At 10:55 AM 1/17/2005, james wrote: Billionaires, even millionaires, are extremely sexy. This is sorta like the way women will say they want a man with a sense of humor, implying that Brad Pitt and Jude Law are hilarious. What's next, Bill Gates jokes? My favorite is a one-liner: "If Bill Gates had a nickel for every time Windows crashed... Oh wait! He does!" I think I'll work it into my next radio show. - John

John wrote: No, even Bill isn't that rich. In fact, I don't think there's that much money in the world.

More than 50e9, and well over 1e8. I've never used Windows for a full day with only one crash.

On Wed, 2005-01-19 at 14:44 -0500, Gary G. Sparkes Jr. wrote: Well Win2k has been very stable for me, too. Can't say it's never crashed, but it's far better than it's predecessors -- and it's successor, because I understand they've fixed this reliability problem in WinXP - more crash prone. Of course this is strictly anecdotal, your mileage must vary, simulated drivers on a closed course, do not taunt Happy Fun Ball... --S.

On Wed, 19 Jan 2005, Computer Collector Newsletter wrote: You're saying Win98 bashing was illegitimate? Um, not. ;) Proudly Fanning the Flames since 1997 -- Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org [ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ] [ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]

This thread has gotten a little far off topic methinks!

On Wed, 2005-01-19 at 20:37 -0500, Joe R. wrote: Classic suckyness. Heh. I ran Win 2k for a bit and that was sort-of-OK stability-wise, but it ate a *lot* of memory. Plus it still suffered from the gradual destruction which I hate about all Windows flavours; as the system was used it seemed to gradually slow down and eat up more disk space of its own accord (presumably registry bloat, disk caches etc.) My old laptop's on Win '95 which is doing well so far, although I don't use it for much more than Word, telnet, and occasional web access. I'll stick some free unix-a-like OS on it when Windows finally destroys itself on there. I do have access to a Win ME machine, and that thing's the biggest pile of junk I've ever seen; it can't run for more than an hour without something crashing it seems, and forget about trying to do any serious access to shared SMB directories anywhere. XP - only ever used it for 5 minutes and thought the UI was just way too warm and fuzzy and cutesey, urgh. I still miss my previous Win 3.11 laptop to be honest, but the limit in screen resolution on that became the factor in forcing an upgrade. It felt a lot more responsive than any other Windows machine I've used, despite the 486 CPU. cheers Jules

Does that mean just PROGMAN.EXE, or the whole noodle, kernel (such as it is) and all, as a virtual instance? -- ---------------------------------- personal: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ -- Cameron Kaiser, Floodgap Systems Ltd * So. Calif., USA * ckaiser(a)floodgap.com -- Make welfare as hard to get as building permits. ---------------------------

Jules Richardson wrote: Yes, this is affectionally known as Microsoft Cancer. I once contracted Microsoft Cancer on a Win98 box that manifested itself in GDI somewhere. The end result was that I could no longer drag icons. I could delete them, right-click on them, double-click, etc. -- just not drag. In fact, I couldn't drag anything at all. Being a personal computer user since early 1980s, I just adapted and used keys for everything. But you want to know the worst part? The part that really got me steamed? A week later it was working again and I hadn't done a goddamn thing!!! THAT pissed me off so much that I reloaded the entire machine. Did I learn my lesson? No; I reloaded with XP. Unfortunately, Windows is the only platform you can seriously tinker with video without spending an arm and a leg for professional solutions; Linux support still isn't there, and Mac is too expensive (and nobody but windows has avisynth and virtualdub). So I stay on Windows, for now. -- Jim Leonard (trixter(a)oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/ Want to help an ambitious games project? http://www.mobygames.com/ Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/

Cameron Kaiser wrote: Sorry, the mac mini doesn't serve my needs (I work with video and audio production, the stock mac mini isn't powerful or expandable enough). -- Jim Leonard (trixter(a)oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/ Want to help an ambitious games project? http://www.mobygames.com/ Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/

Cameron Kaiser wrote: Well, I also work with custom video post-processing ala avisynth, virtualdub, and temporal noise reduction, and the tools I need either aren't available for Mac or cost more than the hardware. But as we all know here, you use the right tool for the right job, yes? For example, I can't think of a better platform for graphic design or art magazine publishing than Mac. -- Jim Leonard (trixter(a)oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/ Want to help an ambitious games project? http://www.mobygames.com/ Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/

Not me, baby. -- ---------------------------------- personal: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ -- Cameron Kaiser, Floodgap Systems Ltd * So. Calif., USA * ckaiser(a)floodgap.com -- A service of the Department of the Redundancy Department. ------------------

Jim Leonard wrote: Neither am I. I am taking 2k images from a render farm and building them into .mov sequences. Why on *earth* are you using uncompressed video? Shouldn't you run it through a lossless codec like huffyuv at least? Gordon.

Agreed. Can we please talk about video processiong on classic hardware, like the PPL hard disks (FM analogue recording, one field per track, 3 separate tracks for R,G,B) or the I2S Image processors (the oldest one I have contains over 3000 4Kbit DRAMs, and about the same number of logic chips on top...). These weren't of course, used for real-time video processiong, but I am pretty sure they were used for frame-by-frame animations, etc. And they're gettign on for 25 years old now, so they're on-topic... -tony

How about audio/video options for SGI Crimsons? I believe its technically on topic.. >snicker< :-> Speaking of which, if anyone has any spare boards they're just dying to get rid of, I'll take them off your hands. I'd really like to find a Reality Engine, or a nice set of complete Red/Grey skins. Mine's a PowerSeries upgrade, so its got old Brown/Blue ones. ciao.. David On Sat, 2005-01-22 at 17:12 -0600, Jay West wrote:

At 03:12 AM 1/20/2005, Jules Richardson wrote: And it's only getting worse. Windows creates zillions of temp files for its Internet cache, then loses track of the folders and wastes hundreds of megs on typical systems. Those thousands of files harbor spyware and other dreck. They take minutes to delete but meanwhile the virus and spyware scanners spend endless time scanning files that IE will never again touch. Software is far more sloppy than it ever was; leaving any number of temp files of any size, leaving behind setup folders of dozens of megs that will never run again isn't uncommon. Hundreds of megs of junk but where are the user's vital files? Personal email stored in a proprietary format, in folders eight layers deep under a hidden folder. - John

Stability is not the concern here. Windows 2000 is, in my experience (I'm stuck using it at work) very stable indeed. It's still slow, ugly and inflexible. It doesn't support simple, essential things like multiple desktops (which X has had for years), has a really clumsy user interface (what an utter abortion copy and paste is!), woefully inconsistent behaviour and what's worse is there's nothing you can do about it! It doesn't even come with a .zip file extractor! Gordon.

At 07:32 PM 1/19/2005, Joe R. wrote: And in what way wasn't it working? They've all had their bugs, but most of the explications and some of the work-arounds are out there... - John

At 09:26 AM 1/21/2005, Joe R. wrote: An hour? That's not very long, depending on the number of files on the tape, CPU or tape drive. I've seen Windows Backup take hours just to catalog the tape before it tries to restore. I didn't say it was fast. - John

Rumor has it that Gordon JC Pearce may have mentioned these words: Scary to say, but I think this has been around over 10 years, so it might even be ontopic... The program 'taper' makes a decent front-end to tar -- I've used it before & it does allright. Text based, but uses ncurses. Rather a bit like a 'midnight commander' for backups. ;-) Offtopically, if you want to back up a machine to bootable DVD for restoring, mondo works well. Laterz, Roger "Merch" Merchberger -- Roger "Merch" Merchberger | Anarchy doesn't scale well. -- Me zmerch(a)30below.com. | SysAdmin, Iceberg Computers