XP is garbage

Yea, c'mon, Guy has gone to great lengths not to see my words anymore. Don't abuse him beyond his ability to cope.

Give him a break. He works hard.

JB

I miss it very much. Very much indeed. I intend to go back there as soon as it is possible.

FWIW, and that ain't much, with Mozilla, and MR/2 ICE for mail, I get no viruses, and no spyware. Can't declare I never will, but I keep looking for it, and after four months, ..... nothing.

I have gotten a few spyware progs when forced to use IE, but I only went to M$'s site, and within minutes, there were several on my machine. Hmm......

Thanks for helping me remember there is a real operating system out there. Looking forward to using it again.

JB

Yes, you're right. I had the two companies conflated. It's made of (stainless) steel, you know. ;-)

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

I assume you've tried Odin but have you tried it recently? They keep improving it. There's also Svista but I haven't tried it yet.

Ted

Have you tried OO? I believe it's supposed to do PP.

Ted

Typical of the Form-Fouls-Function syndrome that plagues Word as well. A friend, now retired from university teaching, complained constantly of these guys who had to use six different fonts in a 100K document to remind people of a comittee meeting.

Years ago I wrote an "electronic blackboard" package that differed in a few major respects from Power Point (which, BTW, was stollen from IBM's Story Board for DOS). My package ran through the presentation at a rate I controlled at any point I could interupt the flow and insert an example in response to a question or my thoughts I could skip over any part that I felt was irrelevent in this particular group and optionally mark it for deletion All insertions were also marked

Later, away from the pressures of the meeting or classroom, I could review the additions and "deletions" and choose to actually delete or include. As well as the replacement of information with glitz, both Story Board and Power Point provide a canned presentation with minimal interaction.

Ted

Most of my presentation have been on the technical side. My ECHO package was/is written in APL and gives me immediate access to serious calculating power. I found this greatly helped make presentations more interactive.

Ted

Doesn't it just make me glad I run eCS!! Although I do have W2K on this machine and use it for a couple of things occasionally, I *never* connect to the internet from it.

BTW, This machine came with a "repair partition" that re-installs W2K. You can download a floppy image that will restore the link to it if that gets clobbered. I used DFSee to make an image of the repair partition so I could have that GB for my use. A bootable CD with DFSee could restore that if it were needed.

I much prefer the way eCS is handled. I ordered it from Mensys.nl, supplied a credit card number and downloaded the .ISO images to burn a CD. While that was happening, I got an e-mail with my registration and in short order I was up and running and still am. :-))

Ted

Hello Spehro,

We used to have a fully manual one. The two sides were gull wings and you laid a piece of toast into each. Then, when you thought it's about time you quickly flipped both down and back up which reverted the slices. However, it had to be done just the right way and very simultaneously. Almost like learning to drive a stick shift car.

That sounds delicious and probably will avoid dangerously low cholesterol levels ;-)

Must be Krups and not Krupp though. Krupp is a steel company that makes tanks and stuff.

Regards, Joerg

Just wait a while. When Longhorn comes out, XP will look good by comparison.

-- Paul Hovnanian mailto: snipped-for-privacy@Hovnanian.com

------------------------------------------------------------------ Porsche 928: 0 to c in 2.125 years, 2.435 light-years per mile^3 of gas

Hello Frithiof Andreas,

Then you are not only assuming that the designers were clever but also had a good quality mindset. In that respect I was often disappointed. Not with stuff like QNX though, these guys would be able to instantly answer questions such as what the ISR latency was in a particular situation. I tried that at an Embedsyscon with another (much bigger) enterprise and the answers where a lot of "uhm, ahem, need to talk to our partners, blah, blah...".

Maybe not quite. I do like progress but only if it makes sense. To me a uC in a toaster just doesn't. It reminds me of the Walkman. When I was young they came out with a new one that had a "talk-through" button. Hey, people with headphones on could talk to their class mates again albeit at the expense of battery juice. Wow! What a progress...

It's the same with lots of daily use equipment. Much of it will simply fall dormant if the power fails or just glitches. I remember the outages we had when the CA gvt deregulated and botched the electricity supply. My wife and I never complained, just lived our lives, cooked, watched TV, heard radio, cooked nice meals etc. Many neighbors couldn't. They didn't know how to cook with charcoal, their new-fangled "all digital" gas stoves wouldn't work without 120V and their fancy cable or Sat TV wouldn't do squat. Some couldn't even call anyone because all they had was cordless phones. And you'd be surprised how many don't know how to unlatch their electric garage door openers. What, you can open a garage door by hand...?

Regards, Joerg

Hi,

I'm aware of someone who has to format XP on a monthly basis because it crashes as you say, taking the file system with it, can't recognise the partition table, can't be repaired or restored by any other means, and all data is lost.

He's already using NTFS..

His mistake was in being an early adopter. Got one of those AMD 64 bit machines when they first came out, doesn't trust himself enough to update the bios, etc. Format away.

I was just typing a manual in Word 2003. It handles inserted pictures very strangely, putting them pretty much anywhere it feels like, disregarding where you clicked or where you drag them in. Then somehow a huge block of whitespace got inserted in the middle of a paragraph (an invisible, non-deletable image? who knows?) and I wasted about a half hour trying to splice the paragraph back together.

I finally got smart and slapped myself upside the head and said, "But of course... this is Windows!" So I saved the doc, closed Word, then re-opened it, and everything was fixed. Bill always did have a thing for self-modifying code.

John

OK I've been watching the 'its OK' and 'its garbage' threads all week. My XP Pro on an Athlon 3200XP has not had a blue screen ever. XP was installed last June. One bout with a virus at Christmas. Also running XP Pro on a Sempron 2500 for the HDTV recorder with an ATI HDTV wonder. No problems there either. My $0.01 (half off!) GG

John, please edit the subject line when relying to this sort of thing. Thanks!

I found that my webpage at

I've never met the man either, but his reputation among the DECies is pretty much unanimous. Use his name on alt.folklore.computers and stand back! ;-)

WinNT has nothing to do with OS/2, other than it was once called OS/2

I've played a little with OO, but not with that end of it. FrameMaker is my text processor of choice.

When I was teaching, I'd use nothing other than white (or black - the college didn't spend much on education;) boards. I tried teaching from prepared materials, but it put the students to sleep. Using the board made it easier to gauge the pace of the students and to veer off into a ditch when necessary.