PktLoss's Journal: First Journal!

Well, I haven't bothered to use the journal option before, but i thought I might give it a whirl.

Firstly, I want to say HI! to my two fans out there on slashdot. It took me a good three minutes to figgure out what the hell a fan was, but now that I know, I am honoured.

Secondly, I found this post in the Worm vs Worm thread funny and interesting (the machines they are talking about are the airport security machines that snif for explosives, they run windows 98.
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Our company borrowed one of those machines from the manufacturer to determine its effectiveness at measuring trace explosives in soil for environmental cleanup.

Because we wern't a paying customer, we were sent the company's test-mule where all the new developments were tried before going into production.

The machine used a lightly modified Windows 98 installation as it's OS. Security was non-existant, as any idiot (me) could go in and monkey with passwords, workgroup settings, and file locations. (I did this to get it to talk to our network for backup) I was concerned about this at first, until I realized that these devices

weren't used with mice or keyboards
and typically had armed guards nearby who took a dim view of people monkeying with the hardware

As far as the installation of windows, we used it for 3 months straight, with absolutely no crashes whatsoever. The only time it was rebooted was when it was shut down for the weekends.

A good friend will bail you out of jail.
A great friend will be in the cell next to you saying "That was AWESOME!
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Namely the bit about men with guns not liking it when people poked around with equipment they werent supposed to. I also think that in such situations running windows has another advantage, the average joe sixpack can probably figure out what to do if it BSDs or brings up a critical error, but would be dumbfounded if anything went wrong under linux (and things do go wrong under linux.)

Finally, I do have a blog, 'CrapBlog' apropriatly enough, it is at http://preinheimer.com/gm/