Monroe

Just a hint to go over to the ThinkPad forum ... they have several sellers that will also build a FrankenPad to order or have built several already for themselves. There will probably be some help and answers there. ThinkPad Forum https://forum.thinkpads.com// ThinkPad T6x Series T60/T61 series specific matters only https://forum.thinkpads.com/viewforum.php?f=29&sid=1b81eda2725f1f2823bea1f030c52c8d ...

Maybe this is old news ... article dated July 25, 2017 http://www.oann.com/adobe-to-pull-plug-on-flash-ending-an-era/ Adobe to Pull Plug on Flash, Ending an Era July 25, 2017 By Salvador Rodriguez SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Adobe Systems Inc’s Flash, a once-ubiquitous technology used to power most of the media content found online, will be retired at the end of 2020, the software company announced Tuesday. Adobe, along with partners Apple Inc, Microsoft Corp, Alphabet Inc’s Google, Facebook Inc and Mozilla Corp, said support for Flash will ramp down across the internet in phases over the next three years. After 2020, Adobe will stop releasing updates for Flash and web browsers will no longer support it. The companies are encouraging developers to migrate their software onto modern programming standards. “Few technologies have had such a profound and positive impact in the internet era,” said Govind Balakrishnan, vice president of product development for Adobe Creative Cloud. Created more than 20 years ago, Flash was once the preferred software used by developers to create games, video players and applications capable of running on multiple web browsers. When Adobe acquired Flash in its 2005 purchase of Macromedia, the technology was on more than 98 percent of personal computers connected to the web, Macromedia said at the time. But Flash’s popularity began to wane after Apple’s decision not to support it on the iPhone. In a public letter in 2010, late Apple CEO Steve Jobs criticized Flash’s reliability, security and performance. Since then, other technologies like HTML5 have emerged as alternatives to Flash. In the past year, several web browsers have begun to require users to enable Flash before running it. On Google’s Chrome, the most popular web browser, Flash’s usage has already fallen drastically. In 2014, Flash was used each day by 80 percent of desktop users. That number is now at 17 percent “and continues to decline,” Google said in a blog Tuesday. “This trend reveals that sites are migrating to open web technologies, which are faster and more power-efficient than Flash,” Google said. “They’re also more secure.” Flash, however, remains in use among some online gamers. Adobe said it will work with Facebook as well as Unity Technologies and Epic Games to help developers migrate their games. Adobe said it does not expect Flash’s sunset to have an impact on its bottom line. “In fact, we think the opportunity for Adobe is greater in a post-Flash world,” Balakrishnan said. ...

Anybody into old cars and such might find this interesting. This guy had everything, including buses, tractors and bumper cars. There was a 1947 Indian Chief motorcycle with side car. I never heard of that model. Also, "milk trucks, ambulances, limousines, muscle cars, sports cars, three-wheelers, and even a couple of amphibious Amphicar 770s" were in the auction. Imagine all the storage space, if everything was indoors? From the article: "The disbursement of Ron Hackenberger’s massive collection included 700 cars, trucks, vans, buses, motorcycles, scooters, tractors, bumper cars, and horse-drawn buggies. The total for cars, trucks, and motorcycles sold was $1.67 million. The overall total, including tractors, buggies, and memorabilia sold, was about $2 million." http://www.foxnews.com/auto/2017/07/20/1947-indian-chief-rides-off-with-top-bid-at-700-vehicle-hackenberger-auction.html 1947 Indian Chief Rides Off with Top Bid at 700-vehicle Hackenberger Auction Andrew Newton - July 20, 2017 In a sea of cars that actually included a couple of sea-worthy vehicles, a motorcycle stole the spotlight at VanDerBrink Auctions’ two-day, two-location, no-reserve auction in Norwalk, Ohio, over the weekend. The disbursement of Ron Hackenberger’s massive collection included 700 cars, trucks, vans, buses, motorcycles, scooters, tractors, bumper cars, and horse-drawn buggies. The total for cars, trucks, and motorcycles sold was $1.67 million. The overall total, including tractors, buggies, and memorabilia sold, was about $2 million. A lifelong enthusiast, Hackenberger accumulated items for decades and dreamed of opening a museum one day. His plans never reached fruition, however, so he decided to part with the majority of his collection. Hackenberger’s first three cars were Studebakers—a 1948 Champion, 1952 Champion, and 1956 Golden Hawk—and his love for the brand never waned. More than 200 pre- and post-war Studebakers were offered. Beyond those Indiana-based Studebakers, Hackenberger’s collection was incredibly diverse and included milk trucks, ambulances, limousines, muscle cars, sports cars, three-wheelers, and even a couple of amphibious Amphicar 770s. One thing that all of the auction vehicles seemed to have in common was their condition. Many of those sold on Saturday were running project cars at best, while Sunday’s lineup was full of vehicles that looked to be parts cars. The old phrase “ran when parked” was used frequently in the auction catalogue. That meant that buyers looking for a cheap project were spoiled for choice. The average sale price was barely $4,000, and many hammered at less than half that. The top sale of the auction was a restored 1947 Indian Chief with original sidecar that went for $37,800, even though it reportedly hadn’t seen the road in 15 years. The top selling automobile was a 1965 Amphicar 770 at $31,500; another much-rougher example sold for $13,650. Other notable sales on the high end included a 1971 Citroen DS for $9,450, a very rough 1954 Kaiser Darrin Roadster for $21,000, a decent 1963 Studebaker Avanti for $15,225, a very rough 1949 Tatra T600 Tatraplan for $23,100, a 1967 Porsche 912 for $26,250, and a 1958 Packard Supercharged Hawk for $19,950. Prices include a 5-percent commission. Otherwise, there truly was something for just about everyone. There were microcars and small cars from Crosley, Metropolitan, Reliant, King Midget, Bantam and Vespa; British sports cars; Japanese Datsuns and Hondas; French Citroëns and Panhards; and German Borgwards. There were also plenty of unusual American automobiles, including Checker limousines and wagons, firetrucks, DIVCO milk trucks, and orphan cars from Packard, DeSoto, Hudson, and Nash. ...

Mathwiz ... that holds merit ... sort of like a large 'school of small fish' darting around, in and out. It's supposed to be confusing to a larger predator ... but I'm sure some get eaten ... but 'safety' is just keep moving and hope with the 'large numbers' of small shiny fish. Either at the Proxomitron forum or the K-Meleon forum ... there was a discussion about user agents some years back and not giving out any more information than you actually have to. So maybe having several User Agents available ... a 'barebones' type and a few loaded with some information to work at certain trouble sites. One of the members posted the UA he uses (barebones) and I used it but along the way I have lost it. It may not even work that good in today's world. Still wish I could locate that old UA. So in reference to your earlier post ... what do you think would be a good common 'school of fish' User Agent worth trying. jumper ... that's good information about a BOT UA. I had more trouble with sites when I used the Google Bot UA ... with the DuckDuckGo Bot ... only once in awhile am I refused entry ... like once or twice a month. Then I just switch to a common FFox Win7 UA for that site. ...

Where can I find this nLite set ... I'd like to read the 'brief descriptions' ? ... and maybe try the tweaks, I may already have the tweaks in place but maybe not all. I will try your download for XP.

A small add to my earlier post ... if when clicking on the link to the first article, you have JavaScript on ... the picture right below the first picture is larger and shows several people who appear to be in a state of shock at what they are looking at. It could also be that they are laughing or finding the whole thing amusing. It's really hard to say ... are they smiling or literally in a 'state of shock' ??? ...

Golly ... what was that film? ... "Back to Windows 98". "Mr. Lee said that he has seen a recent uptick in what he calls an “anti-design brutalism,” with clients opting for more bare-bones, retro-looking sites. Others employ a simplistic Craigslist-style utilitarianism that feels like a throwback to an era when web pages were coded by hand." The Latest in Web Design? Retro Websites Inspired by the ’90s https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/17/fashion/90s-web-design.html By CANDACE JACKSON - JULY 17, 2017 To navigate the website for Arcade Fire’s coming album, “Everything Now,” users need to click through a cluttered cascade of Windows 98-style pop-ups. Balenciaga’s new website looks as stripped down as a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, with plain black boxes and no-frills Arial font. And the D.I.Y.-looking home page for Solange resembles the desktop of a candy-colored iMac, complete with QuickTime windows and rows of blue folders. Web designs have come a long way in 20 years, but some are taking a step back to evoke a sort of hipster nostalgia for the early days of the internet. “They’re tipping their hat to the 1990s,” said David Lee, the chief creative officer of Squarespace, a web platform company based in New York that has created millions of websites for clients. Mr. Lee said that he has seen a recent uptick in what he calls an “anti-design brutalism,” with clients opting for more bare-bones, retro-looking sites. Some websites are purposely cumbersome to navigate, with loud, clip-art-filled pages. Others employ a simplistic Craigslist-style utilitarianism that feels like a throwback to an era when web pages were coded by hand. “There’s a lot of animated GIFs and flames, but mixing it with something new,” Mr. Lee added. While millennials and members of Generation Z — those born in the years from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s — may not remember what the web looked like in the era of AltaVista and GeoCities, the retro designs tap into the current cultural revival of all things ’90s. (See the return of “Twin Peaks,” “Will & Grace” and concert T-shirts.) For those who are older, these sites recall the improvised internet of their youth, in the days before mobile optimization and beta-tested user interfaces brought a sleek uniformity to modern web design. Nostalgic websites meant to mimic the days of dial-up modems are cropping up in artsy and tech-geek corners of the web. Windows93.net, a web project by the French music and art duo Jankenpopp & Zombectro, imagines what the Microsoft operating system would have looked like had it been released. (After a two-year development delay, Microsoft instead released Windows 95.) The site has had more than eight million visitors. NeoCities, built in 2013 by Kyle Drake, 33, a web entrepreneur based in Palo Alto, Calif., is a homage to GeoCities, the early web hosting platform. (GeoCities, started in 1994, was acquired by Yahoo in 1999 for $3.6 billion and went defunct in the United States in 2009.) “I really hate the modern internet,” Mr. Drake said. “My vision is to bring back making websites as a creative thing, not just as a business thing.” More than 140,000 websites have been created through his platform, he said. Paul Ford, 42, an instructor of interactive design at the School of Visual Arts in New York, agrees that the web today can feel disappointing to early adopters. “It’s almost like if your indie band went on to be, not the size of U2, but a $4 trillion industry,” he said. “I think there’s a sense of, ‘How do we get back to that?’” One way is to create a website the old-fashioned way: by enlisting a friend who knows basic HTML. That is what Billy Silverman, 40, a restaurateur, did in the harried final days before opening Salazar, his acclaimed Sonoran barbecue restaurant in Los Angeles. He tapped his buddy Zack McTee, who runs a small production company in New York, to slap together something quick. The two decided that, if they didn’t have the time or money to make the website good, they would at least make it fun. The result recalls a personal website built by a bored teenager in the days before Facebook and Myspace, with flashing Comic Sans text, dancing MC Hammer GIFs and cheesy keyboard music. A banner declaring “now with working email” scrolls across the top. Mr. Silverman said he regularly gets emails from customers who are confused. A common note: “‘I love your restaurant but saw your website and think I can help you out.’” ...

Just as I'm tired of spying drones and hope they all crash ... now we have one less robot to be concerned about ... unless of course, they repair it and put it back into service! We can only hope it's dead. I thought this must be the first robot to commit suicide ... right? Wrong, the first robot on record to destroy itself was in Nov 2013. A cleaning robot climbed onto a kitchen hot plate to 'end it all'. The pressure of everyday life that humans face seems to be taking a toll on these machines. There is some hope this revolution is maybe suffering some setbacks. Robots are thought to enjoy doing the same thing over and over, day after day ... maybe this just isn't true. Like humans, they may need a break every so often to work at a different job. Anyway, there are pictures in both these articles ... be warned, these pictures are not for people with weak stomachs. The robot in the first article drowned and in the second article, the robot melted. Robot Security Guard Commits Suicide in Public Fountain http://nymag.com/selectall/2017/07/robot-security-guard-commits-suicide-in-public-fountain.html By Jake Swearingen July 17, 2017 The Knightscope security robot was supposed to patrol the Georgetown Waterfront, a ritzy shopping-and-office complex along the Washington Harbour in D.C. But the pressure was too much for the rolling robot, which can turn, beep, and whistle in order to maintain order. It rolled into fountain and drowned itself on Monday. The Knightscope security robot has pros and cons. It’s a good deal for any place that wants something patrolling an area on the cheap. It’ll roll around malls or parking lots, with rental prices starting at $7 per hour — 25 cents less than the federal minimum wage. Uber uses it to patrol certain parking lots. On the downside, it’s has been knocked over by a drunk man. Before that, it knocked down and ran over a 16-month-old boy. It looks like some The Fly–type experiment between R2D2 and a Dalek. And apparently it has a tendency toward self-harm. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- World's first robot SUICIDE as family return to find cleaning gadget had turned to ash http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/worlds-first-robot-suicide-family-2786901 By Rebecca Pocklington 13 NOV 2013 A cleaning robot 'committed suicide' by climbing on to a kitchen hotplate where it was burned to death. According to local reports, the Irobot Roomba 760 robot is thought to have rebelled against its chores and decided enough was enough. Firemen were called to the blaze at Hinterstoder in Kirchdorf, Austria, and say they found the remains of the machine on the hotplate. Fireman Helmut Kniewasser said: "The home-owner had put the small robot on the work surface to clean up some spilled cereal. "Once the robot had done its job it was switched off but left on the kitchen sideboard. The 44-year-old house owner together with his wife and son then left the house and were not home when the robot set off. "Somehow it seems to have reactivated itself and made its way along the work surface where it pushed a cooking pot out of the way and basically that was the end of it." He added: "It pretty quickly started to melt underneath and then stuck to the kitchen hotplate. It then caught fire. By the time we arrived, it was just a pile of ash. "The entire building had to be evacuated and there was severe smoke damage particularly in the flat where the robot had been in use. "I don't know about the allegations of a robot suicide but the homeowner is insistent that the device was switched off – it's a mystery how it came to be activated and ended up making its way to the hotplate." The family are now reportedly homeless because their apartment is no longer habitable thanks to the smoke damage. Homeowner Gernot Hackl, 44, said: "I intend to sue to get compensation. It has ruined my home as everything is smoke damaged. "Everything is black. It's not possible to live here at the moment. I would never buy one again, you buy them to keep the place clean, not almost burn it down and ruin everything." ...

sdfox7 ... thanks again for making these flash update links easy to understand and figure out ... it's a big help.

I decided last year to try some bots. I read this article 'Top 10 Web Crawlers and Bots' and just discovered it has been updated from last year to June 2017. The Google bot didn't seem to work very well ... many sites or web pages refused my attempt to connect but DuckDuckBot seems to work just fine. I have only had two sites (as I remember) refuse to let me read something. When that happens, I just change my UA to 'Firefox Win 7' or 'XP'. I just don't like 'giving out' a lot of information. if I don't have to. I also use Proxomitron but sometimes (rarely) have to set it on 'Bypass'. I just tried this last year to see how this might work at some web sites ... if they might be collecting information ... I have no idea if it really works. I set up one K-Meleon browser with DuckDuckBot and the other one with Win 7 or Win XP. In the article below I just lifted some portion of it for here. It has a lot of information. https://www.keycdn.com/blog/web-crawlers/ Web Crawlers and User-Agents – Top 10 Most Popular Brian Jackson | Updated: June 6, 2017 When it comes to the world wide web there are both bad bots and good bots. The bad bots you definitely want to avoid as these consume your CDN bandwidth, take up server resources, and steal your content. Good bots (also known as web crawlers) on the other hand, should be handled with care as they are a vital part of getting your content to index with search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Read more below about some of the top 10 web crawlers and user-agents to ensure you are handling them correctly. Web Crawlers Web crawlers, also known as web spiders or internet bots, are programs that browse the web in an automated manner for the purpose of indexing content. Crawlers can look at all sorts of data such as content, links on a page, broken links, sitemaps, and HTML code validation. Search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo use crawlers to properly index downloaded pages so that users can find them faster and more efficiently when they are searching. Without web crawlers, there would be nothing to tell them that your website has new and fresh content. Sitemaps also can play a part in that process. So web crawlers, for the most part, are a good thing. However there are also issues sometimes when it comes to scheduling and load as a crawler might be constantly polling your site. And this is where a robots.txt file comes into play. This file can help control the crawl traffic and ensure that it doesn’t overwhelm your server. Top 10 Web Crawlers and Bots There are hundreds of web crawlers and bots scouring the internet but below is a list of 10 popular web crawlers and bots that we have been collected based on ones that we see on a regular basis within our web server logs. 1. GoogleBot Googlebot is obviously one of the most popular web crawlers on the internet today as it is used to index content for Google’s search engine. Patrick Sexton wrote a great article about what a Googlebot is and how it pertains to your website indexing. One great thing about Google’s web crawler is that they give us a lot of tools and control over the process. User-Agent User-agent: Googlebot Full User-Agent String Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) 4. DuckDuckBot DuckDuckBot is the Web crawler for DuckDuckGo, a search engine that has become quite popular lately as it is known for privacy and not tracking you. It now handles over 12 million queries per day. DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (their crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (Wikipedia). They also have more traditional links in the search results, which they source from Yahoo!, Yandex and Bing. User-Agent DuckDuckBot Full User-Agent String DuckDuckBot/1.0; (+http://duckduckgo.com/duckduckbot.html) --- I just chose # 1 and 4 ... there are still 8 more there in the article. Maybe this isn't a 'good thing' to do ... Win XP doesn't get any credit when I go to a web page I guess ... but on my end, I want to be under the radar as much as possible ... if that really works anyway.

I wasn't clear in my last post ... I wanted the User Agent discussion to continue for awhile but not in this thread started by Roffen. He was posting about something else. Thanks for the links to the other threads dealing with user agents ... that should work just fine.

dencorso has a valid point ... but I am interested in keeping this discussion going for awhile ... some interesting information being posted. I went to What is my Browser.com and got this with my XP setup. I have three different UAgents : FFox XP, FFox Win7 and DuckDuckBot. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Whoa! We can't figure out what browser you're using! We're working hard to write detection code for all the different types of web browsers, but it looks like we haven't figured yours out yet. And occasionally, either because of a problem or a changed configuration, sometimes web browsers don't provide the necessary information for us to detect exactly what you're using. Hopefully soon we can detect your web browser, until then; check out your User Agent string: DuckDuckBot/1.0; (+http://duckduckgo.com/duckduckbot.html) ...

... we should all be so 'poor' ... kind of a comical story or read ... may the best rich person win !!! http://www.nysun.com/national/bezos-slim-and-buffett-billionaires-pleading/90026/ Bezos, Slim, and Buffett, Publicly Pleading Poverty, Ask Congress for Help With Their Newspapers By IRA STOLL - the Sun | July 10, 2017 It’s the sort of brazen move that might ordinarily trigger a front-page news story or an outraged editorial — a bunch of rich individuals asking Congress to write them a law that would give them better negotiating power against other rich individuals. Yet in this case, the rich individuals wanting special treatment are the newspaper owners themselves. Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos (worth $83.9 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire’s Index), New York Times owner Carlos Slim (worth $61.1 billion), and Buffalo News owner Warren Buffett ($76.9 billion), publicly pleading poverty, are asking Congress for a helping hand in their negotiations with Google, controlled by Sergey Brin ($45.6 billion) and Larry Page ($46.8 billion). In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, David Chavern, president and chief executive of the News Media Alliance, whose board has representatives of Bezos-Slim- and Buffett-backed papers, complained about what he called “an economically squeezed news industry.” The Times, in a column sympathetic to the effort, likened the news providers to “serfs.” Maybe Serf Bezos should have considered the economics of the news industry when he bought the Washington Post, or Serf Slim when he bought his stake in the New York Times. The idea that Congress needs to roll to the rescue of “serfs” like Messrs. Bezos, Buffett, and Slim to bail them out of bad investments just doesn’t pass the laugh test. In respect of the Times, it’s particularly comical, because, as an editorial matter, the paper generally favors stricter antitrust enforcement. The newspaper that less than two years ago was editorializing that Congress “should also study whether there are ways to strengthen the antitrust laws,” now is backing the move for what its own columnist describes as “an anticompetitive safe haven,” “a limited antitrust exemption.” One of Robert Bork’s scholarly insights was that if there’s any logic to enforcing antitrust laws or enacting them in the first place, it is with a eye toward protecting consumers. The publishers contend that news is a kind of special case because consumers are harmed by a decline in news quality. Or, as the Times quoted Mr. Chavern, “If you want a free news model, you will get news...But it will be garbage news.” I’m a paying, seven-day-a-week print newspaper subscriber who earns a living as a journalist primarily on the basis of people’s willingness to pay for news. So I sympathize on some level with what Mr. Chavern is saying. But even I can see that his argument is, to use his own term, “garbage.” Some excellent news — the CBS Evening News in its Walter Cronkite heyday, “60 Minutes,” — is and was “free” to consumers, who paid with their willingness to be subjected to commercials. In this past election, the prediction model of the expensive, paid New York Times was just as wrong as that of the free Huffington Post. Nate Silver had a better prediction over at ESPN’s free website. Even if you buy the questionable idea that more expensive news automatically equals better news, it’s a further, and even more tenuous, logical leap from that idea to the notion that Congress ought to interpose itself on one side of a set of business negotiations to make it easier for the publishers to make their news more expensive to consumers, or their ads more expensive to advertisers. If publishers want to permit competing suppliers to negotiate prices and terms on a cooperative basis, then let them support changing the law to allow it in every industry, without special treatment for journalistic enterprises. The Google-Facebook world has taken advertising and subscription revenue dollars out of publisher pockets. But it’s been a huge boon to marketers and to readers. Advertisers can now reach targets more efficiently at a fraction of what they used to pay for print ads, and readers can now get news from a variety of sites and editors and journalists, from Matt Drudge to Mike Allen to Glenn Reynolds, rather than having to rely on the judgment of their one hometown newspaper editor. Not even Congress has the power to turn back that clock to the old days. Nor would anyone with any sense want it to, other than someone lucky (or unlucky) enough to have inherited a newspaper, or foolish enough to have overpaid for one. ...

Walmart usually starts putting the 'Back to School' sale bins out after the 4th of July. Just got back from a quick trip to get a bag of Potato Chips ... saw they had some sale bins already out. Spotted the bin with the flash drives. The last three or four years I have posted about these SanDisk flash drives being on sale at Walmart in the summer. Four years ago they were 8 GB drives for $4.97 ... then the last two years they were 16 GB drives for $4.97 ... now this year, a real bargain ... 32 GB SanDisk drives still for the same price of $4.97. They may go fast this year ... I bought 14 and may get some more. Just like last year, the drives come in different colors ... blue, green and pink. I had just used up my last 16 GB flash drive this morning ... so I needed a new supply. So excited about the flash drive sale that I forgot to get my bag of Potato Chips !!! ... just to add: these drives are the Cruser Blade model. Amazon - SanDisk Cruzer Blade 32GB USB 2.0 Flash Drive https://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Cruzer-Frustration-Free-Packaging-SDCZ50-032G-AFFP/dp/B007KFAG8Y/ref=sr_1_11?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1499636140&sr=1-11&keywords=sandisk+flash+drives&refinements=p_89%3ASanDisk%2Cp_n_size_browse-bin%3A1259716011 monroe

I guess you are talking about one of these USB type adapters ... years back someone gave me an older USB adapter ... it didn't look like these pictured at all ... just looked like an USB Flash Drive ... no antenna. I really didn't care much for it and gave it to someone else. My computer back then only had one USB slot and I used that for my mouse. https://www.amazon.com/usb-wi-fi/s?ie=UTF8&page=1&rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Ausb wi fi My 'newer' ThinkPads have two USB slots but I have PCMCIA slots which I use for a Netgear wi-fi card. I know there are Amazon websites scattered around Europe. ...

I just have a folder named Unzipped and that works for me ... it has many items inside.

That was close ... it wasn't a huge meteor but there are probably many larger ones out there ... from the article: "A METEOR with the explosive power of TEN cruise missiles has struck the Moon – sparking a massive explosion visible with the naked eye. And terrifyingly the 56,000 mph collision – captured by NASA scientists highlighting the catastrophic danger planet earth faces from similar meteors – was caused by a space rock weighing no more than 88 lbs (40 kilos)." END OF WORLD WARNING: Watch biggest explosion EVER on Moon as NASA warns we could be next http://www.express.co.uk/news/science/825642/Moon-meteor-biggest-explosion-NASA-video-impact A METEOR with the explosive power of TEN cruise missiles has struck the Moon – sparking a massive explosion visible with the naked eye. By Paul Baldwin Fri, Jul 7, 2017 And terrifyingly the 56,000 mph collision – captured by NASA scientists highlighting the catastrophic danger planet earth faces from similar meteors – was caused by a space rock weighing no more than 88 lbs (40 kilos). Despite the meteor’s tiny proportions – about the size of a small boulder and the weight of an average 10-year-old boy – the impact damage was colossal and the explosion shone with the brightness of a magnitude 4 star. A similar strike against a city on earth would create a crater 65feet (20m) deep and create a devastating kill zone equivalent to TEN Tomahawk cruise missile striking in exactly the same place. Experts fear the death toll would run into thousands. Unlike the Moon the Earth has a protective atmosphere meaning most space debris burns up before it can impact. But bigger meteors sometimes get through – most recently at Chelyabinsk in Russia where a 20 metre asteroid travelling at 43,000 mph breached the atmosphere and exploded with the power of 33 Hiroshimas. Fortunately because of the speed and angle of entry the rock exploded while still in the air but 7,200 buildings were damaged and 1,500 people were injured seriously enough to seek medical treatment. A spokesman for respected science website Science.com said: “For the past eight years NASA has been monitoring the Moon for signs of explosions caused by meteors. “They’ve just seen the biggest explosion in the history of the programme." “It exploded in a flash 10 times as bright as anything we’ve seen before. Anyone looking at the Moon at the moment of impact could have seen the explosion – no telescope required.” The Chelyabinsk meteor is the largest known natural object to have entered Earth's atmosphere since the 1908 Tunguska meteor, which destroyed a wide, remote, forested, and very sparsely populated area of Siberia. NASA is so concerned about the possibility of an asteroid strike ending all life on earth it has started the first design phase of a spacecraft known as the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) which will be used to redirect an asteroid’s path. NASA is working in conjunction with the European Space Agency (ESA) on the craft and hope to have the first space tests underway by 2022 where it will attempt to move a “non-threatening” asteroid. Experts fear a similar impact on earth could cause tens of thousands of deaths Lindley Johnson, planetary defence officer at Nasa Headquarters in Washington, said: “DART would be NASA’s first mission to demonstrate what’s known as the kinetic impactor technique – striking the asteroid to shift its orbit – to defend against a potential future asteroid impact. “This approval step advances the project toward an historic test with a non-threatening small asteroid.” ...

sdfox7 ... you may be correct on that free download. I can find nothing on Google, only what you mentioned ... XP Mode. I didn't think that was the program. I had a free virtual machine or window program but it must have been from someone else at the time. The program was for WinXP or Win98SE and I tried it out, seem to work. I mentioned the Time Machine program before since that's how I can test different programs now and recover very fast if everything gets messed up. The VirtualBox v5.1.22 program might also work for me. ...

I'm also interested in this topic. I downloaded VirtualBox v5.1.22 earlier today and will work with it later. My computers also have WinXP installed but with a virtual XP ... I could then 'experiment' with software or whatever and not 'mess' up my existing XP setup ... am I correct? I now have XP backups that I can install in less than two minutes or just one minute to have my original XP setup up and running again. I might like to put Windows 98SE back on my computer into one of these virtual setups. Many years ago I remember downloading and saving a virtual window program from MS ... they made it 'free' to everyone. I have it somewhere on an old CD backup. Does anyone remember MS doing this and what the program was called? My problem will be going through many CDs (or DVDs) till I find the right one. Like I said earlier, I just downloaded VirtualBox so it may be a better program anyway. Some time ago I bought a backup program called AX64 Time Machine ... seems to be a good product once I now understand how it works, actually pretty easy to figure out. I back up to flash drives ... however, I'm not sure the company is still around. The web site seems to be hacked and some complain no one anwsers questions on e-mail. I think product was free to try, as I remember ... maybe not. I place these links here since I use and like the product. Still things may have changed with the product or developer. I don't have it running all the time ... just start it when doing a newer backup every so often ... does work with XP. AX64 Time Machine - Snapshot Imaging Backup | Time Machine Backup http://ax64.com/ Time Machine is a program developed by Bluebird IT PTY LTD. The most used version is 2.0.0.637, with over 98% of all installations currently using this version. During setup, the program registers itself to launch on boot through a Windows Schedule Task in order to automatically start-up. The main program executable is tmapp.exe. The software installer includes 9 files and is usually about 37.19 MB (39,000,991 bytes). In comparison to the total number of users, most PCs are running the OS Windows 8 as well as Windows 7 (SP1). While about 56% of users of Time Machine come from the United States, it is also popular in Russia and United Kingdom. Time Machine (formerly AX64 Time Machine) 2.0.0.637 Beta http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/Back-Up-and-Recovery/AX64-Time-Machine.shtml This might be of some use to WinXP users. ...

I guess these are not 'giants' like in today's world ... maybe 7 to 8 feet tall, but for that time period in China they are considered to be a giant. From the article: ... there are also pictures. "Many of the men discovered in the graveyard measured 1.8 metres (5ft 11in) tall and would have seemed like giants to the average person 5,000 years ago. One of the men in the ancient burial ground measured 1.9 metres (6ft 3in), making him a 'giant' of his day." Incredible graveyard of 5000-year-old 'giants' found in China http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/07/05/incredible-graveyard-5000-year-old-giants-found-china/ Mark Molloy 5 July 2017 A graveyard of 'giants' buried 5,000 years ago has been uncovered by archaeologists in eastern China. The men, whose bones were discovered in Jiaojia village near Jinan City in Shandong province, would have towered above many of their contemporaries. Many of the men discovered in the graveyard measured 1.8 metres (5ft 11in) tall and would have seemed like giants to the average person 5,000 years ago. One of the men in the ancient burial ground measured 1.9 metres (6ft 3in), making him a 'giant' of his day. “This is just based on the bone structure. If he was a living person his height would certainly exceed 1.9 metres,” Fang Hui, head of Shandong University's school of history and culture, told China Daily. Archaeologists say their large tombs suggest they were likely considered powerful, high status individuals who had access to better food than the average person. But what made them so tall? “Already agricultural at that time, people had diverse and rich food resources and thus their physique changed,” Fang Hui explained. Today, men aged 18 living in the region have an average height of 1.753 metres (5ft 9ins), which is higher than the national average of 1.72 metres (5ft 8ins). Archaeologists have discovered a number of artefacts at the site from the Longshan Culture, renowned for its eggshell black pottery, from the Neolithic period. They began excavating the ruins of 104 houses, 205 graves and 20 sacrificial pits in the village last year, China Daily reports. ...

I asked about this maybe two years ago ... any way to clean out the growing Notifications area. There was nothing two years ago, has this changed in any way? ... maybe there has been a fix of some sort ... do they 'drop off' after a certain period of time, maybe a year. I don't seem to have as many as I thought. Just checked and they go back into 2016. I thought I also had some from 2015.

I never looked in that area for the Profile size. This is neither 'here or there' ... mine says 900 MB. Does that sound like the norm for most setups ... give or take + or - ?

Probably as you were replying with your last post, I had come upon Contig v1.8 and that it might be a solution ... but you are correct, it would make sense as you say: 'You want to "compact" the $MFT or "shrink" its size.' I remember that program from some time back now that you made mention of it today. I probably have it saved somewhere on an old CD. UltraDefrag ... I will get the latest version now. This is interesting from 2011: Defraggler may NOT be good at defragging the MFT ... may make things worse. Defragging the MFT Feb 04 2011 09:49 AM https://forum.piriform.com/index.php?showtopic=31443 I was recently most intrigued to see that Mark Russinovich has updated his "contig.exe" command line defragging tool to be able to defrag a number of metadata files, including the MFT. Anyway, I downloaded it and tried it out, it did indeed defrag the MFT of one of my drives. I must admit, I always thought that this was infeasible [except possibly at boot time]. Anyway, I also recently tried out another well-known freeware defragger on a drive and noticed that it fragmented the MFT (as shown using Defraggler). So, then I tried to fix that using contig, and it worked. And then I refragmented it again using the other defragger, and upon a whim tried Defraggler on that drive to see if it could also defrag the MFT...and it did ! Incidentally, I've tried Auslogics' DiskDefrag on the same drive when the MFT is fragmented, and it's not managed to fix it. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- So I don't know ... Windows XP defrag seems to be able to defrag the MFT and then there are Contig v1.8 and UltraDefrag. ...

Well I'm not sure what "Russian Hot Ladies" you are referring to ... I'm not seeing any of that. Wouldn't be the first time I've missed out on "the hot ladies" ... but if they are there somewhere, so be it. I must be filtering the image out in some way with my browser. I was really searching for the latest version of Defraggler v2.21.993 (Portable) which I found at MajorGeeks just before I came across this article. Defraggler 2.21.993 ... portable version is the second link down under: Download Locations http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/defraggler.html I was searching for information on Defragging the MFT (Master File Tree). I found this information on the subject ... don't ask me where I found it ... didn't save the link ... it may be from two separate sites. Defragging the MFT (Master File Tree) In Windows XP and in Windows Server 2003, the Windows defrag utility defrags the MFT. A defrag operation on the MFT combines an MFT file into 1 and prevents it from being stored in multiple places that are not sequential on disk. In this class of operation, the MFT file is more sequential. However, it is exactly the size that the MFT file was before the defrag operation. An MFT can be too big if a volume used to have lots of files that were deleted. The files that were deleted cause internal holes in the MFT. These holes are significant regions that are unused by files. It is impossible to reclaim this space. This is at least true on a live NTFS volume. I also incline towards the possibility of a fragmented MFT to explain this. The feature listing for Auslogics defrag says it moves files out of the MFT reserved area, to help prevent the MFT from fragmenting further if it needs to be enlarged. That could mean that when the MFT is in more than one piece, Auslogics clears files out of the space between MFT fragments even if they aren't specifically in the reserved area. Checking the exact state of the MFT as suggested above will show if this is so. Note that under the Windows API, the MFT is considered defragmented if it is in no more than two fragments, since under the API the starting position of the MFT cannot be moved. So if the effect appears to be caused by the MFT being in two fragments, you'd need to use a third-party defrag utility that can fully defrag the MFT (and hence does not use the Windows API). Other work-arounds could be to just use another defrag utility, or set Auslogics to defrag files only, not the entire drive layout. This is a workable option in any case, especially for a storage drive where the files being contiguous is more significant than their actual location on the drive. File-only defrag is even quicker too. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This information from above: "An MFT can be too big if a volume used to have lots of files that were deleted. The files that were deleted cause internal holes in the MFT. These holes are significant regions that are unused by files. It is impossible to reclaim this space. This is at least true on a live NTFS volume." I'm wondering if I have gaps or space that can not be reclaimed on my hard drive. Do I read this right ... this space is gone forever or will a good defrag program correct this situation? The first line says: In Windows XP and in Windows Server 2003, the Windows defrag utility defrags the MFT ... but I read some good things about Defraggler in another article dealing with the MFT so I went hunting for the portable version. I have an older Auslogics defrag version installed, maybe it can defrag the MFT, I'm not sure. Any help or further explanation of this MFT thing would be appreciated. I have deleted many files and programs over the years ... so do I maybe have big gaps of empty unclaimed space on my hard drive? Thanks for the other links for reading. adding ... just found this program that might be a solution. Contig v1.8 https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897428.aspx I think I need to defrag before Windows starts up completely. ...

I was looking around for some defragging information and I found this article that was just updated yesterday - 27 June 2017. Maybe it might be of some interest to a few people. https://www.lifewire.com/free-defrag-software-tools-2619172 15 Free Defrag Software Tools Reviews of the Best Free Disk Defragmenter Programs for Windows by Tim Fisher Updated June 27, 2017 Defrag software programs are tools that arrange the bits of data that make up the files on your computer so they're stored closer together. This allows your hard drive to access files more quickly. Defragmenation, in other words, can help improve your computer's performance by making the reading of files more efficient, thanks to the fact that all the tiny pieces that make up a single file are right next to each other. Still confused? See my What is Fragmentation & Defragmentation? for more help understanding what fragmentation is and why defrag software is helpful. Tip: All versions of Windows include a built-in defrag program, which I've ranked in this list. However, in most cases, a dedicated program, like any of the other free defrag software programs I list here, will do a better job. Note: I've only included freeware defrag software in this list. In other words, only completely free defragmentation programs - no shareware, trialware, etc. If one of these free defrag programs has started charging, please let me know. https://www.lifewire.com/free-defrag-software-tools-2619172 ...