OT: Microsoft patents "timed button presses"

[Ward Griffiths]

On Monday 03 May 2004 08:48 pm, Bill Campbell wrote:

> I thought it hilarious that Microsoft was touting one of the major
> features of XP is that it boots faster.  Even my development desktop
> machines go for months at a time between reboots, usually limited by
> hardware changes, not OS failures.

Yup.  The only machine I have where boot time is even a factor is an old 
Thinkpad (233 MHz) with a dead HD that I use in the yard or garage or 
kitchen or wherever with a Knoppix CD.  Booting into KDE from CD (oh 
yeah, just 64 Mb RAM) takes less time than the 1.3 GHz, 512Mb Compaq 
notebook on La Esposa's desk takes to get into XP.  I'll admit there's 
the labor of "xhost +", "ssh -l ward 192.168.0.101", "export 
DISPLAY=192.168.0.103:0" that I actually have to type in after it 
boots, but that's faster than responding to all of the maintenance and 
reminder windows that pop up on her screen when she turns it on.  And 
that's the only *ix machine (aside from the two machines on which I 
play with different Linux distros, BSD releases, funny hardware etc, 
they don't really count) that I've rebooted at all in the past couple 
of months.  I replaced the sound card in one of the boxes in the 
basement about mid February as I recall, and we had a power failure 
while we were out of town last October that outlasted the UPSs.
-- 
Ward Griffiths    wdg3rd at comcast.net    http://home.comcast.net/~wdg3rd/

And this was no disciplined march; it was a stampede--a stampede
gigantic and terrible--without order and without a goal, six million
people _unarmed_ and unprovisioned, driving headlong.  It was the
beginning of the rout of civilisation, of the massacre of mankind.
			Herbert George Wells, _The War of the Worlds_