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The Obligatory Happy ***** holiday thread!


freespace2dotcom

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Long story short, my family are as far away from morning people as you can get.

 

Thusly we celebrate Christmas on the late Eve, rather than the early "Day of"

 

So I will probably not be on for the rest of the day as I will be hauling my old NES, SNES, Genesis games out of storage and mingling with the familiy as is traditional. Since most people celebrate on the Day itself I expect not to have good contact with you all for a while, so let this be the happy holidays/merry whatever thread! :lol:

 

Merry Christmas, everyone! :)

 

(Even to that evil black cat that leads others to their dooms detention!)

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Just to be clear I used ******** because of old DOS using the * symbol as a wildcard that can mean anything for searches. I realize after rereading this that it might be interpreted as perhaps a curse, but in all honesty I wanted to convey a line of thought regardless of what holiday you might actually apreciate!

 

So if you thought it was a dirty word, it's because you have a dirty mind. :P

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Merry Holiday of your choice, guys. May it be filled of games, money, alcohol, chocolate, women/men, and maybe if you're so inclined, peace of the heart.

 

Shame on you Freespace for not thinking of a dirty word. I tried to and it didn't fit all that well. Then spent my time mopping for not having enough knowledge of dirty words in general.

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Schwarzbart, you're right, but if I did that nobody would know what on earth I put that single thing up for. :)

 

I would have used the "?" sign as that actually refers to an individual character and so you can determine the length, but then everyone would assume I didn't know about the holidays or it was a mystery or something. :)

 

Nobody really knows or follows DOS these days. :(

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You don't know about holidays Freespace? :blink:

 

 

:P

 

Regarding DOS,... yeah. Save for very early memories of computers (including Commander Keen B)) I can't say that I ever give DOS a lot of thought. Then again I hardly give Windows or Linux much either... If someone made something better of a different name I don't think I'd give them any thought at all.

 

Not saying DOS has faded to obscurity, just that it doesn't mean a lot to me. As long as it works as I want it to and doesn't hinder me then I wouldn't care which operativsystem I use/d.

 

 

*cough* So as to not derail the thread. I present to you a

.
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Mustn't... give in... to the desire to rant... ;)

 

DOS is to computers what an old rusted out (but still working) pickup truck from '38 is to a modern vehicle.

 

Nobody really knows how to use it anymore. For dos, you have to understand the BIOS, and booting using data from any drive you wish from. For the '38 truck you can't just start it using a key. The ignition is a button on the floor, which only will start the car if the key is turned.

------------------

Dos. Command lines.

 

Truck. Manual transmission.

 

If nothing else those things will instantly reduce most people's desire to use them. But for the rest it's actually kinda handy as they *increase* the total amount control you have.

------------------

 

Also, in the true spirit of Christmas, I shall put up something that I have in my archives from way back. :)

 

Santa Claus: A Scientific Perspective

 

I. There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18) in the world. However, since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist religions, this reduces the workload for Christmas night to 15% of the total, or 378 million (according to the Population Reference Bureau). At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per house hold, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming that there is at least one good child in each.

 

II. Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 967.7 visits per second.

 

This is to say that for each Christian household with a good child, Santa has around 1/1000th of a second to park the sleigh, hop out, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left for him, get back up the chimney, jump into the sleigh and get on to the next house. Assuming that each of these 108 million stops is evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false, but will accept for the purposes of our calculations), we are now talking about 0.78 miles per household; a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting bathroom stops or breaks. This means Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second -- 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second, and a conventional Reindeer can run (at best) 15 miles per hour.

 

III. The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium sized Lego set (two pounds), the sleigh is carrying over 500 thousand tons, not counting Santa himself. On land, a conventional Reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that the "flying" Reindeer could pull ten times the normal amount, the job can't be done with eight or even nine of them -- Santa would need 360,000 of them. This increases the payload, not counting the weight of the sleigh, another 54,000 tons, or roughly seven times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth (the ship, not the monarch).

 

IV. 600,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second crates enormous air resistance -- this would heat up the Reindeer in the same fashion as a spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of Reindeer would absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second each. In short, they would burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the Reindeer behind them and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire Reindeer team would be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second, or right about the time Santa reached the fifth house on his trip. Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from a dead stop to 650 m.p.s. in .001 seconds, would be subjected to forces of 17,500 g's. A 250 pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force, instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing him to a quivering blob of pink goo.

 

V. Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now.

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Note that you too can become awesome should you press the "edit my profile" button in your profile, and scroll down until you get to the part where it says "Member Title"

 

...But I'm sure you already knew that. ;)

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I know a fair bit more than that. Still I'm not what would be an expert on DOS. Copying, Deleting, Searching. In DOS you could format the drive you had your OS on. Immediately if you so chose. There was no such thing as "hidden" or "system" files. Everything was there in plain sight and deletable. Sure that meant that if you deleted the wrong thing you crashed the system but that's good motivation to know what the heck you were doing. None of this crap that your system would prevent you from deleting or even seeing "for your own good." Now I'm not a serial deleter, but If I don't like something, I ought to have the power to do so. I'm smart enough to keep a backup of any potential risky file that I delete so I can replace it. But DOS works the other way too. It's so modular that if you feel the base install is lacking you could find someone (back in the day) that could mail you a floppy with a search program, or an ability to copy and delete a directory (with all the other subdirectories in it) with one command. That's all standard windows stuff now, but can you tweak Windows? I don't mean tweaking around with available settings in the control panel, I mean completely adding a brand new (or old discontinued) feature and integrating it into Windows? Can't be done. Some might get close but, in reality, they're just mimicing windows from the User's perspective and are not really enhancing Windows in any way save some cosmetic isssue or the ability of the user to do something that might otherwise require the user to get their hands dirty into the belly of command lines.

 

Another thing that irks me. Windows XP was the last version to have a boot INI file. Now this is basically a text file (a holdover from the DOS days and batch files) that tells the computer a good chunk of the information it needs to boot into windows. Later versions removed that and stuffed that information in a place that is almost impossible to edit even in the required command prompt. (So hard that I, a Windows power user, had to go to the linux side to get both systems to dual boot. it was a one line command in a terminal)

 

The key here, is that Windows greatly restricts your ability to do things. It has been dumbing things down for the end user since it's inception. Take the "Recycle bin" concept, That was in 95. All it really does is allow the PC to forgive the moron who deleted something, at the expense of making more experience deleters who know what they're doing be forced to delete the damned thing twice! :angry: At least back then MS allowed you to disable that travesty easily. Now for the fun part. Amongst the Windows users, Who here knows how to disable the hibernation feature? (and delete that horrific hiberfil.sys file *without* searching on the net.)

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For the later why do you think I almost exclusive use Shift + Entf. to delete a file? With this simple key combination I avoid the bin ^^. But I absolt agree that its horible that when you be on a Admin account the system still hides a lot of files from you and so makes it imposible for the expirienced user to clean up the system manual.

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I avoid the bin by disabling it. I don't like being forced to have to press another key besides delete. I agree with the confirmation box, but that's about it. One time I wondered where all my disk space was. I didn't have anything, really, and I found out that I had 50GB tied up in the recycle bin. I had installed a new drive and windows turned the bin on for it by default. I was... unhappy.

 

Also I noticed you became awesome as well, Schwarzbart! :)

Edit: And the Legate, too. hahaha!

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