Kraellin

Hello Kraellin,

Sorry for being late: best wishes for 2009.

How are you doing?

I bought a laptop a few months ago, it had Vista Business installed. I gave it another chance, but was very happy to use the Upgrade CD after two days.

Hello Kraellin,

Is all well now?

I'm fine, thank you. Log in, you'll meet many old faces. No unfortunately not, I haven't heard from Solypsist in a while.

I guess my Vista was with service pack 1. Granted, the laptop only has 2 GB of RAM, but it's a decent C2D CPU, Vista is so slow, so annoying with 'are you sure warnings' and worst of all not compatible with nice tools I want to use. I'm happy XP is running nicely on it.

It's a Toshiba. I know you need a Macbook Pro, so I decided to save some extra pennies first.

I've Mac, the oldies. I've seen the new ones and they certainly are very nice. Buy one if you can spend the money. I don't think you want to, but XP can be directly installed on the new Macs like a dual boot.

Do you have Red Orchestra Ostfront? That's a realistic WW2 fps shooter.

We had a very nice time with the original STW indeed.

[peeks in] ET? Take it that's not as in the film?

And hello

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TosaInu wrote: Hello Beliria. ET is Enemy Territory, the free expansionpack for Return To Castle Wolfenstein published by Activision.

heya TosaInu welcome to FF, will stop being noisy now, was curious before cause of the title of this thread . And icky war games? Rather play fantasy type role play games myself.. well with elf's and dragons that kind of thing.

aah have left a few things myself cause of people's attitudes . And them that want to annoy people for the fun of it and to get a reaction.

Used to be a GM for a text based game.. wow must be about 4-5 years back I quit that.

lol just went to look and it's still here! http://www.haelrahv.com/

yes, macs have gone completely to intel chips now. and yes, with 'bootcamp' you can run a dual boot system of either mac or pc. quite nice, but it's not like linux where if you boot to linux you can see the pc files and even grab them into linux. with bootcamp you can only see the pc files and i'm pretty sure that while in mac, you can only see the mac files. still, that would be a pretty decent arrangement.

you can also run 'parallels', which is more like an emulator that runs within the mac o/s.

and yes, win 3.1 was pretty much a joke. i saw it 'working' once. lol. that's when i had my commodore amiga 2000. we used to laugh quite a bit at the pc crowd

yes, unless it's something like java, most apps wont work on both machines.

and you may be right about mac seeing pc files. i forget what the salesman told me on that one

i've heard different things from different folks regarding bootcamp vs parallels. bootcamp you simply boot up in without booting up the mac side, where parallels runs from the mac side. and i've heard folks cheer and jeer both, so i dont really know much there. generally, i would think bootcamp would run better, not being an emulator.

the only time i saw win 3.1 was when my brother had it. you could barely get anything to work and if it did, it only worked for a minute and then crashed the system. lol. so, i have sympathy for anyone that had to use it

that's a joke, right carl? windows 7? they cant get windows 5 to work right yet. lol. i think you're going to see a bigger resistance to leaving xp and going to vista or windows7 than we did with leaving win95 or win98.

i could live with 'not perfect'. it's 'perfectly crap' i have a hard time with

Hello Carl,

I heard about the new 'Sorry for Vista version' last summer and I got pretty skeptical as soon as I saw screenshots about it.

I'm not quite sure what you mean about Java Kraellin and frankly I'am not fully up to date with all of Macs ins and outs today. Generally an application is written for either Macintosh or Windows. My guess is that Mac is using some sort of Unix filesystem (SteveJobs is from NeXtStep, you know the joke about that one right?). In the past it was using something totally different from PC's FAT16. But Mac got some tools to read and handle PC disks and files.

You are right. My guess is that bootcamp will indeed run windows applications faster, while parallels will allow some cross-platform copy and paste. That can be nice if you have say a PC only application for math calculations to generate some graph, and want to do some photoshopping and reportcreation with that on Mac.

There was, and maybe still is, a third option. That's a whole PC cramped onto a PCI card. Such a card is installed inside the Mac and you can run both at the same time on their own hardware. That solution costs a few pennies, but it also offers the pros from both worlds as those cards allowed both fast windows and cross platform copy-paste.

tosa,

java is cross-platform. it works on pc's and macs. but yes, most programs are written for pc or mac and then sometimes ported over to the other. but java isnt. you simply write in java and it works on both platforms, providing you have the 'run times' installed on your machine.

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There was, and maybe still is, a third option. That's a whole PC cramped onto a PCI card. Such a card is installed inside the Mac and you can run both at the same time on their own hardware.

now that's an interesting idea. i've said for years that we shld go back to a disk loaded operating system like dos was in the early days. the trouble, of course, is that you have to have updates and the copy-ability of a disk based o/s. and i dont know how you'd do a pci based o/s unless that pci card had flash memory for the updates. still, kind of an interesting idea.

and then there's the vmware based o/s. that's becoming quite popular. you buy a vmware module and then load your o/s into that. if it gets corrupted you simply pull down the module and reload it and all is well again. i tried out the free i.e. browser vmware module. pretty slick. it didnt matter how badly it might get infected with spyware, adware and other malware, once you quit the application, all of that went away and the next time you reloaded it all of that malware from before was gone. you didnt even need a firewall with running that.

but me, what i need is a better o/s in my head. i just destroyed windows again and had to completely re-install yet again. it's a bitch getting old

i know little of java, tosa, other than there are a few apps i use it for and that supposedly, those same apps, without any alteration, will also install and run on a mac. that's about all i know of it, that, and that it is made by Sun.

OragneMicro... ok. never heard of them and am not familiar with the product, but sounds quite interesting. one of my big dislikes of windows (all flavors) is that it's so hard to fix when it breaks and it breaks so easily. so, if you had the base o/s on a card, one that was basically uncorruptable, that would make some pretty good sense. something screws up with windows and you simply reboot and all would be better. that's how windows shld work. i've discussed such a system with my oldest brother at times, and we came up with a system (in our heads) where you would load the o/s from a disk, as in the old days, or like Ubuntu Linux does now. the base o/s could never be written to, just like an old floppy that had the read/write tab pulled closed. so, no matter how many viruses you picked up in one session, when you rebooted, all that would go away and you'd just have your base o/s back again. and that's what vmware does. no matter what happens to it during any given session, when you reboot or reload it, it's just the base system again and anything that infected the system can never be anything but temporary. that's what windows needs.

the trouble with doing things like that is the updates. you'd have to have a new disk each time there was an update, or, you'd set the read/write tab to write, maybe, do your update, then set it back to no write. but a physical protection system like that would work fine.

as for the difference between vmware and an emulator, an emulator is built within windows, while vmware is more of a shell, a bubble, into which you load windows. when you collapse the bubble, windows goes away, or whatever you have loaded in the module. so, an emulator is something built within the system, where vmware is a bubble that sort of floats outside the system.

here, i'm probably explaining it wrong: http://www.vmware.com/ . you can get a free 'appliance' to test it out, the browser appliance. i ran this a few years ago when they had the appliance as i.e. It's now mozilla, instead. but, it shld give you an idea of what vmware is and what it does. you can also look up the wiki on vmware: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMware and it can give you some more info on it. it's a pretty slick technology.

and yes, i had a backup image, but it didnt work. i'm using ghost 10 from norton and when i tried to recover from the image, ghost wouldnt go into the recovery mode. it complained that a device was malfunctioning and wouldnt load the recovery system. the device was a new sata drive that i installed windows on. the old windows was on an ide drive. not sure if that's what ghost was complainging of, but i couldnt restore the old iso

at any rate, i'm back up and running... mostly

no, i dont think it's a bios setting. what ghost said when it tried to go into recovery mode was, that it couldnt enter recovery mode because a device was not installed properly. well, that didnt make any sense since everything seemed to be working. the sata worked fine. there is one possibility, though. i had the iso on a usb device, a 16 gig thumbdrive and it might be that in recovery mode it didnt like the usb device. or, maybe the disk id on the recovery was preventing it from being installed on another drive that was significantly different from the original. i dont know, but that seems pretty odd if that was what it was. the physical drive itself shldnt matter providing the file system was the same and the size of the drive was the same. so, i dont know. but this whole breaking windows is driving me crazy. M$ is so paranoid someone is going to copy their crappy software that we've got a hardware abstraction layer, crappy repair tools including no dos mode any more. you cant even copy files in windows' repair mode. it's just plain crap.

lol. i'm talking myself into getting pissed off again. an o/s shld work. it shld be stable and it shldnt take a rocket scientist to fix it when it breaks!

and i went and looked at macs again when i went to buy the new sata drive. mac isnt much better that i can see, but in different ways. mac hardware is so closed up and locked up, that just to replace one harddrive costs you $800.00 because of the way they build their hardware. **rolls eyes**. i think i'll run linux

i guess i still dont understand the pci card you're talking about. it works on a mac?

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Kraellin wrote: you may or may not have noticed that i've been gone for a while here. western kentucky (where i live) got hit HARD with an ice storm, and i mean HARD! i just got back some temporary power. i had to buy a generator and hook it up and that's the only power i have currently.

of course your absence is very noticable - wow sounds bad storm like England and here we are having the opposite of over 40's heatwave go on day after day and they are warning us to get use to it as this will become the norm and rapidly longer and harsher conditions love to see your pics

these are all unretouched, except for cropping and resizing for the web.

these are mostly all from my yard. #4:

and this last one was retouched a bit; mostly to add some brightness and contrast.

#6

hi tosa

thanks. yes, we're doing fine. we moved the folks to atlanta finally. the progosis for their power coming back is still in the weeks range. so, my brother, who was staying with them in a hotel in atlanta, moved them down to his place till things get back to normal here.

and as for me, the electricians came yesterday afternoon and fixed the service (what they call the weatherhead) on my house. this does not give me power back, as the line to the house is still down. but, it means that, once inspected and passed, when the power company has time to get to me, they will be able to hook me up again. the problem, if there is one, will be that the power company is still swamped with main lines down and may or may not be able to do individual residences yet. but, it's looking much better. the general report for the county yesterday was that about 50 - 70% of the county was back up. so, i'm hoping within a few days i'll be back up.

but, there are two major power companies here and my folk's house is on the other company and more rural and they could still be down for two weeks or so. it's hard to get any accurate predictions of when, since so much is still down and the crews are still working looooooooong(!) hours. but all of that notwithstanding, we might get lucky and have them back in a few days also.

it's also warming up here. the temperature is going to be back in the 50's soon and for a while. so, the electric crews will be able to work under better conditions.

ok, so we're back to windows and ghost. uhm, since there is no 'DOS' any more, according to microsoft, surely ghost compensates for that. their recovery system relies on booting from the ghost cd (changing bios to boot from cd first), that is if you're doing a recovery point restore, and that was what i couldnt get to work when i tried to do a recovery this last time. it wouldnt boot into the recovery mode. it saw the cd and it tried to load, but i got an error message that it failed to load and that was it. lol. what a waste! this is ghost 10, btw and shld work fine with my XP system, as far as i know. when i read the manual after this, apparently i was supposed to test out going into recovery mode before the system all went kaboom, to make sure that i could get into recovery mode. i never did that. so, i'm not sure what i could have done to make the bloody thing work in the first place since i couldnt get into recovery mode. bloody pain in the ass. i just want something simple that i press a button or two and the whole system would be restored on a new drive. of course, microsoft doesnt want that. so, we're giving up easier maintenance for the fear of piracy. bah! pirates are going to be able to crack anything microsoft can come up with, so why put so much effort into protection that only hurts the legitimate end user? it's just an insanity.

oh well, time to find new back up and recovery software. does Nero make iso's?

yes, jobs seems to be fairly innovative and i understand apple is gaining a bigger market share in the world of the home computer. but, their closed architecture is the one thing that keeps me from going mac at this point. $800 to replace a harddrive is insane. and, that's the only way you can do it, because apparently, the harddrive is bundled into other devices, and if you replace one, you have to replace all. duh. and that's on the smaller macs. the tower seems a bit more open, with four, hot-swappable harddrive bays, but the cost on that one is considerably higher. and the customization of a mac is much harder and more expensive, so again, their hardware is what is holding me back. their software seems great, but you know me, i like to get into the nuts and bolts and am always tweaking my system with new hardware. so, mac is going to have to wait unless i just want to get a small one as a novelty. but, $1500 for a novelty is a bit much at this point. oh well, maybe commodore will make a comeback

thanks, bel

the ice is mostly gone now, but it was one of the few silver linings in all this mess. i took quite a few during all this. luckily, my batteries held up; you couldnt buy batteries in the county during all this. that was one of the things in short supply, along with long johns (winter underwear), gas cans, generators, power cords, gasoline, kerosene, diesel fuel, coleman lanterns, flashlights, heavy duty plugs (for generators) and so on. but i had an extra set of batteries with a good charge on them, so i was able to take a couple hundred or more shots. of course, without power, i couldnt upload them to the computer. lol. at least with the generator going i can do that now

thanks, carl

yes, lucky indeed. actually, i had four

it's pretty hard to imagine just how much ice was on the trees and so on. i figured if i didnt take pics no one would believe me

hi tosa,

yes, when commodore went bankrupt there were rumors for years that someone was going to buy them out. i think it was a german company that finally did and then there were even more rumors about the company making a comeback, but it just never happened. i've no idea if there's anything left or not. i tried checking back in the middle 90's, but that's about the last time i looked. it's a shame; they had a good product, but not very good leadlership.

did you ever own one, a c-64?

hehe, yeah, the tapedrive. i had one, too. i ended up modding my drives so that i put a switch on the drives that allowed me to have any one active when i flipped the switch. i dont even remember why that was now, but i could switch in and out any one drive for another. you had to solder across a circuit on a board to do that. i still have all my old c-64 and amiga stuff

so, how's your health these days, tosa?

boy died? oh no! awwww man. that was a cool dog i think i've still got those pictures i modded years ago you going to get another one?

glad to hear you're well

and i will get over to the Org one of these days. everything is a bit crazy here right now. we've moved the parents permanently down to atlanta. it was just too hard to get the help they needed here. they're now living with my oldest brother in an apartment in his basement of his nice, large house there. that means, i may move out the farm to better care for it and sell the house i'm in now... maybe. lots going on. and there's just a TON of fallen branches to be picked up all over the farm and trees that are going to have to be felled or cleaned up. so, BIG JOB right now