On 28 January 2014 15:09, tom <thomas.w.cranston at gmail.com> wrote: Works fine. Did you remember to use the whole URL? It was long enough to line-wrap and many email clients are too stupid to make the whole thing the link, even if it is correctly enclosed in <angle brackets>. -- Liam Proven * Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk * GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com * Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 * Cell: +44 7939-087884

On 01/28/2014 10:39 AM, Geoffrey Oltmans wrote: True, also from USB optical drive. With the demise of net neutrality, one could see the day when you could no longer download operating systems. I have Linux distros optical media going back years. What if I want to install on a very old machine. The old distro may not be available. Depending on a thumbdrive over 4GB is iffy. Storing lots of stuff on thumb drives is cost prohibitive. You can get about 1 distro on each one. Multiply that by a hundred! Life span of electronic drives is short as well. I find the "Demise of the PC" curious. Compared to the hand held devices, they have a very long life, so the demand for new PC's and Laptops is lagging. It is not that people do not desire PC's or Laptops, so much as they do not need to replace them very often. Anything bought in the last 5 to seven years is very adequate for most peoples uses. Why buy one with the latest bells and whistles when the one you have suits you fine. The new ultra thin light weight laptops are very difficult to work on. Like strip it completely down to do repairs. That's if it's plastic body is not permanently welded together. Planned obsolescence anybody? It is interesting that there is a demand for handhelds with diminished display sizes, while at the same time the demand for larger monitors and TV screens is increasing at the same time.

On 28 January 2014 18:47, Peter Corlett <abuse at cabal.org.uk> wrote: I have an external DVD-rom drive for that. I've come home from work (I'm the IT manger, as in I manage to do all the IT, except the programming) and guess what awaits me, a PC to fix. I fixed this one a year ago, and it's apparently infected with porn-malware... again. Oh well, another ?20 for me. I think I'm not charging enough. -- Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems: "The Future Begins Tomorrow" Visit us at: http://www.yoyodyne-propulsion.net -------- "It's easy to win. Anybody can win." -- Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly

On 1/28/14, Zane Healy <healyzh at aracnet.com> wrote: Indeed, dot matrix is hardly dead at all. I'm not quite sure what the author is trying to say with #9 -- DOS is dead? Command line interfaces are dead? I don't think either is true. These sorts of lists always seem to ignore emulation of old platforms; particularly when it comes to things like the 2600, I wouldn't say they've "faded into history". Plenty of people still playing 2600, NES, etc. games. The various Atari-inside-a-joystick products are very popular.

On 01/28/2014 04:31 PM, tom wrote: Indeed. When our state rolled out its ACA enrollment drive, the web interface was useless, so a telephone or FAX alternative was offered. A FAX sent got right through, with a record of receipt; people who telephoned were put on hold for ages. Basic 19th century technology wins again... --Chuck

On 01/28/2014 07:58 PM, Tom wrote: Legal - In some parts of the world documents faxed are considered legal, as if the had been hand delivered. It's been bandied about that if the net went down, fax would still work (Providing there are still land lines)

On 29/01/2014 16:25, Paul Koning wrote: Does that mean that unlike the UK, e-mails are not legal in the USA?

On Wed, 29 Jan 2014, Dave wrote: Is YOUR email relayed through Fort Meade?

On Tue, Jan 28, 2014 at 06:31:26PM -0600, tom wrote: [...] Perhaps in the USA with its free local calls, but they were never that popular in the UK where all calls are metered[0], and they're obsolete now. Also, the vast majority of our phone lines are mobiles, and it's rather hard to fax from one of those![1] In my conslutting travels, I have a handful of clients who requested timesheets or other documentation to be faxed to them, but they were as much an outlier as the one that wanted triplicate carbon copies posted to them. Also notable was that they often had 08xx premium-rate fax numbers, which gives away their true motivation. Finding a still-working fax machine to send the damn things is such a chore I tend to just print out a copy and drop it in the post. I'm happy to wait a day or two for Royal Mail to do their bit. UK law doesn't require hard-copy document exchange, and I've formed substantial B2B contracts just fine via email. The only time I am legally required to send hardcopy is as part of the pre-action protocol when I'm suing somebody who owes me money. The suing itself though has gone online! [0] These days, the price is often 0p/min, or at some nominal expensive rate that's discounted 100%. [1] The networks still supported it when I last tested it, but that was a while ago when I last owned a phone that could initiate a (HS)CSD call. I'm not sure if the capability was completely lost when we migrated from GSM to UMTS.

Or 8 million other worth inclusions. It is just another worthless top n list. -- Will