Difference between revisions of "Talk:1891: Obsolete Technology"

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(neutrino communications is possible, but has a slow bandwidth)
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141.101.99.233, there are neutrino detectors, and they have been used to detect artificially generated neutrinos. For an example from 1999, http://www.nytimes.com/1999/06/29/science/team-detects-neutrino-fired-through-earth-s-crust.html and more recently for communications at http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2012/mar/19/neutrino-based-communication-is-a-first . The problem is partially the cost, but market traders would pay a lot to get a small speedup in communications from, say, NYC to London. The bigger problem is the bandwidth and latency. The experiment in the second link has a bandwidth of less than 1 bit per second. You can send a lot of data around the world in less than a second.
 
141.101.99.233, there are neutrino detectors, and they have been used to detect artificially generated neutrinos. For an example from 1999, http://www.nytimes.com/1999/06/29/science/team-detects-neutrino-fired-through-earth-s-crust.html and more recently for communications at http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2012/mar/19/neutrino-based-communication-is-a-first . The problem is partially the cost, but market traders would pay a lot to get a small speedup in communications from, say, NYC to London. The bigger problem is the bandwidth and latency. The experiment in the second link has a bandwidth of less than 1 bit per second. You can send a lot of data around the world in less than a second.
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I still use MS-DOS. Unless there's an easier way to get a list of all the files in a folder in text file format. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.155.62|162.158.155.62]] 09:25, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

Revision as of 09:25, 19 September 2017


Wasn't DOS still running behind Win95, and integrated into the OS similarly to the Linux shell? 162.158.59.154 14:48, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

Even worse than that. DOS was not "integrated" into Win95 or Win98, but Win95 and Win98 were built to run atop DOS. Windows NT did away with that dependency on DOS.--141.101.105.102 22:48, 18 September 2017 (UTC)
Win Me were also built to run atop DOS. Win NT were considered server system, only later Win 2000 and Win XP brought NT-based Windows to home machines. -- Hkmaly (talk) 23:38, 18 September 2017 (UTC)
Not quite. Windows NT was a concurrent line with the more mainstream 95/98/ME line (I think ME also was on top of DOS, but I never used it so I'm not sure). At the same timeline as those versions of Windows was Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 (NT 5.0), and maybe NT 3.5 earlier than that. Windows 95 was originally supposed to only be a temporary stepping stone from DOS with Windows 3.11 to bring people over to NT, so they kept DOS as the underlying foundation of Windows (which was a good thing because power programs and high end games still used DOS, to avoid the resource suck that is Windows. Not being in Windows frees up processing power). But so many people liked and adopted 95 that they came out with a "sequel", 98. This two-lines idiocy ended rather with Windows XP in the early 2000s, which combined the two lines, having elements of the NT line - like the NTFS system for larger hard drives, literally "NT File System", which is still in use today - with elements of the 95 line - like removing and relaxing the restrictions that blocked certain programs and games from running in Windows NT in favour of greater system stability (my NT 4.0 computer crashed the least of every Windows I've ever run). NiceGuy1 (talk) 04:27, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

This reminds me of this Raganwald article on Blub: Are we blub programmers? Adequate doesn't mean best for the job; this comic presents the other side of the coin, don't upgrade just for upgrade's sake. --Jgt (talk) 14:51, 18 September 2017 (UTC)


The computer doesn't look like an early PC from the MS-DOS era. Reminds me more of the previous generation: à so-called mini-computer or a terminal connected to a mainframe. Zetfr 15:32, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

You are right, but I think we should make allowances to the look as this is stated to be an 'industrial' computer. Sebastian --172.68.110.52 16:24, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

https://www.cpsc.gov/Safety-Education/Safety-Education-Centers/Fireworks has a link to the 2016 Fireworks Annual Report, which has some useful statistics on page 2, the executive summary. --Ozmandias42 (talk) 20:08, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

I just finished working on upgrading an industrial control system. In the plant's control rooms, the interfaces and terminals were relatively new, running Windows 7 Ultimate. However, the DBMs in the server room that managed the control network were running MS-DOS 6.22, and they still worked just fine. The client was only upgrading the system because the OEM no longer provided support or replacement components.108.162.238.11 21:44, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

What bothers me about old technology is that security updates stop while the rest of the world gains an ever-increasing exploit advantage over people connecting to the same Internet. Along with the risks to them, it's worse when compromised devices act as workhorses to leverage "millions of papercuts" against the rest of the system. Elvenivle (talk) 00:27, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

Hm, while it makes sense to stick to a DOS based system if nothing newer is required, the comparative of fireworks/nuclear weapons is incorrect. Upgrading those MSDOS systems to something newer (which could be just freedos) would perhaps incur on huge unnecessary expenses at most, while "upgrading" fireworks to nuclear energy would not only would make them far more expensive, it would make them far, far more dangerous and deadly. 162.158.69.123 00:32, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

What surprises me is that anything for which MS-DOS includes drivers would still be physically running after this long... in the comic scenario, they went 20 years without needing to replace key components? That said, for a lot of the older industrial systems, running something LIKE Dos, such as FREEDOS, or various custom boot environments which use DOS command formats, would probably make perfect sense. 172.68.58.47

Neutrino beams would also mostly go straight through (without interacting with) any sort of detector you might wish to use to intercept the signal.141.101.99.233 07:39, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

141.101.99.233, there are neutrino detectors, and they have been used to detect artificially generated neutrinos. For an example from 1999, http://www.nytimes.com/1999/06/29/science/team-detects-neutrino-fired-through-earth-s-crust.html and more recently for communications at http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2012/mar/19/neutrino-based-communication-is-a-first . The problem is partially the cost, but market traders would pay a lot to get a small speedup in communications from, say, NYC to London. The bigger problem is the bandwidth and latency. The experiment in the second link has a bandwidth of less than 1 bit per second. You can send a lot of data around the world in less than a second.

I still use MS-DOS. Unless there's an easier way to get a list of all the files in a folder in text file format. 162.158.155.62 09:25, 19 September 2017 (UTC)