You forgot one

... when the maths co-processor was swallowed up and became integral to the main CPU. IIRC this was around the time of the DX (as compared to SX) processors. There wasn't really much (PC) CPU competition about at the time and even for larger systems everything had discrete maths units.

Re: What?

"However I dont hear anybody complaining about pabx mfgrs?"

Alright then... Avaya. Their (management and end user) software is indescribably awful in almost every way and their product retention and support for anything over a couple of years old is along the lines of "what product? don't remember making that!"

Happy now? :p

Radiation

It's not the radiation when you're at Mars that's the problem... it's the radiation on the way to Mars that is.

Mars itself will provide some protection from radiation - not a lot, but a hell of a lot more than a stock space vehicle will. As already noted, living in caves is an easy first step, with rock built structures the next.

The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.

WIndows Registry - a bad idea from the offset and the start of a great many problems. However this does not mean that mixing program files and data files is a good idea, just that writing anything into the registry is dumb. Want to recover your application from a failed OS install and your application has written important configuration settings into the registry? Forget it. On the other hand, if the application has *correctly* asked the OS for where it should store data files and put them there, you can easily recover them.

You are completely right about various apps doing stupid fecking things and "requiring" admin rights or at the least any pretence to security removed.

By the way, the MS documentation on where to store where is well over 10 years old, it's just a shame that MS frequently fail to adhere to any of it themselves with their applications. Not right to imply that all the problems are down to 3rd party software though, as a good pile of the problems are embedded within Windows itself.

If you want a real laugh...

Step through some of the calls in a CPU view mode and you'll start to wonder just when you'll ever get to the code that actually does what it's intended to do. There's so much boilerplate (mostly unnecessary) that it feels like 95% of the code is non-constructive - it's no wonder that even with multi-core 3GHz systems with 8GB RAM everything is still so flipping slowwwwwwwww....

@CADmonkey - I used to hate Windows 7

Finding files - I've found the search box in Windows Explorer to be quite useful for simple searches. For anything more complicated (much rarer) the I'd obviously use a better tool.

To fix the explore tree-list operation, in Windows Explorer, click Tools > Folder Options and tick both boxes in the Navigation pane "Show all folders" and "Automatically expand to current folder". That's all it takes to restore a little sanity.

Disturbingly enough, Win 7 out of the box is crippled by the "effects" and other stupdity that effortless turn a fast system into something that feels like it runs like a snail nailed to sandpaper... unfortunately this detritus isn't as easy to find where to turn off. Right click on Desktop, select Personalise, then select "Ease of access centre" (bottom left of window), select "Make the computer easier to see" and in the "Make thing on the screen easier to see" section tick the "Turn off all unnecessary animations (when possible)". Hit OK and all of a sudden your experience will improve immeasurably as no longer are there pointless and annoying delays while Windows fades, slides and expands stuff into and out of view. It's not that nice effects are bad, it's just that they shouldn't make things slower just for the sheer hell of it.

To fix one of the other dumb-ass problems in Windows 7, that of password expiry notifications typically being on screen for around 5ms is, again, to go the "Ease of Access Centre" but this time select "Make it easier to focus on tasks" and change the "Adjust time limits and flashing visuals" and set the drop down box for "How long should Windows notification dialog boxes stay open?" and set it to a sane value - i.e. minutes (don't forget, 5.0 seconds seems to include windows decision and dithering time so the display time is somewhat less than 5.0 seconds).

Likewise, one of the "new features" is that the notification area on the task bar has a whizz bang and utterly useless feature to stop popups. This generally prevents the user from seeing anything important and its implementation makes the entire feature not only pointless but actually a problem. The best option is to just disable the feature. To do this, right click on task bar, select "properties", then click "Customise" in the "Taskbar" tab and in the "Notification Area Icons" page tick the option "Always show all icons and notifications on the taskbar". Now you won't miss sometimes critical notifications.

Start > Run option - this can be restored by going to the same "Taskbar and Start Menu Properties" dialog, clicking on the "Start Menu" tab, clicking the "Customise" button and two thirds of the way through the options is an option to restore the "Run" command to the start menu ("Run command").

Not that there aren't some remaining real ass-hattery things in Win 7, but I've found that with these tweaks it's generally smooth and fast again. The remaining real annoyances are the ludicrous file copy dialogs that tend to spend more time "discovering items" than actually copying and the batshit insane control panel that can now only be used by using the search feature in the explorer window that displays it - not that this search doesn't work well (it does) but it's more clicks and key presses to perform a once fairly rapid task.

@irish donkey - Maybe a schoolboy error

The schoolboy error may be that you did an upgrade. The *only* way you should ever upgrade a Windows OS installation is to slam in a new disk or format the old one and install from scratch.

Not sure if you did though, as I can't remember whether or not it is even possible to do an in place upgrade from Win XP to Win 7...

The "fuzziness" on your screen was almost certainly due to not driving the TFT monitor at it's native resolution (a very common problem). One other possibility may be that it's just the desktop icons that look shite - in this case click on the desktop, hold down the Ctrl key and spin the mouse wheel until the icons look sane again!

No...

Don't start the Comic Sans argument... El Reg's forums will collapse under the weight!!!

Problem?

How about when you don't want to use the ISP provided e-mail address?

Nobody *sane* uses an ISP provided e-mail address - what about when you want to change ISP, your ISP goes under or some other drama? Suddenly you have to change e-mail addresses, and if you're foolish enough to be a business that's using an ISP's e-mail address not only do all your contacts have to change your e-mail address but you have to reprint stationary as well...

Webmail is, of course, the answer to many problems and as dubious as some find them, gmail, hotmail, yahoo mail, etc do provide a non ISP specific e-mail address and the upshot is that you don't have to use a local mail client as well.

One of these days...

One of these days somebody will produce an OS as clean and easy to use as the old Amiga OS (before the "magic" UI and other stuff took over that is). The OS rendered your application, including the buttons controls and everything. As a developer you just provided event handlers to the button presses and any custom rendering required. It was simple, efficient and applications remained largely efficient and consistent.

It wasn't all good, of course, but it was a very good start. Applications tended to (want to) become more complicated than the OS would allow and they would sometimes start to take over the OS's tasks on their own as a result, but as a principle it was good.

I still miss the lack of damn drive letters, obscure mount points and other arcane chicanery as everything was just assign points. The first versions of the OS didn't scale this concept too well but later revisions improved the handling considerably. Being able to access your application's assign point on the file system and not caring whether it was a diskette, CD, obscure mount point within the directories on a hard disk or even a remote file system was a delightful way to handle files. Libraries were handled by the OS and versioning was the norm - it could still lead to library (DLL in windows land) hell but unlike early Windows handling of such libraries it was manageable.

@ *SIGH*

Close...

Religion is nothing more than a mechanism, one among many, for foisting your preferences onto others. You are also very correct though that even the supposed lack of belief, atheism, is guilty of this.

There is a *very* good point though which is stated but not made clear in that these major religions are based around caring and respect - murdering people is not exactly part of this remit. They are also based around spreading their faith to the exclusion of other faiths - which in logical terms is essential to the survival of a religion but generally contradictory to the caring and respect aspects but such things as utter lack of logic and contradictions are what most faiths are made of.

If you take a step back and look at these things in a broader picture, religions are or have been very good at keeping societal cohesion which is critical for the development of civilisation. They're not the only mechanism though, laws, class structures, education, nationhood and the like are others, but they are an important factor. And this comes right back to the first point - it's all about control and foisting your opinion on others.

Bucks...

Bucks roads have been appalling for years. A long time ago, in order to "save (short term) costs" they basically gave up on preventative maintenance. Anything to keep the poll tax down...

The result is that you know damn quick as soon as you get into roads that are, ahem, "maintained" by Bucks CC as the road changes in quality instantly. I've seen cyclists and motorcyclists have accidents directly as a result of these holes and the number of cars that require suspension / balancing / tyre work has gone up markedly as well - your local grease monkey installation will confirm this for you.

Some districts in Bucks are worse than others, but in general they're appalling with holes left for months before being dealt with.

Collective nouns for conspiracy theorists

A government of conspiracy theorists? Or perhaps a parliament of them (but that's already taken by crows)

...don't forget the tech effect

...don't forget the tech effect - after all, these things have to start somewhere. Effectively forcing hard-up competing nations to blow even more cash at a time when they ought to be saving it is a great strategy.

And as for the tech, doubtless parts of the odd crashed stealth plane are already in PRC hands, therefore there's a start somewhere. It's far easier to learn from others and to improve on it than it is to do all the hard work yourself. Besides, just like a space program, the filtering down of research into other industries is invaluable. Who cares if the first plane is especially stealthy? The lessons learnt from it will help the next one, and so on. Keep it cheap and don't try to invent something spectacular and unwieldy in the first iteration (e.g. something that leaks fuel on the ground) and improvements will come.

Equivalent?

"If it must be a Ford, what's the equivalent? a Pinto?"

Renault Twinkle ^H^H^H^H^H^H Twingo. Quite possibly the worst vehicle I've ever had the misfortune to drive...

High revving (with no power), vomit inducing suspension, an interior that a cheap Taiwanese 1980s stero knock-off would be ashamed of for some odd reason, a speedo that's so far out of the driver's line of site you're liable to hit something when checking your speed. Not a problem really though as anything faster than 50mph sets off a vomit inducing roll.

Never been travel sick when driving before :)

They look awful as well, so very good cars for precious first-borns :)

Re: What does Lord Sugar know about copyright?

Yes, copyright does vary globally and from market to market.

However, check this: http://www.copyrightservice.co.uk/protect/p07_music_copyright for an idea as to how it applies to music in the UK.

US engineers?

US engineers using SI? Not from experience they don't.

UK engineers tend to use SI though, however this also varies by their age.