They left Windows Help support out of Windows. And then messed up their website so a bogus version of “GenuineCheck.exe” is invoked, so one can’t download it. Multiple layers of idiocy and incompetence! And they’ve had years to fix it, and haven’t.
Category: Computers
Lousy Power Reliability
We’ve had 6 events long enough to get logged by my UPS on this system in the last 4 weeks.
Total outage time was rather higher, I shut down fairly early in the long power failure and went to bed.
That OS from Redmond
Sometimes I think the updates are kind of slow (down in the right corner it says “Your PC will restart in 2 days to finish installing important updates.”)
Camera Bits Fixed the Network Disk Performance Problem
Photo Mechanic 5 was giving me horrible performance writing to network disk (which is all my disk)—it would take 15 seconds or so to update the rating on a photo, for example. So I was still using version 4 on my desktop (I had switched to 5 on my laptop, where I’m nearly always accessing the local disk).
As I have been doing now and then, I upgraded to the latest V5 today, and ran a quick test—and was very pleased to find that it now updates ratings of photos on network disks quite promptly. Rotation also works fast (that was actually the first place I noticed this problem, back when). (I’m sure I haven’t been hitting every upgrade, this could have been fixed a while back.)
So, kudos and thanks to Camera Bits from me today!
So Long, Alta Vista!
The first good-enough web search engine is officially shutting down in a few days. I remember when they popped up—they had about an order of magnitude more pages indexed than their competition, and they frequently actually returned relevant pages!
They were eventually displaced by Google.
Alta Vista was started as a demonstration of DECs relational database technology, and was pretty impressive from that point of view, too.
To memorialize my first favorite search engine, I’ve made screen captures of what they return for a number of personally relevant searches today.
