I know what you mean. A good number of years ago I had to toss out a good flatbed scanner because the software driver was not updated from win 95.
I have to have a couple of old laptops just to get a PCMCIA (or whatever) port on them to program some cards to go to an old piece of test equipment that origionally cost someone Around $ 50,000. I bought that off ebay for about $ 900 as it was useless to the ones it was bought for ( mainly the old analog cell phones). You should have seen them scramble around at work to find a 3.5 inch PS2 floppy drive to go in a piece of lab equipment. I also need some old slow computers so the rs232 port will work to program other equipment.
I am all for progress, but sometimes it is expensive.. Atleast when the TV stations switched there was an adapter that was not too expensive.
I can read and write 9-track (half inch) magnetic tape, 8/5/3.5" floppies, MO media (various sizes), all sorts of different tape and oddball media (e.g., Orb disks), etc. In the past, these were necessary to support arbitrary requests from clients ("Hey, I bought this really neat, oddball tape drive! Can you send me the files you've created on one of these tapes?")
I keep a Compaq Portable 386 to give me a couple of ISA slots (I have an Opus "Personal Mainframe" that is ISA based):
I run virtual machines to support old OS's on newer hardware.
I've got a laptop that has floppy, PCMCIA, S-video, serial, parallel, etc. ports that i use when I have to interface to a piece of equipment "in the field", etc.
The only "generic" machines that I operate tend to be laptops. No particular hardware (peripheral) quirks -- beyond what the manufacturer supports in its drivers. And, only install applications that don't need to access specific types of peripherals.
Yes. And, you have to constantly ask" what am I *gaining* for what I am *losing* (which, at the very least, is a fair bit of time spent reinstalling software on a "new" machine! That, of course, assumes the protection schemes on "portable" and allow your license(s) to be transferred!)
There are certain "types" that I characterize with this anecdote: Ages ago, primitive man invented the wheel. It was SQUARE with a small hole in the center for an axle on which it would rotate. The conveyances that they created with these were, naturally, "rough riding".
Over time, the wheels would wear and become rounded. At which point, they would be promptly replaced with *new*, SQUARE WHEELS!
That is true. The console model selectric printer could go 15 cps but the 2741 used a modified office typewriter and it was a little slower. Back in those days Ma Bell pretty much had a monopoly on modems and you did not want to rent a faster one than you needed
That is what my last W/98 machine is doing right now. It runs a real nice SCSI scanner, a FAX program that is usually "off" (not answering the phone) and it is my print server. Occasionally I also do some old DOS stuff on it. One of the down sides of W/7 for me is it will not talk to the W/98 machine. In XP it is seamless.
I have a 1.44 drive in my media machine and it is shared as a mappable drive on the network so if I have something looking for an A: drive, I have it. I have a soft copy shop manual for my old truck that needs it.
For most people who were not getting OTA stuff, that was barely noticed. I have pretty much migrated to flat screens now but I still have one CRT in my shop and we just set one on the curb ... working. These days a modest size flat screen is only about $100. I paid $400 for a 58" one the other day.
That might be a good solution for net storage but it won't do much for my scanner ;-)
I have a mirrored pair on one of my machines that maintains my common files. I had one of those "toasters" but it was far from trouble free. To start with it required a driver on every machine that used it and that was bugware.
The trend is to let the customer "debug" the product. Yet, many products never actually reflect those "detected bugs" back into their refinement. I.e., buy an early version, get the bugs that came with it forever!
So called "rapid development", "incremental development", etc. have replaced the traditional "waterfall" approach: specification, implementation, test/verification.
One wonders if the same folks advocating this development style would be happy if their DaVinci surgical robot was *deployed* with such software: "Have you installed TODAY's software updates yet? BEFORE my scheduled surgery????"
A funny thing happened when I was in surgery waiting to be given the anesthesia. The Dr's in the room needed the table lowered, and none of them could figure out how to do it. Finally, one of the nurses in the room walked over, hit a knob, and adjusted it in less than 3 seconds. I had to laugh to myself (and out loud) that these highly educated Dr's couldn't adjust a surgery table.
I had a lover who was a nurse. She would rant endlessly about how bad/inept the doctors were! Mistaken orders, Rx errors, etc. And, this is what you would EXPECT them to GET RIGHT!
When looking at new cars, I was annoyed at how many questions that I asked re: stuff under the hood were met with blank stares. Cripes, this is YOUR PRODUCT! Don't you KNOW IT?? What do you do all day when there are more salespeople than customers? Play Solitaire?? Aren't you interested in your product enough to quiz one of the techs in the service department about those things that you're ignorant of?
As a customer, I could care less about how many silly awards your car company has won. There are all sorts of awards essentially designed so EVERYONE wins something! Tell me something specific about *this* vehicle. Something in which *I* have expressed an interest...
I've given up on COTS NAS boxen. They all tend to be "closed" solutions (even those built on FOSS software). A good test is to crash a volume (after having made an offline backup!) and see how painful and successful recovering the volume will be! Then, crash the *appliance* (i.e., imagine the *box* has died) and trying to recover the volume contents on "something else". So, *when* either of these scenarios manifest, you'll know what sort of nightmare you'll encounter! (Hint: rebuilding a multi-TB array can be frighteningly slow -- especially on the underpowered hardware often used for these appliances!)
Instead, I've been designing a "distributed NAS/RAID" system. I use a set of Optiplex FX160's: running headless and diskless. External (portable!) USB drives act as the persistent stores. I PXE boot a custom OS/userland that turns them into appliances.
This allows me to serve files via a wide number of protocols: SMB/CIFS, NFS, FTP, HTTP, etc. So, the stores are just seen as bytes -- they don't care if they are accessed from a DOS machine, Windows, OS/X, UN*X, etc.
Daemons running on the boxes (more than one box could be online at any given time, obviously) catalog the contents of the attached volumes. Filename, "container" (which may be a directory *or* the name of an archive "file" -- or, even an archive within an archive!), size, MD5 fingerprint, date of modification, etc. are cataloged and maintained on an RDBMS.
From this, the system can (automatically) determine equivalences; file X on volume Y in container Z is another instance of file A on volume B in container C.
A daemon periodically walks through the filesystem verifying each file is accessible and HAS NOT BEEN CORRUPTED (i.e., it's computed MD5/size agrees with its *stored* MD5/size). So, a user knows that a file is still present (RDBMS catalogs the names of existing files; if a file has gone missing, it will exist in the RDBMS but not on the associated volume in the specified container!). AND, knows that it's contents are still intact -- even if he hasn't tried to access the file recently! (the daemon has done so for him!).
The equivalence relationships allow the system to recover a lost file though this may require human intervention (e.g., if the backup copy exists on another volume attached to a different host that isn't currently powered up, then the user must perform those steps!).
It's not designed to be a highly *performant* solution but, rather, automate what a user would do in an ad hoc manner to preserve large quantities of information without having to herd them into a single appliance: "Crap! My copy of RinTinTin is trashed! Where do I have *a* backup squirreled away? Let me drag out that disk and find the backup. Then, refresh my "original" while I am at it to ensure that I have at least N copies to fall back on!"
If you think carefully about what you are doing and what they are saying, it's relatively easy to see the "curtain" hiding Oz.
I can understand a shoe salesman not knowing much about the shoes he/she sells (what is there to know besides price, size, etc?). But, something as big, complex and expensive as a motor vehicle seems to justify knowing more than the number of *wheels* it has! ("Um, I'll have to get back to you on that... Hey, Jim... do you know how many wheels are on this vehicle? I've got a customer who wants to know...")
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