This has an interesting discussion on formatting issue. There was a lot of stuff in Win9x that sacrificed performance for compatibility. On the one hand it's kind of impressive that so much old stuff kept working, but it definitely held back Windows performance compared to contemporaries.
Much like today, my biggest problems with Win9x were driver related. Since it still supported the old VxD drivers, a lot of hardware manufacturers only did very minor work to bring their drivers into the Win9x world and called it a day. I remember I had a cheap no-name sound card and later a gameport card that caused me no end of trouble.
I tend to think most people complaining about the stability of Win9x are viewing it through tinted lenses of history - the NT line was indeed significantly more robust, but Windows 95 was a huge improvement over Win31 in almost every way.
I worked at MindSpring/Earthlink back in that era, and I think it was a branded version of the Shiva dialer made famous by Netscape. It looked/worked very much like Win9x's DUN and worked pretty well. I still have my selection of discs in a closet somewhere, should pull it out for nostalgia's sake.
NT4 will always bring back more painful memories than almost any other OS of the era. It never failed you'd get the guy with no service packs, no RAS installed, and Internet Explorer 2.0 who couldn't find his discs and was mad at us that he couldn't connect to anything. Then he'd find his disc and you'd spend an hour getting RAS installed, service packs (re)installed, browsers working, etc. Throw in RASPPPoE for DSL fun too.
I have a Nook Simple Touch, rooted, and run all kinds of stuff on it.
But not one other person I've talked to with one even realizes its Android, much less anything else.
The Nook Color owners are often a little more aware, but I know several people that bought them specifically to root. Plenty of the other owners still have no idea what it's running underneath. If you look on the sales pages for all the various Nooks you won't find a bit of Android on them. You can't install standard Android apps on them without rooting/hacking, and even then you may end up with unideal button arrangements (since they don't have even the usual required Android buttons).
If anything, all them being Android does is increase their interest to the geek community and doesn't do much at all to raise Android in the public awareness.
This is the point so many fans of modern Firefox and other open source browsers forget. Netscape wasn't about open web standards and cross-browser compatibility until relatively recently - probably after the fall of Netscape itself and beginning of Mozilla/Gecko. Way back in the mists of time, Netscape 2.0 was roundly criticized for introducing a bunch of proprietary tags (many of which were later adopted but at the time weren't) and Microsoft Internet Explorer 1.0 was praised for adhering to standards. I can't find it now but recently I stumbled on an ancient page that urged a boycott of Netscape 2.0 and explained in great detail what proprietary tags it had and which were safe to use.
Not sure if serious... but for me on, say, my 3GS I have to hit the home button, slide to unlock, put in my access code, find my camera app (which isn't hard, mind), and load it. Even if it takes 1.1 seconds to load the app, the rest of the process makes the matter of a second or two difference mostly irrelevant.
This fan thing kind of amused me, I very seriously tried to use a tablet PC for notes in college and work in the early 2000s, and mostly succeeded. The thing that killed it for me was somewhat short battery life, and a fan too noisy for classroom use. If I kept the power management at minimum (which dropped the processor speed down to about 400mhz from 1ghz) sometimes I could keep the fan from starting up, but once it did it was very distracting in a quiet classroom. Sad to see they haven't improved.
I'd love to see something like an ipad with a stylus for writing and something as good as OneNote for note taking/organizing.
I think the biggest failing of cleverbot is a lack of consistent answers and lack of the understanding of a "topic at hand".
It'd really help the immersion if it had a "bio" of sorts, like a consistent set of answers for hometown, country, etc. Maybe even give it knowledge of some local color so it'd survive a deeper probing.
The other problem is it needs some method of keeping track of what it's talking about, what it's said, and such. If it asks you a question, you answer it, and then it asks why you're talking about that subject that'd destroy the immersion right there. If it could understand a string of conversation on a topic, even if it's still using canned responses, it'd really help its ability to converse.
I realize that hearing aids need to be especially good quality for good results, but it seems like in this day and age of miniaturized and cheap electronics that there should be dirt cheap hearing aids that are good quality and small. I have a very hard time believing that it costs as much as a good used car to make a pair of amplifiers, even especially good ones.
Or maybe I'm misunderestimating just what goes into the things. I don't claim particular knowledge
Could be lots of reasons. I'm not sure it'd be the same now, but when I was doing home end-user tech support in the late 90's and early 2000s a lot of people genuinely didn't get that email didn't work like the postal service where typos would likely be corrected and the mail still get where it was going. I was yelled at by more than one (mostly older) person who didn't understand why their email didn't arrive after we "fixed it".
I kind of expect it's also just a lot of people don't know/don't care and aren't paying attention.
I'm genuinely curious (for both HURD and DNF) how much of the code is actually "original" code (or art, or other assets) from all those years ago vs. essentially a rewrite from scratch. We know DNF was essentially tossed and restarted several times; I wonder how much the released version has from old versions.
One of my big reasons for jailbreaking is installing Backgrounder and SwitcherMod to take over control of multitasking. I have it set to not background apps by default (except for a couple apps like Safari and ipod) and SwitcherMod to get rid of recently used apps in the switcher. That way it acts much more like a taskbar/dock of running apps rather than trying to hide which apps are running and which aren't. I'm smart enough to know the difference between running and not running and like being able to control what I leave running.
I used to be the anything-goes sort of dumpster-diver/old stuff-taker and I ended up with a lot of junk in the name of "collecting" or "preservation". I got rid of a ton of stuff not too long ago (95% of it boring beige box stuff with nothing particular interesting about it). I kept a few interesting curiosities like a Fujtisu Stylistic 1000 tablet just because it was neat. Bought it for $10 new in box a few years ago. I just don't have the time or interest to mess with lots of junk anymore, and most of my actual needs/wants for vintage hardware is well-covered by emulation these days.
Screw 512 megs, I ran pre-sp2 on an ancient P-233MMX tablet PC with 96 megs of ram usably. Served as a ethernet-wireless bridge in a remote part of my house for years.
Incidentally, I run Win7 quite well on a P4M-2ghz with 2 gigs of RAM. It's a little sluggish in spots but I mostly blame that on the slow HD. Very usable though.
Personally, as a bit of a gamer (don't have the time I used to, but ah well) I was interested in the newer DirectX versions. Also, the 64 bit versions so I could use all my RAM. I don't even mind the "superbar" thing now that I'm used to it.
You can argue yourself in circles that Microsoft "could" have implemented everything in XP, but they didn't. So as a user, my choice is either to upgrade to get the new features or accept the limitations of the old version.
And like it or not, it's just the way OSes have been handled. Add some new features to a new version, sell it as new. There's no technical reason Microsoft couldn't have written a full Win32 implementation for Windows 3.1. Or written DirectX 11 for Windows 95. But at some point a developer has to make a decision to cut off the old and write for the new.
The amazing thing is the programs in the archive run just fine on XP. Some of them I didn't let do much (like chkdsk and initlarg) because of what they might do, but they run fine.
I think the average/. user probably has a different perspective than the people the article is referring to. I graduated high school in 1999, and thus was a teenager during the mid-late 90s. Indeed, pretty much everyone I knew, even people without computers who only used them at school, libraries, or friends' houses had AIM screennames. Only the geekier/techier (and usually a little older than me) folks knew about or used the likes of IRC or Usenet.
And, much like Facebook and Twitter are/were, us geeks were always a little reluctant to admit we had AIM, but we dealt with it due to so many other people using it that it was hard not to.
Not to diminish yours and other old-timers' point, "Online Presence" surely did go well back before this, but I do think the article has a point that at least in the US, AIM was the first time the average person really had that. We used our Info screens much like today's Facebook status updates would be with random ramblings, about us notes, etc. Substitute ICQ and other similar things internationally as appropriate.
Will always hate that stupid "Uh oh!" default message sound from ICQ too...
If you install a little addon called KernelEx in Win98, you can use up to at least Firefox 3.x just fine on it. Haven't tried the 4.x betas as yet, but 3.x works. Thunderbird should work too
Chrome doesn't seem to work yet in KernelEx but it tries. Maybe someday.
I still use Mac OS 7.x on an old LC475 for fun, and tend to alternate between Netscape 4 with Stylesheets and JS turned off, and the last version of iCab that supports m68k. Netscape was actually very usable for general reading, and worked better than you'd expect (especially if I sought out mobile sites). iCab would have been nearly completely usable, except that it didn't handle multitasking very well at all. While rendering, Netscape would slow the box down but it'd keep running my other programs, allow task switching, IRC chatting, etc. iCab would just lock the box up hard for several minutes at a time while it rendered everything.
Except for the Commodore 64 emulator, which is on there. And the iDungeon app which is a PDP-11 emu. There's also some chiptune music players that are effectively emulators.
It's not that they ban emulators, but that they ban ones that have open-ended disk images and the like. The ones that are on there are very specifically aimed with locked down data available. More or less anyway.
I've been using a slate form-factor Fujitsu Stylistic ST4121 for about 7 years now and it's done me very well (and it was my third Fujitsu tablet). I have to agree with your assessment though - they're brilliant for everything except data entry. Note taking, web surfing, many mouse-driven games, etc are great, but for anything that needs (computer readable) data entry it's a chore.
Still love the thing, and handles Windows 7 decently enough even with its limited specs.
I've seen a few intersections like this nearly cause accidents because people see the countdown almost to zero and stop at the green light. More than anything, I think that any traffic flow design will be fouled up by some percentage of the people.
The main problem with KBB and similar is it doesn't really take rarity or desirability of a car into account for pricing. There are lots of cars that the bluebook value even for an "Excellent"-rated car is pretty low, while you won't find it for close that.
The KBB website does have prices for various condition cars, not just perfect condition.
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This has an interesting discussion on formatting issue. There was a lot of stuff in Win9x that sacrificed performance for compatibility. On the one hand it's kind of impressive that so much old stuff kept working, but it definitely held back Windows performance compared to contemporaries.
Much like today, my biggest problems with Win9x were driver related. Since it still supported the old VxD drivers, a lot of hardware manufacturers only did very minor work to bring their drivers into the Win9x world and called it a day. I remember I had a cheap no-name sound card and later a gameport card that caused me no end of trouble.
I tend to think most people complaining about the stability of Win9x are viewing it through tinted lenses of history - the NT line was indeed significantly more robust, but Windows 95 was a huge improvement over Win31 in almost every way.
I worked at MindSpring/Earthlink back in that era, and I think it was a branded version of the Shiva dialer made famous by Netscape. It looked/worked very much like Win9x's DUN and worked pretty well. I still have my selection of discs in a closet somewhere, should pull it out for nostalgia's sake.
NT4 will always bring back more painful memories than almost any other OS of the era. It never failed you'd get the guy with no service packs, no RAS installed, and Internet Explorer 2.0 who couldn't find his discs and was mad at us that he couldn't connect to anything. Then he'd find his disc and you'd spend an hour getting RAS installed, service packs (re)installed, browsers working, etc. Throw in RASPPPoE for DSL fun too.
The author himself calls it an "Abominable Snow Monster", as seen here. I guess that's more a yeti than bear. Possibly NSFW icon on the page? :)
I have a Nook Simple Touch, rooted, and run all kinds of stuff on it.
But not one other person I've talked to with one even realizes its Android, much less anything else.
The Nook Color owners are often a little more aware, but I know several people that bought them specifically to root. Plenty of the other owners still have no idea what it's running underneath. If you look on the sales pages for all the various Nooks you won't find a bit of Android on them. You can't install standard Android apps on them without rooting/hacking, and even then you may end up with unideal button arrangements (since they don't have even the usual required Android buttons).
If anything, all them being Android does is increase their interest to the geek community and doesn't do much at all to raise Android in the public awareness.
This is the point so many fans of modern Firefox and other open source browsers forget. Netscape wasn't about open web standards and cross-browser compatibility until relatively recently - probably after the fall of Netscape itself and beginning of Mozilla/Gecko. Way back in the mists of time, Netscape 2.0 was roundly criticized for introducing a bunch of proprietary tags (many of which were later adopted but at the time weren't) and Microsoft Internet Explorer 1.0 was praised for adhering to standards. I can't find it now but recently I stumbled on an ancient page that urged a boycott of Netscape 2.0 and explained in great detail what proprietary tags it had and which were safe to use.
Not sure if serious... but for me on, say, my 3GS I have to hit the home button, slide to unlock, put in my access code, find my camera app (which isn't hard, mind), and load it. Even if it takes 1.1 seconds to load the app, the rest of the process makes the matter of a second or two difference mostly irrelevant.
Probably getting a Samsung Galaxy S II soon.
This fan thing kind of amused me, I very seriously tried to use a tablet PC for notes in college and work in the early 2000s, and mostly succeeded. The thing that killed it for me was somewhat short battery life, and a fan too noisy for classroom use. If I kept the power management at minimum (which dropped the processor speed down to about 400mhz from 1ghz) sometimes I could keep the fan from starting up, but once it did it was very distracting in a quiet classroom. Sad to see they haven't improved.
I'd love to see something like an ipad with a stylus for writing and something as good as OneNote for note taking/organizing.
I think the biggest failing of cleverbot is a lack of consistent answers and lack of the understanding of a "topic at hand".
It'd really help the immersion if it had a "bio" of sorts, like a consistent set of answers for hometown, country, etc. Maybe even give it knowledge of some local color so it'd survive a deeper probing.
The other problem is it needs some method of keeping track of what it's talking about, what it's said, and such. If it asks you a question, you answer it, and then it asks why you're talking about that subject that'd destroy the immersion right there. If it could understand a string of conversation on a topic, even if it's still using canned responses, it'd really help its ability to converse.
I realize that hearing aids need to be especially good quality for good results, but it seems like in this day and age of miniaturized and cheap electronics that there should be dirt cheap hearing aids that are good quality and small. I have a very hard time believing that it costs as much as a good used car to make a pair of amplifiers, even especially good ones.
Or maybe I'm misunderestimating just what goes into the things. I don't claim particular knowledge
Could be lots of reasons. I'm not sure it'd be the same now, but when I was doing home end-user tech support in the late 90's and early 2000s a lot of people genuinely didn't get that email didn't work like the postal service where typos would likely be corrected and the mail still get where it was going. I was yelled at by more than one (mostly older) person who didn't understand why their email didn't arrive after we "fixed it".
I kind of expect it's also just a lot of people don't know/don't care and aren't paying attention.
I'm genuinely curious (for both HURD and DNF) how much of the code is actually "original" code (or art, or other assets) from all those years ago vs. essentially a rewrite from scratch. We know DNF was essentially tossed and restarted several times; I wonder how much the released version has from old versions.
One of my big reasons for jailbreaking is installing Backgrounder and SwitcherMod to take over control of multitasking. I have it set to not background apps by default (except for a couple apps like Safari and ipod) and SwitcherMod to get rid of recently used apps in the switcher. That way it acts much more like a taskbar/dock of running apps rather than trying to hide which apps are running and which aren't. I'm smart enough to know the difference between running and not running and like being able to control what I leave running.
I used to be the anything-goes sort of dumpster-diver/old stuff-taker and I ended up with a lot of junk in the name of "collecting" or "preservation". I got rid of a ton of stuff not too long ago (95% of it boring beige box stuff with nothing particular interesting about it). I kept a few interesting curiosities like a Fujtisu Stylistic 1000 tablet just because it was neat. Bought it for $10 new in box a few years ago. I just don't have the time or interest to mess with lots of junk anymore, and most of my actual needs/wants for vintage hardware is well-covered by emulation these days.
Screw 512 megs, I ran pre-sp2 on an ancient P-233MMX tablet PC with 96 megs of ram usably. Served as a ethernet-wireless bridge in a remote part of my house for years.
Incidentally, I run Win7 quite well on a P4M-2ghz with 2 gigs of RAM. It's a little sluggish in spots but I mostly blame that on the slow HD. Very usable though.
Personally, as a bit of a gamer (don't have the time I used to, but ah well) I was interested in the newer DirectX versions. Also, the 64 bit versions so I could use all my RAM. I don't even mind the "superbar" thing now that I'm used to it.
You can argue yourself in circles that Microsoft "could" have implemented everything in XP, but they didn't. So as a user, my choice is either to upgrade to get the new features or accept the limitations of the old version.
And like it or not, it's just the way OSes have been handled. Add some new features to a new version, sell it as new. There's no technical reason Microsoft couldn't have written a full Win32 implementation for Windows 3.1. Or written DirectX 11 for Windows 95. But at some point a developer has to make a decision to cut off the old and write for the new.
I suppose we could all be using Windows 1.0 SP56.
I'd say it's more like they usually get it on the third try.
Windows 3.0 was the first version of Windows that gained any traction.
WFW311 was (sorta) the third of the Win3x line and was popular and long-lived
98SE was the third in the 9x line and was reasonably well-liked.
NT 3.51 was the third version of NT, and was probably the first version of NT to gain traction.
XP SP2 was where it really hit its stride, as the third version of XP.
It doesn't always work though. NT4 and Win2k were both fairly well-liked, XP was hated first but loved now...
The amazing thing is the programs in the archive run just fine on XP. Some of them I didn't let do much (like chkdsk and initlarg) because of what they might do, but they run fine.
I think the average /. user probably has a different perspective than the people the article is referring to. I graduated high school in 1999, and thus was a teenager during the mid-late 90s. Indeed, pretty much everyone I knew, even people without computers who only used them at school, libraries, or friends' houses had AIM screennames. Only the geekier/techier (and usually a little older than me) folks knew about or used the likes of IRC or Usenet.
And, much like Facebook and Twitter are/were, us geeks were always a little reluctant to admit we had AIM, but we dealt with it due to so many other people using it that it was hard not to.
Not to diminish yours and other old-timers' point, "Online Presence" surely did go well back before this, but I do think the article has a point that at least in the US, AIM was the first time the average person really had that. We used our Info screens much like today's Facebook status updates would be with random ramblings, about us notes, etc. Substitute ICQ and other similar things internationally as appropriate.
Will always hate that stupid "Uh oh!" default message sound from ICQ too...
If you install a little addon called KernelEx in Win98, you can use up to at least Firefox 3.x just fine on it. Haven't tried the 4.x betas as yet, but 3.x works. Thunderbird should work too
Chrome doesn't seem to work yet in KernelEx but it tries. Maybe someday.
I still use Mac OS 7.x on an old LC475 for fun, and tend to alternate between Netscape 4 with Stylesheets and JS turned off, and the last version of iCab that supports m68k. Netscape was actually very usable for general reading, and worked better than you'd expect (especially if I sought out mobile sites). iCab would have been nearly completely usable, except that it didn't handle multitasking very well at all. While rendering, Netscape would slow the box down but it'd keep running my other programs, allow task switching, IRC chatting, etc. iCab would just lock the box up hard for several minutes at a time while it rendered everything.
Except for the Commodore 64 emulator, which is on there. And the iDungeon app which is a PDP-11 emu. There's also some chiptune music players that are effectively emulators.
It's not that they ban emulators, but that they ban ones that have open-ended disk images and the like. The ones that are on there are very specifically aimed with locked down data available. More or less anyway.
I've been using a slate form-factor Fujitsu Stylistic ST4121 for about 7 years now and it's done me very well (and it was my third Fujitsu tablet). I have to agree with your assessment though - they're brilliant for everything except data entry. Note taking, web surfing, many mouse-driven games, etc are great, but for anything that needs (computer readable) data entry it's a chore.
Still love the thing, and handles Windows 7 decently enough even with its limited specs.
I've seen a few intersections like this nearly cause accidents because people see the countdown almost to zero and stop at the green light. More than anything, I think that any traffic flow design will be fouled up by some percentage of the people.
The main problem with KBB and similar is it doesn't really take rarity or desirability of a car into account for pricing. There are lots of cars that the bluebook value even for an "Excellent"-rated car is pretty low, while you won't find it for close that.
The KBB website does have prices for various condition cars, not just perfect condition.
From now on, I'm going to refer to jailbreaking as "Fencejumping".