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I would suspect that the overwhelming majority of the ~80% of home users on Windows are just using it for web-surfing and nothing else. Basically most home wind
by malandrew 13y ago
I would suspect that the overwhelming majority of the ~80% of home users on Windows are just using it for web-surfing and nothing else. Basically most home windows machines are probably roughly comparable to a Chromebook insofar as actual day-to-day usage is concerned. Facebook, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc. All the apps most people I know on windows use are web-based. This is anecdotal based on my observations, though I'd love to see hard data in this department.
- batoure 13y agoMy 80 year old grandmother actively uses VMware on her windows 8 machine, for real not making this up. And that's the problem with anecdotes they tend to be way more interesting than the real data.
- malandrew 13y agoWhat does she use VMware for?
- batoure 13y agoshe has been an avid user of PC Gourmet (Big Blue Disk 39) since the eighties. I have never been able to extract the recipes easily and she has been using it pretty much constantly for 20+ years so there are too many to do by hand. It worked ok in xp but won't run since windows 7/8 so ... vmware
- voltagex_ 13y agoIs there any way you can get a copy of the disk to me? I'm interested in old file formats.
- malandrew 13y agoConnections like these are why HN is amazeballs. You can make a simple comment and someone here will have a technical interest in helping you out.
- insaneirish 13y agoFor the sake of everyone in your family, please back up everything in multiple places. That's awesome to have a snapshot of the culinary history of your family in digital format. When the time is right, share all the recipes!
- voltagex_ 13y agoRuns pretty well on DOSBox - found Big Blue Disk 93 on cd.textfiles.com.
- batoure 13y agoI could get it to run in DOSBox but couldn't get things to print right the way she wanted it to. edit: i now see that you found a version of DOSBox that I didn't find that has good printer support.
- voltagex_ 13y agoSorry for the multiple posts on this. You sent me on a bit of an adventure: * Downloaded a modified DOSBox build with printer support from http://ykhwong.x-y.net/ http://ykhwong.x-y.net/ (linked from DOSBox wiki so not too worried) * Mapped LPT1 in DOSBox to LPT1 in Windows * installed CUPS-PDF [1] on a CUPS server in a VM * shared virtual PDF printer via Samba to Windows * ran net use lpt1: \\vm.local\pdf /persistent:yes * printed from DOSBox and got [2] 1: http://www.cups-pdf.de/ http://www.cups-pdf.de/ (or apt-get install cups-pdf) 2: https://mega.co.nz/#!ehpxha4b!U2q9lhH2RoniPKucW862Y2qRxCgMJ6FCn_MPj3N1HG0 https://mega.co.nz/#!ehpxha4b!U2q9lhH2RoniPKucW862Y2qRxCgMJ6...
- batoure 13y agoI will have to try this out.... the problem with extracting all the recipes... of which there are a ton. is that you are still in a go in print them one by one then parse the pdf. What I really wanted to do was figure out how to read the data files then pull everything into a db or something where I could do more with it.
- voltagex_ 13y agoThe file format looks whacky but not impossible to parse. Get in contact with me if you're interested in pursuing this further.