Prank Windows XP simulator(geekprank.com) |
Prank Windows XP simulator(geekprank.com) |
And XP was one of the best Windows, minus a few glaring holes. Some of which could be patched over with third-party apps and some completely missing, like a modern terminal.
Bottom line, XP was about the best there was just after the turn of the century, assuming you were safe behind a NAT and smart enough to use the new Firefox rather than IE in the coming years.
BTW as an Amiga fan, let me take you back to Kickstart 1.3 and a few demos:
...I realized why at around the fourth try.
See also:
chromium --kiosk <url>
or, similarly for Firefox firefox --new-window --kiosk <url>
For Chromium the `--new-window` argument doesn't open in kiosk mode. In order to work no other instance must run.I was running it windowed, on a Linux box.
And it still triggered the "... oh F---!" response.
Very, very well done.
I've not seen it in decades, but there was a great little site in a similar vein years ago that would detect your OS (Windows or Linux) and be an "animated GIF" of a remote exploit of some sort or another, the usual "run exploit, grab root, run id to prove you're root" thing (the Windows version was similar). Except, it was dynamic based on your public IP. So most people didn't get it. And sysadmin types, who usually did know their public IP, had to restart their heart.
That's old news! :)
Where Windows won out at the time is that no end of essential proprietary software ran only on it (or perhaps also on Mac OS) and Linux was locked out. For example, if you wanted to use Garmin mapping software to download from your GPS, or use most printers, scanners, webcams. And of course a lot of web sites only worked on IE6 which looked poised to take over the way Chrome has now.
How times have changed. Most gadgets "just work" in Linux now too, the desktop environment is great (and here I refer to Mate, not the ongoing experiment that is Gnome 3), and the whole thing mostly just serves as a device driver for a web browser anyway.
In my personal opinion, too, the high point of Windows was Windows 7 since it first came with all the common device drivers so stuff would "just work" without the driver hunt dance. Windows 10 works pretty well - I have it on my work machine. But my mom was recently given a Windows 10 machine, and I set it to be as scrimpy with data as I could ("metered connection" and the last aggressive updates). Where, with her limited habits, she used to use around 500MB of data per month (email and very light browsing) she now comes in at 2.5-3GB, forcing a higher tier of mobile data (she's on an LTE gateway - lives in the countryside). Not great. Here Linux wins again in an old school way - it took some serious tweaking under the hood to get it to not consume data constantly i.e. not only not auto update, but not even download the updates and not even constantly download the index of available updates. Opinions vary on the wisdom of this, but it is of course behind a NAT firewall with all unnecessary services turned off. And using zero bytes per month that weren't asked for.
Back to the Windows XP topic. Her Windows XP machine is in the process of giving up the ghost after all these years and while I had her half converted to Linux/Mate, the Windows 10 machine is just more convenient, mostly because it is faster than my leftover laptops.
It might be a fun day to fire up Windows XP in a VM and see how well it can do with a modern browser and 4K screen.
However, I have not encountered the following, which has so far twice happened in Windows 10: Some hexadecimal error number that IT doesn't know about, Microsoft denies would ever happen, and the anecdotal discussions on the internet offer 10 different kinds of voodoo that will fix it for sure, except that none of them do (you can tell just from the number of different things they tell you to try). At least with Linux the rabbit hole goes all the way down; if all else fails you can dig in the source code.
In parallel: Knoppix, KDE3.