H-hi. My name is Outcat, and...I've got a problem.
It all started when I got a Gateway about six years ago. I was young then. Real young. And naive. It wasn't my fault that I saw ISA as the One True Interface. It was all I knew. Can you blame me?
I opened it up and saw slots. Little white ones, big black ones. Four ISA, three PCI. And wouldn't you know it...I had only one PCI card.
PCI. The mystery and misery of Plug n' Pray. And the total lack of anything working. I decided to hate PCI. For it hated me.
For many hours, I marveled over the wonder of ISA. The IRQ. The intricacy of jumpers and DIP switches. It was a beautiful thing...until it...took over.
I found an old Socket 7 motherboard. It had SEVEN EISA slots and 1 *true* ISA slot. I stared at it for hours. (Then I wedged it into an XT case with a half-toasted drive controller, a 486 processor, a Hercules monochrome adaptor, and christened it "Crackhead"...but that's another story..)
Then I got my new board, a SOYO 5EMA+, with only 2 ISA slots. My heart shattered, and I suffered a nervous breakdown.
Server-side software is usually insanely expensive (unless it's Open Source.) Have you ever checked prices on a nice fat copy of NT Server? Win2k, egad. Generally, people pay this much because it's how much they *think* they should pay. Good software can't come cheap, they think. So it goes: direly expensive MS software and tech support.
Say the ASP were to become common. Multiple instances of MS Office, for example. The customer pays for access to the program, and the admin pays for the big fat software suite to run off the server.
The PC becomes a thing of the past. Bandwidth is the factor here. And all the while, bigger and bigger software suites come out server-side, and the customers keep shelling out more and more.
In the short run, this may save the corporate scene money. It's gotta be cheaper to get licences for software off the ASP than to buy bloaty, exhorbitant MS packages and pay for licenses. However, given the inflation and bloat of the majority of the software represented here, woudlnt it just be more costly in the long run?
I'm a technologically-minded female myself (The term 'geek girl' is a little grating to me) and though I don't know ANYTHING about finding a mate through technology, I can tell ya my best friends were made through technology.
Flashback: March 1998. I put off a high school science fair project until the absolute last minute, trying several unsuccessful things with a black light, Plexiglas, and bacteria. (Never mind.) Two nights before the science fair, my dad hits on the idea of me showing off computer animation. I lugged my P5-133 to school and set it up in a fairly secluded corner of the commons, lost amid the run-of-the-mill plant experiments, and began to show off relatively lame WWWGifanimator/MSPaint concoctions I'd labored on.
Two guys came up. One was my age, and talked to me just about the whole time. He taught me quite a lot about my computer in that short time (I was a hapless Windows weenie then.) Later, he would tell me about hacking, which led to reading the friggin' manual, which led to Linux. We also built my new system last summer, which was 72 hours of geek camaderie, wrestling with IRQ's, and a very, very bad OSR2. You wanna learn to respect a guy? Watch him hold your hard drive in his big geeky hands. The guy's my best friend. He knows most of my passwords, the voltage of my motherboard's battery, and a number of other things I wouldn't trust to any but the bestest geek.
The other guy at the science fair was his younger brother. We played Descent for hours upon hours. He's still one of my geeky pals too. Even though he won't touch Linux with a 10-foot pole...A friend of his enjoyed Descent and graphics as well. Voila, another geek buddy.
The younger brother allowed me to use his Internet access two summers ago. Eventually he made me quit...but the eldest one gave me the passwd again.;] Shortly thereafter, I bought my own access and I've been wired ever since. With this new gateway to the world I've found a myriad of geekish compatriots all over the world.
As for a mate? I have no idea. But the geek life is never without socialization...you just need to know where to look.
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H-hi. My name is Outcat, and...I've got a problem.
It all started when I got a Gateway about six years ago. I was young then. Real young. And naive. It wasn't my fault that I saw ISA as the One True Interface. It was all I knew. Can you blame me?
I opened it up and saw slots. Little white ones, big black ones. Four ISA, three PCI. And wouldn't you know it...I had only one PCI card.
PCI. The mystery and misery of Plug n' Pray. And the total lack of anything working. I decided to hate PCI. For it hated me.
For many hours, I marveled over the wonder of ISA. The IRQ. The intricacy of jumpers and DIP switches. It was a beautiful thing...until it...took over.
I found an old Socket 7 motherboard. It had SEVEN EISA slots and 1 *true* ISA slot. I stared at it for hours. (Then I wedged it into an XT case with a half-toasted drive controller, a 486 processor, a Hercules monochrome adaptor, and christened it "Crackhead"...but that's another story..)
Then I got my new board, a SOYO 5EMA+, with only 2 ISA slots. My heart shattered, and I suffered a nervous breakdown.
I suppose that's how I got here.
I'm Outcat, and I'm addicted to Legacy devices...
Server-side software is usually insanely expensive (unless it's Open Source.) Have you ever checked prices on a nice fat copy of NT Server? Win2k, egad. Generally, people pay this much because it's how much they *think* they should pay. Good software can't come cheap, they think. So it goes: direly expensive MS software and tech support.
Say the ASP were to become common. Multiple instances of MS Office, for example. The customer pays for access to the program, and the admin pays for the big fat software suite to run off the server.
The PC becomes a thing of the past. Bandwidth is the factor here. And all the while, bigger and bigger software suites come out server-side, and the customers keep shelling out more and more.
In the short run, this may save the corporate scene money. It's gotta be cheaper to get licences for software off the ASP than to buy bloaty, exhorbitant MS packages and pay for licenses. However, given the inflation and bloat of the majority of the software represented here, woudlnt it just be more costly in the long run?
Just my $.02.
I'm a technologically-minded female myself (The term 'geek girl' is a little grating to me) and though I don't know ANYTHING about finding a mate through technology, I can tell ya my best friends were made through technology.
;] Shortly thereafter, I bought my own access and I've been wired ever since. With this new gateway to the world I've found a myriad of geekish compatriots all over the world.
Flashback: March 1998. I put off a high school science fair project until the absolute last minute, trying several unsuccessful things with a black light, Plexiglas, and bacteria. (Never mind.) Two nights before the science fair, my dad hits on the idea of me showing off computer animation. I lugged my P5-133 to school and set it up in a fairly secluded corner of the commons, lost amid the run-of-the-mill plant experiments, and began to show off relatively lame WWWGifanimator/MSPaint concoctions I'd labored on.
Two guys came up. One was my age, and talked to me just about the whole time. He taught me quite a lot about my computer in that short time (I was a hapless Windows weenie then.) Later, he would tell me about hacking, which led to reading the friggin' manual, which led to Linux. We also built my new system last summer, which was 72 hours of geek camaderie, wrestling with IRQ's, and a very, very bad OSR2. You wanna learn to respect a guy? Watch him hold your hard drive in his big geeky hands. The guy's my best friend. He knows most of my passwords, the voltage of my motherboard's battery, and a number of other things I wouldn't trust to any but the bestest geek.
The other guy at the science fair was his younger brother. We played Descent for hours upon hours. He's still one of my geeky pals too. Even though he won't touch Linux with a 10-foot pole...A friend of his enjoyed Descent and graphics as well. Voila, another geek buddy.
The younger brother allowed me to use his Internet access two summers ago. Eventually he made me quit...but the eldest one gave me the passwd again.
As for a mate? I have no idea. But the geek life is never without socialization...you just need to know where to look.