Redstate

I use ACRONIS True Image 11 which is about the same thing as Norton Ghost.

I was an early adoptor of VISTA and I generally really like it. But I have gotten the Blue Screen of Death (BSD) 3 times since I installed it.

The first two times I got the BSD it took me about 16 hours each to reinstall my system and update all the software and get everything configured back to my satisfaction. And I lost some of my more recent data. After the second incident I found ACRONIS.

The third time I got the BSD I had my system completely back and running in about 45 minutes and did not lose a single important file. It was amazing. Absolutely the best $50 I ever spent. And the boot disk they give you will get your system running from the bare metal.

as a result of having two kids in college with computers I built. Between their wanderings on the internet and the way Windows operating systems seem to accumulate garbage, I spent way too much time reformatting hard drives and trying to save that really important term paper they forgot to back up to CD. That's when I found Ghost. With the boot disk, I could restore one of the kid's files in about 20 minutes. Now, I wouldn't dream of not using image backups.

BSD was a main branch of Unix before Windows ever existed.

---
Finrod's First Law of Bandwidth:
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but it takes the bandwidth of ten thousand.

The only reason I can still type these messages is that I had the forethought to configure the machine to triple boot Windows2K Pro along with Vista32 and Vista64. At least Windows 2000 still functions...

It’s ALL Bush's fault, I watch the news your know. World Hunger, Bush's fault, Pestilence, Bush's fault, Poverty, Bush's fault, seeing the county through 9/11 and those successful tax cuts, Bush's fault, huh, what, er, I mean those brilliant Democrats...

(sniffle, sniffle, dang liberals, maybe I should just go home and get some rest!)

BDS, know the symptoms, seek the conservative cure!

Marie Osmond fainting on Dancing With the Stars, the fact that it took 15 years for the SS Minnow passengers to get rescued.

ALL BUSH's FAULT!

And there's only one sure-fire cure for BDS -- 3 hours a day, 5 days a week exposure to EIB.

Kill the terrorists
Protect the borders
Punch the hippies -- Frank J

Romo throwing that interception in the playoffs-Bush's fault. Patriots losing-grace of God. :-)

"Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.Let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."-Barry Goldwater
McCain/Rudy 08-kill the terrorists and punch the hippies.

As much as I hate NYG, I was rooting for them like crazy to take the Cheating Cheaters down. Here I was just illustrating how BDS just makes a person loony.

Oh, and causing Terry Glenn to be out for the whole season - THAT was definitely Bush's fault.

Kill the terrorists
Protect the borders
Punch the hippies -- Frank J

Who want to conquer the world using Michael Jackson replicas...

"Guns don't kill people...
"...But they sure help!"
-Paul Giamatti, Shoot 'Em Up

Looks older than it is, and that's a good thing.

"After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood." -Fred Dalton Thompson

About a plot to conquer the world using Michael Jackson clones?
I was just referring to the Robot Chicken sketch of the same...

"Guns don't kill people...
"...But they sure help!"
-Paul Giamatti, Shoot 'Em Up

They Live, starring "Rowdy" Roddy Piper.

Ok, so they look like the Thriller version of Michael Jackson, but close enough.

This movie has -The Best Fight Scene Ever- in a movie.

"After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood." -Fred Dalton Thompson

"Guns don't kill people...
"...But they sure help!"
-Paul Giamatti, Shoot 'Em Up

XP and Vista both suck. Each takes more control out of the users hands, a ton of ram, not to mention the fact that they are more susceptible to the Internet germs. Crash on either and your butt is cooked, get used to backing-up. Want to make some changes to the OS, dream on. I am still running ME, partitioned with Linux. Once Ubuntu becomes more software friendly I will make the complete switch.

Every app has its own interface. Mail, browser, file manager, music player, you name it: everything goes its own way. No standards, no consistency, total chaos.

You have to compile everything you want installed.

Plus, most of those apps expect to link to systemwide shared libraries to be installed separately, rather than including what they need and just linking it together. Your typical Leenucks app is like those awful MS Windows apps that dump their DLLs into the systemwide Windows directory.

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"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater

and that's only with the live CD. It's good for machines without good hard drives, like the IBM P3 I have with a bad UltraSCSI drive in it.

lesterblog.blogspot.com

Its really nice for dealing with machines with corrupted drives or no accessible drives.

but only enough to see it work. I haven't really used it for diagnosis and repair. I haven't thought to use it on the IBM but I should do that soon. At least I'll know if the fault is with the drive or the controller.

lesterblog.blogspot.com

They're both fine OSes, but they both lack any UI standardization, same as Ubuntu (and all the rest).

It's ridiculous that all these vendors let Apple beat them to the punch of a great Unix UI.

HTML Help for Red Staters
"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater

You want standardization ?

Apple has had the most rigorous human interface guidelines from day 1. If you ever tried to write a program for the original macs you quickly realize its either do it the apple way or it doesn't work

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"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater

The Linux model lends itself to the insanity. It's digital anarchy by its very nature.

One of the things I neglected to mention about the corporations using free software is that it is never free. If there's a problem with an application (or the OS itself), you either have to try to fix it yourself or wait for the open source community to fix it. Neither are very good options when you're trying to run a business.

RedHat is the only one that's made it work, and they're more expensive than Windows or Apple.

"After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood." -Fred Dalton Thompson

Of course there's no such thing as a free lunch. Richard Stallman's Marxist delusions aside, the Internet reduces costs, but it doesn't change the laws of economics.

Free software is useful because it gives you the freedom to do what you want with it or pay someone else to do it.

And of course it works fine for a business. What do you think you're doing every time you pay Microsoft? You're paying them to add bugs and fix features (no, not fix bugs and add features, we know their track record by now :-)

The only difference with free software is that you're in control. You get to pick who you want to do your work; you have a competitive market rather than a monopoly on development. You also have the ability to fix things and maintain things that the vendor chooses not to fix or maintain.

Free software, for the customer, is strictly a superior model. You get all the options provided by Microsoft's model (admittedly pioneering from a business perspective), plus more.

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"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater

SAMBA is a good case in point. It's never worked well enough to use it in a production environment.

I've never run into problems with Windows that didn't eventually get fixed sufficiently to allow it to run in a critical environment.

I've also found that it's the most forgiving of network glitches. Any UNIX get wiggy if the network is out for very long, especially if you're using NFS.

"After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood." -Fred Dalton Thompson

A smartly designed corporate system wouldn't be using it. Nor NFS for that matter. NFS was designed for mainframes on all the time.

These days I'd probably build based on Apple's new tech for file sharing, in place of SMB drives flying across the network.

You see, it's just a matter of a smartly run company doing things right from the ground up for long-term gains that accrue as everyone who uses the computers is able to work more efficiently and with fewer interruptions.

But American corporate governance isn't steered that way by the shareholders. Their loss.

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"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater

R&D and Manufacturing like I support. These systems are on 24x7x365. NFS is still the best transport method for this type of work.

"After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood." -Fred Dalton Thompson

is that you don't have to wait for billions of dollars to be spent by the vendor before there's a product released. Next best thing is that the developers themselves and fellow enthusiasts are always on the forums and are much more helpful than typical tech support people.

lesterblog.blogspot.com

If there's a problem with an application (or the OS itself), you either have to try to fix it yourself or wait for the open source community to fix it. Neither are very good options when you're trying to run a business.

Very small businesses have to do everything themselves anyways. Businesses of any size hire a Unix geek like me whose job it is to figure this stuff out. Note how at least with open source, you have the option of fixing it yourself; with Microsoft you have no choice but hope Microsoft fixes it eventually-- which isn't a good option either when you're trying to run a business.

---
Finrod's First Law of Bandwidth:
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but it takes the bandwidth of ten thousand.

for more money to fix everything the Microsoft way. Open source solutions are much more pleasant to accomplish on the clock.

lesterblog.blogspot.com

This is not true for a broad range of the most common Linux software. Almost everything I've ever wanted to install on my Ubuntu box I used the automated install process to do so. (From the command line, "sudo apt-get install foo" or use the GUI interface built into the Gnome desktop )

I can think of only two exceptions: Hamachi and TrueCrypt.

I voted early in the Florida primary. Find out who and why.

Everyone I've known who's used Ubuntu has told me over and over about compiling this, that, and the other thing.

(and never mind the stories of apt un-installing a hundred packages because of some obscure version conflict...)

But seriously, I know all about the Leenucks world. It's very hit and miss whether binary downloads are available. There are so many Leenucks-based OSes, and so many versions of each without binary compatibility with each other, that pretty much your vendor has to provide you the package or you have to compile it yourself.

I mean for crying out loud, the gcc people have broken their C++ ABI *how* many times?

HTML Help for Red Staters
"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater

...is that a friend of mine, with a Master's Degree in Computer Science, gave up trying to install nVidia binary video drivers on Fedora. At that point I realized I had no chance whatsoever, and gave up.

"No matter how much lipstick you put on the taxation pig, it's still a pig... and it's currently snout-down in your wallet." - Michael Fisk

That's nvidia's fault, not your friend's or fedora's. The fact that they won't play nice is purely their fault.

HTML Help for Red Staters
"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater

HTML Help for Red Staters
"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater

You're the first I've heard of. Maybe you're doing something with Linux to keep it in line.

I never said XP was anything great but it's stable and, after many hours of educating (torturing) myself on certain line-level issues (like what happens when you uninstall Netgear drivers and have a critical .dll renamed - this is the value of having multiple machines for internet access), I'm used to it enough to do what I need to do.

XP wireless networking is relatively painless, too; I still haven't gotten around to buying a router because ad-hoc networking works just fine. I know I'd use less electricity with a router but I usually need the primary computer on anyway when I'm using network machines, since I move a lot of large files that way.

lesterblog.blogspot.com

then you wouldn't have the spyware problem with ME.

lesterblog.blogspot.com

My DOS base is more stable than XP and Norton will ALWAYS bring back up crashes.

Peer to peer? You are kidding?

and the only thing slowing it down is the fact that one of my adapters is wireless B and so the whole network slows to B speed when that's in use.

lesterblog.blogspot.com

Many smaller ones do. But the big ones tend not to have the leadership.

HTML Help for Red Staters
"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater

...you'd see IT support businesses investing in the technology and offering it at a discount.

There are billions that could be made in this industry, but no one sees a reasonable ROI right now. The training curve for users & support staff is simply too great to overcome for a large corporation.

"After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood." -Fred Dalton Thompson

The belief is that it'd be too hard to train. And maybe with the leadership these places have, that's right, because they wouldn't know how to do the transition properly.

There are also transition costs caused by previous mistakes, when silly companies let themselves get sucked into vendor lock-in and would have to dig their way out.

And with the short-term thinking pushed by Wall Street these days, it's just easier not to be a leader and leave the problem alone, since it won't blow up today, will it?

HTML Help for Red Staters
"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater

I agree with what you're saying, btw. The costs aren't what they think they'd be.

If I had the money, I'd start up a business myself. I know that I could sell it. I could retire in five years after I sold the company for $1B+

"After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood." -Fred Dalton Thompson

HTML Help for Red Staters
"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater

with a concise proposal would be enough to attract the investment? They would at least see the enormous potential for your business idea as applied in the Arab world, where economical machines and proven OS's could really be profitable.

lesterblog.blogspot.com

...and Spaces is one of my favorite parts! But then again, I don't know what it was like before Leopard, so maybe I'm missing something...

So far so good on the Mac. The only frustration I have/had was last night when I moved about 30GB of MS Office docs from my old laptop to the MacBook Pro, and Spotlight proceeded to churn for several hours in the indexing process. The CPU was really heating up, and that was the first time I heard the fans kick into high gear.

I still have a server running XP Pro, and I plan to buy an extra copy/license for the next time I need to install Windoze. Vista? NEVER!

all late-80's through mid-90's vintage. They're good for dedicated purposes but none of them will even make it up to OS8.

I thought about getting a decent modern Mac when the price is right because of a few applications that could really use it, namely ChannelStorm.

lesterblog.blogspot.com

I agree on Spotlight. When I installed 10.5 my system was slow as I set everything up, because Spotlight was re-scanning my whole system! They ought to do something about that; it could really give people the wrong impression about the OS upgrade being a downgrade.

As for Spaces, it's broken by design. It's designed to be application-centric rather than task-centric. You assign apps to spaces, rather than tasks. This means if you're using the same app for more than one task, and want to keep each task on a different space, you're in trouble.

This happens to be something I do a lot. I might have two or more NeoOffice or Firefox or Preview windows open on space one with my iTerm for software development, some on space two because I'm doing some website stuff, and of course I have Red State and other general website reading over on space eight.

Spaces doesn't let me do that without a huge hassle.

Desktop Manager was much better, but it doesn't work on 10.5. No surprise; it does some black magic and depended heavily on 10.4-specific details.

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"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater

I'm personally on record as saying the two best OS's made by MicroSucks are.....DOS 6.22, and Windows 2000 Professional. Not that either is any thing to get excited about.

I haven't even THOUGHT of WFW in a decade. I do remember that starting with W95, for years I would eschew Windows Exploder™ in favor of File Manager.

Kill the terrorists
Protect the borders
Punch the hippies -- Frank J

except ME.

We even have OS/2 Warp and NeXT Step.

My brother calls Vista "Windows ME v2.0"

"After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood." -Fred Dalton Thompson

lesterblog.blogspot.com

"After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood." -Fred Dalton Thompson

no, I meant GEOS.

I also wondered if anyone still runs TOS (GEOS-based) on an Atari ST. ST's are still the best MIDI sequencers you can use.

lesterblog.blogspot.com

Atari TOS was based on Digital Research's GEM but it still looks like a 16-bit version of GEOS.

lesterblog.blogspot.com

True innovation there, seriously. The basis of so much that's good in Macs today. There's a reason Cocoa uses Objective C, and all the class names start with NS.

HTML Help for Red Staters
"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater

on that one.

lesterblog.blogspot.com

You're right. They did drop the ball, and the article says why: they were fixated on copiers almost to the exclusion of the biggest idea since sliced bread.

Xerox dropped the ball on everything. There's a famous book about Xerox called Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer.

But I also think Xerox gets too much credit. Apple and Microsoft took their simple systems far beyond the vision of the academics at PARC. There has been a huge amount of work and invention since then.

that I didn't expect to be relevant to a thread. It's more evidence of the seemingly limitless capacity to improvise with a Commodore 64:

lesterblog.blogspot.com

This post gives me hope. :)

Someone actually crammed a multitasking OS with a GUI for the Intellivision, which has all of 512 bytes for RAM. That's bytes, not KB!

http://intyos.free.fr/

lesterblog.blogspot.com

I remember tweaking that little bugger so I could play DOOM without any glitches (thankfully I don't have to use a serial cable anymore to play deathmatch!).

You want to be on the forefront of technology, you have to deal with things like this.

___________________________________
Two thirds of the world is covered by water,
the other third is covered by Champ Bailey.

It's very useful when rehabilitating an old machine and you don't have to worry about copyright issues or any technical issue you might have from "Dos 7.1" (which was extracted and distributed by "the China DOS Union" and can load from 2 floppies):

FreeDos

lesterblog.blogspot.com

They also have a Sourceforge page though.

HTML Help for Red Staters
"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater

the proper link.

lesterblog.blogspot.com

HTML Help for Red Staters
"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater

then you'll be current all the same. Version 1.1 is coming soon.

lesterblog.blogspot.com

and my older ones run 98se or WFW 3.11, depending on their capacity. I've still never run Windows 2000 Pro on any machine but I do have a disc for it. Every time I used Vista on friends' machines, I didn't like it for aesthetic reasons. I appreciate the warning against buying it.

lesterblog.blogspot.com

I tried the "reseat the RAM and the hard drive cables" fix and I also ran the Microsoft Memory Diagnostic several times from the triple-boot startup screen. I even attempted removing half the memory and swapping the modules around -- no luck. And the system runs perfectly in Windows 2000.

I also tried every conceivable combination of F8 boot options on both the 32 and 64 bit partitions and the error is the same. I reset the BIOS to factory defaults (not that I had even tweaked anything that much) and the condition was the same. I've put about 10 hours thusfar into trying out all the options I've heard of.

I even opened a ticket with Microsoft and had a lot of words, some not so nice, with their people in India and there was nothing more helpful from them.

This machine has expen$ive ECC server DRAM and it has always run flawlessly -- in fact I feel safe in saying that it had been unusually stable for a Vista machine in the entire time I ran it. It ran everything I threw at it with very few exceptions, and I enjoyed using it.

That's one of the reasons I'm seriously disappointed. The blooom goes off the rose when you can't even boot from the installation disks.

assume the lotus position, and rely on Vishnu for insight on how to kiss the machine goodbye?

They're falling down on the job.

But it was mostly out of frustration, and I can say that the guy was one of the *sharpest* tech. support people I've ever experienced from any call center, anywhere. He was smarter than most of the CS students I've met here in America, and I'm sure he's getting paid all of $5 an hour.

The real problem was that he just didn't have anything good to tell me.

And neither does Microsoft.
And neither does any one of the experts I've consulted online.
And neither does anyone else.

So it's not his fault over there in Delhi. I'm still looking for Dana Groff's email address at Microsoft because he was responsible for the integration of the Common Log File System into NTFS and the World's Leading Authority on how it was supposed to be the The Revolutionary Windows Vista Transactional NTFS (TxF) Infrastructure.

It's so revolutionary and transactional that you can't use the machine when it fails! And you can't even boot from the installation disks! And nobody has any answers!

It's kind of like that bad link in the previous message. Here's the real one. And it's only kind of like it, because you can get to the page through a wide variety of other methods, including hitting the backspace key and removing the quote in the URL.

NO SUCH LUCK with the 0x0000C1F5 STOP message. There is no backspace key for that problem.

Bright data blossoms
pour sunshine into soul
and now they are gone

forever

Nobody likes being forced into spending more money but maybe Carbonite or a similar service is a good idea for anyone running Vista.

lesterblog.blogspot.com

Guess that's a moderate.

...and I have been using it on Windows too. I still like Firefox better but it is not bad either.

Wubbies World, MSgt, USAF (Retired):
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println("An argument is a sequence of statements aimed at demonstrating the truth of an assertion.); }

doesn't hang, as mine is wont to do on my primary machine. I find I'm not alone and that other people have been told by the Mozilla forums to just get more RAM, but a P4 with 640MB should not be inadequate for a web browser. It's almost as if Firefox turned into what IE used to be, even as IE improved.

lesterblog.blogspot.com

I have been running beta 4 its great so far

I might try that. I got some minor update today which doesn't seem to have changed anything.

I also just found a link for XP SP3 Release Candidate 2, but I don't think a service pack is something for which I'd want to take chances with a beta.

lesterblog.blogspot.com

...a lot of problems with memory leaks. I love FireFox and use it as my primary browser, but the memory leaks are the main contributor to the hang problems. I have them too.

In FireFox 3 a big improvement on the memory leak issue has been solved and is a much more stable browser with much improved performance so far. It is still in Beta so I am waiting for the final release.

Wubbies World, MSgt, USAF (Retired):
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println("An argument is a sequence of statements aimed at demonstrating the truth of an assertion.); }

If I had the equivalent of the NoScript Firefox extension on Webkit, then I'd ditch Firefox forever, since GreaseKit already gives me Greasemonkey-style page rewriting.

HTML Help for Red Staters
"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater

Any good add ons? I can't live without my add ons.

___________________________________
Two thirds of the world is covered by water,
the other third is covered by Champ Bailey.

The plug ins have worked fine

There are some interesting changes in the way the bookmarks work. I was upset that I couldn't just copy bookmarks.html over to the new system.

Upside is that the memory leaks are history.
Speed is improved as well.

Breaking now? So does that mean I can have my ad block with FF3? No memory leaks would be nice.

___________________________________
Two thirds of the world is covered by water,
the other third is covered by Champ Bailey.

Apparently they haven't bothered to do any compatibility checks.

The Dems can have MacOS X -- we did everything Windows does first and better, unfortunately nobody believes us or cares.

But I would hope the Repubs were Ubuntu -- more efficient, faster, more stable, open architecture - as an analogy to the free market, unfettered by govt overhead.

The Green Party can be DOS 3.2 -- regulate all the progess, good features, and innovations out of Windows, and strip it down to the point where you have a command-line interface (only), 32 MB maximum hard drive - an analogy to CAFE, Kyoto, and other govt efforts to 'save the environment' from AlGoreHell.

Libertarians - yes, UNIX, that's perfect.

In my perfect universe, nobody loves Windows.

Kill the terrorists
Protect the borders
Punch the hippies -- Frank J

they can live by Bill Gates's famous quote, "640K of RAM ought to be enough for anybody."

lesterblog.blogspot.com

So you associate the Republican party with a movement to collectivize the manufacture of software and end intellectual property rights? That's curious.

We're more like Slackware: rugged individualists.

HTML Help for Red Staters
"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater

So you are telling me that MS and Mac model the free market BETTER than the Ubuntu project?

Kill the terrorists
Protect the borders
Punch the hippies -- Frank J

"After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood." -Fred Dalton Thompson