Autoattendant here is a 486/66 on 2.4 33.2; running 24x7 for the last zillion years. Boots and runs diskless.; highly power-efficient, hard to see any reason to replace it.

Seems to recall the MSF timecode box (a 386sx) does boot to linux, but pretty sure that's still on DOS 5.00.

Indeed, still good here in the UK. You can build a Loran receiver that'll feed the PC soundcard at the cost of a few pennies, and get highly accurate time info from it to boot.

Absolute madness to kill off such a simple, reliable system.

But since GPS is so expensive by comparison, there's plenty of money to pay lobbyists with...

If a Next keyboard is the same as an AT PC keyboard, this is a trivial hack; you can do it with a PC LPT port (it's a single bit TTL signal that just needs a bit of waggling).

Much harder now there are no simple I/O ports on a PC.

Pretty sure Ortek made the Northgate (I've got a couple) though to my taste the MCK142-Pro is even better. ALT-Fx/Ctl/Fx is so much easier with F-keys on left (MCK142 also has F-key duplicate row above the keyboard, plus 24 programmable keys above that). Bought a bunch of them many years ago and they'll probably outlast me.

Though the oldest keyboard here is on a Nascom One; 2Mhz Z80, 768 bytes RAM free, still works (swapped it for a motorbike back in '77 or '78, missed it enough I bought it back later).

>I mean is anybody REALLY taking that brand new i3 or AMD quad with 4Gb of RAM and slapping XP on it?

Yes; XP is just less hassle all round. So it gets installed *preferentially* here (on brand new kit, rather more powerful that i3's too).

The story may be a teaser, but that's how the world works.

Eventually you can't buy a better Coke (no matter how much money you have).

We're getting past the age of people building their own X (where X=PC in this case).

I'm a CEO, and I disagree (especially the bit about being better dead).

Perhaps because we work with stuff that's not point'n'click, where cleverness and experience counts for more than lines of code.

From the story:

>On that computer, they placed a ZIP archive entitled "Georgian-Nato Agreement." He took the bait, which caused the investigators' own spying program to be installed.

Elite, wasn't he? Infected by a ZIP file...hmm.

Cockup or conspiracy? Probably cockup - but quite likely they'll discover they've made more by hanging on to cash for a few extra days than this will cost them in customers.

I switched off NW/RBOS when I (banked with them since 1978) joined their online banking and saw .asp in their URL.

>Google has said little publicly about its capabilities, preferring not to give attackers any insights into the system's inner workings.