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Messages - MilesAhead [ switch to compact view ]

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7451
Booting into safe mode with the Administrator in XP Home and typing: 'secpol.msc' (or 'gpedit.msc') in the run dialog from the start menu doesn't work?

One reason more to be happy with XP Pro  :-\

Don't know. I don't have xp home to try it.

7452
Developer's Corner / Re: Hotkey nostalgia
« on: April 26, 2009, 07:08 PM »
I think it was this one
http://www.conklinsystems.com/vmos.htm

I found info on qnix too.  Amazing what still shows up on google. :)

7453
Developer's Corner / Re: Hotkey nostalgia
« on: April 26, 2009, 06:58 PM »
I think the most famous was Borland Sidekick.  I never had it myself but that was like the killer TSR app at least for 8086.  Also there was a task swapper thing I had.  I forget the name of it. 
Sidekick was *really* useful in its day.
I still have a copy of Sidekick 98 on one of my machines.
As to the later, QEMM?

-cranioscopical (April 26, 2009, 06:44 PM)

No I remember Qemm and Deskview. I think we messed around with a trail or demo and also QNix.  But the one I'm talking about wasn't hi memory or expanded memory. It actually used the demand paged virtual memory supported in hardware on the 386. I think it went away after a short time.  One of those things that was technically superior but didn't have the backing of some of the virtual memory products like VM86 or whatever it was.  Maybe being 386 only killed it.  At that time the people with money to spend had a Compaq DeskPro 286 and 386 systems were just coming in.

7454
Developer's Corner / Re: Hotkey nostalgia
« on: April 26, 2009, 06:28 PM »
The other cool thing I never got to try was this Dos Extender thing. It wasn't VM86 but some other one.  I read a magazine review were they said it actually worked very well.  It required a 386 CPU and a minimum of 4 MB ram.  It flipped on protected mode and actually used demand paged virtual memory to run your Dos programs.  Pretty wild.

The one thing that was kind of fun I remember there was some library or bunch of functions you could use that "stole" memory from your graphics card and you could use it like expanded memory.  The graphics card memory region was dormant as long as you kept the monitor in console mode.  If you let a program switch to a graphics mode though, everything got totally hosed and you usually had to cycle the power.  Great fun on the cheap. :)

7455
Developer's Corner / Re: Hotkey nostalgia
« on: April 26, 2009, 06:18 PM »
I think the most famous was Borland Sidekick.  I never had it myself but that was like the killer TSR app at least for 8086.  Also there was a task swapper thing I had.  I forget the name of it.  But it had a TSR module that did the swapping, and you could switch between 4 ordinary Dos apps if they weren't too memory hungry.  It would just park the non-active ones out to disk.  You hit some hotkey to show you the sessions you had saved and you picked the program to resume. It actually worked pretty well if you didn't do anything like programming that would crash your machine.

7456
Developer's Corner / Hotkey nostalgia
« on: April 26, 2009, 05:48 PM »
I just realized one of the reasons I like these Hotkey utilities so much!!  They remind me of those TSR programs in Dos.  With Dos you could only run one program at a time. One way to have small utilities available without quiting your application was to code them as TSRs or Terminate and Stay Resident.  You hit a hotkey and the TSR screen would pop up in front of the app you were using.  You did whatever the utility did, then it popped back down and you resumed using the main application.

I wrote a couple of small ones myself in assembler just to learn how to do it. I think one was an ASCII chart.. that loaded and saved its data to a file instead of generating it. Just to learn how to do file i/o without trashing the system.  Back then PC Magazine had assembler TSR source code for a utility in just about every issue.  There was one esp. good one that monitored keyboard, video mode change, file i/o, timer interrupt, as well as the famous "InDos Flag."  Following the author's suggestion I stripped out the guts and used the monitoring framework as the template for my TSRs.

Oh well, there wasn't that much exotic programming you could do on an XT clone with 640K and a 12" amber monitor. It was kind of a challenge. :)

The other thing I missed were the old bootable Dos diskette utilities.  Now I find out it isn't difficult to make bootable USB key drives.. so the more stuff changes.... :)

I'm still waiting for my 8 GB USB key to arrive in the mail.  :)

7457
Official Announcements / Re: April 2009 Giveaway Results - Posted
« on: April 26, 2009, 05:31 PM »
Sorry for the delay -- just sent out the emails to dc mug winners to confirm email addresses; soon as you reply i will send off the gift certificate for the mug.  :up:

Cool.  I have a Blockbuster promotional coffee mug I've been using for over 15 years but it won't last forever.  Glad to get a backup. Looks like a pretty cool mug.

7458
Official Announcements / Re: April 2009 Giveaway Results - Posted
« on: April 26, 2009, 04:44 PM »
we'll be giving away mugs for the next couple of months, as sort of a celebration of the fundraiser and anniversary.

Is there only one email?  I click the link to the mug but it looks like they want to charge me $18..  and I bet there's not even any coffee in it!! :)

7459
Living Room / Re: ZDNET: Have we arrived in the post-Windows era?
« on: April 26, 2009, 04:25 PM »
Also you don't need X to run Linux.

Agree. You don't need X at all really. But since the apps most people want to use depend on a GUI, it's a showstopper for about 96% of the people out there.

Getting old code would definitely be a smart move if you could get your hands on some.

I've got an antique 386-20 w/8mb of RAM and WFWG loaded on it that still surprises me with what it can do. I have copies of WordPerfect, MS Word, Quark XPress, Aldus (pre-Adobe) Freehand, Interleaf, Lotus1-2-3. TopSpeed Modula2, Turbo Pascal, Turbo Prolog and a pile of other stuff that all still works quite nicely. You could actually get some serious work done on this machine. Lord knows I did.
 8)


Best bet would probably be a used bookstore.  If you could find a book like Slackware 3.0 with the CD still in it.  That thing had the 2.0 kernel.  Once Linux got off the 1.x kernels I don't think I ever got a hard lock.  Had a 486 w/16 MB ram running XWindows.  The X window manager might crash, but I'd just hotkey to a console window, kill X and start it again. Never had to cycle power with that baby!!  Of course what I did have to do was rip my hair out to get stuff to work!!  It's like the inverse of Windows.  Windows you double click install and it goes on, but it breaks easily.  Back then it wasn't just apt-get.  You had to mess with scripts and configure stuff.  Once you got it solid, unless you crashed the file system it didn't break. If you had a UPS you had it made... until you wanted to do something like print stuff on a non-postscript printer.. then more hair loss. :)


It just seems weird to me that you can still find rotary dial phones, but you can't find a 386 that ain't in a museum.  There must be a govt. program where they sent 'em all to India or something.

7460
Interesing info in the article. I'll have to try that on W7.  For Vista I only have Home Premium so that option isn't there. I use a freebie App killer to kill off stuff I don't want to run ever, like mobsync.exe.



7461
In the same vein, somebody on another site recommended this FF addon
https://addons.mozil...S/firefox/addon/6623

you can set it to delete those Flash cookies automatically.. and some other stuff.

7462
My bad. I thought you were referring to the site being discussed. Sorry about the confusion.

No biggy. :) Now that you mention it though, the guy with the graphic sig probably has his own site hosting it, so his server software can tell him the IP and dynamically makes a button graphic with the IP numbers or something.  Learn something every day. :)


7463
Miles, it might be nice to put a screenshot in the first post (and on your website)?

Good idea.

7464
AFAIK, the server you connect to knows your IP (from the HTTP header) whether the site has any graphics or not. :) The pixel hack would only come into play for email or if a third party wanted to monitor a site s/he didn't manage - eg: monitoring a forum's activity by inserting an image hosted on your own site into a post or sig.


If you look at my post I specified a sig graphic. Joe normal user on a board shows you your IP when you read his post because you downloaded the graphic in the sig.  I believe I said that a couple of times.

edit: the pixel thing I was referring to was stat-gathering.  Don't know why they need sneaky pixels but maybe it's something that works on all sites if the page server doesn't block it.  Who knows?

https://addons.mozil...S/firefox/addon/5414


7465
Update

Folder Cache v. 1.6

The Enter key now presses the Open Selected Button in the Folder Cache Window even when it doesn't have the input focus. No need to use Alt-O now. :)


7466
Living Room / Re: ZDNET: Have we arrived in the post-Windows era?
« on: April 26, 2009, 12:01 PM »
I'm still wondering where all the 386s went.  It's like the Gremlins scarfed 'em all up and hid 'em in a landfill before people found out you could run Linux on 'em.  You'd think you should be able to buy one for $20 or something. Is the scrap value really more than a running PC?  Strange.
Does linux still support 386?

Even if the kernel does, I wonder how useful it would be... would you be able to get acceptable X11 performance, for instance?

For an old machine you could get old code.  When 486 was it, most code was 386.  After Pentium came in you got a lot of optimization branches.  Just going from memory.  I used to run a 16 MHz 386 with 12 MB ram running OS/2 with about 5 layers of network software.  Didn't crash. Once you got your applications loaded off the disk it was fine.  Also you don't need X to run Linux.  Back in 2.0 and earlier kernels most installs put console mode Linux with 6 terminals hooked to F1 to F6 function keys.  If you wanted X you had to configure it yourself.  There are many Linux terminal mode mail programs, newsreaders etc..

7467
Reminds me of those graphic buttons people used in their sigs back in the days when a lot of people used Netscape for everything, web, mail, news.
You press the button and it tells you your email address, ip address etc..

Yes, but doesn't the server have access to that info in those cases? If a script can be run to dynamically generate info and display it for the user, can't it also relay it back to the server?

PS: The site also offers to check a friend's  :) history and tell you about it. I sent it to myself & ran the script and sure enough it sent me a link to the (already generated) results.

PPS: I could be way off the mark but I _think_ it's done using this hack.



It can get the IP address because you download the graphic(the reason email programs block images) and there are even detectors for Firefox that look for "invisible pixels" (I forget the name it gives to them) that use the same trick but you don't see them.  How they get the email address was likely the fact that everything was in Netscape, which had plugin calls and no security back then.

Another thing they like to do in these sig graphics is do a DNS lookup on your IP to get the server name, which due to the brilliance of many ISPs, often has geographic info in the name.  (Your IP is given some dynamic name with the ISP server handling your traffic like xyzbostonsvr125.isp.com or something) Makes it feel like they are zeroing in on you. :)

(I'm no networking guru so someone else may be able to tell how it's done exactly. When I first played around with JavaScript I did everything with client side, figuring it's more secure if you don't run anything on the server.  Later I see people saying, no client side is insecure because it can be modified before it's run.. so run everything on the server because you can keep people from changing the code...  sometimes I wonder if it's the flavor of the month... client side is probably back in fashion for all I know) :)

7468
Reminds me of those graphic buttons people used in their sigs back in the days when a lot of people used Netscape for everything, web, mail, news.
You press the button and it tells you your email address, ip address etc..

7469
Hmmmmmmmmmm I have a "double back" bookmarklet so that I don't have to click twice to go back 2 pages.  It has this script
javascript:N=history.length;if(N==2){history.go(-1)}else{history.go(-2)}

goes back 2 pages if it can, if not then 1.. but I'm wondering if JS returns the result and maybe it intercepts it so that your browser doesn't actually change pages but gets the url?  Maybe it's more sophisticated than that though.   :-\

7470
Living Room / Re: ZDNET: Have we arrived in the post-Windows era?
« on: April 25, 2009, 06:02 PM »
I'm still wondering where all the 386s went.  It's like the Gremlins scarfed 'em all up and hid 'em in a landfill before people found out you could run Linux on 'em.  You'd think you should be able to buy one for $20 or something. Is the scrap value really more than a running PC?  Strange.

7471
well
I just had a look - it showed 113 sites I had visited - I may be wrong but I think it didnt pick up on sites I had visited via Opera(?) (Disclaimer - I swear I wasnt trying to hide those sites :o but if that is the case, then Opera could be a good bet for more privacy...*)

If you use a secure form-filler-outer-thingy then disregard, but with Opera, if you like to use the Wand, which I do, you have to watch out as the [Personal Info] section in opera6.ini is in clear text.  As in your name address phone number, if you entered that in.  If I intend to use the Wand, I run a little AutoIt script I wrote that decrypts it, runs Opera and waits, then encrypts it again. Not bulletproof by any means, but better than leaving the stuff in the clear in a known location.

7472
I installed it - then got annoyed with the extra housekeeping involved - and uninstalled it.  (see attachment in previous post)

I use NoScript, but for me it's not enabling facets of a site on the first visit, but the Updates every other day.  Between it and FlashGot, if you have any script launching the default browser, if that's Firefox, you can't count on it launching unimpeded.  Can't they release updates on every Tuesday like when Wimpy pays his tab?  :)

I hope Sandboxie get it going with the W7 32 bit support. It's easier just to run Sandboxed then "Enable Scripts Globally Dangerous" :)

7473
Miles yes I used it. I really believed that the double-click was responsible for opening that folder. It did take awfully long and I might have clicked elsewhere in the meantime ;) Funny.

It's the first Gui I did in AutoIt3 that didn't have all buttons. I was more surprised than anyone when double click and Enter weren't supported. I should have put the label on earlier with the usage info.  Double click wears on your index finger after awhile anyway.  On my XMon similar Delphi program I have right click to open. It's just faster, if you don't need a context menu.  Glad you like the utility. :)

7474
I left a reply.  If it's still there, you can view it here

7475
For future ref. you can create a password reset on a USB key or floppy(if you have a floppy drive)
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306214

Also, not that it helps much, but MS almost got it right with NT 4 Server.  In the user account templates there is a group called Operators.  If your account was a member of Operators, you could install software, register ActiveX Controls etc.. but you couldn't delete core system files etc..

Trouble with non Server Windows is there's no happy medium.  Guess they tried to move in that direction with Vista but it would have been better if they did the Operator's Group approach I think. Thing is it's really a single-user multi-tasking system trying to act like multi-user.  You need to be Owner with all the crap turned off or you lose your mind!!

In Linux I just kept a console window open where I did an su command if I was going to be installing or messing with stuff.  No clicking on "do you want to do that?"  when if I didn't want to do it, I wouldn't have done it!!  Jeez!!

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