[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: can I use Apple II with a vga/dvi monitor? how to get software?

	I think we should start pruning the message pretty soon.

Paul Schlyter wrote:

In article <17vmi.120265$1i1.104794@pd7urf3no>,
The Wizard of Oz  <wizard@emeraldcity.gov> wrote:


Paul Schlyter wrote:

In article <RL7mi.114117$NV3.3285@pd7urf2no>,
The Wizard of Oz  <wizard@emeraldcity.gov> wrote:


Paul Schlyter wrote:

In article <l%Mli.111516$NV3.19072@pd7urf2no>,

.............

        This was back in 2000. No administrator accounts.

Windows NT had admin and user accounts before 2000 ....

        Never said I was running an NT class of Windows.

Most people didn't back then - but you could have, if stability and
robustness had been important enough for you.  On my work I ran NT
from 1995 and on.... I never had a disk crash.

        I couldn't afford NT back then.


Neither could I - for my private computer.  But didn't this bad crash
happen on your job computer?  Was your boss penny-wise and pound-foolish?
It was on my home computer but my boss was giving me non-monetary bonuses for working from home (late start times due to an alcohol allergy and several women who overdid their perfume before getting on the bus - I couldn't see through the tears for an hour). The second time (also a months work lost) was my own business. It delayed the first issue of Digital Civilization. 


2. You didn't back up your stuff properly - so you lost a months (sic!)
worth of work instead of merely a few hours worth of work.

        It WAS backed up. To the second hard drive in the same system.

:-)

A really proper backup shouldn't just be stored outside your computer,
but even in a different building!  The building where you're working
can catch fire.....
Correct. However you have to work with the constraints of what you have. If all you can afford is a second hard drive in the same machine then that's all you can do. It's a different story now though. Especially since people are scrapping fully functional machines just to run Vista. 
A backup doesn't have to reside in another computer to be "elsewhere"!
You could have written your backups to CD-R or DVD-R disks, or backup
tapes, and then stored the backup media somewhere else.  Today you can
also put your backups on some suitable storage space on the Internet.
Back then the burners were starting to drop in price from the $2000 mark. The media was still around $10 per disk. Over the next year and a half the price of the burners dropped to around $250 (I picked up a used one for $50) and the media dropped to under $1.00 per disk. 

Tape backup was the norm back then, true, and it wasn't terribly cheap
either.  But how much did that lost month of work due to that bad
crash cost?
Oddly enough I had one. I used it regularly. The program was on loan from my brother. The restore program was on the C: partition. He chose that month to get married and move to Minneapolis. 


There was one fairly cheap backup medium, available already in 2000,
though: the Zip disk, which could hold some 100 MBytes of data (later
250 MBytes).  If that was too small, you had the Jaz disk which held
one GByte of data.  In 1998 when I got a new personal PC, I put a Zip
disk into that machine (floppy backups were just too tedious).
I *now* have two Zip disks. They were a little too expensive for me at the time. 


Of course, one can also adopt the "macho style" and yell:  "You're a
coward if you take backups!!!"  <g>
I know a few people like that. Coincidentally the same thing happened to them. Most of them had the problems after I did though. 


................................................


I did this on a friend's computer the other week: their computer just
refused to boot.  When trying to boot the system CD and telling it to
either reinstall Windows or reformat the drive, the system CD got so
confused by the damaged registry that it crashed!  So I bought a new
harddrive for them, reinstalled Windows on it, installed their
original harddrive as a secondary drive and then I could just read all
their data from the original drive without problems.  A virus scanning
program later found some viruses on that harddrive -- now they've
learnt to _not_ log in to an administrator's account all the time....
Man they were lucky. When Word crashed my system the disks wouldn't even mount/read. The only thing to do was reformat and reinstall. Normally you'd expect the problems of this nature to happen to the C: drive. It took out the D: drive too. 

C: and D: aren't drives - they are partitions.  True, you can have one
partition per drive, but you can also have several partitions per drive.
So C: and D: could both reside on the same drive, if you so wish.
Yeah I know. I was trying to dumb it down for the newbies. The first drive (hda) consisted of a single Windows partition. The second drive (hdc) was partitioned into a Windows partition and a Linux partition.
My solution of scrapping Microsoft for everything but games works very well for me. YMMV. Of course there are those who believe the propaganda and will never consider the option. 
One should of course not believe in any propaganda - neither the
propaganda that says you shouldn't run anything but Micro$oft'$ stuff,
nor the propaganda that says you should avoid Microsoft like the
plague.  As usual, the truth is somewhere in between.

True. What I described works for *ME*.


You mean Windows ME ?     :-))))))))))))))))))))))))))))
Actually I was referring to the first person singular. Still that was the OS I was using. ;-)
My philosophy is anybody else can do what ever the heck they want with their own computer. I'll give advice when asked (like this time). My advice is to try a bunch of different things and go with what works. Since a lot of people are advocating M$, I have no need to go over the same material they have. To get back to the VM thread, VMs work well. They generally don't take down an entire system. Install them on a stable and secure box then have fun. 


The major advantage of Windows is the very large amount of software
available for it, which means you're most likely to find the
application you need for that OS.  That's why Linux has Wine, and
that's why modern Macs also can run Windows.  And that's why you run
your games on Windows rather than on Linux..... :-)
I won't argue Windows has a large software base. However if you take a measure of the quality of the software available you'll find there are a lot of terrible programs out there produced by guys who just want to make a fast buck. I should know. 

Indeed true.... so you'd better sort that out.  However the bad stuff
usually carry properties you can recognize: flashy boxes or envelopes,
and little info about the software itself, no way to get upgrades or
bug fixes, etc etc etc.
This is especially true of serious (non-game) software. With games that is the way things are normally packaged.
I reviewed my fair share of terrible games for Digital Civilization and Call-A.P.P.L.E.. I've also talked with a number of developers. A lot of the more successful games under Windows are developed under BSD and Linux then ported to the Windows environment. The main reason people don't see these games for *NIX is because of the various agreements signed with Microsoft. I won't even talk about what happened to Loki Software. 

Games don't really matter here IMO -- they're for entertainment only and
not doing much useful.  Actually, I'd prefer to not hog up a whole
computer just for games, but instead use some game console for that.
Then your computer won't be busy when your kids are playing games.....  :-)
In the first instance your assessment was correct. I was working on various programming projects and used Word for documentation. In the second instance I wrote game reviews (among other things) for Digital Civilization. Never underestimate games for stress relief. Personally, I'm rather fond of the top down strategy games (Sid Myers and Blizzard are very good). I try to set aside one day per week for this. It usually averages once per month in reality. I have not completed a game in three years.
In terms of running the same software under Windows or something else... I've always found less problems with the actual programs (the third party add ons are another story) when I get away from Windows. Again, this is where running a VM helps. 

                                Later
                                Mike


				Later
				Mike