Isn't this a Contradiction in Terms? IBM Dishes Out Small, Low-Power Supercomputer

Certainly after Service Pack 4 the thing seems to be almost useable. It's still a crock of sh*t of course, just a much more stable one. BTW, isn't it ludicrous that we have to periodically install these patches 'on the wing' as it were? Any *other* company in the world would fully develop and de-bug a product *before* releasing it. What a bunch of piss-taking jerks M$ are. :-( This is what happens when you allow a virtual monopoly situation to arise, I'm afraid.

How can it be Karma? If it were, it would not discriminate between the bikes. They'd either *both* be crap, middling, or wonderful depending on how many bugs you've stepped on or squished in your life. I used to believe my computers were possessed because they were so trouble. Evenually I found out the problem was basically down to the Windows (spit!) "operating system." All the time I used command line systems I never had any problem. All my grief began with Win 3.1. Should have realised it before, I suppose, but the MS marketing machine is soooo convincing.

Yeah, well that, too. Reminds me of the minicomputer that we had for student assembler classes. They would screw up in their programs and the processor would overwrite some area of the OS. So the OS would crash, and jump to a location in memory and halt. The front panel would display that hexadecimal location: DEAD

But shouldn't that be data ARE not instructions? ;-)

In article , snipped-for-privacy@nospam.com mentioned...

And there lies the rub. All those long unbooted systems could be guilty of being neglected or unattended, or admins have been negligent in proper OS maintenance/upgrades.

Now watch all the feathers fly, as *nix defenders try to whittle what I've said down to matchsticks. I didn't say that the above was bad; if the box is doing its job, then no sense in fixin' what ain't broken. But just the increasing demand for services should put those archaic boxes out to salvage and get them replaced with a more powerful box. Unless, of course, you have acres of rack space. ;-)

I read in sci.electronics.design that Watson A. Name - Watt Sun, Dark Remover wrote (in ) about 'Isn't this a Contradiction in Terms? IBM Dishes Out Small, Low-Power Supercomputer', on Sun, 16 Nov 2003:

Yes, I find Acrobat (5.0.5) to be troublesome. It grabs huge chunks of memory for no reason, screws up the icons on the desktop (replacing the little arrow on short-cut icons with something indecipherable) and generally shows instability.

I've heard that the latest version is no better, which is why I haven't upgraded.

I read in sci.electronics.design that Watson A. Name - Watt Sun, Dark Remover wrote (in ) about 'Isn't this a Contradiction in Terms? IBM Dishes Out Small, Low-Power Supercomputer', on Sun, 16 Nov 2003:

With Win98SE, the memory check is still done in DOS before Windoze is booted, AIUI.

But Norton System Doctor, or one of its competitors, does all the checks rather better anyway.

I read in sci.electronics.design that Watson A. Name - Watt Sun, Dark Remover wrote (in ) about 'Isn't this a Contradiction in Terms? IBM Dishes Out Small, Low-Power Supercomputer', on Sat, 15 Nov 2003:

No; it appears to be an oxymoron (figure of speech involving an apparent contrast), but oxymorons don't have to be false statements.

No doubt the product is smaller, and less power-hungry, than yer averridge supercomputer.

It'd never happen. Nobody could afford the license :-)

Same here. I relegated Acrobat v5.0.5 to the back burner, in case I receive something I can't read, and went back to Acrobat v4.05a as the PDF tool of choice.

I don't know why some of these software shops can't leave a good thing alone and instead develop a new product. Adobe just has to keep adding bloat until they destroy Acrobat.

And I see JASC doing the same thing to Paint Shop Pro :-(

I tend to stick to a good thing, so I'm still using Eudora Pro v3.0.5 as my E-mailer ;-)

...Jim Thompson

In article , snipped-for-privacy@jmwa.demon.contraspam.yuk mentioned...

I was POed at the 6.0 reader. The damn thing wouldn't install until W2000 had SP2 installed. Not only that, but I believe they are trying to squeeze more out of the users by making it do "features" that you have to go to their weebsite and pay for. Some features. >:-(

I suggest you keep a copy of 5.0 whatever the latest was, and burn it to CD-R for future installation. Adobe no longer has it on their site (I couldn't find it), and I had to find it at some Russian site or whatever. It's named something like AR505EN.exe (?). Get it before it becomes extinct. Most documents can still be read with AR 4.0, so I don't think that 5.0 will become obsolete for quite awhile. Especially if Adobe keeps on squeezing the users of AR 6.0 for more money.

In article , snipped-for-privacy@jmwa.demon.contraspam.yuk mentioned...

Have to keep that in mind, thanks. BTW, I can go to DOS box and rename a bunch of similar filenames in 8.3 format to a different name, like xxx123 and xxx124 to yyy123 and yyy124, etc. Like c:> REN xxx*.ext yyy*.ext

But how does one do this in windows, with longer filenames? Does it require a utility? Thanks.

I read in sci.electronics.design that Watson A. Name - Watt Sun, Dark Remover wrote (in ) about 'Isn't this a Contradiction in Terms? IBM Dishes Out Small, Low-Power Supercomputer', on Sun, 16 Nov 2003:

No. If you right-click on the filename in Windows Explorer you get a drop-down menu that includes 'Rename', which highlights the filename and puts the cursor at its end. Very convenient for deleting the extension, which is probably NOT what you want to do. (;-)

You can also do this by left-clicking once on the filename to highlight it and then again, NOT TOO QUICKLY, to rename.

Ditto.

I can't really think of anything else that tends to crash Windows, besides itself every so often when shutting down, for instance. The occasional IE crash might cause problems, WinAmp's been known to crap out for some reason, my DOS games have done a little I 'spose. Overall Win98SE isn't all that bad. Then again, it could be that I've learned subconciously how to steer around crashes! ;-)

Tim

-- "That's for the courts to decide." - Homer Simpson Website @

OMG! WTF is CP/M doing on the sidebar! I haven't seen that in ten years, booting a Kaypro from one of those big 5 1/4" floppies ;)

Tim

-- "That's for the courts to decide." - Homer Simpson Website @

In article , snipped-for-privacy@jmwa.demon.contraspam.yuk mentioned...

Well, in my DOS example, I tried to show that I was renaming multiple files, all at once.

If you kill it in the task manager and restart it, you can get around most of that stuff without rebooting.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

I read in sci.electronics.design that Watson A. Name - Watt Sun, Dark Remover wrote (in ) about 'Isn't this a Contradiction in Terms? IBM Dishes Out Small, Low-Power Supercomputer', on Sun, 16 Nov 2003:

So you did, and I didn't realise. Sorry.

In news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com (Spehro Pefhany):

Just an aside, I've never had to terminate the LizardTech .DjVu viewer process, nor the encoder.

Acrobat reader occasionally locks up though even in XP, so I disabled the .PDF browser plugin, and it works much better that way. Can only have one .PDF open at a time then, however.

I guess we're stuck with it though, huh. Bugs and all.

Starting it! Before I've even had a chance to log on, it just blue screens, and starts dumping memory. Not a lot to be done when it does that!

Damien