A thousand cell phones with a thousand batteries costs how much, and performs how well, compared to PoE phones? The tower, the switch, whatever, there's a bottleneck somewhere. In a major emergency [earthquake] it will ALL go down anyway....[bland music]... CLICK... "Thank you for molding! While you are becoming lichen, we are wallowing in protopasm. But rest assured, our staphlococci think your cholera is very important. Please continue to mold." CLICK... [bland music]...
Years ago I had a boss who had an hour commute each way every day. Every evening on the way home, he would turn on the recorder, verbally rehash the day and organize for the next day. Every morning he would listen to that tape on the way in, and when he got to the office, he was very prepared for his day. If I ever had a long commute, that's what I would do. But, I've always made a point to live close enough to my work so that I could ride a bike. Now that's refreshing.
1. Ram mfgs get together, collude to raise prices 2. Brokers sell stocks of Ram mfgs on promise of increased profits 3. Collusion breaks down as mfgs increase production to take advantage of better margins 4. Prices go even lower
Create a specialized database for some obscure vertical market. I'm the leading (well, only besides homegrown) database vendor for an industry with about 100 businesses in the US. I travel 2-3 times a year - not enough to completely alienate the family (the spouse only sulks a little bit) or get really tired of it.
Get a job where you can ride a bicycle or walk to work and back every day. There's always something interesting to see if you're going slow enough to notice it. Really.
There are a few people who really like the travel and such. Most of them are very people-oriented. I'm more comfortable talking to a few thousand lines of PHP code.
Dang, I was gonna say that. No first post of an idea for me.
Slightly Slower, WAY more functional
on
Is Mac OS X Slow?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I've got a 500Mhz TiBook, 1Gb RAM. The interface, at times, is a bit slow. TheGUI seems to have to go through an ounce or two of weed (smokingly fast!...NOT) to deal with disk I/O. That spinning rainbow CD icon pops up every now and then, and while it's certainly not unbearable, it is annoying and I've never experienced anything like it on Win2K.
A specific benchmark example of speed: Using FileMaker Pro 6.0v3 (which is amazingly crappy on OSX despite FMI being an Apple subsidiary), I'm testing the migration to a new build of databases. Note that in OS9, you have to manually allocate the max amount of memory FMP can use (40Mb); it doesn't use any more in OSX (I did say it's a POS already, didn't I?), but at least it doesn't need manually tweaked.
OS9.2.1 on a 500Mhz G3 iMac with 256Mb or Ram, it takes 45 minutes to clear test import data from the database set and close the application (it has to remove unused blocks). Then on a fresh import run, it takes about 1.5 hrs to import new data into the database set.
OSX 10.2.1 on my 500Mhz G4 TiBook with 1Gb RAM, it takes about 1 minute (vs 45 minutes) to clear data from the database set and quit the application. Then, it takes about 1.5 hrs to import new data back into the database set.
But...
The core OS seems really fucking fast, and amazinly functional, to me. I run Apache/PHP/MySQL on my TiBook, and can copy files off our Linux server and they *just work* on my TiBook. I can take our entire corporate web environment mobile in a matter of minutes. I switch between single and dual monitor mode all the time, and there's never a problem. I end up changing between 3-4 network configurations all the time, and it *just works*. I've set my laptop up, wireless and running off battery, in my kid's room running a DVD, and I can go to our other computer (an old 604e Mac), mount the laptop's volume, and do web development work, hitting the Apache/PHP/MySQL environment on the laptop, while the thing plays a DVD flawlessly. And it's not like the thing chokes trying to serve files via HTTP *and* handle BBEdit chewing on the files over the network at the same time.
I've been running 10.2.1 since the beginning of October; the system has not crashed or needed rebooting - not even once - except for when application or update installs require it. I've never seen *any* other laptop handle all this - Windows or OS9 - without the need for constant reboots and/or system crashes.
So, blah blah blah, YES, OSX is SLIGHLTLY SLOWER. Enough that I can notice it. But it is *so* much more stable, and more functional than anything else out there, windows or OS9, that I'll take the trade-off.
Oh, and I'll be getting myself one of those new 1Ghz TiBooks with the SuperDrive pretty soon! Now I won't have to copy the cheezy little movies I create to a co-worker's flat-panel iMac to burn DVD's.
In the hardware world, the great product testing standard is called "24 hour dock testing". That means that you put the damn thing out on the shipping dock, and if it's still there the next day, you ship it.
What's the equivalent to that in the web app world?
The only way these money- and control-hungry bastards will ever get the idea is if we all (I mean ALL) stop buying CD's from record stores. My personal policy is that I only buy CD's from the musicians themselves. They've almost always got a pile of CD's to sell when they play someplace, and the prices are usually pretty good.
Most bands today can mint their own CD's; wouldn't it be great if the musicians themselves could say "Our music sales are doing just fine" while the 'music industry' saw plummeting revenue?
That's a nice trip down memory lane. Years ago, Crowder College built a solar car for what was then essentially the same race (across Australia). They even brought the car to the shopping complex I worked at, I gave them $25 or $50 or something like that, and got a little piece of paper calling me a sponsor. I could have gotten a ride in the car for another $20 if I had shown up at the demonstration earlier; they were giving rides off the battery stores for almost 3 hours as the sun set. But the like of potential passengers was longer than the battery life, and I was at the end of the line.
The car was pretty cool, with a 'central tunnel' design and airplane-wing arc sides that would supposedly give the car an advantage in sidewinds (expected in the race). I would love to spend a couple of years working on a project like that; everything from electronics and power mamagement to aerodynamics and mechanical engineering. Of course they aren't practical, probably never will be, but give the lucky geeks that get to work on projects like this the fun of their work!
They didn't do too bad for a little college without much funding (lower-grade photovoltaics, less efficient motors, and 'bailing wire and duct tape' centric mechanics). They finished the race, I think just barely in the bottom half of finishers, and something like the 2nd best 'time per dollar spent' status. I'm sure I still have the certificate down in the bottom of a box somewhere, too. It was sort of fun getting into the whole thing, keeping track of the race and cheering the team.
They are called "jarheads" for a reason...
on
Want Freedom?
·
· Score: 1
Government controls the military. If you think our military personnel would be any better at questioning authority than the Nazi military personnel was, I've got some land to sell you.
Maybe you don't quite understand the power of our military; All of us Americans with all our pea-shooters (that weren't busy taking orders from their military superiors to stop the 'bad guys') wouldn't last 10 minutes.
Greed sure is helping former Enron employees; they must be basking in the glow of it! Greed sure helps those (and their families) that are murdered for money. Let the dead bodies and shattered lives be put on a pedestal for glorification!
And greed sure helps all of us, when that's one of the main causes of government regulations and subsidies! Man, I wish *I* could move between different cubicles of my brain that fast.
I now they are 'old fashioned', but box-and-line flowcharts are my program outline, and terse comments in the code correlate to the boxes and lines on the flowcharts. I can show people a flowchart, and most can understand what is happening faster, or more fully, than with any other type of documentation.
Programming is half rubix-cube like puzzle solving and half multiplication-table recital. (Those of us doing it for a living must be slightly [at least] off-kilter.) Documentation is a personal skill/habit; the way for a program to teach you this isn't by forcing you to do both simultaneously. The only way to learn this habit (if you haven't already) is to have your final work gone over and problems pointed out, and be willing to work on it. It seems like stuff like Leo is great for people with the habits already, but yields little more than confusing documentation to go along with confusing code for the rest of us.
You've got to develop some some kind of outline first, then write the code, then test, test, and document (with flowcharting, for me) what's actually happening.
that Apple is gonna start licensing it's OS and get out of the hardware business, Microsoft is going to Open-source Windows, and if you believe in Hell, that's gonna freeze over, too.
15-20% are born with the silver spoon in their mouth. The other 80%+ get rich by being complete nickel-dicks all their lives. A little luck, a hell of a lot of hard work, and never under-charging usually go into it, too.
When I lived in Kansas City, the guy who owned the RanchMart shopping center complex was worth about 20 Million. When it snowed, the fucker was out there shoveling the walks himself because he was too cheap to pay anyone else.
"You get what you pay for" is usually tempered with "You earn what you save". Unfortunately, the 'annual budget' phenomenon turned the second part upside-down. I worked for a school district for awhile, and we had to work to overspend our budget so that we'd get more next year. It's horribly stupid, but true.
You've got to research the companies you sell to. Find out their budget. Decide how much of it you think you can get from them. If 10% less than that is profitable, quote 5% less. The only time your real cost should be a factor is when it's more than what you can probably get.
Maybe I'm a pinko commie fag too, but I like to know this stuff. It matters to me and I want to know when government officials are falsifying information.
If you don't buy the rights to fuck with the original production, you've got no rights to do it. It doesn't matter what the consumers want; it's what the lawyers want. I love to hear the cry 'rights of the consumer'. No commercial venture gives a shit about the consumer. They only care about the consumer's money. Read between the lines: "...rights [for me to get some] of the consumer ['s money]".
CopyLeft: This post is hereby released into the public domain.
What on earth prompted you to pick this one post out of the rest of the 90% of off-topic posts to flame?!? Good gracious, you'd think that it was *that easy* for someone else to decide you're a bad guy! Oh wait... it is.
And I did mention that it was going to cause turmoil in the real estate industry, just in case you didn't read my whole rant.
Mod me down, mod me down, I'm outta control, I'm wearing a frown.
and then hand you the print cards in case your kid turns up missing
If you don't realize that they have more information about you and your kid after the procedure than before, you've got your head in the sand. At the very least, they know you have them. It's not hard for the police to get a search warrant. These days, they don't even need that. Just 'probabe cause'. It's just a matter of someone else (not you) deciding whether you or your kid is a 'good guy' or a 'bad guy'.
Also, inferring that every single one of these types of programs works exactly that way (and none keep a copy) isn't completely accurate.
Furthermore, you might want to extrapolate the scenario a little bit; instead of fingerprints on a piece of paper, it's a locator chip anklet or implant. That's what this thread is about. I don't care what anyone tells you, you are not going to be the only one with the information on how to locate that device.
I'll stick to educating my kids, and skip the fingerprinting.
ID technology is invading our lives very quickly. Hell, I already sold my children's anonymity to the government for a f'ing tax deduction. They've tied the birth certificate to SSN application. You can't claim child tax deductions without their SSN.
There's been ankle bracelets for home arrest prisoners for a long time now. With GPS, expect a *lot* more of this: once you've been caught on the wrong side of the law, government claims the right to shackle you with a device that allows them to know where you are, all the time. It will revolutionize the prison industry.
There's even people who VOLUNTARILY have their children fingerprinted for government files, "just in case" something happens. WTF? As if the government's knowledge of your wherabouts and identity isn't one of the most hazardous propositions there are!
How long will it be before we (well, Americans anyway) replace (or worse add) chip implantment for/to circumcision?
Trading your anonymity for 'security' is just plain stupid. Security is just an illusion - it does not exist. Any time you trade your freedom for security, you are selling your soul for vaporware.
I'm actually surprized that the government hasn't already required car manufacturers to install GPS tracking chips in all new cars. Wouldn't that stop car thieves? And do all kinds of other wonderful 'stop the bad guys' things?
Yeah sure, it would, BUT...
Get a clue, people, it's all relative! There's a distinct possibility you will wake up and find yourself on the wrong side of some law. Enemies are interchangeable; the only thing that stays the same is that people get hurt, lives get ruined, wars get fought. Our freedom, our anonymity, *is* our security, idiots!
And now we're already to the point that we've elevated technology to GOD status - trusting what some GPS receiver says more than our own common sense. For crying out loud, if you've spent 20 years living in a house in Rhode Island, paying taxes there, etc., can't anyone come to the conclusion that it's like common law marriage? This is a huge can of worms, and will throw the real estate industry into turmoil. And what will be the answer? Lawyers and more title insurance companies (that aren't liable for a damn thing, when you read the fine print)? Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Ranting provides some stress relief, at least. Doubt it will do much more than that.
Here's something for all you techies to drool about. I can't believe I haven't seen a link for this already, but there's a guy who has spent the better part of his life travelling with computers (first on bicycles, now on a trimaran!).
Check out The Microship if you'd like to dream about being a tecnho-geek without a leash. There's a massive amount of information about making electronics systems sea-worthy; not as in "put in on a big enough boat in air conditioning and it will do fine", but "shit, my computer system needs to be able to withstand immersion in salt-water!"
Apple is trying to repeat it's desktop publishing success. To this day, a majority of publishing houses are mac-centric. Now, many studios have already converted to using Macs and Final Cut Pro to produce trailers and stuff like that. Steve Jobs is way into the video entertainment industry, and he's trying to make Apple be part of that.
Apple will never be huge like Microsoft, or Dell, but Apple is poised to become a dominant player in making all aspects of video - creating, managing, and viewing - accessible to everyone.
People have such a narrow focus on what computers are; they are bland commodities. Digital video is becoming a commodity too, and Apple is right there. Apple is trying to be part and parcel of the entertainment industry, not the computer industry. The entertainment industry is gargantuan compared to the computer industry.
Yes, the iMac as a computer industry commodity is a failure. But it may succeed as an entertainment industry commodity. That's Job's Big Picture.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, then I went and read the article. Nevermind ;-)
Gawd, if he doesn't mention the iPod, he's TOTALLY Un-Hip.
If it ain't got an Apple logo on it, it ain't shit. Steve Jobs Rules!
Now that's thinking.
...[bland music]... CLICK... "Thank you for molding! While you are becoming lichen, we are wallowing in protopasm. But rest assured, our staphlococci think your cholera is very important. Please continue to mold." CLICK... [bland music]...
A thousand cell phones with a thousand batteries costs how much, and performs how well, compared to PoE phones? The tower, the switch, whatever, there's a bottleneck somewhere. In a major emergency [earthquake] it will ALL go down anyway.
Years ago I had a boss who had an hour commute each way every day. Every evening on the way home, he would turn on the recorder, verbally rehash the day and organize for the next day. Every morning he would listen to that tape on the way in, and when he got to the office, he was very prepared for his day. If I ever had a long commute, that's what I would do. But, I've always made a point to live close enough to my work so that I could ride a bike. Now that's refreshing.
1. Ram mfgs get together, collude to raise prices
2. Brokers sell stocks of Ram mfgs on promise of increased profits
3. Collusion breaks down as mfgs increase production to take advantage of better margins
4. Prices go even lower
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Create a specialized database for some obscure vertical market. I'm the leading (well, only besides homegrown) database vendor for an industry with about 100 businesses in the US. I travel 2-3 times a year - not enough to completely alienate the family (the spouse only sulks a little bit) or get really tired of it.
Get a job where you can ride a bicycle or walk to work and back every day. There's always something interesting to see if you're going slow enough to notice it. Really.
There are a few people who really like the travel and such. Most of them are very people-oriented. I'm more comfortable talking to a few thousand lines of PHP code.
Dang, I was gonna say that. No first post of an idea for me.
I've got a 500Mhz TiBook, 1Gb RAM. The interface, at times, is a bit slow. TheGUI seems to have to go through an ounce or two of weed (smokingly fast! ...NOT) to deal with disk I/O. That spinning rainbow CD icon pops up every now and then, and while it's certainly not unbearable, it is annoying and I've never experienced anything like it on Win2K.
A specific benchmark example of speed: Using FileMaker Pro 6.0v3 (which is amazingly crappy on OSX despite FMI being an Apple subsidiary), I'm testing the migration to a new build of databases. Note that in OS9, you have to manually allocate the max amount of memory FMP can use (40Mb); it doesn't use any more in OSX (I did say it's a POS already, didn't I?), but at least it doesn't need manually tweaked.
OS9.2.1 on a 500Mhz G3 iMac with 256Mb or Ram, it takes 45 minutes to clear test import data from the database set and close the application (it has to remove unused blocks). Then on a fresh import run, it takes about 1.5 hrs to import new data into the database set.
OSX 10.2.1 on my 500Mhz G4 TiBook with 1Gb RAM, it takes about 1 minute (vs 45 minutes) to clear data from the database set and quit the application. Then, it takes about 1.5 hrs to import new data back into the database set.
But...
The core OS seems really fucking fast, and amazinly functional, to me. I run Apache/PHP/MySQL on my TiBook, and can copy files off our Linux server and they *just work* on my TiBook. I can take our entire corporate web environment mobile in a matter of minutes. I switch between single and dual monitor mode all the time, and there's never a problem. I end up changing between 3-4 network configurations all the time, and it *just works*. I've set my laptop up, wireless and running off battery, in my kid's room running a DVD, and I can go to our other computer (an old 604e Mac), mount the laptop's volume, and do web development work, hitting the Apache/PHP/MySQL environment on the laptop, while the thing plays a DVD flawlessly. And it's not like the thing chokes trying to serve files via HTTP *and* handle BBEdit chewing on the files over the network at the same time.
I've been running 10.2.1 since the beginning of October; the system has not crashed or needed rebooting - not even once - except for when application or update installs require it. I've never seen *any* other laptop handle all this - Windows or OS9 - without the need for constant reboots and/or system crashes.
So, blah blah blah, YES, OSX is SLIGHLTLY SLOWER. Enough that I can notice it. But it is *so* much more stable, and more functional than anything else out there, windows or OS9, that I'll take the trade-off.
Oh, and I'll be getting myself one of those new 1Ghz TiBooks with the SuperDrive pretty soon! Now I won't have to copy the cheezy little movies I create to a co-worker's flat-panel iMac to burn DVD's.
In the hardware world, the great product testing standard is called "24 hour dock testing". That means that you put the damn thing out on the shipping dock, and if it's still there the next day, you ship it.
What's the equivalent to that in the web app world?
The only way these money- and control-hungry bastards will ever get the idea is if we all (I mean ALL) stop buying CD's from record stores. My personal policy is that I only buy CD's from the musicians themselves. They've almost always got a pile of CD's to sell when they play someplace, and the prices are usually pretty good.
Most bands today can mint their own CD's; wouldn't it be great if the musicians themselves could say "Our music sales are doing just fine" while the 'music industry' saw plummeting revenue?
not much else to say, really... only when everyone realizes how horrible violence and war is, will we ever begin to see peace.
That's a nice trip down memory lane. Years ago, Crowder College built a solar car for what was then essentially the same race (across Australia). They even brought the car to the shopping complex I worked at, I gave them $25 or $50 or something like that, and got a little piece of paper calling me a sponsor. I could have gotten a ride in the car for another $20 if I had shown up at the demonstration earlier; they were giving rides off the battery stores for almost 3 hours as the sun set. But the like of potential passengers was longer than the battery life, and I was at the end of the line.
The car was pretty cool, with a 'central tunnel' design and airplane-wing arc sides that would supposedly give the car an advantage in sidewinds (expected in the race). I would love to spend a couple of years working on a project like that; everything from electronics and power mamagement to aerodynamics and mechanical engineering. Of course they aren't practical, probably never will be, but give the lucky geeks that get to work on projects like this the fun of their work!
They didn't do too bad for a little college without much funding (lower-grade photovoltaics, less efficient motors, and 'bailing wire and duct tape' centric mechanics). They finished the race, I think just barely in the bottom half of finishers, and something like the 2nd best 'time per dollar spent' status. I'm sure I still have the certificate down in the bottom of a box somewhere, too. It was sort of fun getting into the whole thing, keeping track of the race and cheering the team.
Government controls the military. If you think our military personnel would be any better at questioning authority than the Nazi military personnel was, I've got some land to sell you.
Maybe you don't quite understand the power of our military; All of us Americans with all our pea-shooters (that weren't busy taking orders from their military superiors to stop the 'bad guys') wouldn't last 10 minutes.
...and war is peace, and freedom is slavery, etc.
Greed sure is helping former Enron employees; they must be basking in the glow of it! Greed sure helps those (and their families) that are murdered for money. Let the dead bodies and shattered lives be put on a pedestal for glorification!
And greed sure helps all of us, when that's one of the main causes of government regulations and subsidies! Man, I wish *I* could move between different cubicles of my brain that fast.
I now they are 'old fashioned', but box-and-line flowcharts are my program outline, and terse comments in the code correlate to the boxes and lines on the flowcharts. I can show people a flowchart, and most can understand what is happening faster, or more fully, than with any other type of documentation.
Programming is half rubix-cube like puzzle solving and half multiplication-table recital. (Those of us doing it for a living must be slightly [at least] off-kilter.) Documentation is a personal skill/habit; the way for a program to teach you this isn't by forcing you to do both simultaneously. The only way to learn this habit (if you haven't already) is to have your final work gone over and problems pointed out, and be willing to work on it. It seems like stuff like Leo is great for people with the habits already, but yields little more than confusing documentation to go along with confusing code for the rest of us.
You've got to develop some some kind of outline first, then write the code, then test, test, and document (with flowcharting, for me) what's actually happening.
that Apple is gonna start licensing it's OS and get out of the hardware business, Microsoft is going to Open-source Windows, and if you believe in Hell, that's gonna freeze over, too.
15-20% are born with the silver spoon in their mouth. The other 80%+ get rich by being complete nickel-dicks all their lives. A little luck, a hell of a lot of hard work, and never under-charging usually go into it, too.
When I lived in Kansas City, the guy who owned the RanchMart shopping center complex was worth about 20 Million. When it snowed, the fucker was out there shoveling the walks himself because he was too cheap to pay anyone else.
"You get what you pay for" is usually tempered with "You earn what you save". Unfortunately, the 'annual budget' phenomenon turned the second part upside-down. I worked for a school district for awhile, and we had to work to overspend our budget so that we'd get more next year. It's horribly stupid, but true.
You've got to research the companies you sell to. Find out their budget. Decide how much of it you think you can get from them. If 10% less than that is profitable, quote 5% less. The only time your real cost should be a factor is when it's more than what you can probably get.
Maybe I'm a pinko commie fag too, but I like to know this stuff. It matters to me and I want to know when government officials are falsifying information.
If you don't buy the rights to fuck with the original production, you've got no rights to do it. It doesn't matter what the consumers want; it's what the lawyers want. I love to hear the cry 'rights of the consumer'. No commercial venture gives a shit about the consumer. They only care about the consumer's money. Read between the lines: "...rights [for me to get some] of the consumer ['s money]".
CopyLeft: This post is hereby released into the public domain.
What on earth prompted you to pick this one post out of the rest of the 90% of off-topic posts to flame?!? Good gracious, you'd think that it was *that easy* for someone else to decide you're a bad guy! Oh wait... it is.
And I did mention that it was going to cause turmoil in the real estate industry, just in case you didn't read my whole rant.
Mod me down, mod me down, I'm outta control, I'm wearing a frown.
and then hand you the print cards in case your kid turns up missing
If you don't realize that they have more information about you and your kid after the procedure than before, you've got your head in the sand. At the very least, they know you have them. It's not hard for the police to get a search warrant. These days, they don't even need that. Just 'probabe cause'. It's just a matter of someone else (not you) deciding whether you or your kid is a 'good guy' or a 'bad guy'.
Also, inferring that every single one of these types of programs works exactly that way (and none keep a copy) isn't completely accurate.
Furthermore, you might want to extrapolate the scenario a little bit; instead of fingerprints on a piece of paper, it's a locator chip anklet or implant. That's what this thread is about. I don't care what anyone tells you, you are not going to be the only one with the information on how to locate that device.
I'll stick to educating my kids, and skip the fingerprinting.
ID technology is invading our lives very quickly. Hell, I already sold my children's anonymity to the government for a f'ing tax deduction. They've tied the birth certificate to SSN application. You can't claim child tax deductions without their SSN.
There's been ankle bracelets for home arrest prisoners for a long time now. With GPS, expect a *lot* more of this: once you've been caught on the wrong side of the law, government claims the right to shackle you with a device that allows them to know where you are, all the time. It will revolutionize the prison industry.
There's even people who VOLUNTARILY have their children fingerprinted for government files, "just in case" something happens. WTF? As if the government's knowledge of your wherabouts and identity isn't one of the most hazardous propositions there are!
How long will it be before we (well, Americans anyway) replace (or worse add) chip implantment for/to circumcision?
Trading your anonymity for 'security' is just plain stupid. Security is just an illusion - it does not exist. Any time you trade your freedom for security, you are selling your soul for vaporware.
I'm actually surprized that the government hasn't already required car manufacturers to install GPS tracking chips in all new cars. Wouldn't that stop car thieves? And do all kinds of other wonderful 'stop the bad guys' things?
Yeah sure, it would, BUT...
Get a clue, people, it's all relative! There's a distinct possibility you will wake up and find yourself on the wrong side of some law. Enemies are interchangeable; the only thing that stays the same is that people get hurt, lives get ruined, wars get fought. Our freedom, our anonymity, *is* our security, idiots!
And now we're already to the point that we've elevated technology to GOD status - trusting what some GPS receiver says more than our own common sense. For crying out loud, if you've spent 20 years living in a house in Rhode Island, paying taxes there, etc., can't anyone come to the conclusion that it's like common law marriage? This is a huge can of worms, and will throw the real estate industry into turmoil. And what will be the answer? Lawyers and more title insurance companies (that aren't liable for a damn thing, when you read the fine print)? Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Ranting provides some stress relief, at least. Doubt it will do much more than that.
Here's something for all you techies to drool about. I can't believe I haven't seen a link for this already, but there's a guy who has spent the better part of his life travelling with computers (first on bicycles, now on a trimaran!).
Check out The Microship if you'd like to dream about being a tecnho-geek without a leash. There's a massive amount of information about making electronics systems sea-worthy; not as in "put in on a big enough boat in air conditioning and it will do fine", but "shit, my computer system needs to be able to withstand immersion in salt-water!"
Apple is trying to repeat it's desktop publishing success. To this day, a majority of publishing houses are mac-centric. Now, many studios have already converted to using Macs and Final Cut Pro to produce trailers and stuff like that. Steve Jobs is way into the video entertainment industry, and he's trying to make Apple be part of that.
Apple will never be huge like Microsoft, or Dell, but Apple is poised to become a dominant player in making all aspects of video - creating, managing, and viewing - accessible to everyone.
People have such a narrow focus on what computers are; they are bland commodities. Digital video is becoming a commodity too, and Apple is right there. Apple is trying to be part and parcel of the entertainment industry, not the computer industry. The entertainment industry is gargantuan compared to the computer industry.
Yes, the iMac as a computer industry commodity is a failure. But it may succeed as an entertainment industry commodity. That's Job's Big Picture.