[time-nuts] Google Patent Search is Broken
Mike Monett
xde-l2g3 at myamail.com
Fri Jul 3 19:21:36 UTC 2009
> On Wed, 01 Jul 2009 10:55:36 -0300, Mike Monett wrote:
>> I'm hoping a lot of these problems will soon go away. I have
>> WinXP SP3 running in VirtualBox 3.0 on Ubuntu 9.04, and it works
>> great.
>> But it doesn't like running my old DOS programs. The screen
>> update is so painfully slow it makes the program unusable. I
>> tried VB 2.1, but it was only slightly faster.
> Have you tried any of the Linux DOS emulators? I find DOSBox
> particularly useful for the odd DOS programs I still use.
> http://www.dosbox.com/
> John.
Hi John,
Thanks for the suggestion. I really need to get Win98 running, since
I have about 3 decades of code written in Borland Pascal that works
with Win98 to find and load programs.
For example, one of the biggest problems with Windows and Linux is
you have to load the desired program, then find the file you want to
work with. The search function is extremely poor, especially if you
have hundreds or thousands of files in a folder to look through.
My software generates an index of every file on the hard disk, and
assigns a comment field to each file. I put keywords in the comment
field, such as "pll", "phase noise", "dmtd", "xtal", etc. Then I use
a modified Boyer-Moore search in assembly code to find all files
that contain the keywords. It is very fast.
For example, searching my hard disk for "timenuts" give the
following result (search result list omitted for clarity):
Searched 202,362 files in 4,130 directories
Found 7 hits in 67.331 ms
When I find the file I am looking for, I press a single key and my
program loads the appropriate program with the target file. I don't
have to remeber all the strange incantations needed to make each
program perform the desired task - these are all hard-wired into my
code and so takes care of all the details.
This program is indespensable. I just don't know how I would survive
if I had to work the way everyone else does. I would never be able
to find anything.
Unfortunately, these programs will not run satisfactorily in WinXP.
They are so slow they are unusable. And all the other alternatives
so far have one or more huge show stopper problems.
For example, I tried QEMU. I can partition the drive, but QEMU
doesn't want to save the partition information and it disappears the
next time I boot. I'm sure there must be something I'm doing wrong,
but I can't find any solution.
I tried running Win98 in VirtualBox. This was a waste of time. The
VGA screen only gives 640x480 resolution, which is unusable. There
are several ways to improve this with external video drivers, but
the main problem is there are no Guest Additions for Win98. So there
are no shared folders to transfer files. Copying to the clipboard
doesn't work, you have to constantly capture and release the mouse
to go back and forth to Ubuntu, etc.
One solution may be to run Virtual PC 2007 in Win XP. I tried that
last night before going to bed, but I suddenly realized I need a
much larger partition than the 2GB I was using to make Win XP
compatible with the 2GB limit in DOS.
So the first thing to try is to install another version of Win XP
but with a much larger partition. I understand FAT32 will take
127.5GB, but Win XP can't format anything over 32GB. So I have to
try running FDISK from a Win98 boot disk and see if the latest
version of Ubuntu will let me read the Win98 floppy in Virtual PC
2007 running under Win XP SP3 running in VirtualBox 3.0.
Whew!
Thanks,
Mike
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