Delays

MacOS Rumors is reporting that the public beta of MacOS X may not be ready in time for the upcoming Seybold conference. Am I disappointed? Yes. Am I surprised? No. Considering that the OS was originally supposed to have shipped in July, I now predict we'll see the finished version of the OS shipping on new machines for the first time at next year's MacWorld New York. Jeremy has the low-bandwith blues. He's going to need more than a low ping time to beat me at Unreal Tournament, though. I love my cable modem, I don't think I'd want to move anywhere I couldn't get it or DSL now. Yes, I'm spoiled...

I need a new method to attach my Handspring Visor to my belt. My "Batman Factor" has fallen to two without it! That's a term I've just learned from this discussion over at Slashdot. It refers to the number of things hanging from your belt, giving you that "utility-belt" look that Adam West had going on in the '60's.

I've currently got my Leatherman and my Nokia 5120 on the right side. I need my Visor back on the left side as a counter-weight. The discussion at Slashdot left me with two contenders to replace my broken belt clip, which was shoddily made and over-priced. Do I want the RhinoSkin ShockSuit or one of the Rhodiana models?

The Mopes

I have the mopes. It's just a boring day. Rather warm, muggy, dreary, and uneventful. The type of day that you'd rather spend at home, reading a book or taking a nap, not at work installing Windows on a Pentium 166 workstation. I've got to give a shout out to my friend Jeremy Grimm. He apparently has gotten himself a weblog. I'm giving him some pointers, but I'm not one fourth of the Manila Guru that John is, so it's somewhat like the blind leading the blind...

I'm posting this from within Mozilla, using Milestone 17. It seems pretty fast on my Pentium III-850, but there are still some bugs. Right now, the status bar says "Employee news, research grants, Faculty Senate, Strategic Plan, Fact Book, OPG, policies, forms, more" which is from a page I visited a bit ago at ISU. Mozilla is getting better, but it'll have to truly shine to convert me from Internet Explorer.

Windows ME

Slashdot is running a story about the abscence of some DOS aspects from Microsoft's new operating system. Windows Millennium Edition, or Windows ME. Apparently, the new OS doesn't have the "Boot to command prompt" option in the F8 menu, or the "Restart in MS-DOS" option on the Shutdown menu. But is DOS really needed any more? Since the last DOS game I played was Duke Nukem 3D, I'd say that DOS gaming is pretty much dead. Has there been a major title released for DOS in the last 3 years? Not that I can remember, so I highly doubt that Microsoft has any designs on the gaming market with this move.

In my opinion, Windows ME is for people who want to run crappy programs on new PC's. If you wanted to run good programs on a new PC, you'd run Windows 2000. Win2K doesn't work well with some older games, but it works fine with most newer ones. I've played Rogue Spear, Age of Kings, Diablo, Diablo II, Unreal Tournament, SimCity 3000, Jedi Knight, Quake 3, Alpha Centauri, and many others on my Windows 2000 box just fine. I'd say that covers many of the "must-have" games for the last 2 years or so.

If you can give up your DOS programs, Windows 2000 is the way to go. I was a hardcore DOS user back when Windows 95 came out. I refused to adopt it until well into two years after it's debut, simply because it was too slow, and I had DOS down to a science. That said, I haven't tinkered with an autoexec.bat or a config.sys in a long while, other than to make a DOS boot disk with network access here at work. I'm betting that 99% of Windows users will never need or miss DOS from their machines.

The only places DOS is really needed are shops that run DOS programs from 1992. You'll find a lot of places with some proprietary ISA card which uses some ancient DOS program, all manufactured by a company that is out of business or hasn't updated their software in five years. The solution is simple here, DON'T UPGRADE!

That's right, don't upgrade to a new machine. I've got a few of these situations here at work. Try finding a new machine with ISA slots from Gateway or Dell. You can do it, it's just a pain.

If your program was written 5 years ago to run in DOS, does it really need a Gigahertz Pentium III? No. Use your old boxes until they die, then find another old box. Upgrade to a different product, or insist that the vendor produce a 32-bit version of their software. Whatever you do, don't buy a brand new PC and then try to run your ancient software on a shiny new OS.

Virtual Mac

I rebuilt the server yesterday afternoon. All is well, and the service pack went on fine the second time. Go figure. I've been playing around with Basilisk II, a Macintosh emulator. It emulates a 68K Macintosh on your PC. I'll post some more details about it tomorrow, after I've played with it a bit more, but here's a screen shot of MacOS 8.1 running on my Celeron 458 on top of Windows 2000.

Argh

Now I've done it. I've killed my Primary Domain Controller. I had already installed the Windows 2000 Service Pack 1 on over 40 workstations, as well as the backup domain controller, then I decided to come in on a Saturday and do the primary server, named Jupiter. It installed fine, rebooted, then just sat at "Preparing network connections" for well over an hour and a half. I tried safe mode, which would let me login, but then it'd just sit there. I tried running the recovery utils on the CD, no luck. I tried the "last known good" menu option, still nothing. So now, I'm re-installing Windows on the system partition, and being thankful that I have a backup domain controller which has all my user information saved, so I don't have to re-create 50 accounts and passwords.

What did I do wrong? I didn't find any of the usual gripes about this service pack hosing a server on the web. I assumed this was a "safe" patch to install. In about half an hour, when my server finishes installing the OS, I'll try the patch again, just to see what happens this time. I already have to go through the trouble of re-creating about 25 different file shares, so I may as well try to update it again.