I have any number of old disks but just sitting and ISO'ing them would take forever. Shipping costs would also be prohibitive.

However, I would be interested in finding a few old DOS utils that I used to have, and several of those old "we send you a floppy catalogue, you create an order, send the floppy back and we send you the shareware you ordered" services that had the weirdest of things that you couldn't get hold of anywhere else.

Interactive touchscreens now, and short-throw projectors directly above the board.

And it's a standard part of a UK teacher job interview to do a lesson on an interactive whiteboard. You can't escape it and teacher-training prepares you for it.

It's quite literally an all-day-every-day tool in every school I've ever worked in.

I still have a complete set of INPUT magazine. Some of the biggest programs in it are exactly that, with explanations of the decoding.

Hell, I even chatted to one guy on here who had written one of the biggest of those programs when he was just a kid.

Those were the days.

Show me how that works for Windows login without the exact software mentioned above?

LDAP. Yes. AD login from Windows login screen? No.

I work in schools, I'd love to move to key authentication to save all the "kids forgetting their password / stealing their friends password" hassle (physical items are more difficult to lose or "steal" without getting into more trouble!) but the costs are still FUCKING ludicrous for any such solution and two-thirds of that cost is just software and nothing to do with the devices at all. Still struggling to justify this:

The software to put this into AD logins (which is what most businesses use to tie all their stuff together and do the simplest of logins) is $48/user. Plus $25/user for the key. That's nearly $30k just to get a small school logged on with the system. By the time you buy spares, train users, tie it into your systems, etc. you're looking at a $50k project at least. That's the IT budget gone. Just to replace a password with the simplest of login dongles.

And when 2/3rds of that is software (not hardware) which you just have to hope is available for the next version of your OS (GINA logins went the way of the dodo already), works on the servers when you have an emergency and need to login, hope it works for things like kids logging into school websites from home (or even remote desktop, etc.)... it's stupendously expensive for such a simple thing.

I can't justify paying that much for the one-off cost of writing the software to login.

These ideas are great - would love to deploy them and will gladly pay a lot of money for them. But having the device isn't even 1% of the problem. The software, the ongoing compatibility, etc. consume most of the costs and there's no guarantee at all as the system expands.

I'd much rather pay for the keys and then pay even a few thousand a year for some licensed software to sort out the in-between parts. But everything is either needing a smartcard reader on every PC (useless in tablet environments and remote logins from home) or - more likely - stupendously expensive software.

Anyone know of a sensibly priced solution?

Cygwin works well until you get other programs that use it. You either have to install them within your Cygwin install folder (and hope they are able to cope with Cygwin updates you make, e.g. to Cygwin 2) or suffer DLL hell. Look at the Cygwin FAQ for ".DLL" - if you're not familiar with those errors already, you haven't used Cygwin very much. Now consider across a bunch of workstations on a network.

"Want say tunneling to a Windows service? If you use Windows only as a client...."

Don't. Use a proper tool. PuTTY is a client, not a server. This is like saying that ssh-client is no good at being sshd,.. of course not. But that's not what we're talking about.

And the fact is that for every SSH server set up (properly), you probably have 10-100 clients joining to it or you wouldn't bother setting it up. And one of the main points of things like SSH servers is cross-compile farms and remote access. And almost all the universities that offer such services recommend PuTTY if you're on Windows (because they've dealt with the Cygwin issues, I assure you, and decided it's not worth the hassle).

Opinion, of course. So's yours. Just because it's contrary doesn't make it more or less valid.

However, PuTTY is widely used and recommended for everything from talking to your Arduino's over a serial port to logging into your University server... go take a look. Cygwin - if and when it comes up - is not mentioned in nearly as many places for such simple actions.

Cygwin is, in fact, overkill for the majority of users who just want to use SSH, telnet or serial services from Windows. If they wanted Linux, generally they end up installing it in preference to Cygwin.

Most schools in London (and throughout the UK) already have interactive whiteboards in every classroom.

So, to be fair, it's no more difficult to doodle on them than an ordinary whiteboard. But you can't go to Google and doodle over the diagram on a pen-only board.

And the most popular brand, SmartBoard, have Linux drivers and software. Nobody ever uses that, because schools get Microsoft (and, no, they don't have humongous discounts or kickbacks - MS licensing is one of my biggest budget items every year).

So if you're already on Microsoft and already on whiteboards, it's dumb to suggest going back to pencil and paper for the majority of your teaching / learning.

Personally, I don't get why we bother to spend years teaching kids to write with a pen when they still struggle with maths and science into their teen years. Teach them block capitals, move on.

(Please note, my comments may not reflect the opinion of any of my employers, past or present - but to be honest, the way things are moving, it's that huge a leap to suggest it. This September, we're starting to roll out individual iPads to the kids.)

That's just because they compiled without specifying the build number.

That's LITERALLY a ten-second fix and recompile to resolve.

Don't identify software / spam / viruses by "it has X feature that's easily copied", whether that's a registry entry, a process name or an arbitrary string.

Publish the damn checksums at a minimum, or GPG signing key ideallly.

CygWin is a damn nightmare, especially if you have other software that uses it.

It suffers from enormous "DLL Hell" problems when it has multiple versions trying to load and if you use programs that use older versions of Cygwin, they don't necessarily run at all in co-existence with programs using newer versions. "Cygwin1.dll" exists is so many different versions that it's almost impossible to manage properly.

I used to develop on Windows with Eclipse and Cygwin. I quickly moved to MinGW because silly things like random games, utilities, etc. that use it would interfere with the version I was developing against.

If all you want is a real terminal on a GUI, Cygwin is total overkill. Not only that, if you use WinSCP as well, it will manage the keys for you properly between both programs so you don't even notice that you're using it.

Use *nix, or use Windows and PuTTY. For sure, as a network admin, I wouldn't let put Cygwin near your computers but I'll happily pre-install PuTTY for you (zero install needed, certainly no pissing about with PATH and multiple versions of the DLL etc.).

Any sort of COM port access.
Any sort of SSH access.
Any sort of SSH tunnelling access.

I work in IT, PuTTY is one of the first things I install in every workplace - not "just because" but I'll be damned if I'm going to SSH into a remote server's management module without it or try to use some junky HTTP/Java monstrosity to achieve what one command can achieve on the CLI.

Hell, I've diagnosed mail servers using it by telnetting to the mail port and issuing commands direct for a setting that some Exchange "experts" denied would ever affect anything - when you can show them the entire mail transaction live rather than some convoluted log that purports to tell you everything that happens on the email sending with a junky bounce error, it kinda hurts.

Sure, a lot of stuff is HTTP-managed nowadays but wait until Chrome removes Java and see if the other browsers follow suit. Because then you'll be back on the CLI quite quickly.

The last Cisco switch I installed came only with some absolutely worthless piece of software that only works if you have version X of IE etc. But SSH was a one-tick enable and I could do everything else from there.

EVERY single "police" recommendation/story I read about how criminals are now doing X and we should be on the lookout for it? Utter bullshit.

Criminals are "marking" houses with little signs to indicate whether they have things of value. No. They're not.

Criminals are knocking on your door to see if you have a dog they can steal. No. They're not.

Criminals are trawling Facebook to see when you're on holiday. No. They're not. (And if you have the vaguest sense of privacy, they wouldn't be able to see it anyway).

Criminals are flying drones to see if you have anything worth nicking. No. They're not.

It's not that they aren't that sophisticated, that they couldn't do this, that there has never been a recorded instance of it, but that they - generally speaking - ARE NOT DOING THESE THINGS.

What can you see from flying a drone that will change your mind from "Oh, well, I was in two minds about this house" to "Let's rob it" (or, indeed, vice versa)?. Virtually nothing. Do you park a Lamboughini at the back of your rotten cheap house and never take it out? Unlikely. Do you keep hordes of rabid dogs that are otherwise undetectable? No.

Live your lives people. Take sensible precautions. Lock your door. Put an alarm on (and don't bother about it making lots of noise if nobody is going to care - better a silent alarm to your smartphone than something disturbing the neighbours so much that they smash it off the wall or don't care about it). And don't leave big expensive things on show.

Generally speaking, criminals are opportunists and don't care about your property anyway. If they see an open door, they'll go through it (have had this happen to me in a previous house while I was behind the open front-door doing some repairs - some guy walked past into my house and started looking around. "*cough* Can I help you, mate?" and he (thankfully) ran a mile.). If they want to burgle you, they won't wait until your smart meter reads the energy usage as low, they'll just ring the doorbell and if there's no answer, they'll force or smash their way in. Even if there's nothing worth nicking (very unusual in any house), they're in by that point so they will find something.

"Casing the joint" is for high-level planned burglaries that rarely happen outside of extremely affluent areas and they can afford their own security anyway.

Like all these things, it's rubbish.

If at any point he mentioned that you would be bound by it, then not reading it and not signing it are your problem.

Sure, signing it makes things easier to prove in court, but that's about it. However, if they can prove that your only valid assignment of copyright is reliant on you having agreed to the licence, then it really doesn't matter and it just comes under whether it's a binding contract or not.

Pretty much, those things tend to be unless they are incredibly unreasonable.

They agreed to the EULA.

In the same way if you buy a DVD, copy it and then "demand a refund" you're only entitled to one if the product was faulty (and then only through defective materials or workmanship, etc.).

The EULA is a legal contract on how both sides behave. They let you use their copyright works. You have to abide by non-cheating conditions and not redistribute it, etc. to stay within that contract.

You can disagree as much as you like, but a court will laugh in your face.

"Hey, I entered into a contract to borrow this guy's car after signing to say I'd not take it on the motorway. I did, and now he's revoking the contract." Er... yeah. Of course.

I agree... the arcade machines are for nostalgia only. The games are able to be played better and more conveniently on any modern display and computer. Sure, you can rig up some "arcade" controls, but again, that's just nostalgia - few things are played better on a joystick than other controls, and those that are tend to be things you buy specialist joysticks for even on PC (flight sims etc.).

The arcade cabinets are big, clumsy, expensive, not very comfortable, have room for HUGE CRT displays but you wouldn't use one nowadays, etc. They are the vandal-proof box that such games had to come packaged in to survive in such an environment with such primitive electronics.

I was a massive arcade fan, but the arcade era is dead because of the economics - paying for games that are no better than those you own at home is pointless. even the force feedback, interaction etc. aren't interesting to the kids today and kids fund arcades.

Given the wording, that sounds like they're going to have to contact either every contributor for copyright re-attribution, or rewrite their code for them.

It's the same problem as appears in kernel GPL 2 vs GPL 3 arguments - it's moot at the end of the day unless someone contacts every copyright holder and gets them to agree, or rewrite whatever code of theirs is still active in the codebase.

And MAME's such a big and worldwide project that there's bound to be dead contributors, and lots of uncontactable ones too - given the history.