You remember what happened in the end: people used OS/2 exclusively to run windows apps but at the cost of a bunch of compatibility issues
Actually, what happened next was Microsoft came out with vxd-dependent software and Win-OS/2 became useless.
Re:That's all very well...
on
Pimp Your XP
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I don't think there has ever been a new MS OS release that has run faster on the same hardware than its predecessor.
I can think of two: (1) DOS 5 versus DOS 4 [5 could put part of itself in the UMB, while DOS 4 was the worst DOS for lower memory hogging], (2) Windows for Workgroups (i.e. v3.11) versus Windows 3.1 -- 3.11 came with VFAT and this vxd made it perform better.
XP has the "tooltip for more info" thing, but having to hover over the date to get it is annoyingly slow.
I've used a shareware product that provides a vastly better clock, with fully customizable time, date, font, positionable anywhere -- xReminder Pro. I registered and use it mainly for its equally customizable reminder features -- I now have over 200 events from daily, weekly and monthly to annual things like birthdays. It has become an invaluable part of my life, a cheap hedge against old-age induced forgetfulness.
How did this troll get modded anything but comical? Wait, I know why, because the Troll mod will get slapped on this rebuttal. So be it.
10. Does any/.er running XP get blue screens on a regular basis? How about in 2007? How about any number more than one for a given machine. On about half a dozen machines, over five years, I have had two, and one was from failing hardware.
9. Does any/.er ever get p0wned? Thought not.
8. What part of zero cost is hard to swallow? No one buys XP. They buy a system that comes with it installed. Dell's linux experiment is about to show how few linux users will be putting their money where their mouth's are.
7. This one is so hilarious I can't see my keyboard to type a reply. 4 words: Salty tears of laughter.
6. No need to comment on this nonsense either.
5. Patches are dicey. I am glad _I_ need to initiate patching. Upgrades usually involve money and so the vendor contacts you to encourage you to upgrade. But who among us upgrades their software any more? My Office 2000 works perfectly for my needs. My email program, Eudora, is no longer being updated at all and I am fine with that. CuteFTP v2.8 still works for me. Microsoft knows that the only way to get users to upgrade is to force them -- hence Vista is introduced, whether we need it or not.
4. This is your *nix bias showing, nothing more. I could type the same things about *nix, but instead I just avoid using *nix.
3. Again showing your *nix bias. I have zero of your system integration "issues".
2. More than one window necessary? Download some software to do that. The very last thing I want is a virtual desktop. Thinking of it gave me a Windows 3.x flashback.
1. Can't c&p with a mouse? True. Rats and hamsters don't work either. Computer mice? No problem. The modal dialog rant lacked specifics...wonder why. The Programs menu could not be better for me. And by the way I'm not sure anyone anywhere calls it a good interface -- usually they just rant about it randomly, or accept and use it.
Oh, by the way, I tried the live CD of the latest Ubuntu and I really liked it. No reason to use it, but I was impressed. Now, back to XP.
There's still no way to configure the taskbar clock to show you additional information or information you want to see like the current date.
A task bar height of more than one row will show the date -- just click the top of it then drag it upward. Combined with auto-hide and you have the best of both worlds.
I almost never print anything any more, but the wife and kids might print a page or two a day. We use a Lexmark multi-function that was given to us by a friend. We've used it for years and it continues to work great -- could you explain why the cost of machine and ink is so bad compared to the others?
"standby list erosion" where a number of low priority applications can (over time) cause the foreground application to swap out.
FWIW, I think this can be seen when you bring up the Start menu after you have not used your system for a while. All the start menu icons have to load from disk and it takes 30 seconds to get your otherwise-idle desktop back.
I've have a (sucky) Dell desktop and when it is clean inside it runs quietly, even at 100% CPU load. Then as the days go by and the dog scratches his derriere repeatedly the fan noise rises. After about 10 days to two weeks I have to shut it down, vacuum it thoroughly inside and it is quiet once again.
So, how do these coolers perform with some dust in them? That is the cooler I want for the increased uptime.
Yes there is a difference. A cache has to be written to disk at times determined by the OS. A RAM disk does not, unless we want it to be written. Not writing to physical disk until the end of the process is faster than being forced to write to it periodically -- and very much faster when the result that we want is many times smaller than the data set being worked on.
MS-DOS has caching (through third party software) and RAM drives twenty years ago as well. Whoop.
I had the second scenario in mind. So, to put real numbers on the table: a machine with 1 or 2GB of RAM also has a 16 or 32GB RAM drive and you can right-click on file(s) or a directory and say "Put this on the RAM drive". Copy back would be either up to you, or on a timed automatic basis.
Two cores both hitting the same HD for a ton of data is going to be slower than doing the two processes sequentially. The HD speed vs CPU speed chasm is just getting wider. RAID helps, but with additional cost, complexity and its own unique drive replacement hassle.
What about a massive RAM drive? This would go flash one better in the speed department (my 8GB Ritek USB key is several times slower than a _HD_ based on my informal timings.) Battery back it up if need be.
And comparing the DOS command line to linux or any *nix shows the ignorance of the writer. I have to laugh anytime I watch the Windows IT guys doing something as simple as comparing two ini files by opening them in notepad and doing a manual line by line comparison, how lame and archaic is that.
Which is it, DOS or Windows? By the way, in DOS "fc file1 file2" works, maybe not great but it does.
Re:Why Does Encryption Need to "Scramble" Informat
on
A Mighty Number Falls
·
· Score: 1
Navajo as a written code would be near useless, I imagine. Navajo spoken on the battlefield is probably where the value was. If it takes you minutes to understand what was just said, that is a significant advantage. Still, writing down the words and cracking for the key nouns and numbers is about all it would take. Then when you heard those nouns and numbers again over the air you would have some idea what they are talking about. Navajo codetalking was all about battlefield communication I think, and is overrated today -- I mean, Japanese fought on for decades after the war ended due to their inferior communications setup.
I am not sure that Japanese ever much cared or doubted what American tactics would be, except maybe at sea. On land it was, "they will hit us hard everywhere", and they answered with human wave attacks. That kind of mis-match, and largely defensive tactics, hardly benefits from them learning what the Americans were up to every minute.
I quite agree with you about the obfuscation of TinyURLs. One of the downsides. But if one has an anti-virus, firewall and doesn't randomly type in their name & pw everywhere they go -- what is the worst that can happen?
I guess I just don't agree that marketing is an illegitimate use of email.
Agreed, and I never said otherwise. But I did say that marketers often move from text to html, or start off in html, because of economic reasons. I have seen that with CNet newsletters, Salon.com newsletters, Woody's Office Products newsletters, various quotation newsletters and I am sure others. The problem is that the switch is from information to impulse click, from text that is useful content to shiney buttons, from core competency to please-pretty-please-click-my-links so-I-can-up-my-click-count.
Email is one of many ways to learn about others. If we met belly-to-belly, things like our clothes, posture, amount of eye contact, body odor (lol), etc. would provide clues to and about the other person. Today if someone sends me an email that is pure text, except for the SIG that is in html so that it can be blue, I have just lowered my opinion of that person one notch -- Leisure Suit Larry images come to mind. They went to all that extra effort, just to tell the world they like blue or should be perceived as bluish -- I just don't get it. [It could be justified if that is the theme of their web site/product and they are just being consistent.]
The average person doesn't shorten URLs, but they also don't forward them to 8,000 people. If they do forward them to a friend, then as others have mentioned you white list them and allow that message to come through. It is about information delivery: when I want to read & process something regularly and easily, I want text. So, things I subscribe to should offer a text format.
I fight plenty of tides and yes this is one of them. As I penned elsewhere in this thread, people who publish that choose html usually do it because 1) they think it is *ach*"pretty"*ach*, 2) they want to get people clicking on stuff (as opposed to delivering the information I want), 3) they are lazy/ignorant of the format of stuff they are sending (MS, as usual, helps make it easy to send html crap).
As to html stripping, I do this. When it is worth it. Unlike stripping email headers, which is remarkably easy and quick, stripping html is more touchy -- the difference between removing a wrapper, and scraping off excess mustard and ketchup with a knife.
If we care about others, we deliver information as neatly and minimally as possible. If we are trying to show off, or profit, or we are just lazy -- html it, especially if ponies are involved!
Before TinyURL I would learn how to chop stuff off links to make them shorter. For example, CNN or Salon stories always have an index.htm that can be removed. CNet ads a bunch of fields after the "?" that are not needed, and lately added a very descriptive set of words between the first and second "/", all of which can be deleted. This web page has a link of "http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=234943&op=Rep ly&threshold=-1&commentsort=0&mode=nested&pid=1915 5471" but if I want to tell others about the story itself I would send "http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=234943". etc.
The insult is when I subscribe to a quotes list (one of my interest areas) and they send one quote with ten tons of htmlified crapola. I archive what I get and don't appreciate the staggering bloat factor inherent in html email.
Maybe insulted is the wrong word, but is not uncommon for me to unsubscribe from an email newsletter simply because it is in html. Recent examples include Papa John's pizza -- not even readable in Eudora (I turn off the gui viewer as it is spammer friendly), I have to click a link to go to a web page to read the offer. Another was some computer site, not NewEgg (that is marginally readable) -- it grouped all the product names, then grouped all the prices -- whee!
I absolutely never send HTML and consider it an insult to receive it. Links are not a good reason to use HTML. TinyURL.com the links and you are good to go.
Re:Here's how it works from another perspective
on
How Image Spam Works
·
· Score: 1
Because they make money from html advertisements themselves.
I know there are few here that like Yahoo mail, but recently things have gotten ridiculous. They now routinely convert a 1,000 byte posts into 20,000 byte emails, and you have to change your preferences to "traditional" to stop this madness. I had to switch all my @webtv.net subscribers (almost 100 of them, out of 8,000 subscribers, surprisingly) to traditional as the Yahoo superimposed ads completely blocked my content. B-e-a-utiful.
Right on. I drink Maxwell House, from a drip machine. The 40 ouncer of pre-ground gets refridgerated for days at a time. Yet it beats the pants off of Starbucks anything. Main reason: it is not over-roasted.
Flavored coffees should be illegal. Coffee snobs should move to France. Roasting or grinding at home? Surely you jest.
I'm beginning to think that the only Linux "zealots" left are Microsoft employees posing as such.
As to the article: Well done, Ubuntu. And yes I am one of those who won't continue an install unless I know for absolute certain it is protecting the data I (deliberately) left on the hard drive -- this is what stopped my last Linux install attempt. Why doesn't the default install just say "I'm setting up a 2nd (and 3rd) partition for Linux and you can just do Steps A, B & C from the Ubuntu desktop if you want to remove the old Windows partition (and reclaim its space)".
Also, for those who insist they want to overwrite the Windows partition, why doesn't the installer just offer to resize it downward? [And for the 1337 crowd, give them a command line option that bypasses the above, toasting the Windows partition -- I mean, Windows setup has cmd-line options, why not Ubuntu?]
For that matter, offer a Windows-hosted program that shrinks the Windows partition (after auto-launching and running defrag.exe) in an automated run-all-night manner. Then the steps are (1) download Ubuntu & burn a CD, (2) run the WinPartShrink thing overnight, (3) wake up and install Ubuntu, (4) make yourself a cuppa & use your XP CD as a coaster.
lilo (or equiv.) is perhaps the most important application in the Windows-to-Linux migration challenge. Tweak it, men, tweak it. Think Partition Magic levels of ease-of-use, robustness & batchability.
Slashdot Mirror
Just because it's not how you would choose to spend the money doesn't mean it was pissed away.
Actually, I can pretty much guaranty it was pissed away.
You remember what happened in the end: people used OS/2 exclusively to run windows apps but at the cost of a bunch of compatibility issues
Actually, what happened next was Microsoft came out with vxd-dependent software and Win-OS/2 became useless.
I don't think there has ever been a new MS OS release that has run faster on the same hardware than its predecessor.
I can think of two: (1) DOS 5 versus DOS 4 [5 could put part of itself in the UMB, while DOS 4 was the worst DOS for lower memory hogging], (2) Windows for Workgroups (i.e. v3.11) versus Windows 3.1 -- 3.11 came with VFAT and this vxd made it perform better.
XP has the "tooltip for more info" thing, but having to hover over the date to get it is annoyingly slow.
I've used a shareware product that provides a vastly better clock, with fully customizable time, date, font, positionable anywhere -- xReminder Pro. I registered and use it mainly for its equally customizable reminder features -- I now have over 200 events from daily, weekly and monthly to annual things like birthdays. It has become an invaluable part of my life, a cheap hedge against old-age induced forgetfulness.
How did this troll get modded anything but comical? Wait, I know why, because the Troll mod will get slapped on this rebuttal. So be it.
/.er running XP get blue screens on a regular basis? How about in 2007? How about any number more than one for a given machine. On about half a dozen machines, over five years, I have had two, and one was from failing hardware.
/.er ever get p0wned? Thought not.
10. Does any
9. Does any
8. What part of zero cost is hard to swallow? No one buys XP. They buy a system that comes with it installed. Dell's linux experiment is about to show how few linux users will be putting their money where their mouth's are.
7. This one is so hilarious I can't see my keyboard to type a reply. 4 words: Salty tears of laughter.
6. No need to comment on this nonsense either.
5. Patches are dicey. I am glad _I_ need to initiate patching. Upgrades usually involve money and so the vendor contacts you to encourage you to upgrade. But who among us upgrades their software any more? My Office 2000 works perfectly for my needs. My email program, Eudora, is no longer being updated at all and I am fine with that. CuteFTP v2.8 still works for me. Microsoft knows that the only way to get users to upgrade is to force them -- hence Vista is introduced, whether we need it or not.
4. This is your *nix bias showing, nothing more. I could type the same things about *nix, but instead I just avoid using *nix.
3. Again showing your *nix bias. I have zero of your system integration "issues".
2. More than one window necessary? Download some software to do that. The very last thing I want is a virtual desktop. Thinking of it gave me a Windows 3.x flashback.
1. Can't c&p with a mouse? True. Rats and hamsters don't work either. Computer mice? No problem. The modal dialog rant lacked specifics...wonder why. The Programs menu could not be better for me. And by the way I'm not sure anyone anywhere calls it a good interface -- usually they just rant about it randomly, or accept and use it.
Oh, by the way, I tried the live CD of the latest Ubuntu and I really liked it. No reason to use it, but I was impressed. Now, back to XP.
There's still no way to configure the taskbar clock to show you additional information or information you want to see like the current date.
A task bar height of more than one row will show the date -- just click the top of it then drag it upward. Combined with auto-hide and you have the best of both worlds.
Lexmark
I almost never print anything any more, but the wife and kids might print a page or two a day. We use a Lexmark multi-function that was given to us by a friend. We've used it for years and it continues to work great -- could you explain why the cost of machine and ink is so bad compared to the others?
"standby list erosion" where a number of low priority applications can (over time) cause the foreground application to swap out.
FWIW, I think this can be seen when you bring up the Start menu after you have not used your system for a while. All the start menu icons have to load from disk and it takes 30 seconds to get your otherwise-idle desktop back.
The general idea is that the people collectively monitor themselves, rather like Wikipedia. It is often practiced by the illuminati.
Fixed that for you.
I've have a (sucky) Dell desktop and when it is clean inside it runs quietly, even at 100% CPU load. Then as the days go by and the dog scratches his derriere repeatedly the fan noise rises. After about 10 days to two weeks I have to shut it down, vacuum it thoroughly inside and it is quiet once again.
So, how do these coolers perform with some dust in them? That is the cooler I want for the increased uptime.
Yes there is a difference. A cache has to be written to disk at times determined by the OS. A RAM disk does not, unless we want it to be written. Not writing to physical disk until the end of the process is faster than being forced to write to it periodically -- and very much faster when the result that we want is many times smaller than the data set being worked on.
MS-DOS has caching (through third party software) and RAM drives twenty years ago as well. Whoop.
(1) cache size GT frequently accessed file sizes = happiness
(2) cache size LT frequently accessed file sizes = unhappiness
I had the second scenario in mind. So, to put real numbers on the table: a machine with 1 or 2GB of RAM also has a 16 or 32GB RAM drive and you can right-click on file(s) or a directory and say "Put this on the RAM drive". Copy back would be either up to you, or on a timed automatic basis.
Two cores both hitting the same HD for a ton of data is going to be slower than doing the two processes sequentially. The HD speed vs CPU speed chasm is just getting wider. RAID helps, but with additional cost, complexity and its own unique drive replacement hassle.
What about a massive RAM drive? This would go flash one better in the speed department (my 8GB Ritek USB key is several times slower than a _HD_ based on my informal timings.) Battery back it up if need be.
I'm hoping Windows 201x will address this.
(1) Remove color cartridge from printer
(2) Purchase sheaf of non-fluorescent paper -- probably any enviro paper will do
(3) Stop and release that I rarely print anything, and even more rarely print something that matters
(4) Return to watching Americans get beat at the French Open
And comparing the DOS command line to linux or any *nix shows the ignorance of the writer. I have to laugh anytime I watch the Windows IT guys doing something as simple as comparing two ini files by opening them in notepad and doing a manual line by line comparison, how lame and archaic is that.
Which is it, DOS or Windows? By the way, in DOS "fc file1 file2" works, maybe not great but it does.
Navajo as a written code would be near useless, I imagine. Navajo spoken on the battlefield is probably where the value was. If it takes you minutes to understand what was just said, that is a significant advantage. Still, writing down the words and cracking for the key nouns and numbers is about all it would take. Then when you heard those nouns and numbers again over the air you would have some idea what they are talking about. Navajo codetalking was all about battlefield communication I think, and is overrated today -- I mean, Japanese fought on for decades after the war ended due to their inferior communications setup.
I am not sure that Japanese ever much cared or doubted what American tactics would be, except maybe at sea. On land it was, "they will hit us hard everywhere", and they answered with human wave attacks. That kind of mis-match, and largely defensive tactics, hardly benefits from them learning what the Americans were up to every minute.
all the good news channels - CBC, BBC, CNN International
CBC - Canada Bias Corporation. Yum. Calling this a "good news channel" is funny. [I was born & raised there.]
So when you hear people complain about there being nothing good on TV which to record
You record news shows? I hear that the first season of BBC News is coming out, 296 discs. Covers 1950 & 1951.
I quite agree with you about the obfuscation of TinyURLs. One of the downsides. But if one has an anti-virus, firewall and doesn't randomly type in their name & pw everywhere they go -- what is the worst that can happen?
I guess I just don't agree that marketing is an illegitimate use of email.
Agreed, and I never said otherwise. But I did say that marketers often move from text to html, or start off in html, because of economic reasons. I have seen that with CNet newsletters, Salon.com newsletters, Woody's Office Products newsletters, various quotation newsletters and I am sure others. The problem is that the switch is from information to impulse click, from text that is useful content to shiney buttons, from core competency to please-pretty-please-click-my-links so-I-can-up-my-click-count.
Email is one of many ways to learn about others. If we met belly-to-belly, things like our clothes, posture, amount of eye contact, body odor (lol), etc. would provide clues to and about the other person. Today if someone sends me an email that is pure text, except for the SIG that is in html so that it can be blue, I have just lowered my opinion of that person one notch -- Leisure Suit Larry images come to mind. They went to all that extra effort, just to tell the world they like blue or should be perceived as bluish -- I just don't get it. [It could be justified if that is the theme of their web site/product and they are just being consistent.]
The average person doesn't shorten URLs, but they also don't forward them to 8,000 people. If they do forward them to a friend, then as others have mentioned you white list them and allow that message to come through. It is about information delivery: when I want to read & process something regularly and easily, I want text. So, things I subscribe to should offer a text format.
I fight plenty of tides and yes this is one of them. As I penned elsewhere in this thread, people who publish that choose html usually do it because 1) they think it is *ach*"pretty"*ach*, 2) they want to get people clicking on stuff (as opposed to delivering the information I want), 3) they are lazy/ignorant of the format of stuff they are sending (MS, as usual, helps make it easy to send html crap).
As to html stripping, I do this. When it is worth it. Unlike stripping email headers, which is remarkably easy and quick, stripping html is more touchy -- the difference between removing a wrapper, and scraping off excess mustard and ketchup with a knife.
If we care about others, we deliver information as neatly and minimally as possible. If we are trying to show off, or profit, or we are just lazy -- html it, especially if ponies are involved!
Before TinyURL I would learn how to chop stuff off links to make them shorter. For example, CNN or Salon stories always have an index.htm that can be removed. CNet ads a bunch of fields after the "?" that are not needed, and lately added a very descriptive set of words between the first and second "/", all of which can be deleted. This web page has a link of "http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=234943&op=Rep ly&threshold=-1&commentsort=0&mode=nested&pid=1915 5471" but if I want to tell others about the story itself I would send "http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=234943". etc.
The insult is when I subscribe to a quotes list (one of my interest areas) and they send one quote with ten tons of htmlified crapola. I archive what I get and don't appreciate the staggering bloat factor inherent in html email.
Maybe insulted is the wrong word, but is not uncommon for me to unsubscribe from an email newsletter simply because it is in html. Recent examples include Papa John's pizza -- not even readable in Eudora (I turn off the gui viewer as it is spammer friendly), I have to click a link to go to a web page to read the offer. Another was some computer site, not NewEgg (that is marginally readable) -- it grouped all the product names, then grouped all the prices -- whee!
I absolutely never send HTML and consider it an insult to receive it. Links are not a good reason to use HTML. TinyURL.com the links and you are good to go.
Because they make money from html advertisements themselves.
I know there are few here that like Yahoo mail, but recently things have gotten ridiculous. They now routinely convert a 1,000 byte posts into 20,000 byte emails, and you have to change your preferences to "traditional" to stop this madness. I had to switch all my @webtv.net subscribers (almost 100 of them, out of 8,000 subscribers, surprisingly) to traditional as the Yahoo superimposed ads completely blocked my content. B-e-a-utiful.
All in the name of profit via html ads.
Right on. I drink Maxwell House, from a drip machine. The 40 ouncer of pre-ground gets refridgerated for days at a time. Yet it beats the pants off of Starbucks anything. Main reason: it is not over-roasted.
Flavored coffees should be illegal. Coffee snobs should move to France. Roasting or grinding at home? Surely you jest.
I'm beginning to think that the only Linux "zealots" left are Microsoft employees posing as such.
As to the article: Well done, Ubuntu. And yes I am one of those who won't continue an install unless I know for absolute certain it is protecting the data I (deliberately) left on the hard drive -- this is what stopped my last Linux install attempt. Why doesn't the default install just say "I'm setting up a 2nd (and 3rd) partition for Linux and you can just do Steps A, B & C from the Ubuntu desktop if you want to remove the old Windows partition (and reclaim its space)".
Also, for those who insist they want to overwrite the Windows partition, why doesn't the installer just offer to resize it downward? [And for the 1337 crowd, give them a command line option that bypasses the above, toasting the Windows partition -- I mean, Windows setup has cmd-line options, why not Ubuntu?]
For that matter, offer a Windows-hosted program that shrinks the Windows partition (after auto-launching and running defrag.exe) in an automated run-all-night manner. Then the steps are (1) download Ubuntu & burn a CD, (2) run the WinPartShrink thing overnight, (3) wake up and install Ubuntu, (4) make yourself a cuppa & use your XP CD as a coaster.
lilo (or equiv.) is perhaps the most important application in the Windows-to-Linux migration challenge. Tweak it, men, tweak it. Think Partition Magic levels of ease-of-use, robustness & batchability.