beware of the updates you install

Me too, however I have encountered counterfeit FTDI usb-to-serial devices that were flaky. They did not have genuine chipsets but some cheap knockoff. You know things are bad when the Chinese are knocking one another off.

--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

I apologize for my sloppy writing. I meant "provide a systematic solution".

When I upgraded to a new computer, I found that even the adapters from reputable companies would not work. The result was that I had to replace three serial devices with USB equivalents. (Yes, the adapters were correctly installed.)

The //apparent// reason is that they only work with software that //directly// addresses the serial port. Stick a driver in there, and all bets are off.

I've never seen that happen.

I would think it would be quite the opposite. The driver causes the port to appear as a device file, and software that just opens up the device file and writes to it will be fine.

If you need the device to be COM1: because that is what is hardcoded into badly-written software, it's possible to do some device mapping to make the USB device show up under a different name.

The problems would occur when software attempts to talk to the device directly, which I _hope_ no Windows code would ever do. Old DOS code did a lot of that, but Windows 95 finally brought I/O management into the 1970s and removed any benefits to that kind of stuff.

--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

Well XP is a lot older than that and still fine for most purposes, and still used by a lot of people. Most people simply upgrade the OS when they buy a new computer, you won't find a new one with XP on it any more even if you wanted it. And you probably won't find al the necessary drivers if you did want to downgrade. Most people don't necessarily need to race out and upgrade their existing Windows 7 computers to Windows 8 though.

Trevor.

Windows 7 outsells Windows 8 anyway, since business operations are heavily invested in Windows and sees no reason to try to pretend that their applications need to run on smartphones.

expertise of

Not in the real world (this is _almost_ too harsh). No matter how you slice it someone has to do the work to make it work, and "seamlessly" could limit you to one or no provider.

producing

the

There is nothing wrong with creating useful products nor profiting from it. MS, like all large corporations, has no interest in producing "best" anything, just an acceptable thing. Mediocraty reigns in the commercial world more than the FOSS world by a little bit.

And so totally cannot handle non-MS partition types. Assuming you are talking about the pay ware product. The FOSS tools handle many more partition types. Chose anything YOU want.

?-)

That is what the real home page says. Surprised me. It works really well in wine. Not as powerful as Image magic let alone GIMP, but much easier to use. The normal tradeoff.

?-)

fee

I wouldn't be too sure about that with all the security disasters they have been having. Then again MS seems to have to survived them.

?-)

the

then

way

Microsoft

the de

with

years,

unable

into

In average business/office or home use that can work; in industrial land

20+ year life times are expected and often required. ISA machines are still available to support that market.

?-)

I beg to differ... Pioneer plasma. Nikon & Canon cameras. HP just-about-anything (but calculators in particular). The SX-70.

I'd definitely agree that the Nikon and Canon products had a lot of corner-cutting going on... they were designed at a price point for a market.

HP is weird, though. HP was a large corporation that didn't act so much like a large corporation, because even when it was public it was still managed basically as a private operation by actual engineers who made products for other engineers. HP is very much the exception to the rule, or at least it was until Carly wrecked it.

Polaroid is another one of those oddities, a company actually driven by engineering. Unfortunately a side-effect of that was making a lot of ingenious and amazing products that nobody wanted, like Polavision. The SX-70 was interesting too; in terms of image quality it was a step down from the older 2-part pack technology, but Polaroid found out what the market really wanted and made it for them and if it wasn't necessarily the best image quality that was fine.

--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

If you plug a USB memory stick into just about any computer, it'll figure out what to do with it.

So no - this doesn't limit you to just one vendor.

There are different kinds of companies. Some produce "bests"; some are aggregators. M$ is an aggregator. Microsoft "impedance matched" large-box retail better.

Things are also path-dependent. Because Microsoft did things a certain way, they ended up being an early platform for audio software. So - in a way - that's a "best".

There is come conceptual "shear" between "best" and "quality". Apple played the "quality" game and didn't do as well until the iWhatever in mass consumer space, but won in pro graphics and pro audio ( because ProTools ).

But of you want diamond-like precision, SFAIK the answer is still RADAR, and it's anything but mass market.

FOSS culturally redesigned itself as a heresy against Microsoft. That was largely a mistake.

--
Les Cargill

Not their "best" products. They're better than "acceptable".

I was thinking more of their consumer products. Their current calculators -- mostly designed in Australia -- are high in features and low in elegance.

The company was driven by Dr Land's vision, which had no regard whatever for what people might or might not want. Polavision was his one error, and it cost him his position at the company. Up to then, everything was a success -- and Polaroid had spent not one penny on market research.

Yes, but...

The SX-70 was Land's -- not the market's -- idea of what an ideal camera should be. As a piece of engineering, it remains startling, much more than "acceptable".

PS: You said nothing about Pioneer plasma.

What is RADAR and what does it do?

I must, to my distaste, agree here.

It's a standalone digital sound recorder and editor. It does exactly what it says on the box no more, no less.

--
Tciao for Now! 

John.

It's a digital audio workstation that is designed like a tape machine. It was designed by people who understood the studio workflow and did not want to alter it, just to make it faster.

--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."