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> Please supply me with a statistic because I completely doubt your claim.

http://igeek.com/w/U.S._vs_U.K...

> I have never, at any point in this conversation, talked about gun homicide rates. I have always been talking about regular old homicide rate.

If you're knowingly using stats including other forms of homicide that by firearm in the context of justifying gun control, then you are being nothing more than intentionally misleading.

> the fact that we live in a democracy

Lol you really believe that? Firstly the US is a republic not a democracy, secondly both the Democrats and Republicans have proved over and again that they are 2 faces of the same coin. Both are as corrupt as fuck and both totally controlled by special interest groups and big companies, yet one or the other is your only realistically viable choice when voting. Sure you can write-in mickey mouse or vote for independents, but the realistic chance that changes anything is zero. Its all just a part of continuing the grand illusion that Americans have any actual say.

Oh boy. Now who's spreading FUD? Or more like just plain old bullshit.

Apple already had real multitasking OSes (plural). The failure to ship was not due to technical incompetence. Here is a history of what happened with the Copland project. The earlier Pink project suffered a lot of similar problems, due to similar mismanagement.

Using Mach required no generosity on the part of the author, considering he was employed by Apple. And the BSD layer was merely a bonus. The OS still works without it (it remains, to this day, an optional component at install time).

Even before the NeXT buyout and the beginning of the Mac OS X project, all of the open source components that eventually went into it -- the kernel, the compiler, and even the command line shell -- already had Apple-developed equivalents (NuKernel, MrC, and MPW Shell, respectively). So even if none of the open source software in question had existed at the time Mac OS X project was begun, Apple could still have delivered. The decision to go with open source components was largely political.

The NeXT buyout brought Apple a new CEO who gave the company some badly needed drive and focus. The Cocoa environment was also a boon. Everything else was a wash -- it could have (and was already in the process of) being delivered without them.

Wanna bet?

Shortly I realized they were quite behind in terms of tools they were using, always going about the long way of doing things.

There really wasnt an IT person on staff, except for the IT Consultant they hired to come in occassionally and take care of some problems.

After showing them how to use Access more effectively, and fixing a few problems in Access, I started getting trust from them to go in and start adding and updating stuff for convenience.

One such case was that before if they wanted to create a new list of contacts for a new event based on an older list, they would go in one by one and add them in...Imagine doing that for 1,000 people? That took a long time. Naturally I picked up SQL and Visual Basic, and all of a sudden what used to take a day or two, could be done in under a minute! :-)

We did end up having an IT person hired, but unfortunately the gentleman passed away, and shortly after I kind of got pushed to the front by the CFO. At the moment I dont have an official title, so I gave myself one.

So I do most of the more basic IT support and troubleshooting. If something like say the Exchange server get's borked, then we call in the IT Consultant. I dont presume to know everything, and when there's a problem I really can't fix, I admit to the CFO that's the case and the IT Consultant gets called in.

I dont have any sort of certifications, which may be seen as a bad thing. However, I do have tech experience which gives me an advantage and also I'm trusted by the company to fix something if I know how to.

The basic point here is that you may be able to get away without certifications at a smaller company, but you have to be trusted to not bork anything up.

There are examples of other people in the programming field of which David K. Every of MacKiDo and iGeek fame comes to mind. He doesnt have an official computer science or engineering degree (at least last time I checked), yet he's done contract work for big companies including (I think) Apple. As he put it once "And it's something I warn kids about; you can succeed without a degree, but it is a lot harder."

I would assume the same can be the case with IT certifications, though as David Every also said once "The irony is that while many companies will not hire employees without degrees, they will hire consultants without one."

I'm definitely finding both of these to be true to some degree :-)

Tabby", "Calico", and "American Shorthair" are not exactly going to make Bill Gates tremble in awe.

I don't know. If a monocle and a persian cat are good enough for a Bond Villain (or Bill Gates himself), they oughta be good enough for me.

Can we let the $500 hammer, $10,000 coffee maker, and the $6K toilet seat myths go now? If you want to understand the REAL scam behind this stuff, this is a good overview of exactly how the money gets wasted. For those who don't follow links, here's the explaination of "overpriced" parts:

So the total cost of the project is something like $22.5 Billion (over 5 or 10 years)....that $250 toilet seat or hammer you have heard about... The way they calculate that is to divide the entire cost of the project (including all the fixed costs and so on) over every part or tool on the entire project. And what still hasn't been mentioned is that in many "above board" projects, they had to pad the budgets enough to cover all the black-projects costs. So really a lot of the costs were for part of another program! This would be about as accurate as dividing your total income, by how many times you wipe your butt per year, and figuring that each flush costs you $136. In other words -- it never existed"

My iPod's battery died. Rather than get a new iPod, I got a Zen with a user replaceable battery that works just as well. I understand that this sort of thing is par for the course for Apple (see http://www.igeek.com/articles/Opinion/PowerBookRep air.txt.) This experience has not convinced my to buy any more Apple products.

Although one factor he fails to emphasize enough is that, for various political and business reasons, Apple was forced to start over several times (first Pink, then Copland, etc.)

Netscape 4 is one of the buggiest pieces of software out there. It's hell to develop for, and it's hell to use. (For crying out loud, it reloads a page when you resize the fucker) -- are you going to deny this? -- and if so, you don't even deserver being replied to.

OS2 is/was IBMs flagship. Now IBM is one of the world's biggest software/hardware companies. It's huge. Saying that OS2 was struck by Microsoft is equivalent to saying McDonalds is being hurt by Burger King. Get real. Get FUCKING REAL.

As for BeOS, read this article posted on /. a few months ago... It says:

Some are going to say BeOS would have been different; and they would be wrong. Be had a different set of sins, but sins none-the-less. I have no doubt that had Be been the chosen candidate, then enough new and ugly surprises would have cost Apple enough time, that we would have had roughly the same outcome; years more than expected to actually deliver.

And do read the article, because that is the only 'proof' you're going to find. There is no proof in the market. Only speculation, opinions, and stock prices.

Now you sir, are entitled to STFU, or provide something in return!