FLoC

[yogi]

The rule for multiple OS installations is not aimed at which one is installed first. It is, and from I can determine it always has been the case, that the last OS installed is the one that takes control of the boot process. Exactly how good it is at taking over that responsibility is up to the people who write the software for the bootloader. Linux can be started by a direct call to the kernel, but that is not the case with Windows. That is one reason why I favor the rEFInd boot manager. It can start Linux without using Grub. I've had so much trouble with Grub that I was elated to discover there is a way to bypass it and call the Linux kernel directly. These days normally all the booting is done from the EFI partition which has a list of all the available operating systems. Going through that list is the preferred method of booting multiple OS's, but it is not the only way. Many have been the occasion where the Linux operating system installed, but Grub did not or was corrupt. Having the option to bypass Grub solved a whole lot of boot problems for me.

You and I have used the old MBR disk format for most of our computer life. I'm guessing you STILL are using it. There is nothing wrong with MBR other than it is limited in what it can do. There was no reason I can recall for that MBR to require Windows being installed first so that it is first on the list of optional operating systems. The requirement to put Windows on top of all the other OS's came from Microsoft. The reason for that had to do with backups and disk imaging. When recovering a broken Windows installation from a disk image, the only way that could be accomplished was if that version of Windows was first on the list of choices and thus the default boot OS. If you were not concerned about backup and recovery, you would get a warning from Windows saying it can't make the recovery image, but the system would still boot even if it was not the first choice. I've been aware of that since the days of Vista. Now that UEFI is the norm, it doesn't matter because the system that boots first is set in the UEFI/BIOS of the motherboard. The priorities there can always be changed as required.

Sorry about the TMI. I do get carried away sometimes.

[Kellemora]

I have installed Windows on like the fourth partition in the past, and it installed OK, but was then the only thing that would boot up. Then I reinstalled Grub and/or used a Boot Repair Disk that installed Grub and I could pick which one I wanted to boot first during that operation.
I actually hate it when I have to do a kernel upgrade on the Silver Yogi, because I added a second 1 terrabyte HD to which I installed several OS's on. So it takes forever after an upgrade to get control of the computer back as it fishes all of them off the second HD. Most of them are very old OS's like Debian 7 and 8, Linux Mint 15, Windows XP home and I also have Windows XP Pro MCE on the main drive too.
On a different note: remember back when you had to change jumpers on a HD to make it Master or Slave?
I put 4 HDs in a machine once when the machine was new, and used each of the slave drives as storage for different things on each one, like business data on one, family photo's and genealogy on another, old games on one. The OS and all programs on the main or master drive. On the drive with the old games, I also kept my writing work and a few other things.
I had a Windows file backup system that copied all of those drives to an external 500 gig HD for safe keeping, and the 500 gig HD was backed up to another 500 gig HD I kept down at the house.
I'm actually surprised those super old externals still work. They may take a while to get spinning, but once they do, they work OK. Even so, what is on them is now backed up to a 2 terrabyte drive.

I had Apples up until I had to buy a PC to appease some of my customers I did side jobs for.
It didn't take me long to learn how to use PCDOS and then msDOS and I wrote tons of programs in Basic.
Now Basic for the Lisa System was considerably different than Basic for msDOS machines, things you could do on the Apple machine format did not work at all on the msDOS format. Anything where I used peeks pokes and calls was not an available feature on msDOS machines, at least not in the Basic on msDOS machines anyhow.
One thing I did like about msDOS's Basic was their renumber and append features which I made good use of many times.

[yogi]

I have two physical memory storage devices on this tower, but twelve partitions to manage what I have on therm. LOL The Silver Yogi had Windows installed on two separate physical drives. One was for the main OS and it was an SSD. Because of that any memory intensive program, such as most games, got installed on the second HDD. I figured the HDD was more rugged and wanted to preserve the SSD. When I moved over to this black tower I was very confident about SSD's and decided to merge the two separate drives into one. I still needed to keep separate partitions so that the drive letters remained the same and didn't crash the system. I also switched from MBR to UEFI and GPT formatting. This necessitated two very small additional partitions on the primary boot disk. Thus the Windows platter has four partitions just to run Windows. The second drive is for Linux, swap, encrypted data, and those necessary but useless in this case EFI partitions. All the boot information is on the EFI partition of the first drive but the formatting requires a similar partition on each drive. Something about standards.

The first time around my rEFInd boot manager does indeed poll all the devices looking for something bootable. This takes a little longer than the subsequent polls but only a few seconds more. I guess it builds a table in the EFI partition and if that table is altered or new devices added a new poll is taken. Otherwise the boot manager just goes with what is already known. Every time I insert a USB memory stick with Linux on it, the boot manager goes through the long polling routine again. On the laptop where "Windows is God" no polls are ever taken unless I instruct Windows to do so by pressing Shift and hitting the Reboot link. I could bypass the bootmanager from Windows on the laptop too, but that's the system I'm doing the beta testing on and decided to keep Micorsoft happy and follow their rules. The new Microsoft brainchild is coming out shortly and I may change my strategy if they don't play nice with me.

[Kellemora]

I was talking to a computer nerd last night. He said SSD drives cannot be left unused for any length of time, or they will lose their data. Then he named a few different brands and how long they can retain their data if the machine is not powered up.
The better ones were 3 years, but many of the others are less than a year. Said they should not be used for permanent storage.
He also noted that an SD card, like used in a USB slot, can hold data sitting on a shelf for 10 to 30 years.
They work entirely differently than SSD drives, or so he says.
But it is great to have an SSD drive as your boot and program drive, but better to keep your backups on a SATA drive or on SD cards.

As far as data storage goes, and although many of us use Partitions to store our different types of data.
Several articles I've read talk about using the entire drive for data, and the new instant search features now available.
But the way the rest of it was worded, I didn't really understand what he was talking about.
He made it sound like new methods of storage and data retrieval make recalling anything stored nearly instant.

Another article I read said that all we will have on our computers in the near future is an access program to the cloud programs.
I don't think I will be around long enough to see folks keeping everything in the cloud. I know I won't be doing that, hi hi.

[yogi]

I've been reading about desktops all being connected to the cloud and having nothing local for many years. I think it's more a dream than a reality. All those portable devices used for business purposes would benefit from being cloud based. People like Google, and a few others, built their hardware with that concept in mind. The reality is that people who have the same needs as you do will be around well after you and I meet at those Pearly Gates. Desktops already lost their dominance as far as computing devices go, but they ain't gonna disappear until computers are replaced by something else.

There are all kinds of stories about SSD's and their reliability. In theory what you described is true. The memory in an SSD is a charged state and could be thought of as something like a capacitor connected to ground via a very high resistance. The charge will dissipate given enough time. The big unanswered question is "How much Time?" That depends on the technology used to make the memory. Older flash drives leak way more than those made today. Some horror stories about drives going blank after only a few months circulate freely on the Internet. Then there are those 30 year drives. The best approach to it all is to evaluate the memory frequently which usually means running a program designed for that purpose. The SSD I had Windows on in the Silver Yogi sat at 85% good for I don't know how many years. LOL You will know when a drive is starting to go just by it's performance. That would be the time to replace it. My NAS has a HDD and it does that monitoring constantly. Only once in all the years I've used an NAS did I get a message warning me that the end is near.

So, yes, I concur that the default operating system can and should reside on an NVMe solid state memory device because it is the fastest of all commonly available memory. I don't know much about the protocol on those cards, but I also have read were there is no such thing as defragmentation of Windows files when using that type of memory. I have a few SSD drives and one of them is said to be portable. I think all that means is that it is not necessary to keep it plugged into the system as you would a normal SSD. I've been using that portable SSD for my air gap backup storage. It's only plugged into the system long enough to do the copy and then it's unplugged. It's only been a couple years but so far no problems with it. Plus, of all the flash memory sticks I have laying around and all the times I've added and deleted entire operating systems from them, I only lost one that I can remember. The first one I ever bought is still working fine and it rarely gets plugged in. I suppose in theory it's possible for it to die all on it's own, but it's been going ten years at least, so far. Go figure.

And I began my research for replacing this tower. I think I decided on a starting point for CPU's. What do you think of this one? https://www.newegg.com/amd-ryzen-thread ... 6819113675

[Kellemora]

What a keyboard does has not changed much in more than a hundred years.
About the only thing that has happened is they were made easier to use, and moved from manual, to electric, to electronic, to computerized.
But for anyone who needs to get serious work done, it takes a real keyboard, not something stuck on laptop or cell phone.
I've yet to find anyone who could type 120 wpm on a cell phone, hi hi.

Well you know I still have dozens of IDE drives around here, and all of them still work just fine. Seems a shame to just let them sit and not be used for anything. But the problem is about the same as it is with 8" floppies, or even my 5-1/4 floppies, nothing can read them anymore. I have at least 10 5-1/4 floppy drives in a drawer and one old machine I can put them into to read them. But it too now overheats in like 15 minutes and shuts down. I think the CPU fan quit spinning, hi hi.

Back when I worked on gaming machines, we had this big fancy ROM burner to install new programs onto the gaming boards.
Naturally they were not interchangeable with any gaming board, they had to be programmed for the gaming board they went to.
Companies like Bally would send us a new program for a certain model slot machine or specialty game. These often came on a 5-1/4 floppy, and we had to burn them to a new ROM chip and then swap out the ROM chip in the machine. The reason we did it this way was because there was some information we had to add to the file before burning it to the ROM chips. Otherwise Bally could just send us new ROM chips instead of a floppy. There was a considerable amount of information that had to be added to the file, mostly government license numbers and the like, and of course the serial number of the machine it was going into.
But Bally could send us only one 5-1/4 floppy for us to burn new ROM chips for 10 to 50 machines if need be.
I don't know of an instance where a ROM chip, even those sitting on our shelves, ever lost their memory.
And when you consider how many years ago that was. You have to wonder why the new SD cards and SSD drives memory is not permanent until erased or rewritten.

[Kellemora]

OUCH - So that's how you build a 10 to 20 thousand dollar computer, hi hi.

[yogi]

I don't know what technology is behind those ROM chips you speak of, but I do know a little bit about the SSD memories that are taking over the world these days. Basically the SSD memory works because of it's ability to place a charge into a memory cell and keep it there for an extended period of time. The reason why the memory fails on it's own is the solid state physics. Silicon, or whatever they are making FET's out of these days, is not a perfect insulator. Thus when you use silicon to isolate (insulate) a charged node, it leaks just because that's what silicon does. You can add chemicals and structure gates so that the leakage is minimized, but you can't change the nature of silicon.

Floppies, hard drives, magnetic tapes and any other ferrite storage medium does not depend on charged particles to keep it's memory. That all works on magnetism, and magnets have polarity. I suppose magnets will in fact decay over time, but we are talking thousands or millions of years for that to happen. Once a chunk of iron is magnetized, it stays that way because, well, that's how magnets work.

CD's punch light holes into a thin film. Those holes are like the old paper tapes you used to use where ASCII characters were punched into a roll of paper. You could make additional holes, but it was pretty hard to patch an existing hole. My point is that CD media and punched paper retain their memory due to physical properties of the medium.

Keyboards ... are input devices for computers. They have other uses too but we are talking computers here. You are absolutely correct to say keyboards have not changed in their basic function. They would not be keyboards if they did change. And, like most other things in life, keyboards and input devices in general, come in a wide variety of styles. Each style is suited for it's particular applications. Of course you would not use a touch screen keyboard for any intensive data entry application. You would not use a cell phone for that purpose either, which is why smart phones and tablets are not productivity devices. At best they feed information to some other computer that is designed to manipulate and analyze data. But the normal use of these inefficient mobile devices is to send emails and text messages to your relatives and friends (when you are not taking pictures with them or making phone calls). A computer workstation can be used for such things but that would be a misapplication of the hardware. Workstations are, for work. They have heavy duty input and output devices designed to be productive and accomplish the job at hand. So, again, you are correct. Nobody types 120 wpm on their cell phone. There is no point to even want to in the first place.

I would be surprised if there is no way to use IDE drives and read 8" or 5.25" floppies. It might take a lot of investment in esoteric equipment to do it, but I'm nearly certain the hardware is out there. I sympathize with your frustration that the world has moved on to other protocols leaving you with more or less useless equipment. You spent a lot of time, effort, and money filling up those storage devices, and it is indeed a shame they must just sit around and collect dust. But that's the way technology moves. Fast and often.

And, I did start to investigate high performance CPU's. Looks like Intel's i9 series and AMD's Threadrippers are in that category. The CPU I linked to has 64 cores and maxes out at 240 watts. I'd have no problem with a power supply for such a monster, but what on earth would cool it? But, as I mentioned earlier, I start from the top down. I am reasonably sure I won't get a 64 core processor for my new machine. Maybe 32, but not 64.

And, just an interesting note about Flash Memory sticks. I've mentioned that I still have the very first one I purchased. I plugged it into my USB2 port today and the directory of programs showed up as they normally would. I have quite a list of diagnostic programs on that stick and took it with me every time somebody asked me to look at their computer problems. I've not done anything like that here in Missouri nor for the last year or two up north. In other words that USB memory stick has been sitting idle and unpowered for at least six years. The list of programs go all the way back to 2008, which must be about the time I purchased the memory. I updated some of the programs just to see if I can still write to the device. No problem. I ran a couple portable versions of diagnostic tools and had no issues reading or writing to the memory stick. I am well pleased given that the memory hardware outlasted the usefulness of most of the software on it. Very impressive for something that should not last that long.

[Kellemora]

I'm not sure how ROM chips held their data either. The nearest I could figure out how they worked was like an old buss fuse.
It was filled with thousands of links inside that little black case, and when we burned a file to a chip, being all zeros and ones of course. Anyplace where a 1 went, it burned the link in half, hi hi. Then at the end so the program knew it was at the end it would burn perhaps 25 links in a row in half. What I do remember is it took more power to burn a ROM than it did to write to a disk or CD.

Floppies are like magnetic tape, which the tape can get crosstalk on it due to being wound up on a spool. But floppies where in their own fur lined leather jackets so stacking them up didn't cause them to lose data. But putting anything with a magnet in it on a floppy would destroy it, hi hi. But once that iron oxide is magnetized, even though it is a very week magnetic signal, it rarely fades away, in our lifetimes anyhow. That is why I trusted almost all of my data to the 5-1/4 floppies, and not the lousy 3-1/2 inch floppies that lost data faster than you could write it. And I learned the hard way, CDs ROT.
I didn't know write once CDs burned holes in the mettalic film, but it makes sense.
I know the rewritables simply press down a dent in the foil, and erasing somehow brings the dents back up again.
I had a stack of rewritables I had used numerous times for transferring data. Much like we use the USB sticks for now.

Well, all of my data that is important is on hard drives, redundantly. The only thing is, some of what I have stored, the programs required to read the data no longer exists. That's one area where Linux has saved the day for me a few times. A Linux based program was able to read some of the old data and save it in newer formats for me. But not all of it of course. And this is one reason I no longer trust proprietary software for much of anything anymore. The have you over a barrel with upgrades, and after a few upgrades, the latest versions can't read their earlier versions. So if you skip a few expensive upgrades, it is curtains for your data. And most proprietary software does not have a generic output file available to save your data that way.

My Garmin could only hold a 1 gig SD card max, but had like 250mb sd card in it. I had a camera that had a 1 gig SD card of the same type, so bought a new 5 gig card for it, and took the 1 gig card and moved it to the Garmin GPS. That was something I'm glad I did when I could.
My little flip-fone, the one I got two times before this one used a tiny little chip, don't know the size of it. But when I got the next little flip-fone it didn't come with one, you had to take the one out of your old phone and put in the new phone while on another phone to provider. I've had two flip-fones since then where all they did was move the chip from one phone to another. Being as old as it is, it surely can't have much memory in it. But then I don't use my phone except for voice communications.

I still have my very first USB stick in my pocket. Only look at it about once every couple of years, and so far, it has always worked just fine.

What happens to all your data stored in the cloud if the company you used for your cloud goes belly up?

[yogi]

From what I gather ROM has physical changes in the memory substance; something like the fuse analogy you made. Like most electronic devices, ROM too comes in various styles. Some are masked and some use UV light to burn a matrix of data. They call it nonvolatile, which is true in some cases . You know, consider the paper tapes with holes in them. It's nonvolatile and can only be written to once. There are electronic equivalents to that. We know ROMs by their use in storing boot firmware, typically in BIOS or EFI. Interestingly today's BIOS chips typically require a battery backup to keep them alive. In fact if you remove the battery, the firmware can disappear never to return. Those would be EPROMs as opposed to the older physical technology.

The CD "holes" of which I speak are a matter of opaqueness. I don't think there are physical holes in the substrate but the coating on it can be made more or less translucent with a laser. Then there is the dents for R/W platters. I guess that works by heat warping the storage media. I know I read about it many years ago, but the exact details of how it all works are vague these days.

You run into the strangest problems during your encounters with electronic technology. LOL Floppies of all varieties do in fact work by magnetizing tracks. The R/W head reads those tracks but must be at some very small physical distance from them; typically less than the size of a particle of dust. In other words those magnetic fields are super weak and don't radiate very far. Thus when you tell me about cross talk or one floppy being able to contaminate another one next to it, I have to scratch my head and wonder. I've never heard of such interaction. I am, of course, aware of the physical damage a magnet can due to a floppy disk. In fact I had a degausing coil when I worked at Motorola. All discarded floppies from my desk were degaused first. That not only removed the data but rendered the disk unusable. It could not even be formatted and much less any data read. So, yes, magnetic fields are lethal for floppies, but I still don't know how one floppy can affect it's neighbor.

Retail backup software is designed for ... profit. That's why it is retail and not commercial grade. Thus anything proprietary must be used knowing what you are getting into. I have found a few programs for Windows that do direct copies, something like rsync would do. But most of the software out there is designed to be obsolete after a certain time. You have to keep pace or pay the price. Or, as you would prefer no doubt, just use Linux to do direct copies and to hell with an automated program. LOL

What happens to all your data stored in the cloud if the company you used for your cloud goes belly up?

I've had a couple occasions to answer that question in real time. A few cloud based services I used did just what you point out. They discontinued their service for one reason or another. One of them was Google+ which involved a lot of Facebook-like data but run by Google. When they decided to remove that service from the cloud they sent me a letter telling me what to do and how to do it. If I could not follow their instructions, they would download it for me. Yahoo gave me the same headache at one time, as did a few other places. In other words, when a cloud service goes down there generally is some warning to the users that they need to preserve their data. It is possible to shut down things without any warnings or without giving your customers the opportunity to save what they entrusted to their servers. It's possible, but I can't think of one case where that actually happened. If you are going to move to the cloud you must go with a well established and reliable company. Or, you make your own cloud server and not have to put up with the risks of somebody else curating your important data.

[Kellemora]

I had a paper tape reader/punch back when I had my Heath/Zenith Octal Entry computer.
Paper goes bad too. It was a soft ticker tape type paper, not meant for permanent backups or programs, hi hi.
The IBM punch cards were much longer lived. And the plastic IBM cards lasted for a decade if the sun didn't hit them.

Now wait, I never said the floppy disks got crosstalk, at least I don't think I did.
Reel to reel tapes, 4-track tapes, 8-track tapes, cassettes of all sizes, now those would get crosstalk fairly fast.
But floppy disks were in a fuzz lined plastic cover, so technically were not close enough to interact with each other.

Because I did transcription work, I too had those big electro-magnetic tape erasers. They did a marvelous job too.
Also used it for degaussing a color TV set a few times, before I got the big ring which worked better.

I've been told many times that the stuff you store in the cloud technically is not backed up, unless you make a backup yourself.
But apparently you data is floating around between many servers, so their is redundancy of your data.

I've still never figured out how these big companies like Google keep from losing data. I'm told they do not backup either.

[yogi]

You know about RAID memory configurations because you have talked about them here in the past. Certain configurations are exactly as you describe where no single disk has all your data. Your data is shared among several disks and each one can be hot swapable. After the swap no further action needs be done because the storage system will rebuild that errant memory module automatically. It all happens in real time with no loss of data. While I have no first hand knowledge of how cloud storage is managed, I'd say what I know about RAID would apply well to the cloud if it were scaled up to that size.

Cloud storage has many applications. One that is popular deals with virtual machines which some day might replace workstations and desktops. Your particular situation would benefit from cloud storage as one leg of a total backup and recovery system. You can keep everything you have in place now and make no changes to it. But, then, you can also add the cloud to your storage resources and be darned close to guaranteed that you will never lose your data entirely. Should that company fail, it can all be moved to somebody else's cloud quite easily.

Back at the Big M we did server backkups to cassette tapes. Fortunately we never had to recover from those tapes, but we did do test runs to be sure it was possible if necessary. As I recall they were special heavy duty mylar tapes, or some such thing, that would last more than 12 months. I think 36 months was the limit. To be honest I don't know what happened to data that was older than that, but we were not operating on the enterprise level. We just did factory and manufacturing record keeping which was not business critical. So, perhaps tapes can contaminate themselves. I simply don't recall that being an issue.


And, for your reading amusement, I can tell you that I now (or will in two weeks) have super powers. LOL I just got my third dose of Pfizer vaccine at the local CVS drug store. It was an amazingly simply process registering on line. Initially I went to the Walgreens website because they are the people I have my Rx insurance with via AARP. The process started fine and all the forms filled out as expected. Then pressing the appointment time button crashed the website. I tried to register with them three or four times on different browsers, one being in a VM. The site was definitely broken because I got the same results everywhere. I'm becoming very dissatisfied with the entire Walgreens experience. And, for what it's worth, here I am two hours after the jab with no noticeable side effects. We'll see how that goes tomorrow. Oh, and they were going to give me two jabs, one booster and one regular flu shot. I told them what they can do with the flu shot.

[Kellemora]

Remember my fear of my RAID array, that if that controller card went south, so did all of my data.
That fear came to fruition when my NAS got fried from the lightning strike.
All three of the 1 terrabyte each hard drives seemed to be OK, but without the exact controller card, I couldn't access them.
So, rather than waste the hard drives I reformatted them. Two of them are in use right now, one is in the Silver Yogi for data storage, and the other in my older computer that is currently having overheating issues, probably just needs the dust cleaned out of around the CPU, hi hi. Now the third drive, although it formatted OK, was running slower than it should, having trouble with saving and retrieving files. I reformatted it again only in ext3 instead of ntfs and ran a diagnostic on it. One that writes and reads every cell, since the first diagnostic showed no bad sectors. After it ran that, it showed tons of errors and marked more than half of the sectors bad. This got me to test the other two drives in the same way, and they came out A-OK no errors, no bad sectors. I then tried reformatting the bad drive again, and run it through the same test a second time, it still showed tons of errors. So to make sure I didn't accidentally use that drive I gave it the old heave ho, along with many other things the lightning killed.

I do have a little free space on the cloud, a little extra space on another, which I do use to store a genealogy backup file and part of my image files, but I had to convert most of them to jpegs to reduce their file sizes to get very many uploaded. I really haven't checked them now in a few years, perhaps I should just to make sure they are still there.

I do know cassette data tapes don't read properly after about a year. I figure it is from crosstalk due to the tapes being wound over each other like a roll of ribbon. On old analog reel to reel tapes I made of my little sisters talking when they were young, the older those tapes got, the more it sounded like their voice was echoing, then a few years later, it was like they were saying the same three words about a split second apart which was worse than an echo. So I know first hand what happens on a reel to reel tape, or any tape that uses a reel, including single reel tapes like 4-track and 8-track tapes.
It happens to VHS tapes also to some degree, but not usually to the V-60 commercial grade tapes where the mylar tape is super super thick. But who has a V-60 player to play them anymore. Only TV stations had those large VHS 60 machines.

I still have not got any shots for Covid. Hoping I don't have to, until they've ironed out all the wrinkles. And perhaps have one that does work right.
FWIW: I moved all of my scripts from Walgreens to Kroger now. Much less hassle!

[yogi]

The only place I used tape for backup purposes was at Motorola. We took a few old tapes to restore a test system and it worked, but I can't tell you how old the tapes were or the file sizes for that matter. The particular system I worked on at that time was made by HP and only used to record manufacturing process data. It was pretty simple and worked well for the time I was involved with it.

I don't know about controller cards being tied to specific disks. It's possible I suppose, but for all the problems I've had with storage over the years I don't think any of them were controller card related. At least I don't recall a specific incident. I have on more than one occasion taken hard drives with fully functional operating systems out of one machine and put them into a brand new machine. They worked every time. A few times Microsoft noted what I did and insisted I renew the license. Actually I only had to pay them once when I did that because I upgraded the OS in the process. If I would have left well enough alone they would have not known the difference. Then, too, what I did involved SATA or IDE bus controllers, which is not the same as hard disk controller boards built into the drive case.

Here I am 24 hours after the jab feeling slightly fatigued and my head feels as if I had a cold, but I don't. LOL The vaccines I got were perfectly safe and bug free, but I'm certain even better remedies will come in the future. Probably next year a perfect vaccine will be available, when COVID-19 no longer is an issue and something new is taking its place. That's the exact reason I don't bother with flu shots. Nor do I run antivirus programs on my computer for similar reasons.

[Kellemora]

My first NAS used a Raid Array, and the controller card was part of the NAS. We talked about it back when too.

I am hearing some good news about SSD storage devices that don't require RAID controller cards.
They basically use two SSDs and mirror all the data on both drives instantly.
And you can read from either drive. Should one drive eventually reach its end of life, you just slip in the new SSD drive and it will mirror to the new one. No striping or cross-writing to several drives.
Enterprise SSD systems will replace RAID fairly soon almost everywhere.

I know you can't believe everything one reads on Social Media.
But supposedly, there is a team of programmers out there who have created a hybrid Linux Distro, based on BSD, which can read and write and run nearly every Windows exe program the same as if it was on a Windows machine. And they have a speed control so older Win95 and Win98 games that ran too fast on later Windows computers due to the speed of the system.
There are only a few newer Windows based mega-programs they have not got fully functional yet.
From what I read, this is not using a VM or emulators like Wine, the programs are running natively on the single OS.
The downside is, the Distro they have created is nearly the size of a Windows OS, not lightweight like normal Distro's.
They are still working on getting it to run run MAC and Android programs, which are more packages within the main Distro.
They did not give any inkling on how they are managing to accomplish this feat in the short article.
But they are hoping for an early 2022 release Dealing with package managers is what is holding them up the most.

[yogi]

The last time I read up on WINE, I came to the understanding that it was not an emulation nor a virtual machine. It was designed to be a subsystem running within the native operating system. That means WINE uses Linux kernel functions directly to run those Windows based programs. It is kind of like an operating system within another operating system but not separate. The end result is that you can run most any Windows program inside any Linux distribution that supports WINE. Why you would want to is a bit of a mystery, but it can be done.

Thanks to the miracle of open source programming philosophy Microsoft's Windows 10/11 can do the reverse trick of WINE. Windows has it's own subsystem wherein two fully functional Linux operating systems can be run. Currently it's only Ubuntu and Kali Linux, but the theory is that more are on the way if the need arises. Windows 11 has taken that open source subsystem to new levels and now can run any Android application. At the moment it is only a demonstrable phenomena, but plans are being developed to offer Android apps in the Windows App Store. The only holdup seems to be with Google and the licensing process. That boils down to how the developers collect their fair share. But, be that all as it may, the method and means currently exists to run Linux and Android natively inside Windows 11.

Your description of the Linux Hybrid that will natively run any OS package is intriguing. If such a system can be developed and distributed free, that would be a serious contender for replacing Microsoft's Widows. Perhaps that is what they have in mind, but I've not read what you have read. It certainly seems as if the Redmond gang is headed in the same direction with Windows. They are trying to make it the base for everything out there. I can see some merit in a universal operating system, but capitalism is based on competition. Everyone wants to be unique. LOL

[Kellemora]

Yes I know, WINE stands for Wine Is Not An Emulator.
But that is what it does anyhow, hi hi.

It was only one short article with several comments that added more info about what they were doing.
It was like the sixth comment down that said they are using BSD as the base Distro to build up from.

There are numerous programs for Linux Distro's that are not distributed for free.
But once you paid for a copy, it usually came with all the updates to it for free.
Which is considerably different than how the proprietary folks work, who charge for every upgrade.

In the Windows world there are a many major base programs that you can download and install for free, but most have a time limit or something missing, and to keep using it you have to pay for it, and then pay for all the add-on's separately.
I don't know if you see this in the Windows world or not, where you can download and use a base program for free for as long as you want, but the enhancement modules are where you have to pay a little bit, a token amount is all. And if they come out with an upgrade, that is free too.
My POS system was like that. It did nearly everything I wanted it to do with ease. Including keeping track of sales, and depleting inventory items. But you had to manually enter a credit card sale, unless you purchased a module that worked with whatever brand and company you used for your Merchants Account. The module actually made the credit card machine work and display on the cash register screen, and use keys on the cash register, like most POS systems did.

Don't know if you ever used Cougar Mountain Software back in the DOS days or not. But they worked like that too.
You buy the main accounting package which has AP, AR, Vendors, Sales, Inventory, all in a small way.
But if your Inventory was large, or you had more than X number of Vendors, or XX number of Sales, than you had to pay to upgrade to a more robust module. It still worked the same way though. It also Shipping and Receiving Modules that could run on a workstation and be tied in with everything else. I was actually amazed at all it did back then.
And of course they have grown over the years to cover nearly any aspect of any business.
I think what we liked best about their software was an audit trail and how easily it handled payroll regardless of the terms for each employee. And I'm sure now 40 years later it will probably be amazing, and also probably unaffordable, hi hi.

[yogi]

Wine (recursive backronym for Wine Is Not an Emulator) is a free and open-source compatibility layer that aims to allow application software and computer games developed for Microsoft Windows to run on Unix-like operating systems

I know you are a stickler for using correct English, so I thought you might be interested in knowing why WINE is not an emulator.

I have heard of Cougar Mountain Software but never had a need to use it. It's true that a lot of Windows, and probably Linux too, software can be had free for the bare bones version. This is nothing less than a marketing ploy. The assumption is that you would like their basic software so much that you will be happy to buy the full version. Actually, they know most people won't but they also know how many people will. Naturally they come out ahead all the time by using such tactics. There are also the silly geese who will actually let you use their brainchild free only because they want a presence and to be known. That particular tactic is being demolished by mobile devices which rely on independent developers putting their wares in the company store. It works out well for all parties involved because while a given app might be "free" the advertising in the store is also free. Developers can reach a lot bigger market by getting listed in the company store. Those free mobile apps nearly always have ads embedded, but are fully functional. You can subscribe to eliminate the nagging ads, but most of the time you get nothing extra for it. My Google clever phone updates all the apps in the background and never bothers to let me know unless a change in the settings is affected. Windows is pretty much the same way. Only a few programs I use want money for an improved version or an upgrade. Most of them upgrade in the background or flag me with a notification while using the program. In fact Windows itself upgrades their OS for free. Wife's laptop went from Winows 7 to Windows 10 at no cost. It would go to Windows 11 free as well if that old machine had the right hardware.

Which brings me to my favorite gripe. Next week Windows 11 gets it's general release. I may have told you that my laptop was flagged as not being compatible, but they are sending me the beta version of Windows 11 regardless. Supposedly come October 5, I better have the right hardware or they will force me out of the beta program and give me a comparable copy of Windows 10 as a going away present. Well, I found the TPM setting in my UEFI settings and it is now enabled, which in theory should make the laptop compatible. However, I'm still getting the warning that I need to fix the hardware. We'll see what happens, but I'm not feeling good right now about the prospects of Microsoft parting ways with me.

[Kellemora]

Thank you, I couldn't remember how they described it. Old age is creeping up on me too fast, hi hi.

At the time we started using Cougar Mountain, they were the only one that did everything we needed it to do.
The big plus on their side was almost all extra modules were fairly priced compared to newer kids on the block.
I don't know how much they changed over the years, since for my business I started with QuickBooks, which I did like, but later on could not afford any more upgrades to the QuickBooks Pro which is what I was on. They got too money hungry for my blood.

Apps - It seems everybody and their brother wants you to download their new App.
I don't think these so-called Schmartz-Fonz have enough storage capacity to load over a million apps, hi hi.
And how do you know an App isn't just another way of getting virus, malware, trojans, or ransomware on your devices.

The Appalachia LUG usually only gets about 2 to 6 requests per week to help get a Windows user to installing a Linux Distro on their machines. In the past three months, they are averaging 35 to 50 new requests each week. Many are preparing for when Windows won't work on their hardware anymore. The main problem they are faced with is most Windows users don't even know how to install Windows, much less anything about partitioning, or downloading and burning an install CD or USB Stick. Many folks give up when they find out they have to do so much themselves to install something. Those who can afford it will just go out and buy a new computer, and those who can't afford to will either keep what they have or switch to Linux Distro's.

[yogi]

And how do you know an App isn't just another way of getting virus, malware, trojans, or ransomware on your devices.

In theory, you never know. In practice, however, those app stores run by the mother company does a lot of vetting before they allow anything into their stores. It's in their best interest to do that because they too get a cut out of every app sold or subscribed to. You don't want people to distrust you when your bottom line profit depends so heavily on those type of sales. You can install apps that are not in the stores. Apple, for example, will give you a hard time when you try to do it, but it can be done. They point out that the app has not been verified by their geniuses, and buyer had best beware. While there is some truth to that, it is also true that Apple doesn't get a commission for third party software not purchased through their store. LOL Same goes for Google and Micorsoft.

I have no doubt people are in a panic mode and many are looking into Linux. I find it hard to believe Linux is any easier to install than Windows, however. My thoughts on that uptick is that it is to be expected, but it would be more revealing to know how many of those who changed will still be using Linux next year at this time. Those folks who think Linux will solve the Windows compatibility problem are short sighted. Windows is moving to the next generation of security in personal computing. In my own experience and observation I see Linux in general lagging in that regard. That delay causes problems with upgrades. The world does not stand still just because Linux isn't doing what Microsoft is doing. I suspect corporate Linux users never experience problems with upgrading hardware or software. They have IT departments to take care of that kind of thing. But as you must know with some of your old equipment, it simply can't do what newer computers do. That movement in new directions is unstoppable. I'm not too happy about the changes myself. I may in fact demote the status of Windows ... until I get some new hardware. I've used Linux a lot and don't see it ever being a permanent replacement for Windows.