its not clear what you want to do with your computer. theres lots of things that macosX does well. theres things it doesnt.
one thing it does, is it tries very hard to keep the mac concept of 'ease of use' - easy to just plug in a device and have it work. but this ease is defined by the types of devices. Steve Jobs wants the Mac to be a Digital Hub. that means, cameras, camcorders, mp3 players, cd burners, dvd burners - these all work well. there are some that dont, but a majority of them do. Macs have always been good at external storage - firewire drives plug in, and work. on osX, nfs, samba, appletalk file servers all are accessable.
what exactly is a good performance number? well, if you do photoshop, you want some plugin to run fast. well, thats gonna run damn nicely on a g4. and you will pay for it, you'll pay cuz you also get a really nicely packaged piece of machinary around it. but that machinery, and its osX will also do oodles of nice things for you. you'll be able to easily suck photos from your digital camera into iPhoto, and have iPhoto zap together a nice thumbnail web gallery.
you'll be able to create movies with iMovie and burn em to dvd with iDVD and your dvd superdrive.
you'll be able to rip cds, shove the mp3s into your mp3 player (iPod or other) with iTunes. or, you can burn an audio cd with it too.
thats the nice thing - it all works. sure, linux is coming along nicely, and maybe on kernel 2.6 firewire drives will work w/o kernel panics. thing is, osX does it all now.
and for all its evils, the mac division at Microsoft does put out software that kicks ass over the Windows lines. IE works well. ('cept for a few javascript incompatibilities it works damn well in this windows IE based net of ours) Office works great.
course, if you want to eschew microsoft, you can buy Appleworks for less than 1/4 the price of Office v.X, the only thing you dont get is PowerPoint.
yeah, theres tonnes of issues - one of them is that the BSD its based on is old. certain packet filtering things dont work. but theres stuff that does work well. and yeah theres lots of obvious showy things like the bouncing icons and the magnifying icons that most/. readers turn off asap. but it IS a really really usable unix based system. and you dont have to go searching all over hell and gone to find the tools to do your everyday things. sure, you have to search around to build some of the unix things, and fink is a godsend for that. (everyone who knows or meets Christoph Pfisterer should buy him a beer or 10 for creating fink.)
the reality is, if you want a really nice non microsoft os, and you want it to have nice easy tools for the consumer side of your life, but still have the stability and programability of a unix, its a good choice. sure, its different from linux, its different from solaris, but you dont really notice that after a while. you just get used to it being its own set of things.
dual monitor is built in on the powerbooks, i would guess also on the iBook, but i'm speculating there.
and this is a COOL thing. you can run the monitor as a mirror to your lcd, or have it as a separate screen that can be positioned anywhere around the powerbook's screen. great for presentations - you can move the presentation notes to the 'book's screen and have the presentation come out the svga port.
Gift Cards are not escheatable
on
Gift Card Hacking
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
From Dictionary.com:
escheat (s-cht)
n.
1. Reversion of land held under feudal tenure to the manor in the absence of legal heirs or claimants.
2. Law.
a. Reversion of property to the state in the absence of legal heirs or claimants.
b. Property that has reverted to the state when no legal heirs or claimants exist.
Gift Cards are not Gift Certificates, which are bound by escheating laws. (peruse if you want, a google search on "gift certificates escheating")
which means that to a retailer, gift cards are cheaper cuz they are not regulated.
Most retailers that do gift cards and gift certificates treat them both very similarly - aka have them electronically activated when purchased. The gift card allows the added bonus of havin them be stored value / re-chargable cards. the lack of escheating laws is also very good - less to report/ track to the government, less money lost to the government when the cards fail to be used.
voicestream's iStream service which is a GPRS (packet radio via GSM phone) claims to have 128kb transfer rates. what i've found in my preliminary testing (which was admittedly very meager) showed me that its really painful to try and do anything interactive - aka telnet. its doable, just slow and laggy. it appeared to be optimized for web surfing.
the big caveat is that i was playing with this only a few times, and all from within my cube in my office - which has degraded cellular coverage. Also, i was using a palm pilot to do the connectivity.
so, now that i've shot my own story full of holes, you can think about using this in a pinch. it promises much, and i've yet to really test it out to see what it does deliver. maybe some international/.'s can tell you more of their GPRS experience.
oh yeah, you'd need to spend at least $169 on the motorola phone, and get a monthly service of aorund $59 or so.
all this talk of cluttered desktops - i am gonna go re-organize my desktop folder and actually create a downloads folder and shove all this crap into it. at least then its hidden away from my eyes and i can see my lovely desktop background picture of girlies w/o clutter.
like everyone else who tried reading the article, i was struck by how disjointed it was.
at first you arent sure what metaphor he is whinging about, but then you realize that he does have a point.
we need a new metaphor. its true. we do. and its not really us who need new metaphors, its the typical user community. the ones who we usually bitch about - the AOL users of the world. and since we're all such ass-kick programmers (l33t c0d3 h4>but what i would really really like is to have the desktop not be a file metaphor, but a notes metaphor - in other words, kill the desktop and make it a cube wall metaphor. one where i can stick up notes and reminders and post its. where i can "hang" my clock, my calendar, or maybe where i can hang a shelf to put books and manuals at.
I've always found the "Desktop" concept somewhat difficult. it doesnt feel like a dsektop, its standing up in front of me. why would i be looking down at it? (i know, i know, pre computers we used to write by looking down at the desktop, but i always focused on what i was doing, not on the things strewn about the 5 foot wide space...)
actually, one metaphor that i did like was the old Magic Cap os from General Magic it used a Desktop metaphor and also a Hallway metaphor. these actually work when you realize that people shouldnt have to think to use the computer, they should just be able to use it.
Make computers easier to use, and we'll have more people using computers and doing more with them. To me, thats what makes a GUI good. Thats why i think people liked the mac originally. you didnt have to learn how to use it, it was all presented for you in a graphical and friendly manner - as opposed to a command line.
The GUI has to evolve again. lets go for something even easier to use.
i got an olde tyme powerbook g3(firewire) and its 500mhz, 256mb memory and OSX 10.1.1
first off, it works really well for development. you can run any of the all java IDEs like netbeans or forte from sun or even borland's jbuilder
i've been using jbuilder4 for a while. i had a bit of a hack getting the linux version to install, but once i did, its all straight up java 2 code, so it ran fine. (i prefer jbuilder4 since its got the ability to load in the vi editor tool from sourceforge - jvi.sourceforge.net
i've got tomcat 3.2.1 and 4.0 running fine on my pb, and it all works like a champ.
i've found that the java integration into osX is outstanding. apple has made it one of the languages to code full on applications for osX with. i've got a coworker who does use the apple IDE projectBuilder to do his java development, so i know its possible. i just havent done it. i use jbuilder on NT at work, so i wanted to keep the same project files.
just think. if you integrated a decent text to speech system, you could have the car tell you "dave, i'm sorry, i cant snort that WEP key if you drive this fast"
or...
"well here's another unsecured network! oh look! he's surfing goatse.cx !"
or...
"well we now have his passport account information, shall we go buy me a new set of tires?"
i would imagine that by designing and implementing an application that allows you to use externalized strings, you could easily switch presentation languages. XML/XSL is just the current sexy way to do that easily.
Apple's MacOSX does that - they have localizations by language that install with every OSX Carbon or Cocoa application. (though they dont use XML for the actual string table - most likely they are using some sort of hash table for speedier access)
theres tonnes of ways to do it, and none of them require you to go one language or another. java is just a nice way and the personal preference of many.
if you're already ready to try emulating another platform, why dont you just go all out and use wine. it will allow you to use the ie that the company has most likely tested all their websites with.
that isnt to say that a stealth mode mozilla isnt a cool idea.
its the politics. the politics are insane at any corporation, and especially when you are going against the grain.
it used to be fighting against IBM and the SNA mentality, to try to get TCP/IP based solutions in. now its fighting against MS and that whole mentality in order to get anything else in.
and eventually like me, you get labeled. which is great fun. my favorite label that i was allegedly given - "brilliant, but dangerous" ok. its not like i work with anything lethal, how could i be dangerous? its just software fer chrissakes.
first things first. if you're the ONLY developer on a corporate project, then theres something very wrong with that picture. a wise corporate management droid knows to have at least 2 - that way they can back each other up. its actually a wise decision since you wanna be able to not be supporting the code 24/7/365.
and i agree with all the above comments - lines of code is a horridly bad way to judge how many developers you need. you need what you need. it depends on the project, and the methodologies and the toolset. and of course the architecture.
i work for a large corporation that uses Microsoft (go figure) and we do call upon MS for support alla time. especially since we dont have the time to pick though the BSOD dumps, and we pay them for it. but you are very right - they dont give us much back in the way of real support - other than to pull up MSDN articles we could have searched for ourselves. and usually we find the real answer ourselves in 1/2 the time.
BUT. the problem is that the management perceives that microsoft is supporting us. it isnt about the REALITY of support, its about the PERCEPTION, and more importantly, the BLAME of support - management wants to be able to tell their boss / the clients "we think its a problem in the Microsoft stuff, Microsoft is looking into it" i've consistently found that its all about CYA - Cover(ing) Your Ass - as long as you can blame a vendor, its ok. thats the real reason they're scared of using OSS. you cant blame a website, you cant point to a newsgroup and say "they're looking into it"
by the way, you said this vp kept talkin about windows and asp pages, but he had the right answers about Open Source - was he just a talking head or did he know what was what?
oh, and beware of the management using your answers to build up a case for OSS/Linux and then taking that as leverage to Redmond in order to cut the licensing costs...
one thing that i came across at my company, which is very microsoft flavored (but moving away slowly) is that in terms of stability, the management has become so used to the lack of stability from Microsoft products that they scale up the hardware to adjust - aka making sure they have abundant backup servers that are load balanced or hot swapped in when problems occur.
its quite sad. even the need to bulk up hardware in memory , cpu and disk does not phase them. - one example where we could save millions in licensing and hardware upgrades by moving to a smaller, cheaper, faster linux solution was thrown out without consideration because "well we should use microsoft right?" and my favorite quote "well i'm sure Bill knows what he's doing."
i think in the future i'll counter with "well linus knows what he's doing, and he's much cooler"
i have 2. the first, my department wanted to install web servers onto our many distributed NT servers. our installation group said "no, we dont want to support IIS cuz its buggy" our technical architecture team said "well, cant you just do the same thing with file:// urls? or write some other program to do it? (my answer to that was that i'd just install apache and say that i wrote a server based on industry standards..." i showed my manager that we could easily install Apache win32 and go from there, but he chose to push the IIS issue and finally that got installed.
months later, when we had buttloads of issues with IIS, he came back to me and said that in retrospect it would have been easier to just install apache...
the second story - i was allowed to go ahead and implement Apache Tomcat for a subsequent project, in order to fufill a java based set of core components. it works great, and i even have it hooked into our IIS servers (still have those buggers) and everything works great. the big problem now is that on our 60 person team, theres only 5 people who know java, and management doesnt want to continue with it, even thought our corporate direction seems to be headed towards java!!!
ok, in retrospect these probably arent the right stories to be regaling the populous with, but they're what i got.
go here:
http://www.ltsp.org/contrib/diskless-windows-how to.htm
why do i suspect that this guy is gonna pay someone $150 and then turn around and charge a client $15000 for it? maybe i'm just too cynical after reading about the Fink deal.
*sigh*
for me, 80211b is sufficient - my dsl is only a max 640kbps inbound. so anything faster on my wireless isnt necessary.
that being said, i should also state that i dont do much (but i do some) networking from the laptop to the local server. but for that, the 5.5 mpbs seems reasonable (5.5 since you cant really get 11mb)
oh, so the 802.11B that i'm using at home now is not real? excuse me, but... it works. its good. and even if i do have to be a wireless nazi about who gets in, it is a working feasible technology.
and cost wise... since i'm using an apple powerbook, the card is only $99
oh and by the way, the airport cards they're shipping now are 128bit capable. (no software yet...)
i work for a small but lively midwestern company (i never thought i'd be writing this)
one of our subsidiary companies uses a custom version of OS/2 Warp for some of their major servers.
i'm actually on a project to kill them off tho. unfortunately, we're replacing them with win2k servers. our management isnt that hip to listening to our techincal input, so they'd rather pay millions to redmond in licensing fees.
get this. we have to pay a license for a serially connected scanner device that has NO computing inside it. just cuz its gonna access a sql2000 database. sheesh.
i was talking with a friend of mine who's company is doing an e-comm software deal with amazon, and he described amazon as "the worst example of best in breed that you could look at" - i guess they've taken lots of different best in breed approaches, but not really had a direction or a clear methodology and it has hurt them.
on the plus side, he did say that they had made inroads into cleaning up, and are big on using XML between all systems for easy interfacing. and that they do a LOT of things really well - i mean, how many other sites have link ads that know who you are? thats a pretty strong set of CRM they got running. sure theres a lot of crap and a lot of silliness, but they gots some stuff thats good too.
Slashdot Mirror
check out Speak Freely - its site is here
it supports encryption and is multi platform.
oh and if you're a windows developer the original speak freely site has lots of good points.
since i was born on sept 26th, and i had my 33rd birthday, on the 26th of jan, i became 33 1/3 ... or an LP..
its not clear what you want to do with your computer. theres lots of things that macosX does well. theres things it doesnt.
/. readers turn off asap. but it IS a really really usable unix based system. and you dont have to go searching all over hell and gone to find the tools to do your everyday things. sure, you have to search around to build some of the unix things, and fink is a godsend for that. (everyone who knows or meets Christoph Pfisterer should buy him a beer or 10 for creating fink.)
one thing it does, is it tries very hard to keep the mac concept of 'ease of use' - easy to just plug in a device and have it work. but this ease is defined by the types of devices. Steve Jobs wants the Mac to be a Digital Hub. that means, cameras, camcorders, mp3 players, cd burners, dvd burners - these all work well. there are some that dont, but a majority of them do. Macs have always been good at external storage - firewire drives plug in, and work. on osX, nfs, samba, appletalk file servers all are accessable.
what exactly is a good performance number? well, if you do photoshop, you want some plugin to run fast. well, thats gonna run damn nicely on a g4. and you will pay for it, you'll pay cuz you also get a really nicely packaged piece of machinary around it. but that machinery, and its osX will also do oodles of nice things for you. you'll be able to easily suck photos from your digital camera into iPhoto, and have iPhoto zap together a nice thumbnail web gallery.
you'll be able to create movies with iMovie and burn em to dvd with iDVD and your dvd superdrive.
you'll be able to rip cds, shove the mp3s into your mp3 player (iPod or other) with iTunes. or, you can burn an audio cd with it too.
thats the nice thing - it all works. sure, linux is coming along nicely, and maybe on kernel 2.6 firewire drives will work w/o kernel panics. thing is, osX does it all now.
and for all its evils, the mac division at Microsoft does put out software that kicks ass over the Windows lines. IE works well. ('cept for a few javascript incompatibilities it works damn well in this windows IE based net of ours) Office works great.
course, if you want to eschew microsoft, you can buy Appleworks for less than 1/4 the price of Office v.X, the only thing you dont get is PowerPoint.
yeah, theres tonnes of issues - one of them is that the BSD its based on is old. certain packet filtering things dont work. but theres stuff that does work well. and yeah theres lots of obvious showy things like the bouncing icons and the magnifying icons that most
the reality is, if you want a really nice non microsoft os, and you want it to have nice easy tools for the consumer side of your life, but still have the stability and programability of a unix, its a good choice. sure, its different from linux, its different from solaris, but you dont really notice that after a while. you just get used to it being its own set of things.
dual monitor is built in on the powerbooks, i would guess also on the iBook, but i'm speculating there.
and this is a COOL thing. you can run the monitor as a mirror to your lcd, or have it as a separate screen that can be positioned anywhere around the powerbook's screen. great for presentations - you can move the presentation notes to the 'book's screen and have the presentation come out the svga port.
From Dictionary.com:
escheat (s-cht)
n.
1. Reversion of land held under feudal tenure to the manor in the absence of legal heirs or claimants.
2. Law.
a. Reversion of property to the state in the absence of legal heirs or claimants.
b. Property that has reverted to the state when no legal heirs or claimants exist.
Gift Cards are not Gift Certificates, which are bound by escheating laws. (peruse if you want, a google search on "gift certificates escheating")
which means that to a retailer, gift cards are cheaper cuz they are not regulated.
Most retailers that do gift cards and gift certificates treat them both very similarly - aka have them electronically activated when purchased. The gift card allows the added bonus of havin them be stored value / re-chargable cards. the lack of escheating laws is also very good - less to report/ track to the government, less money lost to the government when the cards fail to be used.
voicestream's iStream service which is a GPRS (packet radio via GSM phone) claims to have 128kb transfer rates. what i've found in my preliminary testing (which was admittedly very meager) showed me that its really painful to try and do anything interactive - aka telnet. its doable, just slow and laggy. it appeared to be optimized for web surfing.
/.'s can tell you more of their GPRS experience.
the big caveat is that i was playing with this only a few times, and all from within my cube in my office - which has degraded cellular coverage. Also, i was using a palm pilot to do the connectivity.
so, now that i've shot my own story full of holes, you can think about using this in a pinch. it promises much, and i've yet to really test it out to see what it does deliver. maybe some international
oh yeah, you'd need to spend at least $169 on the motorola phone, and get a monthly service of aorund $59 or so.
good luck!
all this talk of cluttered desktops - i am gonna go re-organize my desktop folder and actually create a downloads folder and shove all this crap into it. at least then its hidden away from my eyes and i can see my lovely desktop background picture of girlies w/o clutter.
like everyone else who tried reading the article, i was struck by how disjointed it was.
at first you arent sure what metaphor he is whinging about, but then you realize that he does have a point.
we need a new metaphor. its true. we do. and its not really us who need new metaphors, its the typical user community. the ones who we usually bitch about - the AOL users of the world. and since we're all such ass-kick programmers (l33t c0d3 h4>but what i would really really like is to have the desktop not be a file metaphor, but a notes metaphor - in other words, kill the desktop and make it a cube wall metaphor. one where i can stick up notes and reminders and post its. where i can "hang" my clock, my calendar, or maybe where i can hang a shelf to put books and manuals at.
I've always found the "Desktop" concept somewhat difficult. it doesnt feel like a dsektop, its standing up in front of me. why would i be looking down at it? (i know, i know, pre computers we used to write by looking down at the desktop, but i always focused on what i was doing, not on the things strewn about the 5 foot wide space...)
actually, one metaphor that i did like was the old Magic Cap os from General Magic it used a Desktop metaphor and also a Hallway metaphor. these actually work when you realize that people shouldnt have to think to use the computer, they should just be able to use it.
Make computers easier to use, and we'll have more people using computers and doing more with them. To me, thats what makes a GUI good. Thats why i think people liked the mac originally. you didnt have to learn how to use it, it was all presented for you in a graphical and friendly manner - as opposed to a command line.
The GUI has to evolve again. lets go for something even easier to use.
first off, it works really well for development. you can run any of the all java IDEs like netbeans or forte from sun or even borland's jbuilder
i've been using jbuilder4 for a while. i had a bit of a hack getting the linux version to install, but once i did, its all straight up java 2 code, so it ran fine. (i prefer jbuilder4 since its got the ability to load in the vi editor tool from sourceforge - jvi.sourceforge.net i've got tomcat 3.2.1 and 4.0 running fine on my pb, and it all works like a champ.
i've found that the java integration into osX is outstanding. apple has made it one of the languages to code full on applications for osX with. i've got a coworker who does use the apple IDE projectBuilder to do his java development, so i know its possible. i just havent done it. i use jbuilder on NT at work, so i wanted to keep the same project files.
RAWK! that would be totally cool...
i need to mod my car stereo now...
flame on...
just think. if you integrated a decent text to speech system, you could have the car tell you "dave, i'm sorry, i cant snort that WEP key if you drive this fast"
or...
"well here's another unsecured network! oh look! he's surfing goatse.cx !"
or...
"well we now have his passport account information, shall we go buy me a new set of tires?"
or... you could ice/shout/honk?cast mp3/vorbis streams from your car...
i would imagine that by designing and implementing an application that allows you to use externalized strings, you could easily switch presentation languages. XML/XSL is just the current sexy way to do that easily.
Apple's MacOSX does that - they have localizations by language that install with every OSX Carbon or Cocoa application. (though they dont use XML for the actual string table - most likely they are using some sort of hash table for speedier access)
theres tonnes of ways to do it, and none of them require you to go one language or another. java is just a nice way and the personal preference of many.
if you're already ready to try emulating another platform, why dont you just go all out and use wine. it will allow you to use the ie that the company has most likely tested all their websites with.
that isnt to say that a stealth mode mozilla isnt a cool idea.
its the politics. the politics are insane at any corporation, and especially when you are going against the grain.
it used to be fighting against IBM and the SNA mentality, to try to get TCP/IP based solutions in. now its fighting against MS and that whole mentality in order to get anything else in.
and eventually like me, you get labeled. which is great fun. my favorite label that i was allegedly given - "brilliant, but dangerous" ok. its not like i work with anything lethal, how could i be dangerous? its just software fer chrissakes.
first things first. if you're the ONLY developer on a corporate project, then theres something very wrong with that picture. a wise corporate management droid knows to have at least 2 - that way they can back each other up. its actually a wise decision since you wanna be able to not be supporting the code 24/7/365.
and i agree with all the above comments - lines of code is a horridly bad way to judge how many developers you need. you need what you need. it depends on the project, and the methodologies and the toolset. and of course the architecture.
i work for a large corporation that uses Microsoft (go figure) and we do call upon MS for support alla time. especially since we dont have the time to pick though the BSOD dumps, and we pay them for it. but you are very right - they dont give us much back in the way of real support - other than to pull up MSDN articles we could have searched for ourselves. and usually we find the real answer ourselves in 1/2 the time.
BUT. the problem is that the management perceives that microsoft is supporting us. it isnt about the REALITY of support, its about the PERCEPTION, and more importantly, the BLAME of support - management wants to be able to tell their boss / the clients "we think its a problem in the Microsoft stuff, Microsoft is looking into it" i've consistently found that its all about CYA - Cover(ing) Your Ass - as long as you can blame a vendor, its ok. thats the real reason they're scared of using OSS. you cant blame a website, you cant point to a newsgroup and say "they're looking into it"
by the way, you said this vp kept talkin about windows and asp pages, but he had the right answers about Open Source - was he just a talking head or did he know what was what?
oh, and beware of the management using your answers to build up a case for OSS/Linux and then taking that as leverage to Redmond in order to cut the licensing costs...
one thing that i came across at my company, which is very microsoft flavored (but moving away slowly) is that in terms of stability, the management has become so used to the lack of stability from Microsoft products that they scale up the hardware to adjust - aka making sure they have abundant backup servers that are load balanced or hot swapped in when problems occur.
its quite sad. even the need to bulk up hardware in memory , cpu and disk does not phase them. - one example where we could save millions in licensing and hardware upgrades by moving to a smaller, cheaper, faster linux solution was thrown out without consideration because "well we should use microsoft right?" and my favorite quote "well i'm sure Bill knows what he's doing."
i think in the future i'll counter with "well linus knows what he's doing, and he's much cooler"
i have 2. the first, my department wanted to install web servers onto our many distributed NT servers. our installation group said "no, we dont want to support IIS cuz its buggy" our technical architecture team said "well, cant you just do the same thing with file:// urls? or write some other program to do it? (my answer to that was that i'd just install apache and say that i wrote a server based on industry standards..." i showed my manager that we could easily install Apache win32 and go from there, but he chose to push the IIS issue and finally that got installed.
months later, when we had buttloads of issues with IIS, he came back to me and said that in retrospect it would have been easier to just install apache...
the second story - i was allowed to go ahead and implement Apache Tomcat for a subsequent project, in order to fufill a java based set of core components. it works great, and i even have it hooked into our IIS servers (still have those buggers) and everything works great. the big problem now is that on our 60 person team, theres only 5 people who know java, and management doesnt want to continue with it, even thought our corporate direction seems to be headed towards java!!!
ok, in retrospect these probably arent the right stories to be regaling the populous with, but they're what i got.
go here:
w to .htm
http://www.ltsp.org/contrib/diskless-windows-ho
why do i suspect that this guy is gonna pay someone $150 and then turn around and charge a client $15000 for it? maybe i'm just too cynical after reading about the Fink deal.
*sigh*
for me, 80211b is sufficient - my dsl is only a max 640kbps inbound. so anything faster on my wireless isnt necessary.
that being said, i should also state that i dont do much (but i do some) networking from the laptop to the local server. but for that, the 5.5 mpbs seems reasonable (5.5 since you cant really get 11mb)
oh, so the 802.11B that i'm using at home now is not real? excuse me, but... it works. its good. and even if i do have to be a wireless nazi about who gets in, it is a working feasible technology.
and cost wise... since i'm using an apple powerbook, the card is only $99
oh and by the way, the airport cards they're shipping now are 128bit capable. (no software yet...)
but it works just fine for me.
i work for a small but lively midwestern company (i never thought i'd be writing this)
one of our subsidiary companies uses a custom version of OS/2 Warp for some of their major servers.
i'm actually on a project to kill them off tho. unfortunately, we're replacing them with win2k servers. our management isnt that hip to listening to our techincal input, so they'd rather pay millions to redmond in licensing fees.
get this. we have to pay a license for a serially connected scanner device that has NO computing inside it. just cuz its gonna access a sql2000 database. sheesh.
i was talking with a friend of mine who's company is doing an e-comm software deal with amazon, and he described amazon as "the worst example of best in breed that you could look at" - i guess they've taken lots of different best in breed approaches, but not really had a direction or a clear methodology and it has hurt them.
on the plus side, he did say that they had made inroads into cleaning up, and are big on using XML between all systems for easy interfacing. and that they do a LOT of things really well - i mean, how many other sites have link ads that know who you are? thats a pretty strong set of CRM they got running. sure theres a lot of crap and a lot of silliness, but they gots some stuff thats good too.