I think the price of Linux (free) had a lot to do with that. About a decade ago, there started to be widespread adoption of Linux in many countries, like the Extremadura region of Spain, and all over Brazil, and even in various German cities.
Around the 2010 - 2012 time frame, the French Gendarmerie migrated 90,000 PCs from Windows to Linux. The German city of Munich migrated 14,000 city employee computers to Linux. The Extremadura region of Spain migrated 40,000 PCs to Debian.
Microsoft was desperate to stop Linux in its tracks, and fought back with every dirty trick they could conjure up, including their Treacherous Computing / Secure Boot initiative, originally designed to keep Linux from booting on X86 based computers.
Microsoft played dirty tricks in India, too. There had been talk of installing Linux in Indian schools, and Bill Gates realized that if kids grew up using Linux, they were very unlikely to buy his garbage OS later in life. He not only offered Windows to Indian schools at very low cost, he also offered to donate a large sum of money to AIDS research in India - but only if the schools continued to use Windows, and not Linux. Corrupt ministers took the deal, and India remained stuck with pirated copies of the world's most insecure widely used operating system.
(DOS is even more insecure, but that is forgiveable, as it was knocked together by Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products as a toy OS for hobby computers, in an era before Ethernet.)
It's like learning to drive on the other side of the road (since you are in India, it would be like learning to drive on the right side of the road, as we do in North America.) It's confusing and error-prone for a while, as decades of muscle memory and previous experience combine to confuse you and make you uncomfortable, until you get the hang of the new thing you're doing.
To this day, I cannot stand desktops that put the start / menu button at the top left corner of the screen; Xubuntu comes like that by default, but dragging the task bar to the bottom edge of the screen takes only a couple of mouse clicks and about two seconds.
I had to install Windows 10 on about 35 PCs over winter break back in 2018. It had been so long since I dealt with Microsoft OSes that it was a shock to see how barren Windows is after a clean install. It doesn't even come with a usable text editor - you have to go download Notebook++ or something, because Notepad is so limited it won't even line-wrap. Unbelievable.
By contrast, a fresh install of Xubuntu Linux (my flavour of choice for some years now) gets you just about everything you need to start using your computer right away, and if you have unusual requirements, there are tonnes more software available to download, free of charge and entirely legally.
-Gnobuddy
Is there one (a better method of storage)?
Tape drives are long obsolete (and tape was easily damaged). Mechanical hard drives have been found to become increasingly unreliable after roughly 5 years, whether in use or stored. SSDs lose data if they sit around too long, but also wear out and lose data if used too much.
CDs and DVDs were supposed to last for decades, but we quickly found out that this is simply not the case.
This is one of the big problems we have as a world society. In the computer era, we have no robust way to store data that will last for historically important periods of time, such as decades, centuries, or millenia.
Some papyrus and paper books survived in readable form for centuries, and stone and clay tablets for millenia. But computer data often vanishes within a decade.
Soon we will have lost most of human history, and even more people will start to believe that the iPhone is the greatest invention in human history (and not, say, the wheel, the steam engine, indoor plumbing, or household electricity.)
I wrote a bunch of computer programs in my twenties. Most ended up on floppy discs, which because unreadable within a few years. Thousands of hours of hard work from the period when I was at my creative and intellectual peak, gone forever.
What happens to crucial documents that are sometimes useful for centuries - land ownership titles, marriage certificates, population studies, medical research - in an era where all data more than twenty years old is likely to disappear for good? How many valuable Lotus 123 speadsheets have already disappeared or become unreadable? How many legal documents written in Wordstar can never be read again? How many county records typed into WordPerfect (it was the standard in L.A. county at one time)?
-Gnobuddy
There are glass DVDs, I think.
Most paper is not acid free, disintegrates within 50 years.
Windows 7 gives me a illegal message if I leave it shut down, but connected to power.
Disconnecting power for at least 5 minutes, and a second reboot removes the black screen and illegal copy message.
Most paper is not acid free, disintegrates within 50 years.
Windows 7 gives me a illegal message if I leave it shut down, but connected to power.
Disconnecting power for at least 5 minutes, and a second reboot removes the black screen and illegal copy message.
I have books more than 50 years old, and so does the local library. There have been instances of 100 year old newspapers found almost intact in landfills, startling everyone who expected it would have decayed to dust by then.
But you're quite right, certainly a lot of paper, especially the cheapest grades, doesn't last for more than 50 years.
Now, how much 50 year old computer data is still accessible?
Just think how many types of computer data storage have come and gone since 1972. Fifty years ago, your computer program was still likely to be a stack of punched paper cards, or a punched paper tape. If the computer belonged to a wealthy institution, maybe your data was on stored on a 24-inch diameter hard drive inside an enclosure the size of a contemporary dormitory refridgerator. Or maybe it was stored on a big reel of 0.5" wide computer tape.
How many people in the world still have hardware that can read any of those old data formats? Maybe a handful of technology museums, maybe not even that.
A decade or so ago, the BBC wanted to transfer historically significant footage from LaserDiscs to more modern data storage for archival. They ran into major trouble, because they could not find any working LaserDisc players. And the LaserDIsc format only died out circa 1997, when DVDs arrived in North America - the format had only been dead for ten or fifteen years when the BBC started its project, and already it had become hard for them to find playback hardware.
There is a fascinating thread on a vintage radio forum about people still working on recovering LaserDisc data for the BBC: https://www.vintage-radio.net/forum/showthread.php?t=147925
-Gnobuddy
Yes, I also have friends with LD players and collections. Seems strange they had such problems.
I've had to transfer video tape from the 1980s and 90s and it can be difficult. Some of the 3/4" tape has the sticky problem. I doubt it will be usuable much longer.
I've had to transfer video tape from the 1980s and 90s and it can be difficult. Some of the 3/4" tape has the sticky problem. I doubt it will be usuable much longer.
I used to have 3/4 Umatic at home 25 years ago... It was a great format for it's time. The key to old tapes is to wind them back and forth once in a while... Like using an old amp to "work" the capacitors so they don't need reforming...
But would your buddy have been willing to put his precious vintage LD player into someone else's hands for years on end, I wonder? Or give it away to the BBC entirely? That's a pretty big ask.
I think the BBC eventually did end up asking the public to help out with skills and/or vintage equipment. I would guess they scoured Ebay and similar sources as well.
But how many working LaserDisc players can you find thirty years after their heyday? Remember, we're not talking about one or two LaserDiscs that needed the data read and archived: the BBC produces tons of footage, and likely each project consisted of a set of multiple LaserDiscs, given the limited run-time of one disc. It's likely there were many hundreds, maybe thousands, of LaserDiscs to process. So the BBC probably needed a number of working LD players in order to be able to complete the project on a reasonable time scale.
The thread I linked to was from a vintage radio forum, where the OP discussed his part in the BBC project, modifying thirty-year-old LaserDisc electronics in order to get the maximum amount of data off the disc. I don't know if he was a BBC employee, or a volunteer from the general public, donating his skills with vintage electronics to make the archiving project happen.
How long will it be, before it becomes very difficult to find a working CD player, or a DVD player, or a Blu-Ray player? I'm guessing that in another decade they will be very thin on the ground. Around eight or ten years ago local thrift stores were full of them, so people must have been getting rid of them en masse, as they migrated to digital audio and video.
Did anyone here have computer programs stored on audio cassettes? Before the IBM PC arrived, there was a generation of early home computers where cassette tape data storage was the only permanent data storage format you could get. Take data from a serial port, connect it to a voltage controlled audio oscillator to produce FSK (frequency shift keying, where one frequency represents a '0' bit and a different frequency represents a '1'), feed the resulting signal to an ordinary audio cassette recorder, and Bob's your uncle.
-Gnobuddy
The ISOs are free to download.
You don't have to authenticate. I doesn't even nag you...
Maybe MS has turned off Win7 authentication servers, since the product is past end-of-life.
But Windows 10 doesn't nag you to authenticate?
Even with Win7, I'm surprised; as mentioned previously, the (legal and paid for) Win7 installs I looked after would turn the desktop black and display piracy warnings if the Ethernet became flaky. That behaviour must have been built into the software on the PC, since there was no working Internet connection.
Apparently MS is too stupid to know that the same OS on the same PC hardware that was authenticated successfully yesterday does not magically turn into pirated software today just because Ethernet is down.
Imagine if auto dealers were allowed to behave the same way Microsoft does. If you don't take your car back to the dealership every day, and let them check your original purchase documents, they plaster huge posters all over your car that say "This car may have been stolen from Big Ed's Chevrolet".
I cannot imagine a democracy in which that would be allowed, but software companies are given license to misbehave in ways that other businesses are not.
On the subject of legally downloading Windows ISO files, there is now a project that allows you to create a Windows 10 install ISO using a Raspberry Pi 4 (which is a little ARM-based computer). You can then boot an RPi4 from that ISO, which pulls down a large number of Windows files from Microsoft servers, and leaves you with a working installation of Windows 10 on the Pi.
(This is the ARM version of Windows 10, created for the MS Surface tablets with ARM CPUs. It's not the usual x86 version of Windows that runs only on Intel and AMD chips.)
The tool is called WoR (Windows on Raspberry Pi), and you can read more about it here: https://www.partitionwizard.com/clone-disk/windows-10-on-raspberry-pi-4.html
According to the developer who started the WoR project, various MS employees know about the project, and have stated that it is legal - because downloading a Win10 ISO from Microsoft servers is entirely legal. Whether Microsoft's pack of rabid lawyers agree, is another question entirely, and I certainly don't know the answer.
While downloading Windows 10 is legal, running it without authenticating it is not legal. And is supposed to be impossible, as a freshly installed copy is supposed to nag you and cripple itself within hours, unless authenticated. The WoR developer has said that you can only run Win10 on the Pi 4 for a few hours unless you feed it a valid authentication key.
I have no interest in the WoR project, so I haven't tried it, and can't add any personal observations. As far as I'm concerned, running Windows 10 on a Pi would be an enormous step backwards compared to running Linux on it. All you get is a very slow, very insecure, very useless operating system (there is not much software available for the ARM version of Windows 10), in place of a much faster, much more secure, extremely versatile OS. What's the point?
-Gnobuddy
Yes, that did get them somewhat unstuck, but not completely. Some would stall and stop winding. The poor Sony deck was having a hard time dragging them along and I had to put the signal thru a funky old TBC to make it steady enough to digitize. Not all the tapes stuck, but I didn't notice which types of tape were better or worse. R2R you can bake to fix the stickies, but U-Matic would mean at least taking the top off the cassette.
"Illegal" possibly, however, if that was truly the case, MS would disable it like they used to...
"What Happens if You Don’t Activate Windows 10?
If you wish to not activate Windows on your personal computer at all, you can still access it for as long as you want. In other words, you will not be stopped from using Windows even if you choose to never activate the software.
But there will be limitations if you don't activate Windows!"
https://softwarekeep.com/blog/what-happens-if-you-don-t-activate-windows-10
"What Happens if You Don’t Activate Windows 10?
If you wish to not activate Windows on your personal computer at all, you can still access it for as long as you want. In other words, you will not be stopped from using Windows even if you choose to never activate the software.
But there will be limitations if you don't activate Windows!"
https://softwarekeep.com/blog/what-happens-if-you-don-t-activate-windows-10
There was a project to run Android on x86 software, by a person in Western USA, he had a Chinese sounding name.
https://www.android-x86.org/
Maybe we should start a project called Doors, a better version of Windows, and based on a simplified instruction set.
The thing is most cell phones and tablets run Android, which is mostly ARM style designs (the Windows version for cell phones is long dead), and most desk tops / lap tops are x86.
Food for thought.
https://www.android-x86.org/
Maybe we should start a project called Doors, a better version of Windows, and based on a simplified instruction set.
The thing is most cell phones and tablets run Android, which is mostly ARM style designs (the Windows version for cell phones is long dead), and most desk tops / lap tops are x86.
Food for thought.
x86 failed in the cellphone and tablet space, losing out to ARM processors ( https://www.pcworld.com/article/414...-tablet-markets-after-cutting-atom-chips.html )
Intel seems to be failing / have failed at the low-power, low-cost end of the laptop/desktop space as well, with things like Chromebooks using ARM CPUs ( https://www.linuxmadesimple.info/2019/08/all-chromebooks-with-arm-processors-in.html ).
Now there seems to be growing momentum away from x86, and towards ARM, for laptops and desktop computers, and not just cheaper and lower performance ones. Apple is currently leading that charge: https://www.macrumors.com/guide/apple-silicon/
There is an interesting back-story about problems with Intel chips that may have contributed to Apple's decision to switch from Intel to ARM: https://www.pcmag.com/news/former-intel-engineer-explains-why-apple-switched-to-arm
If there is even halfway-decent leadership at Microsoft these days, they've gotta be keeping an eye on ARM, in case their longtime hardware partner Intel continues its downwards slide in the personal computing industry.
-Gnobuddy
Apple is obsessive about being unique, and Hackintosh was not a good thing for them, they want to control things.
So x86 was planned to be out by 2010 itself, though the actual shift took place later.
ARM is a licensing company, and even Intel has a license...
Also ARM itself is in the grip of stock market speculators, and the original chip design team may not be there after a few years.
I feel that Apple is already planning a new CPU with a similar but non ARM design, to keep their unique identity.
If you are interested, look at the Taiwanese company VIA, who have many chips and miniature motherboards below 1.5 GHz range.
And they may not be the only ones, maybe Gigabyte and MSI have similar low end products for dedicated use, for example as car entertainment systems.
So x86 was planned to be out by 2010 itself, though the actual shift took place later.
ARM is a licensing company, and even Intel has a license...
Also ARM itself is in the grip of stock market speculators, and the original chip design team may not be there after a few years.
I feel that Apple is already planning a new CPU with a similar but non ARM design, to keep their unique identity.
If you are interested, look at the Taiwanese company VIA, who have many chips and miniature motherboards below 1.5 GHz range.
And they may not be the only ones, maybe Gigabyte and MSI have similar low end products for dedicated use, for example as car entertainment systems.
ARM architechture seems to be top of the heap when it comes to performance per watt. This wasn't even on Intel's radar fifteen years ago, when they sold powerful (for the time) CPUs that required huge heatsinks and forced-air cooling.
I've used VIA motherboards in the past.
Apple's new ARM silicon has turned out to have a big security vulnerability: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/a...hit-with-world-first-augury-dmp-vulnerability
Apple has the highest hardware profit margins in the industry, meaning they manage to price-gouge people more efficiently than anyone else selling similar computing hardware.
To boost profits even more, Apple's second strategy is to make their overpriced hardware obsolete very quickly, by no longer supporting it with software updates, forcing the unfortunate owner to buy yet another new and overpriced Apple device every few years.
A non-techie friend spent over $3000 CAD on a new Apple laptop just a few years ago because someone told him that Apple was the best. The laptop suffered a hardware failure just out of warranty, which cost him another couple of thousand to fix. Now Apple won't let him update the version of MacOS on it, or install a current Web browser, or install the Jitsi app, claiming the hardware is too old.
Meantime, the eleven year old 2011 Intel PC I rescued from the trash runs Jitsi just fine, on top of Xubuntu 20.04, and also runs Firefox 100 just fine.
-Gnobuddy
I've used VIA motherboards in the past.
Apple's new ARM silicon has turned out to have a big security vulnerability: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/a...hit-with-world-first-augury-dmp-vulnerability
Apple has the highest hardware profit margins in the industry, meaning they manage to price-gouge people more efficiently than anyone else selling similar computing hardware.
To boost profits even more, Apple's second strategy is to make their overpriced hardware obsolete very quickly, by no longer supporting it with software updates, forcing the unfortunate owner to buy yet another new and overpriced Apple device every few years.
A non-techie friend spent over $3000 CAD on a new Apple laptop just a few years ago because someone told him that Apple was the best. The laptop suffered a hardware failure just out of warranty, which cost him another couple of thousand to fix. Now Apple won't let him update the version of MacOS on it, or install a current Web browser, or install the Jitsi app, claiming the hardware is too old.
Meantime, the eleven year old 2011 Intel PC I rescued from the trash runs Jitsi just fine, on top of Xubuntu 20.04, and also runs Firefox 100 just fine.
-Gnobuddy
I know somebody who managed to use an Intel compliant keyboard controller on an old Macbook, he charged much more than normal, as the chip was sourced from Delhi, 1000 km away.
But the owner was satisfied.
This kind of issue, where you are at the mercy of the OEM, is part of the reason Apple has a very low market share outside the USA and other First World countries.
But the owner was satisfied.
This kind of issue, where you are at the mercy of the OEM, is part of the reason Apple has a very low market share outside the USA and other First World countries.
