I think the original point of the poster was that it would not make financial sense to Apple today to risk so much money on a project. Sure, they did years ago with the Newton and many other projects that didn't even see the light of day, but with today's computer market and general market conditions they can't afford huge losses to that kind of crap.
The bottom line is that their current revenue stream wouldn't support it and they've (Jobs) already made it plain that they need to focus on their core market which is the Mac -- not warm-and-fuzzy crap like the Newton/Palm devices. And don't bring up the iPod as an example of their risk-taking -- the iPod isn't even close to the same league as a tablet PC/Mac. There's a HELLUVA lot more development that would go into a tablet PC/Mac... (note the huge financial sinkhole that once was the Newton division as an partial example of the complexities of developing something like a tablet computer)
So many people hate Microsoft because of their platform dominance, but the reality is that there are some real good reasons why they DO dominate the industry. One of those reasons is the way they work WITH their developers instead of raping them or just plain destroying them because they feel like it.
Once you are done reviewing the history of OS/2 & IBM, take a good look at the past AND present of Apple. As a developer (formerly for the Mac, now only for Linux/Unix and Windows), I can honestly say that Apple rapes their "partners" and developers any time they feel like it...
BTW, welcome to the real world and congratulations for graduating... From Utah... actually, I sincerely hope you stay there, because from the looks of your number of replies to this thread, you are a serious psycho...
Since your ex-girlfriend told me that much of your sexual performance is limp, I'll believe that all of it is.
No, really, until YOU, the fuckin' idiot who thinks that MUCH OF THE FUCKIN' WEB is made up of SHIT that is obviously (to those of us who are sane, anyway) in the minority of web development, it is up to YOU to prove otherwise. Count how many random web pages you click on from a results page at Google.com and tell me how many contain Macromedia's Shockwave Flash shit, then drink a cup of coffee (smelling it carefully), then come back and tell us how FULL OF SHIT YOU ARE!
If you have designed a flash animation, YOU ARE A DESIGNER. Maybe a FUCKIN' LAME HACK, but still a designer of some magnitude.
At least I didn't say that Flash animations annoy the shit out of MUCH OF THE PEOPLE WHO SURF THE WEB! That's a generalization, idiot! I said it annoys PEOPLE -- it DOES. I didn't say most, many, much, or any other bullshit.
The point of a beautifully animated site is that it be searchable SO PEOPLE CAN FIND IT! Otherwise, what fuckin' difference does it make how "accessible" it is if nobody fucking ACCESSES IT??? What website do you "design" flash for so we can go "access" it? What difference does it make if it is POSSIBLE to search flash animations IF NOBODY FUCKING DOES IT? If MUCH of the web contains Flash animations, don't you think that search engines would come up with a way to search it IMMEDIATELY??? Most of the web doesn't use Flash shit, therefore search engines don't crawl that shit.
How much? Got a number? Don't use generalizations, they'll always get you in trouble. I personally don't agree that "much" of the web is made up of flash animations.
"which I think are PERFECTLY FINE and can do a lot more than simple HTML."
Yeah you, the designer, think it's perfectly fine, but your opinion is, of course, biased.
Also, the question is not whether it CAN do a lot more than HTML, but whether it DOES in the REAL WORLD. Most places Flash is used, it is used in ways that annoy the sh*t out of people. I've seen a lot of beautifully animated sites that didn't contain a byte of Flash and were perfectly searchable because of it.
Form does not have to come at the expense of function, every designer should know that from day one...
-2.2GHz AMD Athlon XP w/133+MHz FSB & 533MHz motherboard bus (benchmarked to be equivalent to a 2.8GHz Pentium 4) -1GB PC2100 DDR SDRAM -3x60GB ATA-133 Drives & motherboard supports ATA RAID 0, 1, & 0+1 -DVD-ROM Drive -48x/24x/48x TDK CD-RW Drive -NVidia GeForce4 dual-display w/128MB DDR (No bundled displays) & motherboard supports AGP 8x -Cool Blue/Silver Aluminum display case with 6 fans -6 USB, 2 FireWire, 6 channel digital/optical audio, 1 CF/SM card reader
Price: $1,555.00
A roughly equivalent Mac that isn't too overpriced from store.apple.com on 10/25/02:
-Dual 867MHz PowerPC G4 w/133MHz system bus -1GB PC2100 DDR SDRAM -2x120GB ATA-100 Drives (this was the closest they had to my 60gb boot drive and 120GB RAID data drive) -2X DVD-ROM + 16x/10x/32x CD-RW Drives (again, the closest I could get) -NVidia GeForce4 dual-display w/128MB DDR (no bundled displays) -I assume at least 2 USB and 2 FireWire, but their site doesn't say; I also assume no 6 channel digital/optical sound or a compact flash/smart media reader
Price: $3,249.00 (sorry, subtract the special $110.00 "Promotion Savings" from that price)
A roughly equivalent Dell system:
-2.8GHz Pentium 4 w/533MHz system bus -1GB PC2100 DDR SDRAM -1x120GB ATA-100 Drive (closest I could get) -DVD-ROM Drive -48x/24x/48x CD-RW Drive -ATI Radeon 9700 Pro dual-display w/128MB DDR (no bundled displays) -I assume at least 2 USB and added a 3 port firewire card; Turtle Beach Santa Cruz sound; no CF/SM reader
Price: $2,182.00 (subtract a $100 rebate from that price)
Now what were you saying about "where's the overpriced hardware"??? I think the answer to that question is obvious.
Of course, there are a few things people could take issue with, like:
-- Oh, but a PowerPC is so much faster than a Pentium 4! Especially 2 of 'em!
Answer: Yeah, right -- prove it.
-- Oh, but you can't run Mac OS X on a PC! And, Apple has better tech support!
Answer: I don't want/need OS X because I can pick from a half-dozen other arguably better OS's; and Apple's "support" is rated time-and-again as being far below Dell's support level.
I just can't see how a rational human being can state that Macs have closed the price gap. If anything, they've widened it! And I owned only Macs for 9 years!!!
My statistics stand -- how can you compare your buy of 4 power supplies to our buys of thousands of power supplies??? Don't you think I have a better grasp of the real failure rate -- especially when I'm the one talking to the assholes at Sparkle who freely admit their power supplies have an "acceptable" 10-20% failure rate?
The statistics aren't just ours, if you had read my post, you'd understand that they ADMIT 10-20% failure rates of power supplies they sell to suckers like you and say that it is ACCEPTABLE.
That just isn't acceptable to reputable companies like us which is why we don't sell their crap any more...
Aah, the great myth that if the MAJORITY of users have a good experience, then the product in question must be good.
Obviously if 80% of the power supplies don't fail, then most of the users would be perfectly happy. That doesn't mean it's good, that just means they didn't piss off most of their customers.
Shouldn't we in the electronics industry strive for more than a 10-20% failure rate or just "not pissing off more than half our customers"?
As an ex-Mac user of 9 years, I can honestly see your B.S. from a mile away. VMWare (not to mention VirtualPC for Windows) will let you run Linux or anything else except the Mac safely in your Windows PC. And I have no use for the Mac OS any more, anyway.
And if you want a "pure" UNIX, try one of the FREE flavors of BSD -- did I mention those "pure" UNIXes were FREE? I used Mac OS X since it was called NeXTStep 3.1 (up through Mac OS X 10.1), so I can tell you that Mac OS X is FAR from pure in the UNIX world.
I never thought I'd see a Mac user touting the value of a Mac as being its UNIX "purity". Oh, how the world is CHANGING...
I'm sorry, but I work for the number one power supply distributor in the USA (we're not a direct reseller, though) and Sparkle power supplies are the BIGGEST pieces of sh*t I've ever had the misfortune of touching. They are extremely prone to failure -- as high as 10-25% out of the 20-25 we've bought for I.T. use (I'm the Director of I.S.) and we have lots of manufacturers who replace failed Sparkle power supplies with others that we sell.
Yes, they're cheap, BUT you'd better buy two for every machine you use them in (one for backup) just to save you the trip to your local Fry's (or whatever your local computer hardware reseller is) for a replacement WHEN it fails.
And to top it all off, most Chinese power supply companies (like Sparkle) feel that 10-20% failure rates are ACCEPTABLE! This is in an industry where a 1% failure rate usually sends the engineers back to the drawing boards. Sparkle Power is a huge joke in our industry...
I think from most of these posts we can draw the conclusion that you can do this any time of your life -- young, middle aged, or old. You don't have to do anything but what you are ready to do. And that doesn't necessarily mean travelling overseas, you can get a hell of a lot of life experience right here in the USA -- lots of people from other countries come here for that very reason.
I was in the middle of college in South Dakota (where I grew up) when I was 20, and I was bored out of my mind. The "challenging" tech university I was going to wasn't so challenging, and I wanted to really experience life. I knew I wanted to get to California or the east coast where I could continue college, but get a lot more out of life at the same time. I ended up with a girl from California at my night-job during college and we moved to California together. I knew nobody in California and had no family there. I ended up breaking up with that girl and for two years had almost two dozen extremely different jobs while I went to college part-time in the Silicon Valley. I also met a LOT of women here, and met SO many people from so many different cultures that I often felt like I was in a foreign country (I still live here and 1/3 of the local community is non-native Asian-American).
That was 11 years ago. I had a great time, had a lot of foreign cultural exposure and other life experiences I'll never forget (you wouldn't believe how many pages of stories I have from working in a busy Silicon Valley gas station at night!). I found my perfect job, make great money (even today), I've been married to a Vietnamese woman for over four years, and now have 2 kids. The start-up I hooked up with 9 years ago grew into a $150 million company that got bought by a British company 2 years ago -- perfect travel conditions considering I'm the I.T. Director.
So, I'm 32, have all the "bad" things that are supposed to prevent me from "seeing the world", but in the past 5 years I've seen Britain, Ireland, Germany, France, Holland, Canada (not a big hop, but it ain't America), Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam, & Thailand. That's not including all the travel around the good old U.S.A. All that travel, and I've got my family, home, mucho money in the bank, and a job I love to go to every day. AND, one evening with my 1 1/2 year old son beats everything else by a mile.
I don't know what that means to anyone reading this, but I guess it means that if you follow your heart and what you feel you want to do, you absolutely can't go wrong and you'll find what you're looking for.
No, I've used Macs for more than 8 years and they started this crap *years* ago. That doesn't make it any more genuine.
Why is it so hard to believe they're genuine? Because most people tend to believe that BIG companies and other big organizations (i.e. government) are corrupted to some extent by their power. Also, it doesn't hurt that so many of these "testimonials" have turned out to be B.S. over the years, too (Sony did it not too long ago when they used Sony employees to give "testimonials" in one of their commercials).
Another thing -- what else would you expect from a company (Apple) that has sued companies out of existence (I worked for one) and otherwise screwed corporate "partners" (I worked for one, knew many, and bought from many more -- all gone now) for their own gain?
I, for one, don't expect Apple (or most other big companies) to be HONEST, that's for damn sure...
Uum, because those people still with AOL CAN'T GET a better, faster, cheaper online experience.
Believe it or not, AOL is the best option for some people in some places -- I know because I grew up in South Dakota, and some rural areas in the U.S. have pretty sparse/crappy ISP options. And the fact that AOL is the number one ISP in the U.S. among dozens of ISP's doesn't mean much because their total user-base is so relatively tiny...
First, NOTHING is guaranteed -- but you probably know that if you haven't been under a rock for the past 3 years.
I agree with the rest of what you're saying. Reading this Fortune article, I feel sorry for these people that have tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt on top of $50k+ in college loan debt. But, I don't know what the hell is wrong with these people because I paid off my college loan debt years ago (I'm 32), and have never had more than $3-4k of credit card debt -- I'm ashamed when I have even that much, but I'm told by bankers that that is incredibly low. I also grabbed a home here in the Silicon Valley at a great price (current selling price is still more than double what I bought it at), and I've put another $20k into it out-of-pocket to improve my equity even more (about $300,000 today). AND, I have over $25k in retirement funds (IRA & 401k) TODAY -- including the losses of the past few years.
I hope the article is too pessimistic because I can't believe how irresponsible you'd have to be to have so much debt and so few assets.
And speaking of "vapor-skills", yes there were too many losers out there winning projects over me just because they could sell themselves better than I could. Where are they now? Broke and unemployed -- thank God sanity has returned...
Another way to deal with this without paying for a phone company's privacy manager is to buy one of the new phone systems that have a base station and support 1-8 cordless phones. Most of them have built in voice mail and voice attendant systems and you can get a basic package (base station and one handset) for as low as about $150-$200 (standalone Sony cordless phones with no answering machine used to go for the same price!).
With the voice attendant, the caller simply has to hit #1 or #2 (the pound key and the number of your phone) to ring you. I used to get literally 2-4 telemarketers calling me a day, but once I set up this simple system, it dropped to ZERO! I haven't had a single telemarketer call me for over 6 months! They simply don't want to waste their time listening to the message that tells them how to ring you (or whoever). And it doesn't annoy your friends after the first time they learn to hit #1 for your phone, because every time they call they just have to hit that number instead of waiting.
For me it was a perfect solution -- it also helps that I have a teenage daughter who I wanted to get her own calls routed to her own phone so I wouldn't be disturbed every 10 minutes. With this solution, I only pay for one phone line, she gets her calls, I don't get stupid telemarketer calls, and I still have control over the line in case the kids over-use the phone.
That's true, but I think there are probably a lot of people out there who only use one hand for the mouse and use the other hand for keyboard shortcuts...
Sorry, but any consumer who's used Linux for more than a day (and, consequently, has had to try to install some off-CD software) WILL notice the kernel version number. Why? Because often software binaries/drivers are configured per the kernel version.
And I, for the record, would rather have to remember kernel version 2.6 or 3.0 or 3.1 than 2.4.18.123.456.389, etc. It's not a marketing thing, but I'm sure I'm not the only Linux USER who would rather have a simpler version number...
Maybe I'm not the first to point this out, but isn't this redundant/unnecessary? I'm using Linux every day and in the GUI Gnome and KDE both have perfectly fine trash cans. In the command line when you do an "rm -rf" or something like that, the files are gone, but it's the same in Windows. If I use the command prompt to "del" a file, then the file is GONE, not in the recycle bin.
What's wrong with that? If you are advanced enough to use a command line then you'd better be advanced enough to know when you want to permanently delete a file!
I think the guy who made this software is forgetting that the average Joe Blow Linux User isn't going to be using the command line very often (if at all), so this software is irrelevent...
RTFAYYFHI! (Read The Fuckin' Article Yourself, You Fuckin' Hypocritical Idiot!)
On PAGE 3, they quote a U of MN geneticist voicing concerns similar to this "lowly highschooler":
------------ Anne Kapuscinski, a University of Minnesota geneticist and a leading expert on transgenic fish, suspects the complex dynamics of fish populations and genetics may resist a daughterless assault. Nature could conspire to give the carp a higher survival rate or simply turn off the daughterless gene. ------------
EGGSTASY, how could you ever think for a single moment that you are ACTUALLY QUALIFIED to post such a condescending response on SLASHDOT??? A requirement is to understand what the fuck you are reading before posting such a flamingly idiotic response...
If I can't buy a piece of software [reasonably] because I want to use it, then getting a free copy from someone who has that software is ethical.
I don't care if the company who made it and sold it before is complaining today -- if they don't want to take the trouble to publish it TODAY, then TOUGH! If they take the trouble to publish it for a reasonable price today (don't publish a 15-20 year old title for $50, obviously), then the software in question no longer fits the definition of abandonware.
It's interesting that I see this article at the exact same time I'm actually testing some server software in three virtual Windows 2000 Advanced Server machines networked in a virtual network on my PC... using VMWare. It allows me to test configurations and operations without actually using hardware and it's faster since I'm using backed-up VM's in case the software I'm testing destroys a VM (if it does, I toss the destroyed VM and unzip the original from a zip file in about 5 minutes). And, I can test virtually any combination of Intel-based OS's in my virtual network this way.
I don't know, maybe I'm the only one who feels this way, but "Enterprise" is the first Star Trek series since the original '60s series that was really consistently interesting. TNG and it's many spinoffs were, for the most part, boring, politically-correct, pieces of crap. Not that all episodes were terrible, but I've avoided seeing WHOLE SEASONS of TNG because so many of the episodes became so boring, and I don't really care if I ever do see them. On the other hand, I've seen each of the original series' episodes at least 10 times.
Maybe the fact that "Enterprise" was intended to recapture the action and humor style of the original series and thats why it appeals to people like me (I generally see people who liked TNG dislike "Enterprise"). Or maybe the episodes are more like real science fiction and not just intended to expand the audience to people who'd rather watch "Friends"...
Now, you know you're wrong whenEVER you generalize! You just can't throw out a simple statement like "100% of hackers/crackers would be physically or ethically unfit to join the FBI" without getting a response.
I do serious hacking and cracking and have over 20 years of real computer and programming experience. I was a U.S. Army Airborne Ranger for 6 years, and I'm still more physically fit than most Americans at 6'3" weighing 200 pounds (I do serious workouts every day). I have NO doubt that I could pass the FBI's piddly fitness tests and if you talk to anyone who knows me they'll tell you how ethical I am (much more than most).
So first, the old stereotype that geeks have to be fat, ugly bastards is just that, a stereotype! And second, if I exist (and I don't work for the FBI), don't even doubt for a second that there aren't many more people like me or even better than me who actually work for the FBI -- in other words, the stereotype that government intelligence agencies have no decent techies is yet-another-stupid-stereotype!
Uuum, the 2nd definition for "accuracy" at M-W.com (Merriam-Webster) is basically "precision". So what's your point? Why should he use one or the other when they are basically defined as being the same?
Try looking up your information before you post...
Slashdot Mirror
I think the original point of the poster was that it would not make financial sense to Apple today to risk so much money on a project. Sure, they did years ago with the Newton and many other projects that didn't even see the light of day, but with today's computer market and general market conditions they can't afford huge losses to that kind of crap.
The bottom line is that their current revenue stream wouldn't support it and they've (Jobs) already made it plain that they need to focus on their core market which is the Mac -- not warm-and-fuzzy crap like the Newton/Palm devices. And don't bring up the iPod as an example of their risk-taking -- the iPod isn't even close to the same league as a tablet PC/Mac. There's a HELLUVA lot more development that would go into a tablet PC/Mac... (note the huge financial sinkhole that once was the Newton division as an partial example of the complexities of developing something like a tablet computer)
EXACTLY.
So many people hate Microsoft because of their platform dominance, but the reality is that there are some real good reasons why they DO dominate the industry. One of those reasons is the way they work WITH their developers instead of raping them or just plain destroying them because they feel like it.
Once you are done reviewing the history of OS/2 & IBM, take a good look at the past AND present of Apple. As a developer (formerly for the Mac, now only for Linux/Unix and Windows), I can honestly say that Apple rapes their "partners" and developers any time they feel like it...
BTW, welcome to the real world and congratulations for graduating... From Utah ... actually, I sincerely hope you stay there, because from the looks of your number of replies to this thread, you are a serious psycho...
Stay isolated, keep the rest of the USA safe...
OK.
Since your ex-girlfriend told me that much of your sexual performance is limp, I'll believe that all of it is.
No, really, until YOU, the fuckin' idiot who thinks that MUCH OF THE FUCKIN' WEB is made up of SHIT that is obviously (to those of us who are sane, anyway) in the minority of web development, it is up to YOU to prove otherwise. Count how many random web pages you click on from a results page at Google.com and tell me how many contain Macromedia's Shockwave Flash shit, then drink a cup of coffee (smelling it carefully), then come back and tell us how FULL OF SHIT YOU ARE!
If you have designed a flash animation, YOU ARE A DESIGNER. Maybe a FUCKIN' LAME HACK, but still a designer of some magnitude.
At least I didn't say that Flash animations annoy the shit out of MUCH OF THE PEOPLE WHO SURF THE WEB! That's a generalization, idiot! I said it annoys PEOPLE -- it DOES. I didn't say most, many, much, or any other bullshit.
The point of a beautifully animated site is that it be searchable SO PEOPLE CAN FIND IT! Otherwise, what fuckin' difference does it make how "accessible" it is if nobody fucking ACCESSES IT??? What website do you "design" flash for so we can go "access" it? What difference does it make if it is POSSIBLE to search flash animations IF NOBODY FUCKING DOES IT? If MUCH of the web contains Flash animations, don't you think that search engines would come up with a way to search it IMMEDIATELY??? Most of the web doesn't use Flash shit, therefore search engines don't crawl that shit.
"Much of the web is made up of flash animations"
How much? Got a number? Don't use generalizations, they'll always get you in trouble. I personally don't agree that "much" of the web is made up of flash animations.
"which I think are PERFECTLY FINE and can do a lot more than simple HTML."
Yeah you, the designer, think it's perfectly fine, but your opinion is, of course, biased.
Also, the question is not whether it CAN do a lot more than HTML, but whether it DOES in the REAL WORLD. Most places Flash is used, it is used in ways that annoy the sh*t out of people. I've seen a lot of beautifully animated sites that didn't contain a byte of Flash and were perfectly searchable because of it.
Form does not have to come at the expense of function, every designer should know that from day one...
I hate to get into a price war, BUT:
My put-together PC:
-2.2GHz AMD Athlon XP w/133+MHz FSB & 533MHz motherboard bus (benchmarked to be equivalent to a 2.8GHz Pentium 4)
-1GB PC2100 DDR SDRAM
-3x60GB ATA-133 Drives & motherboard supports ATA RAID 0, 1, & 0+1
-DVD-ROM Drive
-48x/24x/48x TDK CD-RW Drive
-NVidia GeForce4 dual-display w/128MB DDR (No bundled displays) & motherboard supports AGP 8x
-Cool Blue/Silver Aluminum display case with 6 fans
-6 USB, 2 FireWire, 6 channel digital/optical audio, 1 CF/SM card reader
Price: $1,555.00
A roughly equivalent Mac that isn't too overpriced from store.apple.com on 10/25/02:
-Dual 867MHz PowerPC G4 w/133MHz system bus
-1GB PC2100 DDR SDRAM
-2x120GB ATA-100 Drives (this was the closest they had to my 60gb boot drive and 120GB RAID data drive)
-2X DVD-ROM + 16x/10x/32x CD-RW Drives (again, the closest I could get)
-NVidia GeForce4 dual-display w/128MB DDR (no bundled displays)
-I assume at least 2 USB and 2 FireWire, but their site doesn't say; I also assume no 6 channel digital/optical sound or a compact flash/smart media reader
Price: $3,249.00 (sorry, subtract the special $110.00 "Promotion Savings" from that price)
A roughly equivalent Dell system:
-2.8GHz Pentium 4 w/533MHz system bus
-1GB PC2100 DDR SDRAM
-1x120GB ATA-100 Drive (closest I could get)
-DVD-ROM Drive
-48x/24x/48x CD-RW Drive
-ATI Radeon 9700 Pro dual-display w/128MB DDR (no bundled displays)
-I assume at least 2 USB and added a 3 port firewire card; Turtle Beach Santa Cruz sound; no CF/SM reader
Price: $2,182.00 (subtract a $100 rebate from that price)
Now what were you saying about "where's the overpriced hardware"??? I think the answer to that question is obvious.
Of course, there are a few things people could take issue with, like:
-- Oh, but a PowerPC is so much faster than a Pentium 4! Especially 2 of 'em!
Answer: Yeah, right -- prove it.
-- Oh, but you can't run Mac OS X on a PC! And, Apple has better tech support!
Answer: I don't want/need OS X because I can pick from a half-dozen other arguably better OS's; and Apple's "support" is rated time-and-again as being far below Dell's support level.
I just can't see how a rational human being can state that Macs have closed the price gap. If anything, they've widened it! And I owned only Macs for 9 years!!!
Fuck you anonymous asshole -- if you wanna see me here in Sunnyvale, come on over!
Yeah, I didn't think so -- shitbreath!
I think you need to retake a math class or two:
.6
4*15%(10-20%)=
My statistics stand -- how can you compare your buy of 4 power supplies to our buys of thousands of power supplies??? Don't you think I have a better grasp of the real failure rate -- especially when I'm the one talking to the assholes at Sparkle who freely admit their power supplies have an "acceptable" 10-20% failure rate?
The statistics aren't just ours, if you had read my post, you'd understand that they ADMIT 10-20% failure rates of power supplies they sell to suckers like you and say that it is ACCEPTABLE.
That just isn't acceptable to reputable companies like us which is why we don't sell their crap any more...
Aah, the great myth that if the MAJORITY of users have a good experience, then the product in question must be good.
Obviously if 80% of the power supplies don't fail, then most of the users would be perfectly happy. That doesn't mean it's good, that just means they didn't piss off most of their customers.
Shouldn't we in the electronics industry strive for more than a 10-20% failure rate or just "not pissing off more than half our customers"?
Oh come on!
As an ex-Mac user of 9 years, I can honestly see your B.S. from a mile away. VMWare (not to mention VirtualPC for Windows) will let you run Linux or anything else except the Mac safely in your Windows PC. And I have no use for the Mac OS any more, anyway.
And if you want a "pure" UNIX, try one of the FREE flavors of BSD -- did I mention those "pure" UNIXes were FREE? I used Mac OS X since it was called NeXTStep 3.1 (up through Mac OS X 10.1), so I can tell you that Mac OS X is FAR from pure in the UNIX world.
I never thought I'd see a Mac user touting the value of a Mac as being its UNIX "purity". Oh, how the world is CHANGING...
I'm sorry, but I work for the number one power supply distributor in the USA (we're not a direct reseller, though) and Sparkle power supplies are the BIGGEST pieces of sh*t I've ever had the misfortune of touching. They are extremely prone to failure -- as high as 10-25% out of the 20-25 we've bought for I.T. use (I'm the Director of I.S.) and we have lots of manufacturers who replace failed Sparkle power supplies with others that we sell.
Yes, they're cheap, BUT you'd better buy two for every machine you use them in (one for backup) just to save you the trip to your local Fry's (or whatever your local computer hardware reseller is) for a replacement WHEN it fails.
And to top it all off, most Chinese power supply companies (like Sparkle) feel that 10-20% failure rates are ACCEPTABLE! This is in an industry where a 1% failure rate usually sends the engineers back to the drawing boards. Sparkle Power is a huge joke in our industry...
I think from most of these posts we can draw the conclusion that you can do this any time of your life -- young, middle aged, or old. You don't have to do anything but what you are ready to do. And that doesn't necessarily mean travelling overseas, you can get a hell of a lot of life experience right here in the USA -- lots of people from other countries come here for that very reason.
I was in the middle of college in South Dakota (where I grew up) when I was 20, and I was bored out of my mind. The "challenging" tech university I was going to wasn't so challenging, and I wanted to really experience life. I knew I wanted to get to California or the east coast where I could continue college, but get a lot more out of life at the same time. I ended up with a girl from California at my night-job during college and we moved to California together. I knew nobody in California and had no family there. I ended up breaking up with that girl and for two years had almost two dozen extremely different jobs while I went to college part-time in the Silicon Valley. I also met a LOT of women here, and met SO many people from so many different cultures that I often felt like I was in a foreign country (I still live here and 1/3 of the local community is non-native Asian-American).
That was 11 years ago. I had a great time, had a lot of foreign cultural exposure and other life experiences I'll never forget (you wouldn't believe how many pages of stories I have from working in a busy Silicon Valley gas station at night!). I found my perfect job, make great money (even today), I've been married to a Vietnamese woman for over four years, and now have 2 kids. The start-up I hooked up with 9 years ago grew into a $150 million company that got bought by a British company 2 years ago -- perfect travel conditions considering I'm the I.T. Director.
So, I'm 32, have all the "bad" things that are supposed to prevent me from "seeing the world", but in the past 5 years I've seen Britain, Ireland, Germany, France, Holland, Canada (not a big hop, but it ain't America), Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam, & Thailand. That's not including all the travel around the good old U.S.A. All that travel, and I've got my family, home, mucho money in the bank, and a job I love to go to every day. AND, one evening with my 1 1/2 year old son beats everything else by a mile.
I don't know what that means to anyone reading this, but I guess it means that if you follow your heart and what you feel you want to do, you absolutely can't go wrong and you'll find what you're looking for.
No, I've used Macs for more than 8 years and they started this crap *years* ago. That doesn't make it any more genuine.
Why is it so hard to believe they're genuine? Because most people tend to believe that BIG companies and other big organizations (i.e. government) are corrupted to some extent by their power. Also, it doesn't hurt that so many of these "testimonials" have turned out to be B.S. over the years, too (Sony did it not too long ago when they used Sony employees to give "testimonials" in one of their commercials).
Another thing -- what else would you expect from a company (Apple) that has sued companies out of existence (I worked for one) and otherwise screwed corporate "partners" (I worked for one, knew many, and bought from many more -- all gone now) for their own gain?
I, for one, don't expect Apple (or most other big companies) to be HONEST, that's for damn sure...
Uum, because those people still with AOL CAN'T GET a better, faster, cheaper online experience.
Believe it or not, AOL is the best option for some people in some places -- I know because I grew up in South Dakota, and some rural areas in the U.S. have pretty sparse/crappy ISP options. And the fact that AOL is the number one ISP in the U.S. among dozens of ISP's doesn't mean much because their total user-base is so relatively tiny...
First, NOTHING is guaranteed -- but you probably know that if you haven't been under a rock for the past 3 years.
I agree with the rest of what you're saying. Reading this Fortune article, I feel sorry for these people that have tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt on top of $50k+ in college loan debt. But, I don't know what the hell is wrong with these people because I paid off my college loan debt years ago (I'm 32), and have never had more than $3-4k of credit card debt -- I'm ashamed when I have even that much, but I'm told by bankers that that is incredibly low. I also grabbed a home here in the Silicon Valley at a great price (current selling price is still more than double what I bought it at), and I've put another $20k into it out-of-pocket to improve my equity even more (about $300,000 today). AND, I have over $25k in retirement funds (IRA & 401k) TODAY -- including the losses of the past few years.
I hope the article is too pessimistic because I can't believe how irresponsible you'd have to be to have so much debt and so few assets.
And speaking of "vapor-skills", yes there were too many losers out there winning projects over me just because they could sell themselves better than I could. Where are they now? Broke and unemployed -- thank God sanity has returned...
Another way to deal with this without paying for a phone company's privacy manager is to buy one of the new phone systems that have a base station and support 1-8 cordless phones. Most of them have built in voice mail and voice attendant systems and you can get a basic package (base station and one handset) for as low as about $150-$200 (standalone Sony cordless phones with no answering machine used to go for the same price!).
With the voice attendant, the caller simply has to hit #1 or #2 (the pound key and the number of your phone) to ring you. I used to get literally 2-4 telemarketers calling me a day, but once I set up this simple system, it dropped to ZERO! I haven't had a single telemarketer call me for over 6 months! They simply don't want to waste their time listening to the message that tells them how to ring you (or whoever). And it doesn't annoy your friends after the first time they learn to hit #1 for your phone, because every time they call they just have to hit that number instead of waiting.
For me it was a perfect solution -- it also helps that I have a teenage daughter who I wanted to get her own calls routed to her own phone so I wouldn't be disturbed every 10 minutes. With this solution, I only pay for one phone line, she gets her calls, I don't get stupid telemarketer calls, and I still have control over the line in case the kids over-use the phone.
That's true, but I think there are probably a lot of people out there who only use one hand for the mouse and use the other hand for keyboard shortcuts...
Sorry, but any consumer who's used Linux for more than a day (and, consequently, has had to try to install some off-CD software) WILL notice the kernel version number. Why? Because often software binaries/drivers are configured per the kernel version.
And I, for the record, would rather have to remember kernel version 2.6 or 3.0 or 3.1 than 2.4.18.123.456.389, etc. It's not a marketing thing, but I'm sure I'm not the only Linux USER who would rather have a simpler version number...
Maybe I'm not the first to point this out, but isn't this redundant/unnecessary? I'm using Linux every day and in the GUI Gnome and KDE both have perfectly fine trash cans. In the command line when you do an "rm -rf" or something like that, the files are gone, but it's the same in Windows. If I use the command prompt to "del" a file, then the file is GONE, not in the recycle bin.
What's wrong with that? If you are advanced enough to use a command line then you'd better be advanced enough to know when you want to permanently delete a file!
I think the guy who made this software is forgetting that the average Joe Blow Linux User isn't going to be using the command line very often (if at all), so this software is irrelevent...
RTFAYYFHI! (Read The Fuckin' Article Yourself, You Fuckin' Hypocritical Idiot!)
On PAGE 3, they quote a U of MN geneticist voicing concerns similar to this "lowly highschooler":
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Anne Kapuscinski, a University of Minnesota geneticist and a leading expert on transgenic fish, suspects the complex dynamics of fish populations and genetics may resist a daughterless assault. Nature could conspire to give the carp a higher survival rate or simply turn off the daughterless gene.
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EGGSTASY, how could you ever think for a single moment that you are ACTUALLY QUALIFIED to post such a condescending response on SLASHDOT??? A requirement is to understand what the fuck you are reading before posting such a flamingly idiotic response...
The bottom line with abandonware is:
If I can't buy a piece of software [reasonably] because I want to use it, then getting a free copy from someone who has that software is ethical.
I don't care if the company who made it and sold it before is complaining today -- if they don't want to take the trouble to publish it TODAY, then TOUGH! If they take the trouble to publish it for a reasonable price today (don't publish a 15-20 year old title for $50, obviously), then the software in question no longer fits the definition of abandonware.
It's interesting that I see this article at the exact same time I'm actually testing some server software in three virtual Windows 2000 Advanced Server machines networked in a virtual network on my PC ... using VMWare. It allows me to test configurations and operations without actually using hardware and it's faster since I'm using backed-up VM's in case the software I'm testing destroys a VM (if it does, I toss the destroyed VM and unzip the original from a zip file in about 5 minutes). And, I can test virtually any combination of Intel-based OS's in my virtual network this way.
Anyway, back to work...
I don't know, maybe I'm the only one who feels this way, but "Enterprise" is the first Star Trek series since the original '60s series that was really consistently interesting. TNG and it's many spinoffs were, for the most part, boring, politically-correct, pieces of crap. Not that all episodes were terrible, but I've avoided seeing WHOLE SEASONS of TNG because so many of the episodes became so boring, and I don't really care if I ever do see them. On the other hand, I've seen each of the original series' episodes at least 10 times.
Maybe the fact that "Enterprise" was intended to recapture the action and humor style of the original series and thats why it appeals to people like me (I generally see people who liked TNG dislike "Enterprise"). Or maybe the episodes are more like real science fiction and not just intended to expand the audience to people who'd rather watch "Friends"...
Now, you know you're wrong whenEVER you generalize! You just can't throw out a simple statement like "100% of hackers/crackers would be physically or ethically unfit to join the FBI" without getting a response.
I do serious hacking and cracking and have over 20 years of real computer and programming experience. I was a U.S. Army Airborne Ranger for 6 years, and I'm still more physically fit than most Americans at 6'3" weighing 200 pounds (I do serious workouts every day). I have NO doubt that I could pass the FBI's piddly fitness tests and if you talk to anyone who knows me they'll tell you how ethical I am (much more than most).
So first, the old stereotype that geeks have to be fat, ugly bastards is just that, a stereotype! And second, if I exist (and I don't work for the FBI), don't even doubt for a second that there aren't many more people like me or even better than me who actually work for the FBI -- in other words, the stereotype that government intelligence agencies have no decent techies is yet-another-stupid-stereotype!
Uuum, the 2nd definition for "accuracy" at M-W.com (Merriam-Webster) is basically "precision". So what's your point? Why should he use one or the other when they are basically defined as being the same?
Try looking up your information before you post...