Nice reference. Except... doesn't John Henry die in the end? I mean... Human strength of spirit won out in the end, when presented with a singularly strong figure of indomitable strength. But ultimately, in that story, we the people, sacrificed that person to win one battle against "the system" or "the machine" and gain the people . A battle which didn't stop the progression of mechanized advancement.

But then again, perhaps that story is apt. As many strong spirited and vocal individuals will rise up against this, win some battles, some sacrificing their lives in the effort. But ultimately, the mechanization will still win out in the end. And the masses of people who cheered so loudly for those few strong individuals will cheer for the cheaper power that mechanization brings.

Getting people out of harms way is a GoodThing(tm). Why aren't people focusing on transitioning the workforce to another related field where they can continue to be gainfully employed and retain their pride? No, it's not an easy thing... but it's something that needs to be done. Just because the market changes doesn't mean that people should be left behind.

I suppose that's the lesson to be learned from John Henry... that advancement should not be at the expense of human lives and human livelihood.

Q: What would a language need to have to be able to replace English?

A: English. It would have to have English.

PCMCIA:

Get yourself a PCMCIA Compact flash adapter. You can copy your data to the compact flash drive. (requires drivers, so this may fail for you)

You can also get a PCMCIA network card. Probably only 10mbit, but still more than enough. You have Windows 3.11, which was Windows For Workgroups. If TCP/IP wasn't installed on that version, you can download and install WinSock, an early TCP/IP socket stack for Windows. (requires drivers, so this may fail for you)

Serial:

You can do link between two computers and transfer over serial... but this requires the right software and the right drivers, so this may be out of the question for you.

Emergency Boot Floppy:

Use an emergency boot floppy and boot linux off of the network with a pcmcia network card. You can then mount the filesystem Read-only and copy over the network. (requires linux server, linux skills or someone who can do this for you)

Extract the hard drive directly: (best option)

Yank the hard drive. See what kind it is. Get the appropriate laptop drive adapter cable and relevant USB adapter. Plug that into a newer computer and transfer off the files.

Of the options, the hard disk pull and copy option is really the best way to go, bar none. The only thing you would need to buy would be the right USB-to-laptop hard drive adapter. You can find them on amazon/ebay/etc. If you live near Sunnyvale, California, you can even stop by Weird Stuff and they might have it for a song.

Military or civilian, the individual would still be evaluated based on skill and culture fit. Period.

If the candidate shows good problem solving skills, aptitude, and knowledge/experience as well as a personality which shows positive signs of communication, teamwork, accepting criticism as well as being able think independently, then they make good candidates.

Many of the traits listed above (1-5) are good traits to have. No argument there. But fitness for one organization does not imply fitness for another organization. Sometimes, it's just not a "good fit", to borrow some recruitment parlance.

I've had the pleasure of working with veterans both motivated and unmotivated. At the end of the day, the individual decides how they want to proceed in their life.

Having said that, would be good to see more veterans with the skills to apply for Ops positions(Site Reliability Engineers/Development Ops/Systems Ops/etc). There is a mission. And that mission is Up Time. 24x7x365

Crazy, isn't it?

Evidently, there is some unwritten law that states that Geolocation by IP address shall override any and all set preferences by the user on their device, and ignore any possibility that barring or redirecting the user makes no sense.

I get a version of this periodically on Spotify, where I'm informed that the particular album or single I'm looking at can't be played because it isn't licensed to my region. And of course there's the small matter of my being IP-blocked from Pandora Radio for the same reason.

I ran into a particularly nasty geolocation issue back in late 2012, when I was informed that I couldn't access my National Lottery account because they no longer believed that I was accessing it from the UK. Went back and forth between them and my ISP (VirginMedia), with each blaming the other for the problem.

I've also heard of situations where people have found the books on their Kindles vanishing because they're holidaying in an area where said books aren't licensed.

Glad to hear you survived! ^^;

Alerting you to login attempts from new locations or devices, and offer two-factor authentication, will slow down the hackers for a time.

But the answer, for most service providers, is to tell the user that it's their problem now.

Consider yourself lucky, then - SMS spam seems to be pretty common here in the UK. Even my parents occasionally get hit.

I've been fortunate so far - I don't have any fellow iPhone users that I regularly communicate with via said device. I've now turned off iMessage, so hopefully all texts should go out as SMS.

My personal bugbear with my iPhone is the number of steps required to block a number from Messages. As I use my mobile number as a contact for business, my number is public, and as a result I've started getting SMS spam and telemarketer calls. You would think that Apple, of all people, would make it easier to tell the iPhone "block this number from calling me again."

Hello there! :)

Well, as I'm a Mac person these days, I've swapped out those sorts of issues for the ones that Apple produce. ;) About the only thing I really miss from Windows is the certainty of knowing when the next lot of security updates are due - at the moment, they're so slack they make Adobe look on-the-ball.

...yeah, if I've gotten a slipstreamed install disc with SP3 on it, I could have saved myself a lot of time when I did the same experiment. *shrug*

Out of interest, which version of IE did it have after install completed? I see you were prompted to upgrade to IE8, but my memory is hazy on whether IE7 was ever included on later XP install discs.

I'm aware you can still get XP discs second-hand or ex-stock here in the UK - Amazon lists several versions, although some look suspiciously like they may be OEM versions that are tied to specific brand/model PCs. I'm not aware of any PC maker here in the UK offering an XP options, though - maybe Windows 7, for business systems and workstations.

I recently wiped my old (2003 vintage) laptop, which originally came with XP, and installed Linux Mint - considering the machine's specs, it works fairly well.

I've read about ReactOS, but given the slow pace of progress I regard it as curiosity rather than a viable alternative.

Seriously. I remember trying out the preview version on my then-XP-running PC back in 2009, and being blown away by a) how much easier it was to install and get going, b) how well it ran all my existing software, c) how it let me finally use all of the memory installed in my machine, d) how much better it was than Vista. I pre-ordered a copy soon after, and the rest is history. Now, on my Mac, I have my Windows 7 VM for running various applications I still use.

Installing Windows XP today is not nearly as fun as you might think, particularly if you've got a pre-SP2 copy. When I tried it, I had to manually install some patches just to get Windows Update working, then some more before I could install IE8, and some more before I could install MSE. And then all the patches to bring the whole lot up-to-date - that took hours and hours to finish. I'd only recommend trying it if you're installing onto a machine that you don't actually need to use for a good while.

As for the 'but it's tried and tested" argument for hanging onto XP, I would point to the number of flaws that are still being uncovered in the Windows codebase, many of which are also in XP. Yes, you can mitigate against some by hardening your system, running only as a standard user, etc. - but for most current XP installs that will probably mean extra aggravation caused by third-party software written back in the Bad Old Days that expects to run with full admin privileges.

The only excuse for continuing with XP, to my mind, other than sheer obstinacy, is where you've got systems that absolutely, positively require XP running on physical hardware - specialised hardware or software that won't work via a VM because they need direct access through physical ports. Such systems should be segregated from local networks and the Internet as much as possible.

Damn it /. - I logged in to post that message. WTF?!