Why don't "they" develop a texting system for long-range use? I know the mobile companies would hate it, but a protocol using CW-digital burst on HF channels allocated for this purpose would allow sending a text message along with sender-id, receiver-id, error-correcting, and authentication. The receiver would monitor a set of these channels and filter out the desired messages. One could construct a transceiver that stored received messages with a built-in WLAN and webserver so that a PDA could serve as the GUI so the whole FAMILY could send and receive messages during the whole trip!
Women and Men should think twice before spending years attaining a degree to work in IT. IT is a moving target and its always someone's subjective opinion if a job is being performed well or not. A "profession" is a field where the person has control over their time, methodology, tools, etc. IT people have none of this and are damned to an adversarial relationship with their masters. Don't screw yourself. All of the development and programming work has been transferred to Asia or will be. Don't waste a degree and all its meaning on a fucked up job. Be a real professional or at least a blue collar worker whose work has some respect, standing, and standards.
When I inherit such a monster I just start studying it. Too bad the environment of today's open plan office doesn't allow concentration necessary to learn code. This will doom our planet in a hundred years. If only women in the office could be required to shut up for at least 20 minutes out of every hour.
And at the thankfully now defunct MCI Worldcom near Dallas I was directed by our teamleader, a farmboy from west Texas, to write a program to generate reroutes for use if a circuit went down. He studied my work and said I was "good", but was afraid to put the program into production in case it malfunctioned and he got fired.
I worked as a contractor at a major manufacturer of snack foods in Plano, where all the permies were semi-retarded and used new PCs running Windows 3.1! Nevertheless I was further shocked when during the team-building exercise we draped each other with (thankfull unused) toilet paper. It was the second place I was fired from (the other was also near Dallas, the home of Buckwheat).
Why don't you just buy a PS3 or a WII and save yourself a ton of money? Using a PC for gaming is a waste of money and energy. And when you move on to a newer console, the old one still has a residual value. An old PC and game library are too hideous to even contemplate.
I can use XP until Linux is completely ready. In fact I already have Linux on one machine. I only use XP because I have ONE app that runs only on Windoze and I need that app for my business. At my job they just upgraded to XP a year ago so I won't be on Vista for another 5 years! By then Linux will have taken over except in the US of course.
LinuxMint makes Ubuntu usable. It has plugins and codecs that are missing from Ubuntu 6.xx. I can finally say that I have found a version of Linux that installs properly and is usable as well! Try it, you'll like it:
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Why don't "they" develop a texting system for long-range use? I know the mobile companies would hate it, but a protocol using CW-digital burst on HF channels allocated for this purpose would allow sending a text message along with sender-id, receiver-id, error-correcting, and authentication. The receiver would monitor a set of these channels and filter out the desired messages. One could construct a transceiver that stored received messages with a built-in WLAN and webserver so that a PDA could serve as the GUI so the whole FAMILY could send and receive messages during the whole trip!
Women and Men should think twice before spending years attaining a degree to work in IT. IT is a moving target and its always someone's subjective opinion if a job is being performed well or not. A "profession" is a field where the person has control over their time, methodology, tools, etc. IT people have none of this and are damned to an adversarial relationship with their masters. Don't screw yourself. All of the development and programming work has been transferred to Asia or will be. Don't waste a degree and all its meaning on a fucked up job. Be a real professional or at least a blue collar worker whose work has some respect, standing, and standards.
When I inherit such a monster I just start studying it. Too bad the environment of today's open plan office doesn't allow concentration necessary to learn code. This will doom our planet in a hundred years. If only women in the office could be required to shut up for at least 20 minutes out of every hour.
And at the thankfully now defunct MCI Worldcom near Dallas I was directed by our teamleader, a farmboy from west Texas, to write a program to generate reroutes for use if a circuit went down. He studied my work and said I was "good", but was afraid to put the program into production in case it malfunctioned and he got fired.
I worked as a contractor at a major manufacturer of snack foods in Plano, where all the permies were semi-retarded and used new PCs running Windows 3.1! Nevertheless I was further shocked when during the team-building exercise we draped each other with (thankfull unused) toilet paper. It was the second place I was fired from (the other was also near Dallas, the home of Buckwheat).
Why don't you just buy a PS3 or a WII and save yourself a ton of money? Using a PC for gaming is a waste of money and energy. And when you move on to a newer console, the old one still has a residual value. An old PC and game library are too hideous to even contemplate.
I can use XP until Linux is completely ready. In fact I already have Linux on one machine. I only use XP because I have ONE app that runs only on Windoze and I need that app for my business. At my job they just upgraded to XP a year ago so I won't be on Vista for another 5 years! By then Linux will have taken over except in the US of course.
LinuxMint makes Ubuntu usable. It has plugins and codecs that are missing from Ubuntu 6.xx. I can finally say that I have found a version of Linux that installs properly and is usable as well! Try it, you'll like it:
http://www.linuxmint.com/