jaclaz

The problem: A friend of mine who is involved in a non-profit medical assistance organization asked me if I could have a look at the QMS (Queue Management System) and Digital Signage system the organization bought (for an awful amount of money BTW) and that was never installed/tested/configured/whatever by the supplier because the company went bankrupt (and anyway they were not capable of configuring the setup). The system is (was) intended to be installed in a medical ambulatory. The current situation: I have available the actual hardware consisting of: 1) three small "brick" PC's, all of them running Windows 7 (but of course this can be changed), one intended to be a "server" and two intended to be "clients", bolted behind the TV's 2) two 32" LCD FLAT TV's 3) a "ticketing" kiosk, which upon visual inspection appears to be nothing more complex than a tablet (has to be checked but likely running a windows embedded or CE of some kind) and a thermal ticket printer integrated in a three foot tall metal stand/pillar. 4) A proprietary software (currently locked by a password) that has all the looks of being a (crappy) Access based *something* The expected goal: 1) have the displays show 4 or 5 (anyway no more than ten) queue lines numbers (something loosely similar to the "We are now serving ...", one for each medical room and *something* else, let's say at the bottom the name and telephone number of the charity and a window with - say - a TV feed from the news channel. 2) have the counters of the queue line number be incremented or decremented by any (authorized) PC in the intranet (loosely one in each doctor's room + one at the reception 3) Have *somehow* the ticketing "kiosk" print tickets in sequence incrementing the printed number, divided for each queue This MUST be free and as simple as possible, though foolproof is always a big word, particularly when fools are involved in the daily use of something, the expectation is for somethign that doesn't break easily or that is very easy to fix if broken. I managed to contact the actual maker of the kiosk and I am expecting in a few days to be able to understand what is in it and what it does currently, but anyway I don't think that it will be much of an issue to simply replace the current "unknown" tablet with *any* suitable el-cheapo one. I had a look around and it seem like there is nothing free/open-source that can do something like that in the simplest possible way, what I mentally imagined was: a (local) http server running on the "server" PC with a number of pages, each with an access or similar counter (which would be *somehow* incremented when a ticket is requested from the kiosk) a page to be served to a browser on the two bolted-on-TV PC's displaying the updated status of the various counters, the static text and the TV feed a number of password protected pages, one for each counter/room displaying just the current status of the single counter and a +/- button to increment or decrement the publicly displayed browser an "admin" page, also password protected with all the counters and a +/- and reset button for each (let's call it "receptionist page"I expected to find tens, maybe hundreds of similar examples, I was prepared to wade through a myriad of half-@§§edly implemented setups in order to borrow (or steal) some simple javascript code and "site template" but I came out empty handed Besides the usual "Let me teach you javascript programming, here you will learn how to display "Hello World" to a web page" extremely lengthy description of a three line snippet followed by the sentence "OK, now that you have learned the basics to complete this project you just need add the buttons, the authentication of the page, interface to SQLite through a Perl script running a Java VM executing a VAX emulator initiating an instance of ...., I found only one simple (here simple means that I can understand) example here: http://www.osyes.net/ which BTW seems coincidentally originated from Italy, but that seems to me not simple (in the sense of simple) at all as it needs: and however, besides the total lack of documentation gives the impression of being as half-@§§ed as something I could probably write myself . All the rest I could find are extremely complex "framworks", "Ultimate Digital Signage" tools and *what not*, a number of which stupidly "cloud based", some purely Commercial "masked" as Open Source, with only a few exceptions: Vodigy (seemingly now defunct as a company) for which I have anyway as well no good feeling and xibo: http://xibo.org.uk/ which appears like nice but simply too complex and with a whole lot of complications both on the server and on the client side (I am not disputing that PHP/mySQL/JSON/SOAP and .net/Flash/IE/WMP etc. are not needed for the wide possibilities xibo offers, but they seem to me overkill and a possible cause of issues/problems for the very simple needs I have). Same goes - at first sight - for Dashing: http://shopify.github.io/dashing/ The request: If you happen to know a FREE, SIMPLE, NOT involved with the CLOUD, tool or site template or *whatever* that could be useful to reach the goal I would appreciate your help/suggestions/ideas. As well if you have the time (and knowledge) to put together something that could do or help me in putting it together it would be highly appreciated, remember that the "end user" is a charity/non-profit organization . jaclaz

Sure they do. The issue at hand is however that also small (and teeny tiny) minds think alike, and when you put a discrete number of them together what comes out is the Syrius Cybernetics Corporation (actually its Marketing division). : http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Sirius_Cybernetics_Corporation "Update, Share and Enjoy" jaclaz

I wonder which OS may have inspired this Dilbert strip jaclaz

Well... IMO, where one reads "senescence", one ought to read "sentence", in case it may be of help... Hmmm. Clever but not entirely unexpected , you can't get away with just the easy parts, now translate "a enhancement such liver" for me, please jaclaz

I know what binaural beats are, thank you . As said earlier usually (and AFAIK) binaural beats are generated NOT derived from speech/voice. And again as said there is nothing to be "recognized" from speech or voice, speech recognition means to understand the meaning of the words you say, voice recognition means to identify your particular voice, distinguishing it from any other one. So, let's take "recognition" out of the equation. You can generate binaural beats and mix them with music or sounds (or your voice, which in this case is nothing but a sound like any other). A known software for this is GNAURAL: http://gnaural.sourceforge.net/help/ and another one is SBAGEN: http://uazu.net/sbagen/ Maybe you are wanting to convert your voice (in the sense of sound) into binaural sounds, thus creating subliminal messages of some kind? http://sourceforge.net/p/gnaural/feature-requests/28/ jaclaz

Well, one thing is sure, noone (if not the MS good guys themselves) will ever be able to find a way to make it worse. jaclaz

Well, the only thing they seemingly haven't actually done (yet ) is to hijack the home page of Ineternet Explorer to a page pushing for the update/reserve the copy, etc. but I wouldn't be so surprised should this happen. jaclaz

I will try typing the following slowly: We have right now NO IDEA of WHAT (the heck) you are talking about, would you be so kind to explain to us WHAT is that you are asking for? jaclaz

Yep , though the good WinBeta guys have it backwards: Should really be: jaclaz

Well, dencorso has some relevant experience at brain surgery so I would guess it's a tie. And before you ask ... jaclaz

Before the thought passes my mind, Windows 8 (in some versions only) provided downgrade rights (and if I recall correctly even some 7 versions). A good question would be will there be downgrade rights in any version of Windows 10 (not in the next free forced - doesn't it sound strange BTW - update, once the new OS will be so-to-say on the shop shelves as full release) ? jaclaz

Here is an English version: http://winsupersite.com/windows-10/successfully-cancelling-your-windows-10-upgrade-reservation which is seemingly accurate, and has only a typo : which should obviously read: Personally I believe that the good MS guys have been more than nice to allow this change of mind, anyone actually making the reservation (if not as an experiment and/or on an "expendable" machine/VM) IMHO actually deserves to be delivered those goods bads. jaclaz

...which is not actually the case of a LP drive, however . @bitcheck19 Of course only the good Seagate guys know what kind of specific hardware they use to initialize and test a disk drive in the factory. The alternative AFAIK is only a nice little piece of hardware called PC-3000 that some good Russian guys developed which in their simplicity they sell for around US$ 10,000 apiece (+NEEDED training+yearly license fee). The PC-3000 seemingly can "load" a fimware from another device 8Or form PC memory, etc.) and/or edit hexedit an existing one, etc. and is the "reference" tool generally used by the data recovery labs. Besides the fact that that thingy is clearly outside the possibilities of a hobbyist or in a DIY contest, it is - I am told - an exceptionally good product very well upgraded/maintained and offering unique features and they have (again I am told) a nice "regional" approach to the sale price (which is higher in countries where data recovery services are more expensive and lower in countries where that cost is lower). jaclaz

The ST32000542AS is actually a "LP" drive: http://www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/datasheet/disc/ds_barracuda_lp.pdf So you may want to have a look at the (scarce) info/experience we have on those: http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/157329-barracuda-lp-no-not-a-720011-nor-a-720012/ http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/161029-seagate-barracuda-lp-green-is-not-recognized-in-bios-suddenly/ BUT please don't be fooled by the usual misconception of the one remedy fixes all illnesses. IF the drive is diagnosed as being either LBA0 or BSY then maybe the respective LBA0 or BSY fix procedure may work. IF the drive is NOT in one of those states (from what you reported sounds more like a drive starting developing bad sectors) there is no sense in attempting to unlock/reset the firmware. The only thing that you can (maybe) possibly be able to do is to attempt using ddrescue or similar (under Linux) to salvage whatever can be read (as RAW sectors) in a disk image (you will need a bigger than 2 Tb disk), any firmware related fix will be ineffective and at the risk of preventing any further data recovery attempt. IF (hopefully) most of the RAW data can be imaged, then it should be possible to extract them from the disk image or "fix" the filesystem in the image. Attempting to recover data from the filesystem while it is still residing on the failing disk is less likely to ever succeed (even if *somehow* it is possible to avoid the Windows locking). jaclaz

It is a "normal" S.M.A.R.T. field (though each manufacturer may use a different notation for the uptime), more specifically it is 0x9 "Power-On Hours (POH)" if you want to draw a line somewhere, it should be about anything manufactured since 2000-2002 (but many disks had S.M.A.R.T. capabilities earlier), at the end of the day, anything with a SATA interface has surely S.M.A.R.T. capabilities as well as anything PATA using advanced Ultra DMA modes (i.e. anything using an 80 wires IDE cable) whilst anything earlier might have it not. jaclaz

Another guess might be that since they need to deploy that awful amount of bloat (BTW how large will it be the "update", I believe something between 3 and 4 Gb ) to billions of machines they good MS guys will somehow need to plan a schedule to not clog their servers, if the data reported here: http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/172826-windows-10-first-impressions/page-36#entry1100580 is even approximately accurate, upgrading just the (source Wikipedia/Netstat April 2005): Windows 7 58.39%Windows XP 15.93%Windows 8.1 11.16%Mac OS X 10.10 4.23%Windows 8 3.50%Windows Vista 1.95%Mac OS X (other) 1.60%Mac OS X 10.9 1.53%Linux 1.52%Windows (other) 0.19% roughly 15 % running Windows 8/8.1 (assuming that those that still run XP might at the most upgrade to 7 and that the ones running Vista are aficionados that won't upgrade anyway and that those on 7 won't be fighting to get the upgrade) it would mean 3.5*0.15*1,500,000,000=787,500,000 Gbytes to be "delivered" or "served" over a limited amount of time (hours, days, weeks? ). So, the "reserving" might behave like a sort of "priority list", the ones that "reserved it" might be served earlier. On the other hand it could provide some preventive data about the success (please read as failure) of the nagging upgrade campaign and it could be a very good promoting slogan. Given that the release day is July 29th 2015, it would be of great effect a campaign (say one or two weeks before) on newspapers and TV going like: More than 300 million[1] people already reserved their upgrade to the new Windows 10.Windows 10 will be soon delivered to them, on the 29th of July.What are you waiting for?Microsoft will deliver the update to all current users of Windows Vista,[2] 7, 8 and 8.1 for free.We are committed to further enhance the user experiences of all our customers.[3]Technology has the power to unite us. it inspires us. Technology has taken us places we've only dreamed. It gives hope to the hopeless, and it has given voice to the voiceless.[4]MicrosoftWindows 10Empowering us all.(of course without the footnotes ) jaclaz [1] the actual number being of course completely independent from the actual number of "reservations" we received, this figure has just been totally faked by our marketing guys because it sounded good .... [2] ... come on, you don't expect us to name that OS, really... [3] ... but we are failing at it badly.... [4]... good technology of course, not the senseless crap we are now shoveling down your throat ...

Naah, no need to be sorry , it is not really "forbidden" to go off-topic, if you go off-topic in good faith the most you might get is a stern look of disapproval , and after all it was the OP that steered it into "what runs not on my system" .... jaclaz

Yep , the base image is here: http://i.imgur.com/jYshZ.jpg a similar (IMHO nicer, or at least with more shelf space) is here: http://i.imgur.com/lcHhN.png (warning images are biggish) Preview: http://www.freeplaza.it/sfondi-desktop-per-arredare-con-le-icone/#more-2612 and here is a more photo-realistic one: http://occhiodivetro.altervista.org/sfondo-desktop-scaricabile/ jaclaz

Well, jaclaz has a clear advantage on you , then. as he is perfectly aware of the existence of binaural sound and beats and the effects they have (or that it is claimed they have) on the brain. But binaural beats are usually "generated" (along a set of given patterns and following some rather strict frequency rules) and not connected with voice, let alone with voice recognition. He is even aware of the existence of "binaural entrainment" (though admittedly he has some serious problems in understanding what the heck it is about from descriptions like: and: To put it bluntly, jaclaz never attempted to break a qualia barrier (basically because he never thought about them barriers) . Is it serious doctor ? jaclaz

But, the question is "How to run the Oxford Hachette thingy I own in the stupid OS I am running now?" It is not really a "generic" virtualization question, given that a VM is slower than the "natively booted" OS and that the virtualized OS would be in this particular case only the means to run a single, specific tool, the simpler the OS in the VM is, the faster the Oxford Hachette will load. All the rest, every single byte, every single additional feature of a newer (or better) OS that is not used to load the Oxford Hachette thingy is unneeded and would (even if "how much exactly" would of course need to be measured) only slow down the user experience, in this particular case, as nothing will be actually done (except running the dictionary) inside the VM. The VM itself will need less memory (which is subtracted from the memory of the machine), the OS image will take less space on the hard disk, etc., etc., only to give a reference these are the default VM RAM settings in Qemu Manager: Windows 95 32 Mb Windows NT 64 Mb Windows 98 64 Mb Windows 2k 128 Mb WindowsXP 256 Mb Windows Vista 1024 which are the mimimum OS requirements and should really-really be doubled to make the VM faster. A "normal install" of Windows 3.x would be running more than OK with 8 Mb or RAM from a disk image 16 Mb or less ( a Minibox will use a much smaller image of course). Still "normal installs" (without reducing source, or removing unused apps and subsystems, etc.) typical HD base space requirements (please read as minimum size of the disk image): Windows 95 60 Mb Windows NT 150 Mb Windows 98 200 Mb Windows 2k 800 Mb WindowsXP 1800 Mb Windows Vista 16000 Mb jaclaz

Maybe you could try to better explain what you are asking for (personally I could not understand WHAT you are actually talking of ). Try to describe what you are after. jaclaz

Well, after a quick look at the contents of that update, there are good news and bad news. The good news are that evidently the whole lot of tracking sh*t that has been deployed till today did not provide enough data to deliver a proper update, so - in relative terms - till today not much data about your system was harvested by the good MS guys, i.e. they know about your system less than what you have feared till today...and possibly with these added info the update may after all go well for all The bad news are that at first sight almost everything in it is either "diagnostics" or "tracking" or both. The further bad news may be that, given this nth added level of "current situation detection" the *whatever* will be downloaded will be more "targeted to the specific" machine and if you have several machines, likely you won't be able to download the stupid amount of bloat, possibly in the several Gb's range, once and re-deploy it to all machines but you will need to re-download the update directly from MS servers on each machine (with an unprecedented overhead of bandwidth consumption - I am thinking of the people that have a metered connection to the internet). I do understand how they may want to field-test the whatever new update model, but maybe - just maybe - providing an install .iso would have not been that bad an idea (and maybe they will eventually decide to go that way, at least as an option or when/if some system will be botched). Just yesterday I read an (unrelated to this, it was about school/edication) article about the need to distinguish between innovation and evolution, the Author Paolo di Stefano gave a good example: that would roughly translate to: jaclaz

Yep that's what I thought was your setup . What I was thinking is that, if I get it right, you have right now: motherboard connected to a "longish" 44 pin IDE cable (the original one possibly not suitable - for *any* reason - for "higher" Ultra Dma mode[1]) on the other side of the cable a "compact set" of : 44 IDE to SATA converter SATAto mSATA adapter mSATA SSD deviceLooking at the manual you posted, I cannot say if it possible (due to space requirements, interferences, etc.), but personally I would like better a setup like: motherboard connected to an extremely short 44 IDE cable *like* http://www.cablesonline.com/244pinidelap.htmlor even "directly" connected to 44 IDE to SATA converter connected to a "longish" SATA cable on the other side of the cable a "compact set" of : SATAto mSATA adapter mSATA SSD deviceIn good ol' times the rule of the thumb whenever a hard disk had issues (since the early SCSI times) was "it can be anything, but you'd better try changing the cable first thing.", those issues went mostly away with IDE, but came back (to a much lesser degree) with Ultra Ata modes and the 80 pin cable, and still go strong with SATA drives. jaclaz [1]or not capable to fully deliver data reliably in a "higher" DMA mode when "forced" by a fastish SSD device to it's upper limits, or *whatever*

Interesting . From the good guys that are going for the "continuous update" model, YAFUP (Yet Another Failed Update Precedent) . jaclaz

It seems like that update is only a replacement for a couple of Windows Media Player .dll's. Are you actually using WMP? In any case it seems like not as "critical" as it is depicted, at least if the system is used correctly (in the sense of using a minimum amount of attention/intelligence): All in all IMHO if someone: runs with Administrator credentials uses Internet Explorer, additionally registered as default browser uses Windows Media Player has it registered in \Internet Explorer\Low Rights\ElevationPolicy happily clicks on links found in an e-mail or IM message from strangersactually deserves to have his/her PC hacked. jaclaz