Remember remember...

Here's a guest post by Flo

As far as I remember, we haven't always had these computers around. I'm not going to write about the abacus or the first giant computers, but rather about the first PC’s I had my hand on…

My first computer was a small box and a huge keyboard. It was an Ice-Felix HC-85 computer built in Romania, but it actually was a ZX Spectrum Clone. It was faster than the speed of light, with a mind-blowing 3.5 MHz. Its internal memory was even more negligible, but it was enough for the BASIC operating system.

The rest of the computer was improvised: the monitor was my everyday TV and the “CD-ROM” was my brother’s walkman. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, a walkman! The programs and games were written on magnetic tape.
Of course, the graphic capabilities were limited, but it was good enough for puzzle games.

Next, I got my hands on an Intel 486. The magnetic tape was obsolete now, so it was equipped with a 3 ½” floppy disk and a monitor that was as wide as 10 inches.

15 years later I got to play with a 286 Compaq laptop. It was operated with Windows 3.1 and its hardware was something like 8 Mb RAM, 100 Mb HDD and so on. The amazing part is that it still works (except for the charger) and the battery can still run for up to 2 hours.

Next time your computer crashes, before cursing and punching it think about the computers I wrote about and you’ll probably change your mind.

PS: If you have experienced working on any old computer, feel free to comment here. Maybe even write a couple of follow-up posts…

Happy surfing, Flo

A little post

So, after a very long time of not writing anything I decided to write about what’s been going on lately. Nothing really special, just your average day to day weird stuff.

Ever since I got Vista I was happy to see that almost every upgrade brought a new improvement in stability and other issues. The SP1 was no different, addressing quite a few issues that made everybody happy once they were gone. But every once in a while Microsoft screws up big time. A few years ago people started accusing Microsoft of changing root coding with their updates, which is not allowed, as updates may only address non essential coding. And they brought forth some good evidence to support this claim, but if I remember well, nothing happened. Now Microsoft did screw up a little.
Cause about 3 weeks ago they released the super cool update KB938371 that made all our mouses/mice/rats useless. Not to mention many other usb devices. Now some people said that further updating windows would fix this issue, but for me it didn’t.
So here’s what you have to do: 1) learn to use the keyboard to get around. 2) refrain yourself from getting Linux 3) go to system restore and use the auto restore to the last restore point that Microsoft suggests. Be careful, if you restore to a different restore point you might just lose any chance for your mouse to work until your next format. This was just one of the ways I’ve been having fun recently.

Another thing that has happened more or less recently, actually about 2 months ago :P , was the release of all the new browser betas. The IE beta was quite nice, being faster and more ergonomic than before, but it still has issues with rendering certain things. So it still doesn’t pass the Acid 2 test, and people from MS said that this was not because it wasn’t capable of it, but because of a special security protocol incorporated in the new coding. I wonder how Firefox or Opera can still pass the test, and be more secure than IE ..wow. Firefox was on top as usual with no issues at least not on the surface. Opera was a disappointment, having issues with rendering, plug-ins and other things, but I hope this is simply because it’s still beta.

And last thing going on right now, that I really enjoy is Microsoft being fined with 899 million euro by the European commission . Now MS has had different problems respecting the EU’s rules, taking advantage of it’s strong market position. This fine was imposed on MS for charging “unreasonable” prices to rivals for access to its dominant software. Now I really enjoy this, because I’m not a very big fan of MS and anything that shakes them up a little is fine by me.

Anyway this was it, hope I’ll have something better next time. Cheers.