Virus, Virus, Everywhere!
in [Laptops]
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From: BillW50 on 24 Jul 2010 11:52 BillW50 wrote on Sat, 24 Jul 2010 09:40:59 -0500: > Richard Bonner wrote on Thu, 22 Jul 2010 11:56:53 +0000 (UTC): >> BillW50 (BillW50(a)aol.kom) wrote: >>> In news:i26mte$f47$1(a)Kil-nws-1.UCIS.Dal.Ca, >>> Richard Bonner typed on Wed, 21 Jul 2010 11:50:06 +0000 (UTC): >>>> BillW50 (BillW50(a)aol.kom) wrote: >>> Can you run the most popular games under Linux? Nope! >> >> *** I can ask my Mint friend; he is a gamer. > > I can't see a Linux user being a serious gamer. As the most popular > games don't even run under Linux. Well I found a link to all of the Linux games here. http://icculus.org/lgfaq/gamelist.php And it lists only 383 games. Geez I think the Commodore 64 had over 10,000 games. 383 games are really slim pickings. And there is only one of them that I would be interested in called X-Plane. And I already have the Windows version, so what would be the point? And you should read the X-Plane manual about what it says about installing it under Linux as well. Unlike Windows and the Mac, it don't matter which version of Windows or Mac OS you have, the installation is the same. Not so under Linux. It is all different. As there are different distros, interfaces, etc. under Linux. And there are no instructions to cover all Linux distros. So they only cover how to for just three of them. How so limited and it just complicates everything. There is just no way anybody could convince the 99% of the masses to start using Linux. The only hope for Linux to gain any favor at all is for all of the Linux distros to go away and to have only one Linux distro still standing. And the Linux community will never let that happen. So there isn't any hope for Linux really. -- Bill Asus EEE PC 702G4 ~ 2GB RAM ~ 16GB-SDHC Xandros Linux (build 2007-10-19 13:03)
From: Sjouke Burry on 24 Jul 2010 11:53 BillW50 wrote: > And by the way, I haven't touched a floppy in many years. But how often > are those old floppies have become unreadable? > None of my system/install/backup floppys yet. But several cd's and dvd's already died. Floppy's dont like being handeled, or hot/dusty storage. And as I have computers(working) as old as 30 years, floppy works between most of them.
From: BillW50 on 24 Jul 2010 13:43 Sjouke Burry wrote on Sat, 24 Jul 2010 17:53:01 +0200: > BillW50 wrote: > >> And by the way, I haven't touched a floppy in many years. But how >> often are those old floppies have become unreadable? >> > > None of my system/install/backup floppys yet. > But several cd's and dvd's already died. > Floppy's dont like being handeled, or hot/dusty storage. > And as I have computers(working) as old as 30 years, floppy > works between most of them. That is very good to hear! I was working for Philips when we created the CD. And believe it or not, the first ones were made out of glass. I don't believe any of them ever made it out in the market. And even today I wish today I had some of them. As they were designed for a much longer life than the plastic discs we have today. The bad thing though, they would shatter very easily. And yes, I accidentally broke one once. It flipped out of my hand and hit the floor and shattered into pieces. Oops! Good thing they were not made out of crystal or something. ;-) I only had two major problems with floppies in all of the years I used them. One was most floppies could be booted between 300 to 400 times. After that they were trash. Pain in the butt with copy protected boot floppies. As you had to go out and buy another one. What a scam! The other one was a Commodore GCR floppy drive hardly found a disk it didn't like. And about 5% of my disks, ended up with bad sectors in about 6 months after being written. It didn't matter if you used them or not. And you could write over them once again and they were good again for another 6 months. And I learned I could filter this problem by formatting them in MFM format first as this would catch them right away. I can't recall now if I was using a CP/M MFM format or the MS-DOS one. Besides those two things, I can't think of any serious problems I had with floppies. CDs are a totally different story. The early days, CD writers often left gaps of space if the computer couldn't keep up with the writing speed. Those CDs were always problematic. Some could read them and some could not. I don't think that happens anymore. At least with DVD burners (even burning CDs with them) it shouldn't anyway. I also hear tell that the RW format doesn't last so long. As the R format lasts so much longer. I personally haven't seen this problem yet. But it isn't a big worry for me either since anything important is already on another format too. The most stable mass storage format I ever seen has been IDE hard drives believe it or not. Although you can't put all of your eggs in one basket, as even hard drives could work perfectly fine one day and totally unrecoverable the next. Although a second backup should be really reliable. -- Bill Asus EEE PC 702G4 ~ 2GB RAM ~ 16GB-SDHC Xandros Linux (build 2007-10-19 13:03)
From: BillW50 on 27 Jul 2010 10:11 Bob Villa wrote on Sun, 25 Jul 2010 05:19:18 -0700 (PDT): > Of course, I haven't read all of this head-butting but I believe Bruce > has the higher ground. Leaving Bill in the rant, tirade, and BS seat. Too bad you didn't read it all Bob, as there is no head-butting for one. And second of all I never would have taken you for an ad hominem attacker. And rant, tirade, and BS seat is just all in your head. As there are none of this out here. > "I only had two major problems with floppies in all of the years I > used > them. One was most floppies could be booted between 300 to 400 times. > After that they were trash. Pain in the butt with copy protected boot > floppies. As you had to go out and buy another one. What a scam! " > > What kind of "engineer" would not know how to copy a protected floppy? > One who invented the CD? I didn't invent the CD for one, Philips did. And I worked as an electronic engineer in the scientific division and not in the consumer division. But we had CD drives in house before they became widely available. And as for cracking the copy protection of Berkeley Softworks, they used extended tracks and changed the sync timing. So copy software was totally useless. Yes the code to check for the copy protection could be hacked out. But when Berkeley Softworks released GEOS v1.3 of their new desktop, they also included AFAIK one of the first trojans. As it would check if the copy protection was removed. And if it was, it would in a month or two delete all of the boot files. Nice eh? -- Bill Asus EEE PC 702G4 ~ 2GB RAM ~ 16GB-SDHC Xandros Linux (build 2007-10-19 13:03)
From: Bob Villa on 27 Jul 2010 22:42
On Jul 27, 9:11 am, BillW50 <Bill...(a)aol.kom> wrote: > Bob Villa wrote on Sun, 25 Jul 2010 05:19:18 -0700 (PDT): > > > Of course, I haven't read all of this head-butting but I believe Bruce > > has the higher ground. Leaving Bill in the rant, tirade, and BS seat.. > > Too bad you didn't read it all Bob, as there is no head-butting for one. > And second of all I never would have taken you for an ad hominem > attacker. And rant, tirade, and BS seat is just all in your head. As > there are none of this out here. > > > "I only had two major problems with floppies in all of the years I > > used > > them. One was most floppies could be booted between 300 to 400 times. > > After that they were trash. Pain in the butt with copy protected boot > > floppies. As you had to go out and buy another one. What a scam! " > > > What kind of "engineer" would not know how to copy a protected floppy? > > One who invented the CD? > > I didn't invent the CD for one, Philips did. And I worked as an > electronic engineer in the scientific division and not in the consumer > division. But we had CD drives in house before they became widely available. > > And as for cracking the copy protection of Berkeley Softworks, they used > extended tracks and changed the sync timing. So copy software was > totally useless. Yes the code to check for the copy protection could be > hacked out. But when Berkeley Softworks released GEOS v1.3 of their new > desktop, they also included AFAIK one of the first trojans. As it would > check if the copy protection was removed. And if it was, it would in a > month or two delete all of the boot files. Nice eh? > > -- > Bill > Asus EEE PC 702G4 ~ 2GB RAM ~ 16GB-SDHC > Xandros Linux (build 2007-10-19 13:03) Okay Bill, I'll take back the tirade part. Here is your quote, "I was working for Philips when we created the CD". |