original article, was a troll or not).
I use Windows 2000, XP and 2003 versions and various Linux systems in about equal measure, but never fail to be impressed by how stable and tolerant of external factors (e.g. power failures) ext3 is in comparison to NTFS. The "drive full / fragmented" slowdown affect with NTFS / FAT32 is also much more obvious than on ext3.
Part of the "general slowness" is no doubt due to using an on-access virus checker on Windows but not Linux, but the "drive full" thing certainly isn't.
That said, I don't think that "regular crashes" under normal use have been a feature of computer systems this century. It's about time that myth was recgnised for what it is.
I agree - I don't think that the current version tries to phone home repeatedly. On my work PC the original WGA version was prevented from doing so by a software firewall rule (which I haven't changed). I haven't seen any alerts from it for some time.
Obviously this isn't proof - any software running as part of the OS can do what it likes (including turning on and off third-party firewall rules) but it's a pretty good indication.
Not an insult - but a mechanism for helping to maintain topsoil.
Agriculture does not consume "topsoil which takes up to hundreds of years to build". Sure, you can bulldoze it out of the way or arrange for it to blow away, but that's stupidity rather than agriculture that's doing that. As an example, the part of England that I was born in was originally natural deciduous forest, and over the last 2000 years was farmed first for trees, then for a mixture of everything (with cows doing their bit to maintain the topsoil), and now mostly for barley. If your argument was correct we'd have had a dustbowl in the 1700s. It didn't happen - and in fact even where people have been growing wheat on chalk (with only a few inches of topsoil, and using mostly nitogen fertilizer in place of the aforementioned organic one) what soil there is is incredibly resilient.
There's a "when it's gone it's gone" argument for saying that the Brazilians should preserve their old-growth forest; but it's a bit rich coming from Europeans (in my case) who have already got rid of theirs.
Thomas Malthus was wrong when he said we'd run out of food in the 1800s, and you are too.
So the majority of people are voting with their feet in the opposite direction to the one that you said...
Personally, if people are paying income tax and VAT here I couldn't care less where they were born. I'm descended partially from economic migrants to the UK (19th century Irish), and if you've got a UK passport the chances are that (unless you're pure-bred Welsh or from the far West of Scotland) that you are too.
Nah - it's just someone " 'aving a larf " and trying to make their spam stand out for a split-second among all the other spam.
It worked though - even though the original article is slashdotted all of the images have been reproduced here. The spammers must be laughing all the way to the bank...
(judging by the lack of comments here, anyway)
There is useful information out there though, and it's usually in independant sites for users-of-all-of-the-manufacturers-of-product-x. To pick just one example, http://www.adslguide.org.uk/ is very concerned with the quality of the various offerings.
There's also the likes of http://blagger.com/ and http://www.clik2complaints.co.uk/ for seeing how often things have gone wrong for other people. All of these are UK examples, but surely there are national equivalents in most places?
You might have to explain that to some of the youngsters here...
> Rip off Britain's a bleeding con and it's no wonder 0.5 million of us are emigrating each year.
So that's why the population's historically low right now then?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/5281360.stm
(or maybe not)
OK, so it could be worse - it's Bob Fripp writing it, not some herbert just making a "lame synth noise". I suppose he could let his missus have a bit of a screech in the middle of it as well to really wake us up (when she's finished narrating the tellytubbies).
Presumably the article is a joke to keep Windows Vista in the news, but even if it wasn't, how hard would it be to rename / replace / delete the offending sound file?
Create a big tar (or .bkf) file of everything that you want to back up. Split that into smaller tar files using tar and "-L" and the amount you want to write to each disk, and then write the individual files to individual disks. Then at least check that you can actually read what you've written and take it somewhere else (off site).
The downside of this is that you'll probably need to restore from all the disks to restore one file, but the advantage is that you don't need to do the maths beforehand.
I happened to be in Orlando at a conference when there was a launch on a few years ago. It was dead easy, even to do at the last minute - just drive in the general direction of Canaveral and park by the side of the road. You may not think you're close enough, but you probably are! Allow extra time because lots of other people will have the same idea. If you want a laugh, tune in to local radio, too.
And where do you insert this "device" between your PC and the wireless router in the coffee shop or hotel romm in which you're sitting? Wave it around in mid-air or something?
Besides that, the most useful purpose of these things isn't against trojans that someone's running because they're an idiot, it's software such as media players insisting on phoning home (for example, the "Microsoft Windows Media Configuration Utility" connection attempt that occurs when WM9 tries to update itself).
He's just a poor student trying to save some cash...
http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/15/ 0030209
I don't think that it is a BAA problem, it's a Heathrow problem, even before the current "security issues".
Due to late customer requests, I've had to fly through Heathrow several times in the last year (the only other UK direct flight to where I was going was from Manchester, which gets booked up first). Roughly half the time BA's ground staff (who represented both of the airlines to the country that I was flying to) managed to screw something up - one one occasion keeping the passengers on a late-landing plane on board for an hour because of some lame excuse or other.
Manchester, Birmingham, etc. don't have these issues, and neither does Edinburgh (which is also BAA). Obviously Schipol and CDG don't either.
PS - If I were you I'd consider Brussels as well as Paris and Amsterdam. It's less busy most of the time, the Eurostar time's quicker and the beer's better when you get there!
That's because they're following the old "check luggage through to your destination" rules rather than the new Schengen ones. If you'd been flying to, say, Amsterdam, then you'd have had to clear customs in Copenhagen (and not in Amsterdam). I'm assuming that you stayed in the non-Schengen part of the airport in CPH and didn't really enter Denmark or the Schengen area of the EU at all.
Whether this is a good idea or a bad one is a different question, of course - a system like this is only as strong as the weakest link. Take Lockerbie for example (whoever you believe did it) - they didn't stick the explosives on at Heathrow.
As an ex-HP-support user, sometimes it wasn't obvious that their helpdesk people had ever used Windows. The front-line people had been given a script, and followed it with no comprehension. When (in the case of the laptop hardware problems that I was logging at the time) it was impossible to follow their instructions, the only solution was to box it up and send it back. With a laptop that's feasible; just swap for another one - but with a server it isn't.
.depot files).
I suppose that there are always the HP-UX and ex-Dec Unix people - they're already familiar with some of the software (see http://hpux.connect.org.uk/hppd/hpux/Gnu/) and the concept of a package manager shouldn't be too alien to them (HP
You'll have to tell us what airlines you use, so the rest of us can avoid them! For the record, I've flown 20-80 times per year over the last 15 years or so. So far:
o checked-in luggage late - once (by 24 hours, delivered to hotel).
o checked-in luggage lost - never.
o checked-in luggage early (got placed in lost property because no-one collected it from the carousel) - once.
Buy a tube of toothpaste from the Supermarket in Schipol (out of the arrivals door, turn right and follow the corridor round). It'll cost you less than any fancy solution from a vending machine.
Or if you need a visa to get into Schengen, how about an apple?
Or turn off autorun on CD drives. Rocket science it ain't.