I remember when BASIC was a language you could actually write a program in, without memorizing commands like {*^*&%a$AdBil. Totally fucking absurd. And dont' tell me this isn't intentional, it absolutely is. They don't want the masses to know how to write programs or mess with computers.

Actually, BASIC was never considered anything but a learners programming language as you can't really write a descent program with it. I've read a few articles saying why some programmers are bad because they learned bad habits learning and using BASIC because it's not a fully featured programming language. It only became, somewhat useful, when M$ came out with QBASIC.

I believe you are referring to regular expression when say, "commands like {*^*&%a$AdBil." They are kind of like varibles but far more powerful. Instead of:

cd "~/Docs/blah/blah blah"

You can do:

cd ~/Docs/blah/blah blah

The "" tells the interpreter to treat the next character literally. It's basically the only way you can do some things.

OH, and Steve Balmer is a half kike. I'm wondering how many other top execs there at M$ are as well. Yet another reason to switch to Linux or Mac, though I'd suspect Apple is infested to some degree as well.

One last thing, if you think XP is bloated wait until you get a load of Vista. For starters, you have a minimum requirement of 512MBs of RAM and that's only if you don't want to use the new "Aero":rolleyes: desktop.

The fucking Media Player for Windows XP pisses me off royally. With 98, you could open any number of the players and watch different clips at the same time; not with the New Improved XP, oh no.
Goddam Gates....

a perfect example, one of many. I think there are still some viewers you can do that with, though, haven't tried them.

and also, how do I still get 'not enough memory' messages on some software programs? The freaking old version of the program worked instantaneously with 8 megabytes of Ram, now I got 256megs and it's telling me I need more memory to run it, even though it does the exact same thing. I smell a scam going on here. Either that or they're herding us all into the computer cattle pen, where they can upload everything typed by everyone in one second to their central computers in Israel or Switzerland or whereever.

Actually, BASIC was never considered anything but a learners programming language as you can't really write a descent program with it.

if you had mispelled 'decent' and I was a computer I wouldn't know what you're talking about.

One last thing, if you think XP is bloated wait until you get a load of Vista. For starters, you have a minimum requirement of 512MBs of RAM and that's only if you don't want to use the new "Aero" desktop.

This has really GOT to be simply a scam, a conspiracy by the software companies and the computer manufacturers. How come all these programs could do that same things they do now on my old 8 megabyte computer?

I could play video files with 8 megabytes of ram, like NB forrest said, I could open up a dozen videos at the same time, til I got the 'out of memory' crash. Now if you try and open up two different media players at the same time, it can't handle it. what the hell is going on?

I think it's all about selling you new computers and new software. It's not about functionality, it's about fucktionality, them fucking you out of your money, then using their programs to take over your computer.

You can always do your own Software; and after about a 1000 hours
of debugging your rotten convolved recursive reams of GoTo crap.
You will be glad someone did it for you.

The new Macs will allow you to run OS X, Windows, and Linux on the same machine, since they are now Intel based. That's pretty cool.

Also, Microsoft Virtual PC is now free:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtualpc/default.mspx
It allows you to run other operating sytems on top of Windows, such as older versions of of Windows or even Linux. I have used it for Knoppix running on Windows 2000. So you can keep your Windows system and use Linux at the same time.

Yeah they’re awesome I just bought a i mac core duo with a Intel processor from Apples website and maxed out the specs.

ATI Radeon X1600/256MB VRAM
2GB 667 DDR2 SDRAM - 2x1GB
500GB Serial ATA drive
SuperDrive 8x (DVD+R DL/DVD+RW/CD-RW
Wireless Keyboard & Mouse
L2 Cache 2 MB
Bus Speed 667 MHz

Apples new I mac core duos are fast best computer I ever owned. The only downside about using a mac is that If a Mac user receives a computer virus via email then clicks the forward button and then forwards the infected email to friends who us MS windows then those friends, clients, colleagues will most likely become infected. Linux users as well as mac users can unknowingly wipe out thousands of computers running Microsoft windows if they are not careful. Micro$oft windows is an accident waiting to happen.

Another irritating thing I noticed is that when I save a picture in my browser, it again starts to download it, although the picture is already there in my cache! Especially with big pictures it's quite irritating. Version 1.0 of Explorer did that too, 12 years ago.

And yeah, the rattling as if the contents of my drive are uploaded to Tel Aviv is irritating as well.

Another irritating thing I noticed is that when I save a picture in my browser, it again starts to download it, although the picture is already there in my cache! Especially with big pictures it's quite irritating. Version 1.0 of Explorer did that too, 12 years ago.
And yeah, the rattling as if the contents of my drive are uploaded to Tel Aviv is irritating as well.

God , I know what you mean, I noticed that my Internet Explorer was re-downloading every picture, wtf? This was a problem that was solved in their first version? What crappy software. And my harddrive spins like crazy, too.

What you can try and do is as soon as you hear your drive spinning and your processor grinding, quickly hit cntrl+alt+delete and bring up the Task Manager, then select the 'Processes' tab, and then click the "memory usage" column, to sort processes by memory used. Look at the programs using the most memory, look for one shooting up the chart, then google that program, like "wmiprfse.exe". This is how I've discovered 85% of my installed programs are installing viruses and Terminate and stay resident programs.

You can select to end the process if it is a non-critical windows process.

Also, run 'msconfig' and disable all programs at start up, this will help your computer run alot better. I had so much crap that runs when you boot your computer, like yahoo, aol, all the programs chose to run themselves when you boot up, (just like viruses do), how unbelievably fucking annoying.

but when you look at 'memory usage' under processes in Task Manager, look at how much memory Internet Explorer is using, sometimes I see it using 60 megabytes of RAM. How the hell can this be using 60 MB of ram? It does exactly the same thing the older versions did, with one MB of RAM? Is this just horrible programming?

Netscape has always been better than Internet explorer, it's a free download, you oughta give it a try since IE is so fucked up, but one thing i noticed , the address bar is too short to see much, they've fucked up some stuff on netscape too, but at least it doesn't reload every freaking picture everytime, jesus christ.

If it's using 60 megs of RAM, everything should be instantaneous, it should have 100 recent webpages in the ram, which would make it all lightening fast, faster than even reading from the disk, but I think they fucked it all up.

download netscape here

http://browser.netscape.com/ns8/

it won't mess anything up if you install it, it works great, is very stable. after you get used to it you'll love it.

Firefox does the exact same thing. Shit, there's been times where it hogs up 175 megs of ram, then it just pukes and crashes on me. Previous versions weren't this bad. What are the FF programmers response to this? Its a "feature" they say. What a load of shit.

I eventully said fuck it and went back to Opera. It may lack AdBlock, something that was great in FF but other than that, I have no complaints.

Mac Users all think they're some kind of trendy, sporty, superior geeky whatever. Or maybe that's just computer users in general. I've used Macs, don't really see a big difference, IBM's are better.

I've tried everything. Pc's, Mac, numerous Linux distros, Slack, Debian,
SUSE, Redhat, yellowdog etc, etc.

In my opinion OpenBSD or FreeBSD are with out a doubt the two best operating
systems on the planet. Both are SUPER SECURE and STABLE.
http://www.freebsd.org
http://www.openbsd.org
FreeBSD has over 15,000 ports/programs to choose from. 99.999.% of
them are free. I've never had to pay for software, I've never had a crash,
Never been hacked, don't need to worry about spy-ware, trojans virus's etc.

I've heard people say, You can't do on UNIX what you can on windows - I
would like to know what you can do on windows that I can't do on UNIX?

Multimedia:
Xmms is similar to winamp and does everything winamp does.
Video: Mplayer or Xine will do anything any windows player will do and more.
K3b will burn and rip your ISO's CD,s Mp3's in any format that you want.

Web-browsers: We have the same browsers that you run on windows Opera,
Firefox Mozilla etc.

Office. I don't use the office stuff, but we have OpenOffice.
http://www.openoffice.org It should be capable of doing anything windows office can
do and its free.

Same with Image editing. We have 'gimp' that's similar to photoshop and its
free.

Want a desktop that looks just like windows? Install KDE
http://kde.org/screenshots/kde350shots.php
KDE is included on the FreeBSD ISO. It can be installed from ports when you
install OpenBSD over the net. Its exclusive on 99% of the Linux distros
that you install.

BSD would be much more for advanced users - If you don't want to take that
road, check out Fedora, SUSE & Mandriva. Both are just as easy to install
as Windows, all three have automatic updates, need a firewall, you just
turn it on. Try it out, I guarantee you that everything you've done on
windows can be done on Linux. As for those Linux distros above, I would go
with Fedora. Fedora runs SELinux and is activated during install.
The NSA are using it on their computers.
http://www.nsa.gov/selinux/
Very similar to a Chroot/Jail environment on BSD but Fedora has a GUI for
this program.

I hope I can convert a few windows users.

if you had mispelled 'decent' and I was a computer I wouldn't know what you're talking about.

Not if your programmer was smart enough to write an algorithm which would ensure that the correct grammar is being used and if not find the best match for a mispelled or incorrectly used word.

Firefox does the exact same thing. Shit, there's been times where it hogs up 175 megs of ram, then it just pukes and crashes on me

From what I'm gathering, Windows has some new-fangled method of paging memory in and out of RAM. It has some radically different method of inserting and removing data in and from RAM, it's supposed to be more efficient but it looks like the programmers have no idea how to use it.

If it worked right, it would be awesome, having all your programs in RAM, you last 1000 webpages right in the ram, it should all work instantaneously if that's what it was actually doing.

I think it's partly my shitty compaq presario, the hewlett packards seem to use XP pretty well, and some of the other brands. Some computers aren't set up to work as well with XP.

One of the cool features of netscape is the form filler. You can set it up to automaticly fill in forms, like a program called 'robofiill' only it's integrated into Netscape. It's what those damn bot programmers use to make all those yahoo, aol and msn bots, so it's also kind of a nuisance in the hands of twerps, but it's a pretty cool feature.

Windows removed the macro recorder for this reason, you could automatate your computer to do just about anything and leave it on all day, like dial numbers, any idiot could do stuff that would take a programmer ten thousand lines of code to do, but jesus christ, what's a computer for?
you can still get macro programs, but they're alot more complicate than the old windows macro recorder, it's borderline ridiculous how complicated they've made something that was once as simple as 1,2,3.

Firefox does the exact same thing. Shit, there's been times where it hogs up 175 megs of ram, then it just pukes and crashes on me. Previous versions weren't this bad. What are the FF programmers response to this? Its a "feature" they say. What a load of shit.

I eventully said fuck it and went back to Opera. It may lack AdBlock, something that was great in FF but other than that, I have no complaints.

I hear ya. Opera Rocks!
http://www.opera.com/

Thanks for all your information, especially the two posters with all those numbers in their names. Most useful! Although Firefox is a bloated mass now, I have to keep it because all of its "extensions", little programs that do useful things like stopping pop-upsm translation, remembering passwords, mass downloading, and so on..