[XCSSA] The Tyrrany of Redmond

[xcssa@xcssa.org]

Instead of ASCII, you should have asked for ISO 8859 Latin-1 ;-).

http://kb.iu.edu/data/ahfr.html

I can appreciate her problem, though.  Even on my mac, when I try to  
save a PDF it doesn't give me a plain text option.  I do get a bunch  
of graphical options like TIFF and PNG.

Speaking of IEEE, I did join just after the last meeting (starring  
Tweeks).  Good way to spend a lot of money.  Their website is about  
the worst example of overcomplicated programming I've ever come  
across.  After a couple of failed attempts, I'm not going to bother  
to fill out the personal information stuff.

My biggest gripe about Windows XP is how bad it is about shutting  
down.  It takes many minutes, if it works at all.  First you wait and  
wait, and then it asks if you want to terminate non-responding task  
such-and-such.  You say YES and then wait a few more minutes, and  
then it asks if you want to terminate some other non-responding task  
(or maybe the same one).  Finally, it will sometimes actually shut  
down, and other times it will simply leave your desktop in an  
inoperable state which gives you no choice but to hit the hardware  
reset button.  Then, of course, it complains that YOU did not shut  
down properly.  I have to go through this ritual weekly because of  
security updates, or whenever something else messes up the system.

I've finally tracked down some of this trouble to Norton AntiVirus  
(ccapp.exe).  But still, I think the OS shouldn't be so easily  
sidetracked.  When I say shut down I mean SHUT DOWN NOW.  Because of  
the frequently needed updates, they should make shut down and reboot  
work as quickly as possible rather than getting worse and worse with  
each new version, despite massive improvements in CPU speed.

Also, I think filesystems should handle unexpected shutdowns nicely,  
only losing the last data if it hadn't been completely written yet.   
The disk cache should always sync to disk completely whenever there  
is idle time.  On AmigaDOS, for example, the write cache synced  
almost immediately after every operation, and you could pretty much  
do a hard reboot with impunity.  Of course, that was usually because  
you had no choice, but that's not different from Windows.

Also, XP didn't make it easy to find the things I find most  
essential, like the terminal (cmd.exe) and scandisk:

http://www.duxcw.com/faq/win/xp/scandisk.htm

Charles

On Nov 15, 2007, at 5:51 PM, xcssa-admin@xcssa.org wrote:

> So, to try and avoid poisoning myself, I asked for allergen  
> information
> from the restaurant I frequent.  (Their location map links only  
> work in
> IEEEE!, so you can guess what I was sent in response to my query.)
>
> The followup to my request for an alternate form of the data says  
> it all.
> I say we dust off and nuke Redmond from orbit.  It's the only way  
> to be
> sure.