OT: Microsoft patents "timed button presses"

[Bill Vermillion]

On Mon, May 03, 2004 at 11:05:19PM -0400, Ward Griffiths thus spoke:
> 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.

Boot time is much faster on XP - MOST of the time.  But when it
gets slow it really gets slow.  And I'll walk away and if it hasn't
finished in 1/2 an hour or so, I start over with the F8 and try
'last known working version' and that works - MOST of the time.

XP is far less trouble than the predecesors but far more trouble
than an *n*x system I've used. 

And I've just upgraded a pair of FreeBSD machines remotely.
Compiled a complete new base OS, built a brand new kernel,
installed the kernel, rebooted remotely, installed the new OS with
the new kernel running, changed any config files needed for the new
OS variant, and rebooted again.  After the OS and kernel builds,
which I start with a nohup and log out and pick up the next day,
after cheching nohup.out, I can have everything done in under 1/2
hour.

You aren't supposed to install in multi-user mode, but unless you
are upgrading from across multiple version, such as going from 4.0
to 4.8, there is no problem.   That means things will run, and on
the mail server there were just two periods of about 3 minutes each
when things weren't accessbile.

Try that with ANY MS product after DOS 3.0 and see if you can beat
that time :-)

Bill
-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com