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The criticisms that people have of this site are ridiculous. People can be a little worrisome.

Wombat

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I love a lot of the Brit mysteries, one of my favorite was Ian McShane's Lovejoy.
My ex and I would look forward to it each week.
Great comedy too, one of the best was John Cleese's Fawlty Towers. Basil --- BASIL

I particularly like Lovejoy.

Try A Touch of Frost(Pommy police). Start at the earliest ones if you can.

History
 
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Sir Sanders Zingmore

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An Australian friend was quite surprised when she heard the term ' fanny pack' here in the U.S. I don't know if it still means what it did 30 years ago, but the translation would have been quite rude to say the least.

Not only is a “fanny pack” a source of much merriment in Australia, we wear thongs on our feet

And if we get “pissed” with someone it means we’ve been drinking with them and are probably not even slightly angry.
 

Wombat

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Not only is a “fanny pack” a source of much merriment in Australia, we wear thongs on our feet

And if we get “pissed” with someone it means we’ve been drinking with them and are probably not even slightly angry.

And we sit on our arse(behind/bottom/derriere), not a donkey. ;)
 

anmpr1

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Dos 6.22/3.11WFWG for me was the best...

I recall 6.x as something of an unexplored country. MS came out with at least 4 different versions of 6, due I believe to patent issues with other companies. Interestingly, advanced features in DR-DOS 6 (remember them?), a year earlier than MS-DOS 5.0, were subsequently 'incorporated' into MS products, and advertised by MS as better than sliced Wonder bread. Really, MS was never much of an innovator. But they had good marketing, and played hardball with everyone. And they hit with corked bats. Those were the days of Microsoft FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) in MS advertising and press releases.

Also, as I recall, 6.x retail versions were the first DOS packages where you didn't get a large book explaining commands. You got a smaller, condensed version. Then, after that, you got a four or five page color flyer in the package, mostly an advertisement telling you how great the 'new and improved' features you just bought were. But that's what most folks needed, and wanted.

PS: I had an early first gen Pentium 60 with, I think, 8MB of RAM. That's right. You heard right. 8 MB. Might have been 16, but I think it was 8. With DOS/Windows 3.11 it literally screamed. Even relatively fat programs like Lotus 123. To use 'audiofool' language, it 'blew away' my 486DX2-66. Then, my PCs got progressively slower, as programs and the OS became progressively more bloated. I'm not arguing for a return to the DOS Shell... I'm just sayin' ... :cool:
 

Pluto

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I think I am being quite just. Where I worked, corporate IT refused to go with 8
I understand that, for IT professionals, Windows 8 does not measure well.

But it sounds really good :D:Do_O

Honest!
 

Sal1950

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Try A Touch of Frost(Pommy police). Start at the earliest ones if you can.
I've watched a ton of Touch of Frost, not a lot available any more in US AFAIK.

PS: I had an early first gen Pentium 60 with, I think, 8MB of RAM. That's right. You heard right. 8 MB. Might have been 16, but I think it was 8. With DOS/Windows 3.11 it literally screamed. Even relatively fat programs like Lotus 123. To use 'audiofool' language, it 'blew away' my 486DX2-66. Then, my PCs got progressively slower, as programs and the OS became progressively more bloated.
Talk about bloat, I remember my first Win 95 box. Had a 2 gig hard drive but with Win 95 loaded along with Office 95 and a bunch of other programs, it still had 1.5 gigs of room left empty. o_O
 

Xulonn

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install Classic Shell
I liked Windows 7, skipped Windows 8, and moved to Windows 10 after the first major update, and immediately installed Classic Shell so I could continue to enjoy the Windows 7 interface experience.

I played with Linux Mint, but it is still basically a command-line toy - not for those who do not enjoy memorizing lots of commands and employing them at the command-line level - or tediously searching for tweaks and cutting and pasting or manually copying commands and parameters into Linux.

That being said, my Intel 5CPYH NUC-based HTPC is Linux based - dual booting to either Daphile on the internal SSD for audio, or Kodi on a USB drive for video. Neither product is perfect, but they are both completely free, open source products, and good enough to be useful for my needs - and I have not had to resort to command-line tweaking. However, I may have to resort that to get Kodi to recognize my ethernet connection (eth0) works automatically in Daphile, but doesn't show up in connections in Kodi Leia 18.2.
 

Hugo9000

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For me Windows 8 was somewhat annoying at first, Windows 8.1 was much better. I should not have taken Microsoft up on the free "upgrade" to Windows 10, however. lol

8 and 8.1 weren't the same thing, at least the user experience. Under the hood, I don't know how much was actually changed for 8.1. It seems like most of the hatred is directed at the original plain old 8, while those of us who liked it at all are mentioning 8.1 specifically.
 
OP
Z

Zerimas

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I've watched a ton of Touch of Frost, not a lot available any more in US AFAIK.


Talk about bloat, I remember my first Win 95 box. Had a 2 gig hard drive but with Win 95 loaded along with Office 95 and a bunch of other programs, it still had 1.5 gigs of room left empty. o_O

Dang. That must have been one expensive computer. My family had a Windows 95 box (in roughly 1995). It had a 1 gig hard drive (which was pretty big at the time) and 8 megabytes of RAM. The thing cost like $3000CAD (and that is 1995 money). I was like 6 or 7 at the time, so I may be misremembering things. I actually think I've seen the manual for Windows 95 floating around in my house somewhere.
 

restorer-john

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PS: I had an early first gen Pentium 60 with, I think, 8MB of RAM. That's right. You heard right. 8 MB. Might have been 16, but I think it was 8. With DOS/Windows 3.11 it literally screamed. Even relatively fat programs like Lotus 123. To use 'audiofool' language, it 'blew away' my 486DX2-66. Then, my PCs got progressively slower, as programs and the OS became progressively more bloated. I'm not arguing for a return to the DOS Shell... I'm just sayin'

There's an ancient Pentium100 with 24MB and a 3.2 (or is it 2.3?)GB HDD (Trident 512K SVGA graphics), sitting in the cupboard under my desk that runs Win95 for some old audio hardware I use. A 10BaseT LAN and it goes like a raped ape- so fast. Boots up as fast as anything to a usable desktop. I have a few old MBs I keep alive for that gear. After some surgery on the Dallas Semiconductor RTC chips (to fit an external backup battery) they go forever. It was running quite happily on a DX2/50 and a DX4/100 for years. I need true direct port access (serial for both the mouse and the RS232) and '95 does it properly.

The other PCs in my lab are W7 and W10 plus a few 7/10 laptops.
 

Sal1950

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yuki980e

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Let's not single out SBAF, the internet is full of audio sites that don't know their butts from a hole in the ground. Head-Fi has a Sound Science header, just don't get too objective on it, along with it's DBT censored Cable header. Things are the same at WBF and it's "Measure Based" header, don't get too objective there and I won't go into it's history or Amir's and mine there. Not much better at CA/AS, put on the gloves if you want to talk science there. LOL
Nice to have a home here that knows the difference between science and voodoo.. Amazing how far it's come here in the last 3 1/2 years, I remember when we were better known as "The Dirty Dozen". :p

Reddit is worse in my view for people making up stories and passing of as fact. I've had people get legit threatening because i would go that not how BA drivers work, When they would just say the ER4 can't sound good or what its "Flat, Netural" sound.
 

Frank Dernie

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I only used Windows at work where there was an IT department I could shout at when things didn't go as they should.
Despite being a bit of a computer pioneer myself, I wrote my first bit of software I got paid for in 1971 and was the first to use computers and CEA in my field, I gave up on computers, exasperated, in 1985 when it became clear that Microsoft were going to take over. The first PC we got ran my programme on MS_Dos/Basic about 50x slower than the ugly Analog Devices Macsym 2 (I think that is what it was called) process control computer running their version of Basic on (I think) CP/M.
I can't tell you how angry and frustrated I was!
I swore I would never spend a penny of my own money on anything Microsoft, ever. I almost succeeded but my wife needed Word when she decided to do an Open University degree.
I was happy to buy a Mac to use at home eventually, it was a bit more expensive but was about 20x better back then!
 

Hypnotoad

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Use Ubuntu now, ditched Windows10, spyware disguised as an operating system.
 

Burning Sounds

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I only used Windows at work where there was an IT department I could shout at when things didn't go as they should.
Despite being a bit of a computer pioneer myself, I wrote my first bit of software I got paid for in 1971 and was the first to use computers and CEA in my field, I gave up on computers, exasperated, in 1985 when it became clear that Microsoft were going to take over. The first PC we got ran my programme on MS_Dos/Basic about 50x slower than the ugly Analog Devices Macsym 2 (I think that is what it was called) process control computer running their version of Basic on (I think) CP/M.
I can't tell you how angry and frustrated I was!
I swore I would never spend a penny of my own money on anything Microsoft, ever. I almost succeeded but my wife needed Word when she decided to do an Open University degree.
I was happy to buy a Mac to use at home eventually, it was a bit more expensive but was about 20x better back then!

I understand the frustration Frank - when I joined a small newspaper in California in the early 80s they were still using electric typrewiters (IBM of course). Within a year the new editor had brought in some terminals with a pair of 80k floppy drives. These enabled us to write our stories and the floppies were compatible with a walk in freezer size Compugraphic photo typesetter we had purchased. The terminals were also used to capture the newswire from Washington DC. On a busy newsday the floppies would fill up quickly and it took good timing and skill to remove a full floppy and insert a blank before the entire system crashed! The wire service were not happy when we used to ask them to resend the story!

As news editor I was pushing to adopt Desk Top Publishing which was in its infancy. Consultants brought in to advise on it said what I wanted to do wasn't possible.

I had known Jonathan Seybold for a number of years socially and when the editor left suddenly I took the opportunity to implement DTP, with the blessing of our IT department - as long as I used IBM PCs! Jonathan was working closely with Steve Jobs, but I had no idea at the time how significant this was. Jonathan correctly saw DTP software as the killer app for the Mac, but unfortunately our corporate policy meant I had to use IBM ATs.

Still, we managed to accomplish our goal using Ventura Publisher, which had just been acquired by Xerox, and the Atext wordprocessor ported from large newspaper DEC systems IIRC. Jonathan had convinced me that Postcript page description language was the only way to go and so we purchased a tabloid (A3) size Dataproducts postcript laser printer for about $20,000 even though it was only 300dpi. It would have been far easier if I had been allowed to go down the Apple Mac route, but we accomplished the same goal, albeit with a lot more effort. Those were exciting times, though!
 

anmpr1

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- so fast. Boots up as fast as anything to a usable desktop.

Over the past years I'd given up on anything Windows based booting up at what I'd call fast. Even for home use. However, my new PC has a SSD, and that has changed. I'd advise anyone to get one of those, if their motherboard can accept it. Make sure it's a big one, because Windows programs sometimes have a habit of installing everything to your C: drive, making it more difficult to offload stuff to other cheaper, secondary storage.
 

dweekie

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I feel old. People are talking about their "ancient" Pentium processors.....
Windows 2000 was the best operating system I ever used for it's time period. There were other "superior" operating systems, but when you factor in software and device compatibility, it had the least compromises for my use. On phones, I'm getting a little annoyed at the overly smart operating systems in iOS and Android. They're taking a little too much user control away. Right now I'm struggling with finding the culprit for my battery drain on Android Pie that's not rooted, sigh. Maybe it's a sign that I'm getting to be that age where kids start rolling their eyes at me with technology...
 
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