Posts by Sandtitz

"Actually, I saw Windows 95 running in 4MB on a 16MHz 386SX. It booted. It ran. It was possibly the slowest computer that I’ve ever seen"

Check the WinXP on a Pentium 8Mhz / 20MB RAM project!

"He illustrated his point by referring to the 314 remote code execution holes disclosed in Adobe Flash last year alone, saying the strategy to patch those holes is like a car yard which sells vehicles that catch on fire every other week."

<pedant> That was actually the total number of vulns for Flash last year, not everyone of them necessarily being remote code execution holes. </pedant>

I wonder why he didn't point to the 187 vulns Chrome had last year...?

Re: So you didn't fix root cause

"11 downvotes. It looks as if the MS marketing crowd have paid a visit again."

No. The feature isn't stupid, it is just fine. The root cause was a stupid user, not Outlook. Outlook has many failings but the inability to fix the bursar's dyslexia isn't one of them.

It is plain faster to start typing the name or email address in the To: field than clicking the To: button and selecting the recipient from the list. A mistyped autocomplete address can be removed from list by highlighting it and clicking the X or pressing delete.

Creating a contact in Outlook also has a chance that the recipient address in it is wrong. The bursar wouldn't still admit her fault and Jack would have had to fix the problem.

Re: 20K+ 25K

"Ok, so not on a speccy, but how about an Amiga?"

OpenSSL has been ported to Amiga and this BearSSL is supposedly lighter on resources so why not?

Re: XP forever!!

"Having pointing at China, I should also mention a Midlands town council who require IE6 to pay a parking fine."

So... why won't you name them?

"For controlling volume (or Photoshop brush size, for example) a well implemented touch-strip may be a better than traditional keys."

Yes, it may be better if it is implemented well. The Carbon X1 problem was poor visibility of the touch strip icons (to me at least and this could be remedied) and you need to look down at the touch strip to find the correct key instead of letting your fingertips find the proper function key.

An extremely well implemented Mac Wheel could in theory work better than your regular keyboard. It's just very unlikely.

If the touch strip proves to be a genuine improvement then Apple be praised.

Re: Garmin

"But the main advantage is that I can see who is calling or texting me with the flick of a wrist. Makes in invaluable when driving as I do not need to take my hands from the wheel, "

Any sufficiently recent car fitted with a hands-free system will show at least the caller and some can also show the text messages as well. But you still can't make or answer calls with that Garmin... :-)

"I may be wrong but the decline of IBM started when they allowed MS to shaft them over OS/2 and sped up when they stopped support for OS/2 rather than using it to forge ahead."

Hard to say when IBM started to decline but I'm sure it wasn't just over OS/2. IBM was just a big ship that turns very slowly. They were used to having near monopolies in the areas they worked with and they never had that position with the PC.

I used OS/2 for a long time and while it was a great leap from DOS and Windows of its time IBM should have pulled the plug earlier before Warp. It filled a niche in some businesses but NT4 delivered the final death blow. At that point (if not earlier) no business decided to focus on OS/2 as their core servers and desktops. They needed on outsider (Gerstner) to cut the pet projects that didn't deliver.

IBM poured a lot of money into OS/2 at one point, and e.g. the free Lotus Office suite was great but 3rd parties just didn't bother either with drivers and software since the OS share was so minimal (chicken and egg). They should have just abandoned OS/2 and embraced Windows on the PC space.

Re: But I don't want any of them

"Your standard programmable thermostat doesn't sense when your living room is unusually empty and take appropriate action, figure out the response characteristics of your radiators, pay attention to the outside temperature, have the ability to activate if you're coming home unexpectedly early on the train, etc."

My boiler room thermostat is older than Nest thermostats, and it knows the outside temperature very well - there's a cable to an outdoor sensor and it's likely more accurate than the weather services Nest utilizes. It also has an ethernet connection for remote control.

"I'm pleased with the operation of my non-HomeKit Nest controller. It saved me quite a bit of money last year (evidence available)"

Show the evidence then. Did you compare it to a modern thermostat or the one you had fitted 50 years ago? I'm not saying you're wrong.

I'm not against Nest or any IoT stuff per se, but I wouldn't buy one until the benefits and hazards are well known. Some usually require an internet connection to "cloud" and when Google decides to shut down the Nest services or decide to deprecate Nest products over X years old, what then? How many features will you lose?

I can happily wait until standard arise (e.g. a single ZigBee controller for all ZigBee devices) and devices from different manufacturers can communicate with each other when necessary (e.g. smoke alarm disables A/C and sends me a picture or video). All these are attainable at the moment, but only if you work with a single vendor.

Re: Awesome, truely awesome

"...and it was filled with fine flour dust (Tower pc was half popping out of it), as always I'm amazed at how long pcs in these conditions will often be last."

I've also baffled how much metallic dust computers can intake while still functioning well. The sure way to kill these computers is then to blow the dust away and ensure that some of it gets into critical niches and end up short circuiting the whole thing - so let it be!

Re: Rewrite phrase ... @Voland's

The papers were very suspiciously missing any all USA usual suspects while containing the key Russian ones as well as a few others here and there "for veracity".

Others would argue that it was aimed at the Chinese rulers and so forth.

Wikipedia lists a few reasons why there are not that many US citizens/companies on the list: the "US-Panama Free Trade Agreement", "Shell companies can be created in the United States", "Major international banks based in America tend to have offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands instead", and "US laws like FATCA and the TIEAs of 2010".

If you think the Panama Papers have been edited to remove US politicians or add Russian counterparts then show us some evidence of this. The fact that the Russians immediately downplayed the Papers as "Putinophobia" without checking the authenticity of these allegations speaks volumes.

Re: Windows Server 2008 R2 @Buzzword

"The last version of Windows Server to feature a Start menu. Sorely missed from subsequent releases."

2016 has a Start menu.

Start menu is only a software launcher. I'll just press the Win key on keyboard and start typing "users", "dns", "dhcp" (etc) and press enter and the program is launched - I'm not using mouse at that point at all. With 2012 server you could just start typing in the start screen. It's different but not that much.

Re: It would seem

The consumer devices should accept by default only private network addresses, i.e. from 10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12 or 192.168.0.0/16. The restriction should then be removed once the user is able to change the default password to something non-trivial. Telnet and other services (such as UPnP) except HTTP (redirected-to-HTTPS) should be disabled by default.

Re: It's not "if", it's "when"...

I agree on FB, but MS?

Surely the greatest treasure troves would be either Google or NSA.

"Typhoon which is just as capable, much faster and a much better dogfighter than the F35 will ever be."

Is dogfighting still a thing? I though modern dogfighting would be to fire the missiles beyond visual range at 100+ km away (or whatever the range of AA missiles these days) and resume watching the radar for next blip or let the AWACS planes and ground systems help in finding targets.

This is an honest question, I'm not saying you're necessarily wrong there.

Re: “violation of W3C standards...."

"...why not stop right there?"

How so? Does Edge violate them? Do other browser makers offer bounties for W3C violations?

Re: And I want this...

"trying to find your codewheel for Bard's Tale III"

Just download the DOS/Amiga version + crack then. The Amiga version likely looks and sounds MUCH better and since C64 version required 3 double sided diskettes (6 images) the constant diskette changing is annoying. I suppose the Amiga version (just 2 disks) can be installed onto the "hard drive" in an emulator as can the DOS version in DOSBox.

Re: Insidious

"My latest HP printer wanted to phone home to report on the toner cartridges. Presumably to confirm that you are using 3rd party toner and invalidating the warranty "

Using 3rd party toners do not void warranty in countries with reasonable consumer protection.

If however the 3rd party toner borks the printer then the warranty may be void and the 3rd party supplier would be responsible to unbork the printer in addition of replacing the faulty toner with a new one / giving money back.

Re: A question @PaulR

Hard to say since Kaby Lake is not out quite yet.

This is likely the "not supported so may or may not work" scenario. A Kaby Lake computer may also have some fancy brand new devices for which the manufacturer hasn't bothered to create Windows 7 compatible drivers - but probably you can at least install Win7 as long as you modify the installation media to include USB 3 and NVMe drivers.