Two Stop Bits | Borg's comments

Borg 14 days ago | parent | on: Beige Box LAN Party Fall 2024
DOOOOM!! :)
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Borg 51 days ago | parent | on: The Music Industry’s ’90s Hard Drives Are Dying
Imo the tapes are best long term storage medium. You can easly get around 25 years of storage from a tape. Unfortunately streamers are expensive and hard to use. I always toyed about buying a streamer for my data... Ended up hoarding HDDs...
But if we speak about 100s of years.. Hmmm, unsolved stuff..
- bmonkey325 51 days ago
  And you have to preserve the mechanism that wrote the tape. Eg. LTO-8 drives can read LTO-7 and LTO-8 tape, but not LTO-6 tape.
  I have a complicated relationship with LTO, QIC and QIC mini. Mostly it works but it senses fear like printers …
  - Borg 50 days ago
    Right... You basically need to move data too to newer format.. Ill stay with my HDDs ;) (for now).
    - bmonkey325 50 days ago
      For hard drives that are powered off for a long time "stiction" is a real concern. Yes I know, parked heads and all that, but powered off HDs for many years with varying temps/humidity gives my nether region a pucker thinking of the data loss
      - Borg 50 days ago
        Yeah.. I store them at home, so temp is 23-28 deg. Usually in those plastic little boxes there were sold in. I know they will eventually fail. I just do NOT have cheap reliable option to store backups. Those disks are leftover of upgrades, like.. 20GB, 120GB, 320GB, 1TB :) Some are reused in cheap USB ext cases that have IDE/SATA connectors.
Borg 56 days ago | parent | on: Windows NT vs. Unix: A design comparison
Ohh, because Windows was pretty much single user machine. Even NT. Imagine that up to Win2003, Filesystem Cache is not really shared. Every user logged in into system have its own FileSystem cache view (with rights cached in). Imaging how inefficient it is :). Except that, for single user experience, its very solid OS. I still use Win2003 actually.
Borg 86 days ago | parent | on: Why the fascination with retrocomputing?
Yeah. Im kinda retro here too. Im very network oriented so I cannot go back to certain level. But give me P3, 256MB RAM and vioala.. I can run Linux or Win2000 :)
Borg 94 days ago | parent | on: The History of Windows 2000
Yeah, Win2000 was very decent. I was running it for long 10 years on my P3 800 and 512MB (then 1024MB) of RAM. Until build in mobo IDE controller started to failing, so I had to upgrade to i5-760. And so, I also upgraded to Win2003 :)
Borg 116 days ago | parent | on: How to Make Windows XP Safe (and fast) (2020)
Yeah, there are few projects.. Check MSFN forums. There is also supermium browser (hosted on GitHub).
- qingcharles 115 days ago
  Wow, that's wild. A Chromium fork for XP.
Borg 120 days ago | parent | on: How to Make Windows XP Safe (and fast) (2020)
Actually, this guide is not bad really. Well written. There are few questionable things like installing some specific software that can be skipped. Also, Firewall is a must. Even if you harden your XP, there are still few ports left open like 135 and 445. They seem to be inactive (wrapper?) when you disable services and uninstall Microsoft Networking, but I would not trust that. Also, antivirus is useless indeed. Better solution is sandboxing or even VM.
I use Win2003 daily on more powerfull PC (i5-2400, 16GB RAM) and its indeed blazing fast. When cache is warm, everything starts pretty much instantly, so SSD is not really needed. Cache FTW!
Borg 139 days ago | parent | on: X Window System At 40
Cool story. I am myself Windows users here for desktop but still enpowering it with Cygwin and X11 renderer (Xming). Its so nice to run VM in the background, start Xming, SSH to box, type xterm (script) and vioala. I have xterm running with renders on my Windows box. I think can start web browser from it and other X apps :)
Unfortunately, dark cloud are comming. Firefox become so bloated that it start to badly work w/ X11 over network.
Borg 147 days ago | parent | on: Intel's Pentium Pro: Was it their best or their wo...
Ahh, I owned P233 MMX CPU for a while.. It was beast :) Good memories. I remember I skipped PII cpus and jumped to Intel Celeron 633, then I bought P3 800 and finaly P3 1000. And they I stayed at it for long time runing Win2000. So long, that mobo IDE controller started to fail, so I had to do replacement. So I upgraded to i5-760 :)
Borg 180 days ago | parent | on: ICQ messenger shuts down after almost 28 years
Hmm, I never (I think) used it. For me, THE place to chat was always IRC. And today, I try hard to avoid wallen gardens.
- bmonkey325 179 days ago
  Maybe it depended on your geography. In the late 90s it was really popular with almost 100 million accounts. Kind of like how WhatsApp is the chat platform of choice outside NA but has a gaping hole in US/canada
  Once AIM and msn came on it died quickly
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